Week one.

After being shocked into fear and HOSTILE ANGER a week ago, I decided I needed to get myself under a minimal amount of control before I got to a point where I would be wanting to lose 20lbs JUST TO GET BACK WHERE I AM NOW!  I have been there many times before and I really don’t want it to go there any more than I already have.

Here is a summary of week one.

Worked out 6 of 7 days.

Ate acceptably 6 of 7 days.

…shoot… let me give myself a grade.

I would give myself a “B” on workouts and a “C” on eating.

I could have worked out more intensely and for longer periods than I did…. and I DEFINITELY could have eaten better.

When it came to food, I didn’t keep track of calories most of the time.  I just tried to eat small quantities more frequently and made sure to never have my “weak’ foods near me. No chocolate, chips, ice cream, etc.

I find if I eat bland foods, my crazy cravings are more manageable. I mostly ate cereal bars, deli chicken (low sodium), and fruits. I was very conscience of what I was eating, but didn’t keep an exact tally….which is something I REALLY need to start doing.

I had a few missteps, but nothing too terrible. As long as I work out, I tend to stay focused on my eating too…(as demonstrated by my not working out on Sat., which led to eating poorly too)

05/20/09 – 294

05/27/09 – 282

Down 12lbs.  I’m hoping I can give myself an  “A” or a “B” in both categories next week.  I know from past experience that the second week weight doesn’t fall off like the first week, so I will need to “step up my game.”

Total weight lost so far:  12lbs

Ok, I’m going to ramble about a few items in today’s news since they seem as pathetic and interesting as ever.

Over 300,000 text in one month….

Are you kidding me?
Is this what today’s teenagers strive for? I know I used to text more than I should (until I got a new phone with an annoying virtual keyboard), but 303,000 times in one month? That’s inconceivable.
That turns out to be over 400 text per hour for an entire month. The girl’s mother claims she still holds down a job and maintains good grades. Yeahhhhhh….surrrrrree.. 300,000 in ONE MONTH!!! UGGGGH!!

Click to read 300,00 Text in one month!

America’s first face transplant shows face….

I feel so terrible for this lady.  Her husband left a hole in her face with a shotgun blast. Doctors then performed the worlds most extensive facial transplant. They replaced 80% of this woman’s face from another woman who had just died. Click here to see the photos.

Traffic a few miles from my work in Tampa was shut down for hours because of this disgusting piece of crap….

One of the busiest sections of freeway was virtually shut down for hours due to an investigation after finding a dead baby on the freeway. Evidently, this loser with a criminal record a mile long decided to throw his girlfriend’s baby against the concrete before leaving with the baby and throwing it out of his car window while driving on I-75 this morning. Click to read story

On a brighter note….

The future of Earth’s energy may come from somewhere out of this world. For nearly 50 years, there have been ideas of capturing solar energy from space and beaming the energy back down to Earth. It appears as though this idea may be taking another step towards reality. Click to read story.

]]> http://ericsdream.com/2009/05/05/just-a-few-thoughts-on-news-items/feed/ 0 http://ericsdream.com/2009/05/04/still-oinking-without-the-swine-flu/ http://ericsdream.com/2009/05/04/still-oinking-without-the-swine-flu/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 01:49:27 +0000 Eric http://ericsdream.com/?p=670

I didn’t lose any weight this week, which means I’m a svelte 288lbs.

….Hey…..“check in next Monday as I weigh in at the same weight again.…

“I’ll start again tomorrow…”

I think I’m going to put up a page with dieting “cliches.”  God knows there are a million of them.

Since I have enjoyed venting about various things in the news lately, why should tonight be any different?

Last thoughts on Swine Flu…

Some Tampa schools are closed this week because of the infamous Swine Flu and I’m starting to think that the dumbing of Civilization is really rearing its ugly head these days.

Do you realize that closing only a few ‘random public” schools really defeats the purpose “closing to not spread the flu?” Many schools are only a couple of miles apart, which leaves many same aged kids from different public schools hanging  out together anyways. Is this really going to stop the spread if school A is off during the day, but school B isn’t, especially when students from A & B are hanging out together after school hours?  IT MAKES NO SENSE!! Either close all county schools or don’t close any!  THIS FLU PARANOIA IS REALLY BEGINNING TO IRRITATE ME!!

I also saw today how a United passenger was kicked of a plane because of a “runny nose.”  God forbid you sneeze any more!!  Remember when a sneeze was just an innoculous reaction to something and not the spreading of the GREAT PLAGUE?

Now…in United’s defense, they did later give this sniffle snafu a happy ending. They sent the contagious cold-bearer and his tissue on another flight home in 1st class.  Obviously, this was ridiculous and some morons had the power to kick off the nose blower when they clearly shouldn’t have.  Either way, it doesn’t change the fact that a random 10% of public schools are closed in my county and a man was booted off of a flight for sniffling.  ..

