The Day My Wedding Ring Fell in The Bathroom Garbage

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I have been very pleased with my weight loss to date even if it doesn’t feel like I lost that much. Many people that see have been saying it’s visible but I still have a belly for doesn’t feel like a lot to me. That changed today when I was drying my hands after using the bathroom at work and my wedding ring fell off my finger into the garbage as I was throwing the paper towel. Thankfully the garbage was only paper towels and was able to dump it out and hear the ring hit the floor. I was very grateful to be able to get it back so easily.

I knew the ring was a little bit looser recently but I had no idea how loose it was until that event happened. From what I’ve read it’s actually quite difficult or impossible to have a ring size smaller. It’s easier to get it bigger but from what I can tell the only way I can get it smaller you have little balls added to the inside to account for the extra space. I need to bring it in soon to see if that can be done. Until then I am playing Russian roulette every time I wash my hands. Of course on the plus side I do feel like the weight loss is working now!

I Have a New Nemesis, Well Technically Two of Them

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On my road to a lower weight i have learned many things about food and about myself.  Recently the biggest things I have learned are who are my enemies.  I didn’t think I had many of them but I have learned that not to be true.  Early on in my weight loss mission I learned French Fries were not only not my friend but they were evil.  They became nemisis number one.  For years we were so friendly.  I ate them and they kept being so tasty.  Now they are generally what makes a meal ok to wow I will gain weight tomorrow.

This past month I learned of another rival, the once so nice cake.  MC has been making test cakes for Teagan’s upcoming birthday parties (we are doing one for Family and one for Teagan’s friends).  Being a good husband and father it was my duty, no responsibility to sample the test cakes.  What I learned was two fold.  One, MC makes fantastic cake but I kinda already knew that.  The decorations are pretty amazing.  Two, cake is now my nemesis.  Granted I ate 3 slices in one day of the first test cakes but I didn’t expect to gain over 2lbs doing so.  It took over a week to get back down to the weight I was before I ate the cake.  I know I need self control but it is not my fault my enemies are so tasty.  I am great if I just dont have any and stay away from it.  That is what I do with fries, but cake is harder to resist after I have one small slice I have to have more.

I think I need to fast leading up to Teagan’s birthday.  That is my current solution for birthday cake problems that are in my future!

Deleting Facebook and Starting From Scratch

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If you are a Facebook friend of mine and are wondering why suddenly you got a invite to be my friend again and can’t find all my old content here’s why.

I have been pondering my use of Facebook for over a year. It started last year when I took the entire month of July off from using social media. I read in an article somewhere and thought it was a good idea. It turns out I did not miss it as much as I thought I would. Once that month was over I started using it again but on a more limited basis. Over the past year I keep reading about the things Facebook can do with my content or is doing with my content. I wasn’t pleased. The new search functionality just spooked me. It’s not like I posted anything questionable but I just don’t like some of the business practices they’re doing with the information I put in the system. When I first started using Facebook it was treated as a personal area to post things to my friends only. Over time they keep doing things in semi-sneaky ways to make your data more public. It just makes me uneasy. I tried to remove old content but after much searching online it became apparent that there is no easy way to bulk delete anything. Most forum posts suggest just deleting your entire account and starting over. I didn’t want to do that but in the end I felt there was no other feasible choice if I wanted old content removed.

Everything finally came to a head today when I deleted my old account. First I exported all the data from my old account and verified that I wasn’t using Facebook authentication on any sites that were critical to me. Then I just remove the account. Apparently it takes 14 days for account to actually be deleted and then another month or so for all the data to be removed from their systems. After deleting the original account I went on and created a new one. I spent time inviting friends from the old account to the new one. I will be honest in saying that I did not invite 100% of the frames on the old one to the new account. I took this change as an opportunity to remove people I really don’t talk to anymore. I seriously thought about not signing up for an account again but in the end I did for two reasons. First, a lot of family loves getting photos of Teagan via Facebook. The second reason is more practical. I like having Facebook because it does enable me to stay in contact with people I don’t always get to see but I had issues about security and what they do with my data so I will continue to use it or treat anything I put there like I do with twitter. When I first started posting I didn’t do that and that was what bothered me.

Longer term MC and I are talking about how and if we continue posting photos to Facebook.  We have read some articles about what people (or Facebook themselves for that matter) can do with the photos and Face recognition and EXIF data. I would like to find a way to use my Flickr account to link to my Facebook wall with no data remaining on Facebook systems.

