Then I got to high school. By high school my family was living in Wichita, KS. It’s actually an okay town, and the American great plains can be stunning, just make sure you keep an eye out for tornadoes. Anyway, something your may not know, a lot of aircraft are built in Wichita. In fact, a number of aircraft companies got started in Wichita, including Boeing, Cessna, LearJet, and Beechcraft. The men who lend their names to these companies were not from Wichita, but the went there to test their brand new airplanes because the wind is constant and predictable (flat plains with no trees) and the geography was favorable (see previous parenthetical). Today, those same companies manufacture their planes in the same city (yes, Boeing is headquartered in Washington, but they have a plant in Wichita. Well it’s actually owned by Spirit because…well it doesn’t matter, they make Boeing planes and plane parts and used to be Boeing, I worked there for 6 months even, see below. Boy this parenthetical is long and useless). And we’re back. The whole point of this is that, by the time I was in high school, I had decided I wanted to work in aviation maintenance as an Airframe and Powerplant Technician. An airplane mechanic.

In high school, I had enrolled in welding and metal shop, and absolutely loved it. And I was good at it. So that made me decided I needed a job working with hands rather than working in an office. So when I was still a senior in high school, my grades were good enough that I was able to spend only half a day in high school, and the other half I would go to the aviation vocational school and get a jump-start on my post-secondary education. So after English class, I drove to the airport and took the General Aviation courses required by the FAA to be an A&P Mechanic. Parts of it were very cool, such as learning about aircraft, and how they fly, why they fly, what the control surfaces do, all that stuff. Some parts were really boring, like the math, learning how to calculate an airplanes center-of-gravity (highly critical to make sure people don’t die, but god-awful boring), and studying Federal Aviation Regulations. But I stuck it out, took the FAA  tests at the end, and passed my General exam. All I needed now was two more years of school, and to pass the Airframe and Powerplant exams.

I graduated high school in 1994, spent the summer working and hanging out, then enrolled in the Airframe program at the beginning if the next year. Airframe was awesome. I loved almost all of it. We got to learn everything there is to know about airplanes. We had a hanger and got to do hands-on work almost every day, taking planes apart, fixing them, putting them back together, crawling all around, under, and through them. It was incredible. When school ended, I decided to wait and take my Airframe exam along side my Powerplant exam the following year, knock out both tests at once (they are expensive and not part of the actual education. They are conducted by FAA certified examiners, can take anywhere from 5 to 10 hours, and include both written, oral, and practical portions). That summer, though, I decided that I needed to “take a year off” from school. I talked myself into taking a break, convinced I would go back the following year.

I didn’t go back. Partly because I got a job working at Boeing in the Military Modifications division where they were taking brand new 767 aircraft and turning them into military radar planes. It was amazing, dream-come-true work. At first. I found out that they actually only hired some of us guys fresh out of school because they were behind on their current project, and were using us to get them caught up. Once that was done, they shipped all us new guys off to the Major Paint Facility where we hung small airplane parts on wire racks so somebody else could paint them. All day..hanging small parts on wire racks. All…..day…

So I quit after only 6 months, and that 6 months remains the total amount of time I’ve spent in the aviation industry I was so sure I wanted to be part of. When I quit Boeing, I moved to Indiana and got a job as a tool and die maker (specialized machinist). This job I really liked as well. But when I moved to Arizona in 2002, nobody was hiring toolmakers. You see, a journeyman toolmaker at the time could demand $25/hr or more. It’s a skilled trade, but today most shops only employ one or two journeyman. The rest of the shop is filled with much cheaper laborers that can put parts into a computerized mill and press start. No real skill required. So after 4 months unemployed, my mom got a job at the bank, and that’s where I finally found what I wanted to be when I grow up.

I had not written any kind of computer programming language since the mid-80’s when my brother and I copied BASIC commands from magazines into a very early version of a portable home computer. But at the bank I got recruited into being a database analyst and learned how to write SQL. And man, I was hooked. In 2015 I got my Bachelor’s in IT with a concentration on database management, and to this day work in data analytics.

