Pre-emptive strike against holiday nom noms

Alright well the time has come for me to re-vitalize my efforts at losing weight... our department had a biggest loser challenge, and shockingly I won... of course I beat out Madhukar, my skinny ass employee, everyone else seemed to give up when they realized that people were actually trying, but anyways, since coming down to Coach I have lost 20 lbs... now, I just have to lose the last 20....

One thing we were doing, that had relative success when I had more time, was Jillian Michaels (from the biggest loser) 30 day shred... and tell you what, make fun of my all you want, joke about exercising with cans of beans all you want, by day 5 that shit hurt.... then part 1 got yanked from utube and we lost interest. Well I bought the damn CD, so tomorrow, December 1, will be day 1 of the 30 day shred for me... be interesting trying to keep it up through Christmas, but I have every intention of posting my results here as I go.

I will save you from picture.
I will provide critical details such as my weight as I go through this.
I am also adding a walk for me and "the big dumb blond" a.k.a Sawyer our Golden retriever, every day for at least an hour. I have the route, just a matter of actually doing it.. Time to get off my ass and do something about my ever increasing ass... Jenn re-confirmed over the weekend that she actually wants me to survive until I retire so we can have some us time (I hope to the powers that be that I don't have to wait 28 years for some alone time..) so time to get serious about it....

What's it mean to me in reality?

Getting up at 5am instead of 5:30 for a 30 minute workout in the morning.
Pain, suffering....

Whats it mean to you?
Endless hours of me complaining, and regaling you about how much I hurt... until it stops hurting and I start seeing effects, then endless hours of me selling the DVD to you...;)

Anyways, wish me luck, and I'll check back more often now that I actually have something to talk about!

I'm in love, again....

OK so it should come as no surprise that I am a gadget junky... I'm sure those of you who know Jenn have heard the many tales of my purchases... I bought a laptop back when they were ridiculously expensive, bought an Iphone when you couldn't use them in Canada (successfully hacked it, used it for a month, and ended up with a HUGE cell phone bill, now use it as no more than a glorified i touch) I'm a geek, and proud of it...

My most recent infatuation is a star trek type tablet PC. I spend 3-4 hours a day on a bus going to and from work, and while the Iphone is nice, its small and you have to deal with itunes to get stuff onto and off of it. Some of the stuff I watch doesn't work with itunes, for one reason or another... What I really want (don't need, I know better than that, I want it) is something like this....

Thats Archos's new tablet PC, it runs windows 7 (yeah well if mac would finally come out with their tablet PC I might consider them instead) and looks super sexy... Also its not retardedly expensive at around 600$... (http://www.archos.com/products/nb/archos_9/index.html?country=us&lang=en) Now.... I don't have 100$ to rub together at the moment, but if I can hold off my crazy impulse buy tendancy until I can actually afford this baby it would be cool! Maybe everyone I know will get together and buy it for me for xmas, who knows...:)

I came up with this crazy idea while I was sitting here waiting for my next meeting, why don't laptop manufacturers come out with upgradeable laptops... I know what you are going to say, they don't do it because they want to sell more laptops, but a lot of people don't buy laptops because they can't upgrade them.... Food for thought, what if you could upgrade the video card, and CPU to a certain extent, what if the card was in a compact module like the hard drive that could just be unscrewed and replaced... The next step would be to replace the screen as well, which is possible now if you drop it, but it would be important to be able to replace it with a better one... though not as important...

Anyways Dell/IBM/Cisco executives that read my posts avidly looking for technological advances, have at it, idea is all yours, just send me an email when you are done so I can buy one!

Off to another meeting...

Long time no post...

I am sure that most of my posts start with long time no post these days... Life is getting a little crazy, we are getting into a routine but the routine requires a lot of running and last minute aha moments that would otherwise not be considered a routine....

We are basically settled into the new place, we probably jhave a half a dozen boxes that we are too scared to open and everything else has managed to find a home.

I guess I could rant about our house a little, but everything that was wrong with it I basically fixed at this point so not sure there is much point.

This blog originally started out as a therapeutic place for me to vent my random thoughts to the world, if anyone happened to read it great, but I wasn't setting out to have a huge web presence and I'm sure I have achieved that....