Enough said…

Pin the tail on the donkey?

OK Taliban, we are all well aware of your brutal tactics in daily life and warfare. You oppress your women, hang people in soccer stadiums, and target civilians in bombings. Whether it’s due to an inability to match up militarily with your opponents in warfare or your fear of women matching up intellectually with you in life, I’m sure you have your reasons for doing what you do, but your latest tactics are truly a new low

I think you are grossly misinterpreting God’s word or completely misunderstand the rules of America’s classic game ….”Pin the Tail on the Donkey.”

You see Taliban, this is the way the game is played…..blindfold one contestant, spin the contestant to create disorientation, and then point them at a poster of a donkey hanging on a wall.  You hand the contestant a donkey tail and then the contestant tries to place the tail on the  donkey (anatomically) as close to the correct location as possible. All the contestants get a turn and whomever gets the closest wins the game. This may seem like an easy task, but after spinning in a circle and being blindfolded, I can assure you that this isn’t as easy as it may seem. I have lost a many times at this game. Years of childhood practice failed to perfect my donkey tail pinup techniques and I ended up retiring at age 5.

The game is meant for fun and enjoyment….IT IS NOT MEANT TO BE USED IN WARFARE!!

"Who's the ass?"

I know your war isn’t going well against the civilized world, but this is not an excuse to load up an innocent donkey with explosives, send him for a walk down a desolate road, and to explode him when your enemies drive by the animal.

Have you run out of innocent children pushing wheelbarrows? Have mothers gotten tired of using their babies as bombs? Why a donkey? WHAT THE HELL HAS A DONKEY EVER DONE TO YOU?

Your attempt to blow up a British Convoy with a donkey bomb Thursday only left the Brits laughing at you!  Do you really want to live in caves, not shave, and now make donkey bombs?  The Brit on top of the truck next to the donkey bomb was covered in blood, which did throw a scare into the first person on the scene, but once they realized that it was poor donkey’s blood,  they were left scratching their heads. As if you didn’t give the civilized world enough reasons to think lowly of you already, now you are blowing up livestock?

Next time, please spare the ass and buy one of the 350,000 pigs set to be slaughtered in Egypt because of the swine-flu hysteria.  Those poor pigs are dying for NOTHING!  350,000 of them!  Think how many pigs you could have running around Afghanistan strapped with explosives! With the 25 million birds slaughtered in Egypt a few years ago and now 350,000 pigs this year, you could create an army of livestock ready to wage a bio war on the world.

If the exploding livestock doesn’t hurt anyone, there is always a one in one billion chance of an infidel catching the flu.

Is blogging sometimes just rambling?

~Tonight, at this very moment, I will ramble on my virtual soapbox as if I’m actually on Speakers Corner in Hyde Park~

Some of the things I love about working at Quest are the very same things I dislike about it.  T-I-M-E to T-H-I-N-K!!

I sometimes wonder if my trip last fall would have ever happened if I had a job the prior four years that required my mental attention at all times.  I am reminded of this daily as I sit and think..and think….and think….and think.

You have no clue how many things I have discovered, invented, and accomplished in my own mind during my shifts in the cube.  I have cured cancer, I have learned to speak every language on the planet, I have traveled through time, and I have even mastered Quantum Physics and had a beer with Einstein.  It truly is a great adventure every single day!

In between all of the wonderful planning I do at work, I also think about daily news items. Today was no different and as a direct result, I am here to vent.

Today’s Topic: Cloning.

Ok, so we’ve all heard about cloning by this point. We saw Dolly the sheep years ago and we were amazed, terrified, and began to question “Where will cloning stop?”

I can’t answer the question “where and when will it stop,” but I can tell you that the latest cloning project seems to be a little ridiculous to me.  You can breathe a sigh of relief because it is an animal project and not a human, but I would like to question “WHY?”

Four beagles named Ruppy….  Ruppy?  Yes,  Ruppy.  It is not one name for one dog, it’s the creative genius of these scientific morons to name all dogs the same.  Hell, I guess they are all clones so why shouldn’t their names be cloned too?

Ruppy is a beautiful and creative name which combines “ruby” and “puppy.” By day, these four cloned beagle are just normal, average puppies looking to live their lives exactly the same as every other puppy, but by night…or wait…ULTRAVIOLET “RUBY COLORED” LIGHT….these dogs GLOW IN THE DARK!!  Much like a blacklight poster straight out of the 70’s, it glows under the right conditions.  YES, GLOWS IN THE DARK!

Scientists at Seoul University had to “one-up” the previous morons in Japan and the U.S. who cloned glow in the dark mice and a cat by creating a glow in the dark dog. Is it coincidence that all these glow in the dark wonders are natural enemies? Is there something else going on here? Hmmm…. can you say conspiracy?