My point to all this is that, if you’re young, maybe only young-ish, and you don’t know what you want to do with your life, or maybe only thought you did, that’s okay. I don’t know why we put so much pressure onto 18-year-olds to go to college immediately, choosing right then what they are supposed to spend their life doing. Some people can. I have a cousin that’s an award-winning engineer and she just this year earned her Masters. She’s known since before high-school that she wanted to do this. For her, that’s amazing and lucky. For most regular people, they can only guess. So my advice is, if you have no clue, to go do some living, hold some jobs, try things out, then make a decision.

To date, I’ve had the following jobs:

• Grocery store clerk (2 years)
• Home-Depot-style-store clerk (6 months)
• Silk Screen operator (2 years)
• Aviation Technician (6 months)
• Newspaper-rack refurbishment (3 months, worst job I’ve ever had)
• Tool and Die Maker/Designer (6 years)
• Home Equity Loan Processor/Underwriter/Compliance Analyst (6 years)
• Data Analyst (8 years and counting)

It took me 17 years of actually working to find my passion. I don’t expect an 18 year-old to know what they want to do just because they finished high school.

Just make sure you find it eventually.

And that’s okay. It’s more than okay, it’s awesome. You don’t need to know the world of the older crowd, that’s their burden to bear. Your job is to be young, idealistic, sure that everything you do will work out. Because that’s where innovation lives. Where imagination hasn’t yet been suppressed by caution, worry, fear of failure. Being young is where you do things you’ll tell yourself you don’t regret, even though a small part of you will always regret the decision.

When I was 21 I decided to move to Indiana with a girl I had known only for a few months. On this side of things, I now see the plethora of red flags that indicated things would not go well, but i was 21, “in love”, and willing to sacrifice for that love. And it was horrible, all 6 years of it. There were maybe a few days total of that 6 years when I didn’t hate life,  but for the most part I was abjectly miserable. Then things changed, the girl left me for another man in another state, and I went home to Arizona.

When I moved to Indiana, I left behind my friends I had known since high school, my family, my whole life. I’ve wondered for more than a decade now what my life would have been like had I not moved away, but the reality is, it doesn’t matter. I know that my decision was a poor one. It was a decision that screwed me up emotionally for a number of years, destroyed my credit, had me living in filth and poverty, and laying on the couch in the only room where we had heat because our gas had been shut off and we were using a kerosene heater to stay warm contemplating whether I would get out of my car if it was stalled on the tracks and a train was coming. When I got out of that situation, though, I eventually found that the experience, while awful, also made me resolved to never live a life like that again.

So do I regret the decision to move? Mostly no. I regret that I lost touch of my best friend for a bunch of years, missing the birth of his children. I regret needing money from my family so often that they eventually had to cut me off. But that’s really it. The stuff I lived through, the misery, the ugliness, I don’t regret any of that. Those things made me a stronger person, they made me who I am today. I also ended up loving my job while living there, and use the skills it taught me to this day in designing and fabricating custom knives.

Everything we do leads us to where we are. I made a bad decision in my twenties and it led me to 6 years of self-imposed misery, but that, in turn, led me to today. Today I am married to the best person in the world for me, and we have an incredible child, something we were sure for years we would never have. I love my life today. I have a great job, make decent money that allows us to, for the most part anyway, live the lifestyle we choose to live, beautiful wife, brilliant child, you know…the works.

So what’s the point of all this? I guess it’s to say that yes, you will make decisions that somebody older would probably not make. You will realize when you are older that the decision was poor and you will wonder what you were thinking. But emotions can heal, credit scores can be fixed, hell even tattoos can be removed. So just do your honest best, make the most reasoned decisions you can today, take chances, be imaginative, explore yourself and your world, because everything you do is incorporated into who you will become.

But seriously, nothing illegal, that stuff doesn’t go away.