The bottom line is if you’re a friend of mine please don’t be offended if I don’t “like” post of yours or do lots of commenting on things you post to your wall or mine. I am just not doing that at all or very often going forward.

Kanban Training

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Over the past two days most of my team in NY and I have been in training related to a project we are doing that involves implementing Kanban. The training was really good. I know the trainer and he is very energetic. He didn’t disappoint. The training was very interactive and got everyone thinking. I think it was really helpful and I hope to use a lot of what we learned and apply it to the real world. Its one thing to try something (I have been trying a Kanban implementation with my team for a few months) and it is another to get really in depth info from experts and be able to use it better. I already learned of several ways i can modify what we are doing to improve on it outside of the project we went to the training for.

Test Cake

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MC has been experimenting with cake for Teagan’s upcoming first birthday.  This weekend she made her first test cakes.  One was in a duck mold.  it looked horrible but tasted perfect.  The other one was a traditional cake that also tasted fantastic.  MC is really good at this cake stuff but her decision to start a baking hobby is a challenge since I am dieting.

I was eating so much of that awesome cake that we had to throw out what we had left over after giving away a ton of it.

Another Jawbone UP

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While I was away on vacation my jawbone UP broke yet again. Their warranty replacement process takes one to two weeks. They’re very good with giving you a replacement UP’s but it takes forever to get it. I am assuming since I have gone through six or seven of them and I don’t beat them up very much they are having problems with them and that is why they are quick to replace them. While I’m trying to actually lose weight and check my activity every day not having an UP for one to two weeks is very difficult. Because of that I decided to eat the $129 and get another one so I had it when I got home from vacation. I seriously contemplated getting the Fitbit Flex but I opted for another UP.  MC convinced me to get another black band one instead of the blue one I was looking at. I’m glad she did because Jawbone I didn’t have any black ones in stock so the replacement one I am getting will be blue.

Our Private Pool Cabana

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On our last full day in Aruba we decided to rent one of the awesome poolside cabana’s and relax in style. It was really nice. The free towel service, water and ice on top of the guaranteed shady chairs made the splurge worth it.  I can’t see spending money on them every day but since we had the cabana we stayed by the pool a lot longer today.  Teagan enjoyed her nap in the shade as well.

It was a fantastic last full day in Aruba.  Sad to have to be going home tomorrow.

 

 

2013-08-09-Aruba

Dinner on the Beach

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Today Teagan took a power nap with me while I walked her in the stroller on the beach. She then took a two hour nap after lunch.  We got lucky.  The weather continues to be fantastic.  For Lunch we walked to the Westin Hotel and grabbed food at their poolside cafe since MC & I  did not think that much of the poolside cafe in our hotel.

For dinner we had reservations for a beachside meal right on the water in the sand at our hotel.  It was one of the two splurge nights we decided to have on our stay.  It was pretty amazing to sit and relax at a table right on the beach.  They timed it so we started to sit down as the sun was going down.

The food was pretty good.  it was the first time i had a lobster bisque soup.  The service was a bit slow but we attribute that to the distance the servers had to travel to get to us!  Teagan was very cooperative also.  She generally is a fantastic baby and she fell asleep in MC’s arm’s after it got dark but not before she was up way past her bedtime.  Overall a perfect day in Aruba.

 

2013-08-07 Dinner on the beach

Catching up on Blogging

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The way I write this blog is I will try to come up with a subject to an entry and a sentence or two on what I want to write to job my memory when I finally sit down to write about it.  Many times I will write the full post within a few days of my thinking of it.  Other times I pile up entries that I really want to write but dont get to them for weeks or sometimes months later.  Tonight I had some down time so I went back to a half a dozen posts that I have wanted to write since as far back as November and tried to catch up.  I still have over 38 drafts pending but I made a dent in my backlog.  I will usually back date things to the day they happened or when I thought about writing them instead of posting things dated today.  It is my way of keeping a certain point of view.  My post for today is that I spent almost an hour and a half catching up on posts this way.  it is news in my life only because I dont normally get that much time and when I do I dont always focus on writing.  I almost never focus on writing.  I like doing it and it sometimes helps me relax so I will try to do it more often.  Of course I can find a half a dozen times when I say that over the past 10 years and it is always a struggle to sit down and write.