A 'lil HooHaa

Sitting in front of me is a Dell Axim PDA. I really enjoy it, think it could be extremely useful to me in my job and life.

And why in the world do I need to do all this?

Because although I have been turning things around recently with a diet, my health and things like that, I have yet to turn everything else around. I sit on the computer on my free time, I don’t plan my time well, making it hard for me to accomplish some of my other goals. Time I could be spending riding on my exercise bike, I’m doing something online even if there’s nothing to do.

I do want to do other things. I’d like to write a little. Do some more photography. Read a bit more. Maybe even play a little more PS2. The computer isn’t that big of a deal. I still like to mess around on it. Whether it be with my website, or the blog, gallery, a couple other boards etc. , I enjoy it. And I don’t plan on cutting it out of my daily routine, no matter what. I’ve never claimed I’ll do that and don’t plan on doing it.

And there sits my Axim.

It’s a lightweight item and does wonders, if used. Datebook, contacts, a way to carry files — all sorts of good stuff. But it sits in the charger staring at me, as if to say “Yo, idiot, use me!”

Yet I let it sit there and hurt its feelings.

I want to become better organized and utilize my time a lot better. In college, I was mildly organized and had decent time management. Now? pfiff. My time management sucks balls.

I work 4-12. I come home and stay up playing online until 3 a.m. or later. I sleep until like noon. I wake up, check email and message boards, shower and go to work. Also working at a six-day, I rarely get two days off back-to-back. So it seems my days off are spent: sleeping in and playing around online. Sometimes I’ll go watch a movie or run some errands. Outside of that, notta.

Becoming organized and having some time management would be fantastic.

Now I just have to find a way to do it.

Something tells me Axim has some answers. If I listen.

But hell, who has time to listen??

This isn’t some sort of rant from a health-food nut. Believe me, I like my junk food just as much as anyone else. That being said, with this diet I’m on and actually having to watch some health-related things, I’ve started looking at things differently.

I look at labels and actually understand what I am looking for.

I don’t eat a ton of sugar or crappy candy. I also don’t eat a lot of salt (never really have anyway) and I’ve pretty much knocked refined carbs out of the diet. I cheat here and there, but I’m pretty solid with it. If I have candy anymore, it’s usually hard candy and even then, it’s sugar free.

I miss some things — such as french fries, cheese whenever I want it and potato chips. Still, I deal and I’ve dealt pretty well, actually.

The thing that really irks me, however, is that the rest of the people out there in the food industry don’t seem to give a shit that people do eat healthy.

Take for example the break room at my paper. I eat there basically every night because I always bring a dinner to work (easier to make it and know what I’m eating). Sometimes I don’t always pack enough to fulfill my hunger at that time and could use a little something extra.

Scan through the vending machines in our break room and it downright sucks.

One is loaded with candy and chips — not much more. Sometimes you can get lucky and there will be peanuts or a trail mix, but basically it’s candy, pastries, chips and the like.

The one drink machine has coffee, tea, hot chocolate and things like that. The other is a soda machine.

Finally, the “food machine” has things such as sandwiches, milk, microwavable food (burgers, muffin sandwiches, hot pockets etc) and the big healthy thing — muffins. Problem with those are they are Otis Spunkmeyer. You would think a muffin would be somewhat healthy, no?

Ha!

My boss got a banana nut muffin last week. It was like 350 calories — for HALF OF IT! And a ton of sugar in it. Can you imagine? 700 calories for the whole thing.

I’m on a 1,400 calorie diet right now. The muffin would be half of it. For a friggin’ muffin.

I can’t figure out when you have things like this in a break room, why wouldn’t there be some sort of a healthy choice? I’m not saying fill it with health food or tofu, but help us out. How about a veggie package, fruit or things like that? The machine is usually only half full anyway, so adding another portion or two shouldn’t be too bad. There are people who do like to eat more than what they put in the machines.

I mean hell, I looked at the machine in the hospital here and it’s the same thing. At a hospital!

I realize most people want to eat the other stuff, but adding another line for those who want a different choice shouldn’t be too hard.