During the summer months, we were home all day by ourselves. We watched Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting and other morning kid’s shows. Sometimes we would head up to the school and attend the summer program they had there (though I think we only did that one year, maybe two). We would play some board games, play some ping pong (badly), at some point they had 3 or so beginner karate classes that we took. Some days we would go to school and run through the industrial sprinklers they used. Most days we would head out into the desert near the neighborhood with the kid next door. We would play guns, climb mountains, harass the real estate agent at the model homes by drinking all his chilled water. One time we built a fort out of a tree; not in a tree, we literally turned the tree itself into the fort itself.

It was a big desert tree, probably a Hackberry as I look at Google images of Sonoran Desert trees, whose branches and leaves went all the way to the ground. We used tools stolen from our dads to essentially hollow out the interior of the tree while leaving the exterior shell in place. From the outside, per my 8-year-old self and my now 40-year-old memory, you could not tell there was a “fort” inside. My brother and friends each had our chosen perch in the tree, a particular branch or crotch in the tree that we decided were comfortable and relaxing where we would sit and talk, think, or pretend to sleep. But these locations were also “tactical”. We had a plan to handle invaders based on where they might attempt entry and who could respond to the invasion in the most efficient manner. We had tools as weapons, we had booby traps, we had egress routes, and defense plans. We had it all. We spent weeks on this design, even hauling the cut branches and twigs to another location so you couldn’t tell there was construction under way thereby giving away the fort’s top secret location. Then one day we all kind of forgot about it and never went back. School started or something probably.

And speaking of school (hell of a segue there!), the elementary school my younger brother and I went to didn’t exist when we first moved to the neighborhood. It had to be built. During summer. When parents didn’t know what we kids were up to and construction sites didn’t fence in their work zones because it was the 80’s. Oh what a playground that construction zone was. What a dangerous playground. I cringe now, especially as a new dad, thinking back to the things we did at that school before it was built. We constantly got on the roof of the two story multi-purpose lunch-room/gym/stage. We crawled underneath the classrooms (crawlspace under the main buildings). We “hijacked” a scissor life that they left the key in over the weekend, driving it around the multi-purpose room fully extended two stories up. The lift eventually ran out of power, while extended, and because we were kids we didn’t understand that hydraulics would still lower even without power, so we climbed down the frame of the lift. But not before we used the lift to tie a rope we found to the rafters, then tied a board to the end and made a two-story tall swing. That was all great fun until, while I was on the swing, the rope broke mid-swing and I slammed to the concrete floor, bashing my head. We threw dirt clods off the roof at passing dirt bikers, hiding behind the rim of the roof after throwing. We once got inside a tanker trailer half full of cement powder after lashing plastic sheeting to our legs to “protect” ourselves, bringing the workers trowels and shovels into the tanker to play and make trails with.  The list goes on.

So much danger, so many chances to get injured, arrested, hurt other people. I still feel guilty to this day that we left the trowels and shovels inside that tanker because the crew likely didn’t think to look inside there, figuring they were stolen, and had to buy new ones. We cost some construction works money simply because were stupid kids. And who knows if we damaged the tanker itself, the tools could have gotten caught in the mechanism used to extract the cement. So stupid. The worst, though, was the time we almost caught the whole desert on fire.

We had found a hidden room dug into the ground in the desert, covered with plywood which was then covered with dirt and vegetation to hide it. The entrance was a small opening near a bush, but you really had to be looking to find it. The room itself was probably 6 feet deep, and maybe 8×8 square. There were notches in the wall with cans holding candles for lighting and a bench for sitting. As a kid, this was the coolest bunker ever. As an adult, I can only imagine what kind of horrible, illegal things happened in a hidden hole out in the desert. It makes my skin crawl to think about, yet as kids…awesome! More importantly as kids, it meant a safe, hidden place to play with fire. For days we would go to what we were now calling the Rat Hole. We would burn paper, plastic, straws, cups, twigs…anything that would catch on fire. We had a great time, and except for the noxious fumes, we thought we were perfectly safe in an earthen pit. Except that pit had a roof of wood. And that wood was covered with vegetation. Not the living kind. Including a dead Christmas tree. So, one day, we’re down there playing around, and somebody says “hey, what’s that crackling noise?” The neighbor kid pops his head out of the entrance and yells that word everybody in the desert dreads…”Fire!”