I need a topic to post, I'm not someone who can post about what I am doing, and frankly most of what I do is not all that interesting, the only really interesting things in my life are jenn and the boys, and occasionally the dogs, but so many people blog about their kds that I don't see the point... I'm also pretty sure most of my parenting decisions could be second guessed until infinity... We had an interesting discussion over dinner tonight about relationships and parenting, and it weas interesting to get perspectives from just about every walk of life.

Jenn asdked me the other day, are you a verticle thinker, or a horizontal thinker. Of course I was playing bejewled blitz at the time, but it actually made me stop and think about it, right after I beat her high score... We all think differently, and fundamentally if uyou don't understand that everyone around you sees everything differently than you do, be it tinged in their own glow, jaded by past experience, or just verticle instead of horizontal, your doomed to be arguing with people forever.

I tell tristen to stop trying to convince kyle that he is right. He doesn't have to agree with you on most things, plus I know for a fact that kyle is deliberatly disagreeing because it bothers tristen...but its not important for everyone to agree with me all the time, it doesn't mean I always do what I want or do what someone else wants, but it also doesn't mean that I have to agree with what someone wants me to do, in order to do it. Sometimes its not important, and while you may approach it from a different angle, you may also be wrong... There is that 50% chance, and in some cases its much much higher...;)

Summer fridays rule...

Coach has this cool concept of summer fridays, what it amounts to, is you work 10 hours a day for the first 4 days of the week, and then go home early on fridays!

Anyways last time around I promised photos!! Now time for me to figure out how this shit works... Jenn's friends post pics all the time, some seriously amazing photos are up there, makes me want to grab my camera, blow off the dust and try and remember what I know about photography...

The above is an example of a really bad picture... I've been shooting for about 4 years, very off and on... My previous life was a traveling consultant whereby I would be all over the country, sometimes around the world, and so had lots of opportunitites to shoot photo's and refine my talents (much, much refining is required...) but if you shoot 4,000 photo's a day you get lucky once in awhile...

Somewhere in there is Kyle... This was shortly after his 11th birthday... With my previous life I had to travel a lot, so much so, that I was not home for my birthday, or Jenn's for 6 years straight.. just had crazy bad timing. I was however usually able to make it home for the kids, but missed Kyle's Bday, so to make up for it I told him we could go anywhere he wanted to go! I however suggested we go Deep sea fishing (he loves fishing) in Florda, and he went for it...:) One of the perks of being a consultant on the road 60-80% of the time, is you have a ton of frequent flyer points, car points, hotel points so it was also relatively inexpensive.. Most expensive part of the trip, was chartering the boat for fishing (Hey good news there, dad gets sea sick...)

We had a lot of fun in Flordia, went fishing, and swiming in the ocean, it was good times, a good bonding experience, at least for me and that was the intention.

So yeah, occasionally I get lucky, I am definately not a natural at this. I walk around the world in a bit of a daze, I go about my business with the intent of getting where I am going wihtout much thought to the world around me. Probably why I fit in so well in New York frankly... but thats a topic for another blog... Whenever I pick up my camera I have to literally flick a switch in my head to change the way I view the world and be able to take some decent pictures...

This one is from the botanical gardan in San fran, I was there with a friend photographer who was busy out shooying me everywhere, I spotted this little flower floating perfectly in the small pond and thought hey cool and shot it... as soon as he saw it he got a little miffed with me, we were of the habit of not taking pictures of what they other shot...:)

All things considered that was one of my better days for photo's..

Our internet is hella slow tonight, but theres some samples of what you can do with an over priced camera and a lot of luck...:) My advise to anyone starting out, get a good beginner camera SLR preferrably as they will stretch as far as you want them to. I'd also heavily suggest taking some courses if you are going to take it seriously.. F stops, ISO, BW bracketing, all kinds of strange things you need to be mildly aware of, or your pictures can turn out like that first one, instead of

We're going to the Diva's BBQ tomorrow, I'll be snapping a ton of photo's there and put them here or on FB... each image took around 5 minutes to upload, feels like dialup, and the process is a little bit of a pain in the ass... more power to you ladies out there that post every day...:)

I like the new little widget that tells you who visit's...now I know I am blogging for a reason

Well, more eventful days... I've never really had an easy life, let me change that up a little, I have never had a SIMPLE life...:) I'd hazard a guess that 95% of the world would say my life has been easy.