————–

I visited the doctor on Tuesday and got some good news. Figured I should post it here, considering I had posted about what I have been going through.

Well, first the bad. His scale blows. According to mine, since I started this diet, I’m down 12 pounds. By his, I’m down five. He also hadn’t weighed me the past two times I had been there. So, who knows with his. I’m losing though.

So, the prognosis was this — my blood sugar is down and only have to check it three times a week now, my blood pressure is doing quite well and when I go back in March, he wants to check my cholesterol (which wasn’t bad, but one of them wasn’t where it was supposed to be).

I think I actually saw him smile a little when he told me things were going well and obviously wants me to keep it up.

I’m still reading the stress management book and hoping by the time I end that, the book on meditation arrives. Then I can read that one and go into the Yoga one. I’m hoping by that point I’ve lost a bunch more weight and am into a good routine.

Becoming healthy is actually a pretty good thing, I’ve decided!

More later. I’m off Thursday and might decide to add another entry today. I have a list of stuff I want to rant about!

I don’t visit many message boards. I have a handful I check out on a regular basis and a couple that I’ll post to on a regular basis. If the ones I’ll post to on a regular basis are: mine, a Phillies one if there’s something to post about and a mod site.

Of the others I visit, I’ll post when I feel I have something to add or when there’s something I think I can add to.

But there’s one thing that has been bothering me lately — the lack of using English when you post (or chat) on the Internet. It’s not even shorthand (as I’ve already covered HERE), as my feelings on that are already known.

But it’s the lack of basic grammar that really fires me up. Or the lack of wanting to use it and make sense. The post that drove me over the edge was the following:

hey there is no mods at all for if i don’t know why this guys crying lol

Care to explain that one?

This was just the one that made me realize I had a good blog entry idea. But this is far from the only time this happens. It’s all the time. I won’t even rip that statement apart because it shatters about every rule that you could.

Look, I understand everyone isn’t a writer and doesn’t look at things as close as I might. Or other writers might. But I also understand people should at least have a basic concept of communication and grammar. If these people are looking to ask a question or get a point across, you have to write so others can actually, I don’t know, understand you.

The thing with the Internet is that people of all ages are using it. When you get to these computer sites — no matter mods, programming, HTML or whatever — there are a lot younger people posting to the sites because they are learning a lot younger.

Funny thing is this — these kids, probably as young as 14 or 15, could program a seriously in-depth mod or computer program, but couldn’t write something to explain what they have, or spell for that matter.

Case in point — the casino mod. It’s a GREAT mod. The person who wrote it had a spelling error easy to the eye. At the top of the main page is shows the top winners and losers. Problem was, “losers” was spelled “loosers.”

Someone had fixed all the spelling errors in the code and posted the file upgrade, so I changed it. Although I have noticed “loosers” is more times than not used for “losers.”

I don’t know if it’s our education system, the age of those posting or just plain ignorance, but it’s rather annoying. I can live with misspellings because you can understand what people are saying. It could be a typo, someone might not be a good speller and truthfully — not many people are going to spellcheck a message board posting. But basic grammar rules should apply and at worst, learn to use a period here and there!

With wacked hours and rarely having back-to-back days off, I find myself trying to plot my vactions for this year a little more than normal.

In the past, I’ve picked a week or something and planned around that. But this year, I’ve plotted a time I’d like to go on a trip, as well as a couple of other things I’d like to do. I now just have to run the dates by the boss and make sure those times are cool and all.

I got to wondering, however. How much time do people put into planning vacations. For example, I know I’m going to Montreal for at least four days this summer. But I’m looking into different things and I’ve started planning already. I’m hoping the weekend we picked will have a home Alouettes game again. I’ve been looking at different parts of the city, hoping I can see some new things this year. I’d really love to take one of the days and drive up to Quebec City as well. Or at a minimum, take one of the boat tours up the St. Lawrence a little ways.

It will also be my 10th trip to Montreal, so I’m looking to make it a little bigger. We always say we’re going to different things, then we get into the same habits. It’s not that bad — we always have a blast. But as I get older and others start falling off, it’s hard to keep committing time to make this trip. So before it stops becoming a yearly trip, I want to make sure I see everything I want to see! Not to say I’ll never go back (I will for sure), but I want to make sure I see these things.