We bolted. We were terrified, and rightfully so. We had just started a desert fire! We were going to be so busted. We ran to the only adults we knew could help, the guys building the school. They weren’t far away, couple hundred yards. We poured into their construction site, yelling “fire, fire!” as loud as we could. A bunch of the men grabbed shovels and told us to show them where, and we all ran back to the Rat Hole. Those men then proceeded to dump shovels full of dirt into the now collapsed roof, putting out the fire and saving all our butts. They were our heroes, but they were also adults. So as soon as the danger had passed, the questions started. “What happened? Did you guys do this? What is this place? How did the fire start? What’s going on?” Of course, we didn’t want to admit we were playing with fire, and we certainly had no actual idea what the Rat Hole was, we had stumbled onto it accidentally. So we told the men that we had been walking down the street (a hundred yards away), saw the smoke by chance only, and ran to get help. See? We were good kids, we would never play with fire in the desert, are you kidding? What’s that mom, dinner? Be right there! And we ran away from the men who, I now know, knew exactly what happened. We would periodically check back and see if the Rat Hole was re-excavated by whoever the owner was, but it never was. Certainly, whoever made it moved elsewhere, further away from the pesky kids that ruined their sex/drug/murder pit.

After the school was built, a lot of our desert adventures ceased as well. We were older, wiser, more mature. My older brother didn’t want to hang out as much his kid brother. I had my best friend and we had remote controlled cars and GI Joes to occupy our time. We also both had paper routes. In the 80’s it was very normal for kids our age (12-ish) to have paper routes. Most times that meant when we got off school we would deliver the afternoon paper (something that was real in the dark ages pre-Internet). But on Sundays, we didn’t deliver the afternoon paper, we delivered the Sunday Paper, and they had to be on doorsteps before 6am. So every Sunday, Jon and I would get up at 2am and ride our bikes to the paper drop house, grab our bundles, cross check against our subscription list to see if any houses were added or removed from our route, then get to folding papers. We had to combine all the sections by hand and in the right order, stuffing the ads inside the comics, then both into the living, then all that into business, and finally into the front pages. Then we had to rubber-band if it was clear skies, or bag if it was raining. Then into the baskets went the newspapers, and away Jon and I would ride making deliveries. Alone. At 3am. Ahh, the 80’s.

One time we got spooked, certain we had seen somebody standing in a street light watching us. So the next Sunday, we each took our BB guns with us on our routes. We had a plan on how to use them too. Jon had the spring action rifle, lower power but fast shooting. Mine was an air rifle, it had to be pumped, making it slow, but it was more powerful. So in the event we were attacked, Jon would pump BB after BB at the perpetrator, slowing them down while I lined up the kill shot…heck I even had a scope, they were as good as buried. Alas, the only thing we ever shot was a streetlight. It was Jon’s idea. He took aim, pulled the trigger, and his low-power BB bounced off. I snorted, but pulled out The Beast to show him how it was done. 10 full pumps, maybe even 11, I wasn’t playing around. Ping! The BB bounced off. Jon laughed at me. But I must have done some damage, because when Jon fired again the glass shattered, raining large chunks of thick glass down onto some poor guy’s El Camino. At 3am, that much sound is deafening. I had never before, and likely never since, ridden my bike so fast to escape what I was sure was immediate arrest. The next day we both kept a keen out for the cops, who we were sure were on their way to lock us up. But no, to this day I am free of vandalism charges.