Now at first sight, this may seem like only a novelty…but I soon realized the usefulness of the new invention.

I can’t wait until I see a glowing red seeing eye dog leading someone down the street …and never again will we be startled in the middle of the night by Fido hiding around the kitchen corner waiting to scare us. With these two things being said, I do have other questions about this new genetic mutant.

Won’t this be a target for any would be robber at night?  No longer would the dog have the sensory advantage since it is bright red.  Also, what about the people who let their dog sleep in the same room as them?  Is this going to keep people awake?  I think the dim switch on the clock radio is still too bright, what I am going to do with a dog glowing at 4000 lumens? Can we even watch Tv in the same room as this creature or does it come with a shade to get rid of the glare?

If the dog is small enough, can I throw it in the back window of my car for..yet another brake light? How about Christmas? Can we throw this dog on a tree and consider it festive?

All in all, this barking ball of kryptonite is going to drive me nuts!  I think the smothering personality of a dog can sometimes be annoying the way it is now, I don’t need Radioactive Rover brightening up every corner of a room as it attempts to saliva slap me or hump my leg. I DON”T WANT A GLOW IN THE DARK DOG IN MY WORLD and I DON”T WANT SCIENTIST CREATING ANY MORE GLOW IN THE DARK ANIMALS!

Hey scientists, can you spend your time curing cancer or finding a vaccine for the SWINE FLU…or better yet, figure out how to make the Swine-Flu virus glow in the dark so we can see it coming!

Maybe motivated is overstating things a little, but compared to this past weekend, I’m feeling optimistic.

It has been only two days, but it’s going fairly well. I ran, I have eaten in moderation, and if I can keep this up for a few days, I think I’ll be happy with the results.  With very little going on in my “diet world” the last two days, I want to ask a question…..

“Swine Flu?”

I’m sitting here typing while listening to Obama talk about the “Swine Flu” and it brings a few thoughts to mind.

Have you heard that Israelis and Muslims want the name changed from “Swine Flu” to “Mexican Flu” because they find the name “swine” offensive.  Are you kidding me? Ok, let’s change the name to “Mexican Flu” because I’m sure the Mexicans would love to have yet another negative connotation attached to them.  You’re offended by “Swine Flu?” Hell, I’m offended by everyone whining about how offended they are all of the time.  Suck it up people and live your life!!

On the other hand, I have heard that farmers want to change the name to “North American Flu” to help alleviate the worldwide panic that is growing over the association with eating pork, even though there is no evidence that shows you can catch the “flu” from eating pork.  I can understand the name change rationalization in this case.

Most countries have already banned importing pork products from the states as a result of this “Impending Pandemic.” I saw that Russia has even gone as far as to ban ALL meats from some states. While this is hurting pork futures and we’re all acting like it’s the Ebola virus gone rampant, instead of another strain of the “flu,” we still haven’t gone as far as Egypt, who has now decided to slaughter all 350,000 pigs in their country.

Yes, that’s right.  Where is PETA or EPETA (Egyptian People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) when pigs need them?  350,000?  HOLY CRAP!!   Ok, it’s only 350,000 pigs and it’s to save humanity, so I should be ok with it.

Well, I guess I’m not in complete agreement with the Egyptian government and I have to take the side of the farmers storming the streets in protest over their government’s decision to destroy the pigs, especially since there hasn’t been ONE CASE OF REPORTED SWINE FLU in Egypt. Why should this be surprising though, they did kill nearly 25 million birds a few years ago when they feared the bird-flu. 25 MILLION!!

Even with this so-called Swine Flu having killed people in Mexico and one person in America (a 23 month old Mexican visiting America) it is nothing compared to the nearly 10’s of thousands of people who have already died this year as a result of the “regular influenza.” It takes a flu named after an animal for all of us to run around buying up mask off of shelves and to stop shaking hands?  You mean to tell me that it’s not the 36,000 people who die in America each year because of the flu that had the President on Prime-Time television asking us to was our hands, it’s the “Swine-Flu?”

N95-NIOSH APPROVED!!

Then again, maybe we should all be running in the streets with the highly demanded respirator masks because according to some Islamic Militant websites, this flu is God’s revenge against the infidels.

So the next time you greet someone by bumping elbows instead of shaking hands or you need to remove a N95 respirator mask to kiss someone, you can thank a bird-shit eating pig.

I didn’t meant to talk about something other than my diet, but I don’t have much news on the diet, so I ran with what i had.

Audra, like I said in the comment I left on your page, I enjoyed reading your post very much and I can assure you I will NOT cross your path during the combination of DIETING and CYCLING.

I also need to get the graph, stats, charts, thing figured out.

Stick to your plan and everything will work out.  We’re gonna do this.