So my goal is to go in late June/early July. It’s early in the softball season and early in the O-Tigers season, so hopefully I won’t miss a ton. I’d also get to visit Montreal again during Jazz Fest as well as Canada Day, which would be fantastic.

If I don’t go then, all of July is shot and part of August is. Whether work, weddings or softball. Mostly work (weekends — big events).

Also, the past couple of years, the bulk of my vacation time is all bulked together in December and I’m finding it unfair that I have to use most of my vacation time in the middle of the winter when it’s tough to go do stuff. I need to be able to take a good bulk of time in the summer to go do some things and I don’t want to wait until the final part of summer schedules come out to make the plan.

Which leads me back to the original question — when is too soon to plan? Is it crazy that I am already starting to plot a four- or five-night vacation? Or is it normal? I mean, yes, I am months and months away from leaving this area and making the travel to Canada, but still, it’s always good to think ahead, right?

Also, if I am going to plan a trip to Quebec City one day, I need to plan way ahead. It’s a 2 hour, 30 minute ride to Quebec City and it would take some planning to know we are going up there, touring the city a little and having to drive back to Montreal. I wouldn’t want to travel in the dark in places I have no clue about.

Crazy things vacations are. But I find it makes work easier at times when you can know you have some good things to look forward to and not just a vacation where you sit around on the computer all the time (as I seem to do during December vacations!)

Outside of the state tournament, my paper doesn’t usually cover the first day of a wrestling tournament. We go to the second, check out the consolations and cover the finals. In fact, I think that’s how it is, for the most part, for most newspapers. The first day is just full of quarterfinals and wrestlebacks. You can usually get all that info with a call in or a fax.

Today, I went for the second day of the tournament. And when I got there, four or five people bitched right away to me about how the wrestling was getting treated at this school. Now, we don’t cover the school where the tournament was. So I’m not sure how the normal protocol is. I do know that where the tournament was held was in the old gym. The new gym, I always thought was smaller anyway. By looking around today, things looked fine.

Two mats, all the bleachers down, things moving faster than expected. Where’s the problem?

Apparently Friday was totally different.

Three mats set up, two sets of bleachers gone. Fans couldn’t sit or even get in the gym. It was apparently not a fun situation for wrestlers, fans or coaches. Which is never a good thing.

Today everything seemed calmer.

Then it was time to work. As I looked at the brackets, my eyes were rolling. Fifteen weight classes and I had at least one kid in each class and in six or so, we covered both kids. Now this was a league tournament with 10 teams and we covered six of them, so that would explain that.

But damn, I was pulling double duty — covering it, tracking wrestlers down, working on a sidebar– AND — taking photos. Ouch!

Now I like covering wrestling tournaments. It is, after all, my beat. But when you have that many kids in the finals, it makes it tough! I think I did a pretty solid job and should work out fine. It’s also nice that my paper is a 6-day, so I have an extra day to get things together and write it up.

I could see today where some people would have been annoyed with the tournament and the school. The lighting was dim and it was pretty crowded. But the problem with league tournaments is that they are usually held in a gym of one of the schools involved. This league is a lot of rural schools, so the gyms aren’t going to be huge.

I thought things went pretty well today. Food was well priced, admission was good and everything else was solid. They did the spotlight in the middle for the finals, which is nice for the wrestlers and fans. But, they turned on the lights in one half of the gym after 96 because they needed people to be able to see the awards!!

Here’s the thing I hate about covering wrestling tournaments — with so many kids and weight classes, sometimes it’s hard to find a good way to lead these stories. Thankfully, in the past, I’ve had good luck finding things. Today it was tough. But I stumbled across a solid story to lead things off and the kid actually won, so I’m pretty happy about that. I have a good sidebar and hopefully feature for later in the week, so a pretty good day.

The best part is this is the start of the post season. We’ll only cover two more tournaments — our Sectional Tournament and States, but those are two I always look forward to. And the best part is, when that all ends, I know spring is right around the corner!