I decided to quit the paper route after Jon almost got himself, me, and our friend Jay killed because he thought he was funny. We were out doing sales one night around 7:30. This is when our boss at the paper company would come pick us up in his awesome Nissan Maxima and drive us to some strange neighborhood where we, as children, at night, would go door to door trying to sell newspaper subscriptions. We didn’t try hard, it was mainly fun times with the off chance you could score a new sub and get a pat on the back from man in the Maxima, who would then drive everybody to the 7-11 where we would get candy and play arcade games before heading home. Except the time we almost died. We were in some neighborhood we had never been to before, and the Maxima man was supposed to pick us up in 30 minutes or so. Me, Jon, and Jay were moseying down the street, contemplating going to another house, when a van drove by and the passenger yelled something unintelligible out the window at us. A quick event, happens all the time, moving on. Except this time, Jon yelled back. He yelled “yo mamma!” at them. I looked at him in disbelief just before the brakes on the van locked up, skidding to a halt, and the sliding door on the van roars open. We never saw who actually jumped out because by this time were already running at full speed in the opposite direction. What we did know is they were mad, they were high-school “big kids”, and they were running after us. And catching up. I was not a particularly athletic child, and they were absolutely going to catch me, and Jon who was right beside me. But then he had an actual brilliant idea, he yelled “Go to a house!” So we turned at the next driveway, went to the door, and started knocking. It worked, the van occupants turned around and got back in the van. Lucky for us that worked, because the lady behind the door didn’t open it when we both yelled out “Phoenix Gazette Newspaper!” She just told us to go away. But since the van had turned the corner, we thought we were safe. We found Jay, a track star at our school who had left both Jon and myself in the dust, hiding a few more houses up, and we went in search of a maroon Maxima. That is until the van saw us again. Once more with the sliding van door, and feet hitting the ground. Once more with the running, but this time we were further away, and we managed to get to the corner of the street before they caught us. This time it was Jay that had the good idea, hide in the sage bush. So we dove into the bush, terrified, trying to make zero noise as we heaved breaths. We heard their running feet getting to the corner and stopping right in front of where were hiding. We held our breath, willing our hearts to stop beating so loudly. “Where did they go?” one asked. “Not sure, they can’t be far. Probably jumped a fence somewhere, hiding in a back yard. You go back that way, I’ll circle around.” We stayed put for another 10 minutes, mainly because we didn’t just see their shoes while they were less than three feet from our heads, we also saw their aluminum baseball bats. After a while we emerged from the bush, found Maxima, and went home. That was the last time I went on sales.

Eventually Jon moved away. Then my family moved away as well. Life got more mundane. Adventures became much fewer and further between. A few tornado scares, my first girlfriend, my first breakup, high school, graduation, work, a few bad years in another state with a sociopath, and then marriage and the birth of my son.

My son.

I really hope he has adventures like his dad.

Wait, strike that, he hope he has adventures, but not like his dad. I hope his adventures are far safer and less likely to result in cancer and/or death by fire.

But I hope his adventures are grand.

E=mc^2 states the equivalency of mass and energy. In English, this equation says that the Energy of an object is equal to its mass time the square of the speed of light.  (This equivalency is what makes nuclear bombs possible…massive explosions (energy) from a chunk of uranium the size of a bowling ball). When talking about traveling at very high speeds, this equation informs us that the more mass you have the more energy it takes to accelerate that mass. This is pretty simple to understand. You can easily move a dining-room chair across the floor, moving a fridge requires much more effort. What isn’t so easy to understand is that, because mass and energy are equivalent, the more energy you have, the more massive you become. In other words, the faster you go, the mass you gain. This then loops around again, where the more mass you gain, the more energy it takes to accelerate your mass. The end result of all this is that, according to Einstein, by the time you are nearing the speed of light your mass is so great that the energy required to accelerate you up to the actual speed of light may as well be infinite. Because there is no power source available that can provide infinite amounts of energy, it is impossible for anything with mass to travel at the speed of light.