But I have kind of specialized in being complicated... I think I get it from my mom..

anyways enough boohooing.

We put in a offer to lease on a place in Jersey.. no idea if it will be accepted, process if very different/strange as its almost like buying a house, you negotiate the move in date, the price, the down payment/deposit, everything.... and then wait to see if the landlord will accept it...

Its not what we were hoping for, 3 bedroom place so the kids will be bunking together but its in a good neighborhood and was all we could afford with the house still not sold.

Then we got an offer on the house! They offered 20% less than what we were asking... and they can't afford anything more than 15% less than what we are asking. What is it about tough economic times that brings the parasites out in people? To put that in perspective, houses down where we are looking run 500,000 for a 4 bedroom in a reasonable neighborhood.. that would be like me walking in and offering someone 400,000 for their house...

Thank god I have my family behind me, because if we agree on the price I believe we need to agree on, we will lose 25,000$ selling the house we already put 20,000$ in improvements in to sell.... In order to even make that a possibility I have to borrow all of the money from my parents so I can write a check to the bank to walk away from the house I paid so much for and did so much work on... Here I am, a grown man, working for a living for the past 11 years, and I had to cash in all of my RRSP (401k for you americans), steal money from my youngest sons college/schooling fund, and once all is said and done I will have a 25,000$ debt to show for it. Actually, its quite a bit more than that, but I can blame the other debts on things we actually enjoyed so not going into that here...:)

Anyways hopefully this move was the right things to do, hopefully Coach recovers before everyone else in this economic blah blah and we can start making some money... for now its going to be tough. But, as someone keeps reminding me, we're all together finally. I am working for a great company that my wife's friends all love, my boss is great, the team I work with is great, my kids are great... I really have more to be happy about than sad, but who the hell likes losing money? I know everyone is losing money right now, anyone watching their retirement savings are watching it do nothing but go down, but the only time that really matters, is if you need it right now...

If you don't need your retirement savings, leave it where it is, keep investing in the same investments and they will come back. The market always bounces back, it just sometimes takes awhile.. Luckily, I have no money in the market, one less thing to stress about...:)

OK, next step, posting pictures of the family, dogs, disney trip etc... this weekend I swear I'll get some various shots up on here and start making a concerted effort to make this more than just a wall o text.

Wow once again, letting the blog slide...

Well been an eventful couple of months….

We closed up the house up north, packed up everything consumable, gave away whatever we couldn't bring, and packed the kids, dogs and ourselves into the rented mini van and drove down to New York… what I normally drive in 6 hours, took us 10 door to door. We were on the road for 12 hours, but Jenn doesn't want me counting the first two hours because we were getting lunch, and driving her brother home, walking the dogs before we started for the border etc etc, but hell we left home at 10am, and the car was in the garage in NJ (empty for the most part) at 10pm, that in my books is 12 hours…>.>

Getting across the border, oh man was I terrified something would go wrong there.. Jenn had packed up a bunch of dry goods to bring with us, pasta, canned crap, flour, sugar and I was too paranoid to bring it with us… We breezed through the border.. I think it helped that the lady who was interviewing us loved Coach and wanted us to adopt her… We didn't even have to show the dogs papers that I spent 2 days getting, or really answer any questions… we just walked up, got the passports stamped and the visas put in, and off we went..

We moved down July 4th weekend, and I promptly threw my back out, spent 4 days being waited on hand and foot… I thank god it happened when it did, can't imagine my friends helping me as much as Jenn did…. Ever hurt your back? There is no pain as intense, except I am told child brith… Of course for the really luck ones, child birth doesn't last 4 fing days, but whatever… It hurt so bad I could not get out of bed, I literally could not lift my legs, was almost paralyzed by the pain and lack of mobility. That was some of the scariest time in my young life… I couldn't help but think what if this stays this way, what are we going to do..

