In a very short amount of time, we found a new house, and closed on it. So once more, my wife and I find ourselves in the enviable position of being a homeowners again. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to pack all of our crap and move it to said new place.

I’m thinking I would rather use this:

And deal with collecting the insurance money than have to pack and move once more. Apparently though, this sort of thing is illegal so we’ll just have to pack and move instead and leave arson and fraud for another day.

Lastly, for everyone in the US, have a happy Tax Day!

I imagine when he gets back to the Bat Cave, he drinks his beverage of choice at this awesome coffee table:

I wonder if the Riddler’s table would be a massive green question mark? That would be a pain in the ass to sit at I’d imagine.

Source: Single Serve Coffee

I hope you all have a happy Pi Day today. This is the perfect time to go and make some for you and yours.

I’m not gonna bore you with the details of what Pi is, but you can find out more about the holiday here, and fine a great apple pie recipe here.

Again, remember to celebrate at 3:14pm!

Now I’m gonna slightly break one of Wil Wheaton’s blogging rules: I’m gonna be a dick.

The funny thing a lot of people don’t realize about Florida: Most people in the state are not from here. Where are they from you say? In my own experience, they tend to come from the other parts of the country, especially the North and Northeast.

And of course they bring their heaping gobs of crazy with them.

Putting that aside though, every time I read a comment from someone outside of Florida talking about how we’re all crazy down here, I’m reminded that while they have to deal with this:

I get to enjoy this:

So, with that I say I’m glad to be in Florida. You guys can go ahead and keep all the snow.

P.S.: If you do come down to live here, please leave your crazy up North. Thanks!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Getting away from the couch take considerable effort. It’s a lot easier to come home, sit down and go “Blah”. So I’m gonna have to change things up, but do it slowly so I can sorta sneak away from the couch without it noticing I left the room. Maybe I can trick it into thinking I went to the bathroom and then sneak out the window.

I also have to pick a weigh-in day. I think I may do it on Thursday or Friday, not sure. I guess in the long run it doesn’t matter what day I pick as long as it’s done.

Me in Japan during my foreign exchange in 1992.

For as long as I remember in my life I’ve been overweight. When I was younger I wasn’t that heavy but as time went by, I started to balloon up to where I am now, which is up to 366 lbs. Needless to say, this has got to stop and a change needs to be done.

Looking back, I believe the weight gain really didn’t start in earnest until my later teen years. Thankfully, I didn’t have a horrible childhood (I had great parents, and we lived a nice house, etc.) so I can’t really attribute my weight gain to that. I think it just simply came down to my lifestyle, which was extremely sedentary to say the least. In my early life, I believe my metabolism was higher and helped to keep the weight off but eventually, as I aged it slowed and thus “Hello Pounds!!”. You can see me in a photo from high school. I wasn’t the thinest guy, but I sure wasn’t where I am now. I think I was in the high 170′s at that time.

My graduation from Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program with my Master’s in 2009.

Of course, being the lazy bastard that I admit I am, I did nothing to change and of course, it continued to get worse. Not even the threat of diabetes was enough to get me off my ass (which eventually came to pass). So, here I find myself at this point. The question is what am I gonna do about it?

Bust a Move

And just like that song’s lyrics say “So come on fatso and just bust a move” that is exactly what I’m gonna do.

I need to become less sedentary and need to find a way of doing more exercise. Only problem is I HATE exercise with a passion and every time I start a routine I get bored with it and stop doing it.

So, I’ve decided to use my OCD qualities and competitiveness when it comes to games and technology to lose weight.

After seeing how one of my friends made some great progress using one, myself and some of my family have decided to try out Fitbit. In essence, Fitbit is an activity tracker (as well as a sleep logger which is a nice plus) and it logs your activity throughout the day with some daily and weekly goals in order to spur you on to greater amounts of activity. It also has a strong community element where you can see how well you stack up against your friends and family to see just how active each of you are. There are even badges you can get in an almost 4Squareish manner. In short, it tries to get you off your ass by adding a bit of competitive/cooperative elements to what it normally and abysmally boring thing.

It even has an online component that allows you to track things such as your water intake as well as a food journal. Man I hate using food journals, but they are effective in seeing what you jam down into your gullet. I do have to say that my first day of using it worked partially, but I am going to make sure I make better use of it going forward. In fact, there is a program that my friends are also using called Lose It! that makes it much easier to log your food by scanning barcodes. A very appealing alternative to pecking out the names of a food indeed.

I’ve already started a couple of days ago, and there hasn’t been much change to my routine, but I am planning to at least add an afternoon walk with the dogs to see how that increases my step count and see what it does with my calorie count.