So how do we attain light speed without violating relativity? Enter the Higgs Field. Right now researchers at the Large Hadron Collider are working to  prove the existence of the Higgs Boson, a theoretical subatomic particle that does the work of the Higgs Field. You may have heard this particle referred to as the God Particle, nicknamed as such because the Higgs Field (theoretically) gives objects mass. If you’re not sure how that works you’re not alone. As of now there is  some evidence and a whole lot of theory that suggests the Higgs Boson is real, but nothing concrete. For now, though, think of the Higgs Field as a sort of weird magnetic field. Chances are you, like most of us, understand the effects of a magnetic field without understand exactly how the magnetism works. The Higgs Field is kind of like a magnetic field in that it is intangible. You can’t “touch” a magnetic field but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. However, instead of making iron filings stand on end, the Higgs Field gives objects mass. It does this by giving particles that interact with the field potential energy. As we discussed earlier, energy and mass are equivalent, so by imparting these objects with energy, it also gives them mass. In the future we’re going to find a way to shield against this field. When we learn to shield against the Higgs Field, the stars will open up to us. By blocking the field we’ll be able to turn off our mass. Once we turn off our mass we’re no longer subject to mass-energy equivalency. Once that isn’t a factor, the speed of light will be possible.

Before you go packing your bags and figuring out the best time to visit the beaches around Proxima Centauri, keep in mind that the other effects of traveling at relativistic speeds still apply, most notably time dilation. Time, like all things in the universe, is relative to the observer. When you hop on a light-speed ship for a quick jaunt to Andromeda and back the people you know and love will have been dead and gone for 4 million years. That might be great for some people, but a high price to pay for a silly extra-galactic t-shirt from one of the ironic-tee stores in M31. Maybe someday we’ll find a time-field and learn how to disable that as well. Then all we’ll need is a phone booth that is bigger inside than out…

Edit: It worked, and except for accidentally flooding facebook with a bunch of blog-links, all my old blogs are now moved to this one. I also added the Archives into the sidebar in case you want to waste your time reading stuff I thought years ago ha!.

During my second year an ex-Navy sailor joined our class. He was in his mid forties, skinny, average height, with long, stringy blonde hair. We all found him slightly odd at first, but over the course of the year he seemed to get stranger and stranger. He had chosen a seat near the front of the class so we rarely saw his expressions during lectures, but sometimes he would, well, kind of flip out. For example, one day, during some math exercises, he apparently had some sort of disagreement with the figures his calculator was giving him. Rather than take a break, he got angry, yelled out, and broke his calculator in half, buttons flying all over the classroom. When the instructor asked what the problem was he simply stated “It was giving me wrong answers.”

Other times, during breaks, or idle time in class, he would lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and sing in a normal speaking voice a song called “All My Dead Friends”. None of us knew if it was a real song, and to be honest, none of us really wanted to know. He also often had conversations with the coffee machine, the gist of which depended on how well the machine had made the coffee that day. Having conversations around him was always risky too. If you said something he either liked or disliked, his response was usually the same, he would suddenly whip around, hair flying, stare at you intently, sometimes giving you chills, and then explain his feelings on the subject. Sometimes he would just sit down at our lunch table and start telling stories from his Navy days regardless of the conversation taking place. He especially liked telling us about his times in the Philippines (“I once at a live giant beetle because it landed on my shoulder in a bar. The guy who owned it as a pet was pissed!”).

Eventually he flunked out of the program. For the rest of the year we were sure that, one day, he would back with an arsenal to take his revenge. We also found out, much later, that he had been diagnosed with 4th stage syphilis shortly after leaving the school. So, while we did eventually have a reason behind his apparent madness, he was certainly the most bizarre person I’ve met yet.

It’s times like these that I wish I had the time/money to go back to school to learn how to write. I’m good at coming up with a decent plot, I can move a story forward, but the story is always dry. I’m no good at description. I think part of the problem is, even when I read a book, I tend to just glaze over the details of the setting. I don’t care about the color of the drapes in the room adjacent to the one the character is standing, let’s get on with it!  Then, of course, when the author references some detail that I paid no attention to I’m temporarily lost, and in the end I miss out on some of the richness the story offered. The result, however, is that in my own writing I just want to blow past the adjectives and adverbs and move the plot along at a blinding pace. My style tends to be “this happens, then this happens, then this happens, the end”. I have no richness, no content, no character depth, and I don’t know how to do those things.

