Week of running..

Well, I have been running more and more, currently up to 16 miles for this week. I jogged 3 miles yesterday and have 3 more for today. I think I am down about 10-15 pounds in the last month of jogging, but I know I am down at least 2 belt holes. I am in dire need of new shoes, but don't have the money get a new pair. I hope to get a pair in the coming weeks, but I will see.

Well, There are a lot of things going on in the coming weeks. I have my daughters 4th birthday, going to San Antonio, TX and also have my wife's 30th birthday. All of this along with the every day things that go on.

As for WoW, I got into beta but it has been so laggy I have not played much. Instead I have been playing my rogue again, and enjoying it very much. I am thinking about moving my priest back over to Baelgun, as I never play him because he is on the other server.

Till next time, will keep updating..

Busy week last week. Had a hurricane come though LR and it decided to damage my roof some. Ending up calling my insurance but they said that with my deductible, it is not worth using them, but instead just go get the shingles myself and do the work.

Because of the rain, i did not get to run as much as I wanted to last week. I only got 6 miles for last week, about half of what I wanted.

This week, I am pushing for 13 miles for the week, with 2 miles today and 1.5 miles tomorrow. My long day is Saturday with 5 miles.

As for Warcraft, I have been grinding SSO rep so I could get this shield, Sunward Crest. I will be going to Kara tonight and hopefully I will get some more tanking gear, so I can start running Heroic Magisters' Terrace and get Commendation of Kael'thas and Cudgel of Consecration

LR Marathon !!

Well, I am back. I was kind of in a drought and now I should be back. I have started running in preparation for the Little Rock Marathon in March.

I started last week and have been running every day with Sunday as an off day. I find it relaxing when I run. I don't have to worry or think about anything. I just listen to my Ipod and jog. After only a week, I have noticed a difference in my jogging. The longest distance that I have done is 2.5 miles. I know that it is a long way from 26.2 miles, but that is why I am starting now for the race in March.

A cool site that I have found for mapping routes around my house is, runstoppable.com This site uses Google maps to help create a route for your to run/jog.

I will log all my miles so anyone can follow. Last week, I ran 11 miles and today my scheduled distance is 1.5 miles.

Later

Politics...

I know that I don't talk about this much, but something I read got me thinking. Did you know that this is the first US war that we have gone into without raising taxes. Instead of raising taxes to fund the war, we borrowed 750 Billion to 1 Trillion dollars form other countries. This is one of the reasons that the US dollar is so weak and a reason that the US economy is doing so bad.

So now that we know that, what can be done about it? My mother raised me to save money and to buy things when I had the money for it and guess what, this is what I have done though out my life and I have very little debt. Why can't we do the same for our country? Isn't it the same but just on a much larger scale?

I want to ask this to the candidates that are running for President. If there is someone out there that reads this little blog that has email address for each of the candidates, can you please reply so I can ask what plan they have to get us out of foreign debt.

Enough politics now, again if anyone knows of the email address of the candidates that I can send some questions to, please post them.

Sorry..

Sorry for the lack of post. I went out of town for training in Orlando and got back and had so many things to do that updating this blog was not close to my mind. While I was out of town, Megan had her "show me night" at dance/tumble. I will try and get the video up in the next few days. I have to do some editing with the video.

Well, a lot has happened since I last wrote. As I mentioned earlier I went to Orlando for some MS training. Let me tell you, coming from a Unix/Linux background I was skeptical. It was an eye opener. MS looks to have some nice server products out, with Server core 2008, IIS7 and Hyper-V.

I also got a new grill and have been using it and am really loving charcoal. I ended up getting a Weber One touch Silver and getting a clay pot to put under it for the ash. It works very well. The next thing I want to do is some smoking. Ribs, chicken, something easy for my first attempt. I also need to get a thermometer for the grill so I know what the temperature is while grilling.

Later.

