New Year's Resolution

I almost never make a New Year's Resolution for several reasons:

1. I almost never keep them
2. If I try to keep it and fail it makes me look bad and I don't like looking bad
3. I think they are stupid

Well, this year is different. (Actually, it is no different than last year but I am going to make it different.) I am going to make and keep a New Year's Resolution!

My New Year's Resolution will be to loose 100 pounds before January 1, 2009.

I have several reasons for making this resolution:

1. It is difficult to tie my shoes without holding my breath
2. It is difficult to do any kind of rigorous activity without loosing my breath
3. I don't like looking/feeling like a blimp
4. I don't want to have a heart attack/stroke by age 30 (but if I do, it better kill me)
   

Actually, I have not liked the above things for sometime now...probably the number one reason for me wanting to loose weight came last Sunday. An elder at my parents church, whom I love and respect shook my hand after church and asked me if I had entered a weight gaining contest. Now, I know that he was just kidding and I'm not saying that it even hurt my feelings (I mean, common, I am a middle school teacher for crying out loud, I have had much, much worse things said to me than that) but it actually made me realize, "hey, I am fat." I knew it all along, but actually having someone else say it to my face, in such a matter of fact way, was kind of humbling/humiliating (even though this man meant not to do either of the two). So, thanks for the inspiration.

When I left Searcy, I weighed my self and was shocked. For the better part of a year now, I have hovered in the 290-295 range. Thursday, December 20, I weighed in at 304 pounds. So, if I can stay motivated this time next year I will be down to 204 (incidentally, lower than I was as a freshman in High School!)

I can do this if I loose an average of 1.923 pounds per week.

I will have to have some goals in order to accomplish this:

1. Exercise 3-4 times per week
2. Cut out all soda (exception, 1 Mt. Dew in months that I have lost each week)
3. Reduce sweets
4. Drink more water
5. Don't eat in the cafeteria unless it is salad
   
6. Exercise 3-4 times per week

I will be updating regularly, here is my before photo:



Wish me luck!

Oldest man 116; Couple Shoot at Each Other

I have wanted to post about this for two weeks now. It is actually kind of aggravating... At school I cannot post from Blogger. I can use google reader to read all of my RSS feeds but cannot post to blogger. So, I have been forced to use my classroom blog to post most of my stuff. Using that blog kind of limits me though...I am limited by the content that I can post because I have my school hat on when posting there. I have been tossing around the idea of registering my own domain...I can do it for less than $50 per year.

Back to the reason for the post...

Several weeks ago BBC reported about a man who lived to be 116 years old! This is simply amazing. I am not sure that I would even want to live to be that old. Think of what all this man saw in his life time:

• The rise in popularity of the automobile
• The rise in popularity of the air plane
• WWI, WWII, Vietnam
• The space program
• The Titanic
• Carnegie Hall opened the year of his birth
• Etc.
  

Another source that reported on this and asked Nestor why he never married, Nestor said, "If I had had a wife, I would have been in a coffin long ago."

This kind of goes against my good friend Josh's theory but then I found another story where "Couple shoot at each other; wife is killed" is the title. According to authorities, here is the timeline:

• Couple gets in to an argument about a snow blower
• Wife goes inside to get shotgun (12 gauge)
• Wife shoots at husband and misses
• Husband gets pissed and retrieves his handgun from vehicle
• Husband and wife have another altercation near car
• Husband shoots and kills wife
• Husband calls and waits for police to arrive

Wow, what a Sunday afternoon!

Note: Anyone who does not use some kind of reader to bouese your blogs or any other site that is updated often, you should really consider using google for this...it really is wonderful!