In today’s dreamland, nuance and subtlety is the key to the process of the character discovering what happened. It’s a gradual realization that is completely centered on things like the how faded certain fabric covered cubicle walls are. Without the ability to describe the original look of the walls adequately, how can I ever bring the reader along the path of noticing the very subtle change in the look? Then, of course, there is the love interest. The main character makes a decision that has a huge impact on the rest of his life, all over a girl that dies. Without the vocabulary or style, how do I make the reader feel the emotions of his decision, his anguish at her loss (and possible un-loss…*that’s called foreshadowing ha!* and no she’s no a zombie). I can see the place in my mind, I can see the small details, like the dust that hangs in the late afternoon sunlight that is meandering through the 12th floor windows. See that line? That’s the best I can do. Real writers could describe the sunlight as a flavor and make you totally understand. *sigh*

It makes me wish I had a ghost writer..I could be a famous author, if only I didn’t have to write the stories.

This was my experience heading into the summer after 5th grade. I hadn’t the same freedom before, and not again since. 4th grade I suppose I was still “too young” to appreciate the days stretched before me, and by 6th grade I was nervous about starting junior high. 5th grade though, man that was the year. I had my best friend, Jon, and we knew, even if we didn’t realize it, that this was our last chance to be a kid. By the end of this summer our parents would start thinking of us a junior high kids – almost young adults! – and the pressure would be on to start behaving mature. This year though, we were still just kids. It was still cool to have the biggest collection of G.I. Joe figures and vehicles. It was still cool to play with Matchbox cars in the dirt. It was especially cool to have larger boundaries, as they were called in my family, to where we could ride our bikes without having to ask permission. 5th grade meant we had almost 1/2 a square mile of neighborhood that was ours, and we traveled every inch of it.

The best part of that summer was when the guy who used to live next door to my family moved out and accidentally left the door to his now-vacant garage unlocked. That garage became my and Jon’s clubhouse. We started by moving our water supply into the garage. It was just a large thermos with a pump on top that was designed for dispensing tea or something at a picnic. We would fill it from the hose of whatever house we were near and take it to the clubhouse. Next, we set up a Matchbox car chop-shop on the workbench the previous owner had left behind on which we would, using the paint-pens from our model paint sets, give all of our cars a fresh new look (except the Ferrari Testarosa, oh no, nobody touches my Testarosa!). Finally, the garage was a base for the elite squadron of GI Joe commandos that we deployed to protect the world.

We never did tell our parents that Gene had left the garage unlocked, they would probably have told us it was unsafe, or that we were trespassing, and locked the door on us. Instead, we spent the summer feeling like ninjas sneaking into the garage without being seen.It was my first secret hideout. Eventually, as days are wont to do, the days got shorter and cooler, and the next thing we knew somebody had purchased the house, taking away the clubhouse/shop/base. Then school started, and we started down the path to adulthood. Jon’s family eventually moved away and he and I lost contact, then my family moved a year later, but I’ll always remember that summer and my last taste of pure freedom.

Anyone who has spent years trying to lose weight recognizes the above mathematical series (I believe it’s called the Sonofabitch Series, so named by famous mathematician Clark “Triple Cheese” Berger).  For me the latest round started about two weeks ago. We had been good with what we were eating, I was watching my portion size, I had gone to Taco Bell for my wife without getting anything for myself, and I was down 25 pounds. Then we tripped a little. I didn’t fall off the wagon, I didn’t even fall partially off. We decided to eat some Wendy’s Friday night, and then Saturday night went to a Mexican restaurant where I got some of the best pollo fundido I have ever eaten. Neither meal was especially over the top, considering what I can put away on a normal basis, but by Sunday morning I was back up 7 pounds. I didn’t even eat 7 pounds of food, how is it possible?!