Gavyn came in on Thursday (first day of the ordeal) and demanded Breakfast.. Jenn was busy trying to help me find a position that would allow me to stop screaming, and Gavyn wanted to know what was wrong with me. I asked him, have you ever seen Daddy cry before, Um nope, well that’s how much this hurts… he promptly turned around and left. I never take time off work for illness, my parents raised us to believe that if you didn't break a bone, or have a fever you didn't stay home.. I was out for two days, feeling guilty the entire time, but I just couldn't do it.. The first day, late in the afternoon I managed to get into the car and drive to the chiropractor, by using my hands on my legs to push on the peddles… talk about horrifically unsafe… Jenn came with me to help me into and out of the car, talk about a stupid plan… here I am driving with my hands on my leg to control the gas/breaks with my wife in the car.. Bad enough I should die in a car crash but to take her with me? Luckily nothing went wrong, and the chiro/massage really helped…

Other than that, we are in our luxurious 4 story town home, boy are the kids ever in for a surprise when we rent some other place that is a hovel because we haven't sold our house yet and we need to have somewhere to live….but while it lasts it sure is fun…!We're all getting a lot of exercise from the TV being in the basement and the computers being on the 4th floor..:)

I'm sure some of you have teenagers… Kyle is 14, and a fine upstanding young man don't get my wrong.. But there are times where I want to grab him and shake him until his head falls off… He never thinks, he just does stuff… he gets bored and eats, or finds a raspberry in the container of raspberries that are designated for a special desert, and tosses the entire thing in the garbage…. Or eats my secret stash of cashews in my office, not just one of them, but rips the bag open and spreads them all over the inside of my drawer..He was grounded from use of his computer for reasons that I can't even remember anymore, but he goes on my computer, his brothers computer, he gets up in the middle of the night and plays on my computer so we won't notice….he watches TV until all hours and sleeps until 1… I mean I remember doing some of this shit, but I still listened to my parents for the most part… he listens, agrees, then completely ignores us and does whatever he wants..

Other than grabbing him and shaking him until his head falls off, I'm running out of ideas… One thought we had was that we are going to have him use his money/allowance to buy food for himself, so he knows how much things cost… secretly I am going to go eat his food once he does that… to show him how irritating it is to be saving a half bag of chips for Friday night all week, to avoid the temptation of eating them so you can enjoy the guilty pleasure at the end of the week, and then when it comes time, to open the bag and find it completely empty.. Or just missing.. See how much he likes it.. Will have to do it randomly though so he doesn't get blase about it…I just don't know what to do to get through to him…

Nanyways, serious wall of text, but there you have it.. I hopefully will be able to write we sold the house for real this time, the next time I write… shh don’t tell Jenn.

Long time no talk...

Don't even remember the last time I wrote to my blog.. Its been crazy busy at work and I just fall asleep on the bus on the way home... Not much different about today except its Jenn's birthday today.

Happy bday girl!! You say you wish you were stronger, but I don't know many people who could raise three kids on their own while their absentee husband is god knows where in the world dooing whatever the hell it is he calls work. From meetings at the school, to late night trips up north to find a runaway son who doesn't know how lucky he is, to a husband who isn't even home for your birthday... You are the strongest person I know, bar none.

I miss you with all my being, and am counting the days to when you guys move down here. I don't know how the hell we"re going to afford it... But I'm ignoring that for now because I miss you all so much.

We lost the bid on the house, and our agent felt that our best chance of selling was to take care of some of the items from the inspection report like the asbestos in the attic. 10,000 dollars before taxes, which is 15% in mtl btw, to remove this shit from the attic... Of courde halfway through the find an issue... Just like everything else in this stupid house the guy who did the renovations did them half assed and we have a suspended ceiling... The asbestos has fallen through the first one, and is sitting on the second one...

now what? Its not buyer be ware in montreal. I can't just remove half and leave the rest, so I have to take care of it... 6,000 dollars more, before taxes... I have no idea where I am going to get all this money, the bank of mom has offered up but that's just humiliating... I love her, but she has had to bail me out so often that my dad looks at me sideways every time I visit wondering when I am going to ask for money no doubt...

Its not that bad of course, I have paid back every cent I borrowed each time, but still...

Anyways enough self pity...