30 Days..

I have been watching a show called "30 Days". Maybe someone of you have heard of the show, it is a reality show in which one person does something for 30 days. In the first episode of last season the host decided that he and his girlfriend would go live on minimum wage for 30 days. They found out how hard it was just living on aluminums wage and end the end, one of them had to work 2 full time jobs, just to keep up.

Going from this, I want to start a 30 days experiment. I am still thinking about what I can do for 30 days. I want to do something that will take me out of my confront zone because I believe that anything worth having takes work.

I thought about trying to bike to work for 30 days, but realized that I still have to take kids to daycare/school so that would be out. Other things I am thinking of is not eating meat, or no sodas. I am not sure what would I should do.

I know I have a problem with self control, so whatever I do will test me with this. Whatever I do, I will blog about it here, and I will tell you day by day what is going on.

Decisons..

For my birthday my wife asked me what i wanted. I thought long and hard and for the longest i was going to get wiifit. Well the time has come and I don't think i will get it, but instead I am going to get a new grill.

I have been wanting to get back into charcoal grilling. I have had a gas grill that my family bought us 6 years ago when me and my wife got married. It is high time that i got back to charcoal grilling. I have been looking at different grills, but the grill that keeps popping up as a quality grill is the weber kettle grills.

If you go to amazon and do a search for weber kettle grills, you see dozens of 5 star reviews for the 2 kettle grills that they make in 22.5 inch diameter. One is the Weber One Touch Silver and the Weber One touch Gold. The differences that I can tell is that the gold has a ash "bin" on the bottom to help dispose of charcoal ash easily.

The One touch silver does not have this "bin", but instead just a pan below it. I have read that a clay pot works very well for collecting the ash also if you have the silver. All you do is get a clay pot an put it on the "ash pan" and just let the ash drop in the clay pot instead of the pan.

The difference in cost is about $50. Is the cost worth the ash catcher? I don't think so, I think I can spend $50 on accessories for my new grill. Also I can get the silver down at my local Walmart along with a nice clay pot :-). There are a few mods that I want to do the grill when i get it. One of these mods is adding a thermometer to get the grill temperature.

So there you have it, I will be getting a grill for my birthday, something that every man should want and have. There are plenty of different grills out there, but I don't think there is one that comes from as good of a company as Weber. They make a quality product that will last for years.

Once I get it and grill, I will write about my experiences. I know that fathers day is coming up and I can think of no better thing to do but to grill.

Memorial weekend come and gone..

It came and went, and with it, my birthday. What exactly happened I am not sure but I will share with the 1 or 2 people that read this blog.

This year we decided to travel back to West Monroe, LA and spend Memorial Day with family. It just happened that my wife's (Tiffany) brother and wife (Brandon and Pam) were also coming into town to be with my wifes family also.

We left early Friday morning so we could get into West Monroe to eat lunch with my wifes family. This was the first time that we drove any large distances with our new addition, Mason. He slept most of the way, only to woke up and cried about 30 minutes outside of Monroe because of a dirty diaper.

Saturday was an interesting day. My wifes family decided to go to Natchez and after driving all day to get to West Monroe getting into a car and drive for another 2 hours was out of the question. We decided to meet up with some friends that we have not seen in awhile and visit. We ended the visit and went back to the in-laws house.

Later in the day I decided to hang out with some old friends and have a few drinks, this was a bad idea. I knew going into it, it was a bad idea but I did it instead. I can remember talking to Eddie sitting at the bar drinking my beer saying "I feel bad leaving my wife and kids at home". I guess Eddie wanted to give me a good birthday present by buying all of my drinks and food, but I can tell you the next morning it was not feeling like a good present.

I think in that evening, I had 3 jager-bombs, and 2 shots of tequila along with all the beer that I drank. Needless to say the next morning I was not feeling well. I don't think I have felt that bad in the past 10 years and I know that I have said it in the past, but I will never do that again.

Now don't get me wrong, Eddie is not a bad guy. In fact he is the type of person that would do bail you out of jail if you needed it, or the type of person that always has your back if you get in over your head. I just made a bad decision on how much to drink.