I’m trying not to lose momentum, trying to stay focused on the goal, trying to see myself 150 pounds lighter, but when 4 pounds of food makes me gain 7 pounds it’s incredibly hard. I just want to give up, decide that life is cruel, and eat what I want instead of what some doctors say my body needs. But I’m not giving up. Yesterday I ate:

Breakfast: A homemade fruit smoothie (no idea what was in it, Andrea made it, naturally)

Mid morning snack: A handful of almonds

Lunch: two cups of cottage cheese, 2 hard boiled eggs

Mid afternoon snack: a handful of almods

Dinner: Chicken breast and a baked potato

….and then a cupcake….and then another. Damnit!

This morning, I am still lower than I was Sunday. I’m making up the lost ground, but it’s cost almost another week. My body is already losing weight slower than it was a week ago, my metabolism is already adjusting to the new lower portions and healthier food, compensating, and slowing the burn of fat. I know what that means, it’s time to really start exercising. No more “well, I played the Wii Fit twice last week…that’s good enough”. It’s time to start the CaveMan portion of our Healthy Living program. It’s still cold though, in fact it snowed yesterday. It’s not that we can’t walk in the snow, everybody on the planet knows we can, but it’s….ya know….cold!

Anyway, the struggle continues, with me and millions of other fatties. I keep in mind that in the very least I’m getting healthier. The foods we are choosing are better for my entire body’s health, even if my waistline…line? I think from now on I’m calling it my equator…even if my equator isn’t shrinking.

I met my wife (AndreaLand in my blogroll) almost exactly three years ago, and she had problems with my eating habits almost right away. Over the years she’s added more and more pressure to get me to change my habits (she’s lucky she’s so cute, otherwise I never would have stuck around!). I finally started to cave in late last year, and over the last month or so we’ve been really dedicated to eating healthier. By that I mean veggies. I’ve been anti-veggie for most of my adult life, I don’t care much for the texture or flavor, but she convinced me (by blackmailing me with tears) to start eating them.

It’s been hard. I used to look forward to dinner with mouth-watering glee, knowing it was only a few hours before I could eat 3 normal-sized-people’s portions of grease-soaked cow flavored product. But when we first started eating “mostly plants”  I would sit down at the dinner table each night, glare at the plate of veggies, sigh, play with them for while until they were nice and cold, eat a couple, and shove the plate away. Eventually I got sick of feeling like I was starving to death, and started to eat them while they were still warm, just shoveling them into my mouth, chewing as few times as possible, and swallowing, figuring that at the very least I was taking in calories. Over time, and I know this will come as a shock to all of you, I started to find them less repulsive. I eat a little slower now, I try to taste the bell peppers and onions instead of just the rice they’re cooked with, and I no longer feel the hunger pangs after dinner.

The added benefit of eating more healthy is the lack of guilt. I used to hoover way more Taco Bell than a single human should, enjoying every bite…until I was done. I would then sit back, wipe my chin, look at the carnage of empty taco wrappers, and guiltily gather them into the bag so I wouldn’t have to look at them all, trying to ignore the voice in my head screaming “Seriously? You really need to eat 8 tacos and a huge plate of nachos for dinner? I mean…REALLY?!”. These days, though, I eat one, maybe one and a half portions of the dinner Andrea cooks, then push my plate away. I still feel hungry most of the time, but I know that’s just because my body is used to the huge portions I’ve been giving it for the last ten years. I know that I have all the calories and nutrients my body needs.

So we’re getting the diet part down, and we’re still trying to work on the exercise part. We haven’t started the Cave Man part yet, mostly it’s because it’s hard to motivate yourself to get up early and go for walk when it’s only 33 degrees outside, but we’re getting there. We walked a lot over the weekend, and cleaned the garage out, and I even figured out how I could trick the Wii Fit into thinking I weighed less than I did so I could actually use the damn thing (it doesn’t really like fat people, and if you weigh what I weigh, it won’t even let you play). With the weather warming up, I know we’ll be spending more time outside working off the already reduced calories we take in each day. And hey, so far it’s working. I’m down almost 15 pounds (only 11 more to go before the Wii lets me play without putting the thing on a thick blanket!).

Turns our those nutritionist people were on to something. Eat healthy, whole foods, eat veggies instead of grease, get off your ass. Who knew?