In the end, I’m hopeful that this will finally help me get me on the right track.

It is survived by my Keurig B70, Nespresso Latisima Plus, Nescafe Dulce Gusto, and coffee grinder.

Rest in peace my caffeine buddy.

Since I last posted, I have a bunch of things to write in this sphere, but for now I want to ask you a question: Do you love Legos?

Well if you do, and of course you like coffee, then I know you’re gonna love this: The Build-On Brick Mug

This genius mug is what happens when a coffee mug has an illicit affair with a Lego set and catches VD. It breaks out in bumps!  Wait, that didn’t sound too good. Let me rephrase: It’s a mug where you can stick Legos on it!

Too awesome for words. I say you should go and get one, because I know that sometime in the future I will be.

So, while I posted all that neat stuff yesterday, I've been battling a nasty cold, which of course taps right into my productivity (i.e. almost completely kills it). Gotta love life and the various curve balls it throws you, huh?

Instead of whining about it, I decided to see if any other writer friends of mine have some advice on how to plow on forward when you're not feeling your best. I found some great gems out there. They may not be recent, but if you've never seen them then as NBC says, "They're New to You":

From Daniel Swensen's Surly Muse:

Writing When You’re Sick, Tired, or Just Hate the World

And for comedic value, from the Absolute Write forum:

Why Can't Men Handle Being Sick

Awesome picture from Nikki Hampson.

Anyhow, time for me to get back to work... And my DayQuil.

This is what it feels like to be a writer at times.

Well, it’s been since last October and I figure I would inaugurate the new look of the blog with a blog entry talking about how things are going:

The Blog’s New Look

I finally got around to updating the look and feel of the blog. I had decided to remove the old theme, mostly due to errors that were getting tiring to trying and fix, and also since it never seemed to quite work as well as I wanted.

So, after throwing my hands up, I decided to go the framework route and obtained the Genesis framework and a child theme Streamline. What a night and day difference as far as site maintenance goes. This is so much simpler. I should’ve gone this route to begin with and not wasted money and time with the other method.

At the moment, all of my blog content is up and working, but not my works content. I’ll work on that in the coming months as I get time to make pages for them. Using a portfolio system in retrospect wasn’t the best idea for writing.

My Writing Works List

I had posted this list before and have replicated this in order to show what was going on with these projects. There are not in any particular order:

• Calling Home: Damaged Echoes – I have completely failed to bring this online as I wanted to. It didn’t help that the old website had died a horrible breath and I also need to re-work it. I think I’ll go a similar route that I had for Renegade Sanctuary here in order to get it back online as quickly as possible. As far as Comicpress is concerned, I’ll be ditching it since the comic has ran its course and will provide the comic in either a PDF or printed format for a small fee. As far as the story goes, I have the characters done and need to work on the beginning of the story and get back into the groove of writing it once the site is back online. I’ll be late but I will get it done this year.
• SF Short Story – This short feels like I’ve been working on it forever and I think it has to do with my lack of writing. I’m definitely in the longest dry spell I’ve had in a long time. I’ve decided to take a different angle for this short and turn it into my newest favorite genre: SF Horror. Only thing is I haven’t written a horror story before but I think with the help of a couple of horror writer friends of mine I can do this.
• Memories of Ys: Angel Down – This is in the same place as it was previously. I’ll leave here what I posted last time since the same still holds true as of right now: My thesis work at Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. I had unsuccessfully attempted to find a publisher for it, so I plan on looking over the manuscript to see if there are revisions that can be done to improve the work. This is a lower priority since I want to focus on newer projects like the others mentioned here.
• Childhood’s Sentinel (working title) – Same thing as above. I’ll leave the previous status of where this work is at the moment: This is a YA/teen fiction project I am working on as a gift for all of my nieces. I wanted to have a book that featured all of them as characters and it was also to be an experiment for me in writing non-adult fiction. So far the project has stalled for a while, but I want to finish these before my oldest niece (hello Emily) starts collecting social security.
• Memories of Ys: Rules of the Heart (working title) – I still haven’t started this at all, and the ideas and pieces are still on the ground before me as it were. I’ve left the previous staus posted since I’m in the same place as I wrote this in June 2012, and I will try to remedy it: This is the 2nd novel in my Memories of Ys series, and I had started preliminary work a long time ago, but I want to start it up again since I really want to keep the series moving forward.

So, there it is. A concise list of things I need to do. Now I just need to get to doing them and everything will be all set. I think this video best sums up what I need to do:

Click here to view the embedded video.