I stayed at a buddies house for the night and I was hurting the next day. I got home around 11:00am on Sunday. Let me tell you, don't roll into your mother-in-laws house very hung over and looking like you slept in the street. That is not a good way to get on your mother-in-laws good side. I tried to eat lunch but could not and ended up falling asleep after lunch and woke up around 4'oclock that evening feeling much better and able to eat again.

Finally I get to my birthday on Monday the 26th and it went off with out much fanfare. I guess that is what you get when you get older. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it, just a little meh I guess. I grilled out with my in laws and my wife got me a little cake, it was a nice jester.

Now is Tuesday, back at work, another birthday down. This was my Memorial weekend in all of it excitement. What will I do next year? I don't know but I know for sure it will be with wife and family and without jager-bombs and tequila shots.

Enjoy the rest of the week...

Crawfish Boil '08

Well, I had my boil over the weekend and I can tell you I am tired. It took a full day to recover. We had a great time, had around 15-20 people over and around 5 or so kids. Everyone enjoyed themselves and ate a little crawfish. I did not have enough, but instead gave it to my guest.

We took down 70 pounds of crawfish, 10 links of boudin, 8 hot dogs, and 10 hamburgers, and I can't tell you how many long necks. All I can tell you is that next time I will be drinking water, because the next day I was hurting, and I did not even drink that much. I think I got a little dehydrated.

Well here are some pics, enjoy..

How you like me now !!

Well, another day another dollar. I have been reading some food blogs and found a pretty good one, ifoods.tv. The site is a recipe site that has videos attached to it. You can upload your own video or watch the videos of the site owner. They seem pretty good, as for the site it is pretty good. It even has links to other food blogs. Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

Have not been playing much of anything gaming wise. I think that I am getting WiiFit for my Bday on the 26th of this month. I say that because that is what I asked for. I am looking for a reason to play my Wii. After sending in my Guitar Hero III disk to get replaced, I have not been playing much of anything. I have thought about selling my Wii, but just can't get around to do it. If the WiiFit does not do it for me, it will be on Ebay.

Mason is sleeping more and more in the evenings and staying up more and more during the day. Getting nice not having to wake up 3 times in the evening.

I have a Softball game tonight at 8:30, hopefully we will win. The big crawfish boil is this weekend, really looking forward to that. As of right now, looks like we will have more than 20 ppl show up. I will have the grill fired up for any meat that needs to be cooked. I will have pics, so expect them to be up on the site sometime early next week.

Later..

Counting pennies

Well, another day another dollar. Thats what they say right? Well I downloaded a price-book spreadsheet. If there is someone that does not know what that is, it is a spreadsheet that keeps track of how much you pay for groceries. In an effort to save money, I am trying it out. I have now added milk and eggs that I got at Wally World earlier today.

Not much going on today. I had a softball game this evening at 6:30 and we lost :-( oh well, comes and goes, I believe we are 3-4. Not doing so well, but its only a game. I think I got bumped up in the game, I was catcher, but when the right fielder missed 2 balls, I got bumped to 2nd base. I think it was a move up :-)

Not much going on in the world of blogs that I read... but I did make some tea last night using, wait for it, a pot and the stove and not the tea maker !! I know, what was I thinking. Well it turned out pretty good if I say so myself. Out of the gallon that I made, it is almost all gone. I think someone besides me likes it.

I have a crawfish boil this weekend if I have not mentioned it yet, and I am not the only one looking forward to it. When I got home from work, my neighbor stopped me and told me how much he is looking forward to it also. As it is looking right now, it will be around 80 degrees and sunny this Saturday, I can't wait. Right now, I think we have about 15-20 people that will be there in one form or another.

Well, time to get my little girl in bed, till next time...

If anyone is wondering...

I have starting to try and cook more. With 2 kids now, going out to eat is getting quite expensive, so I have been trying to cook more. My goal is to cook, atleast 1 good meal a week. Meaning no leftovers, no sandwiches, etc.

I hit up slashfoods.com a lot lately, it is a blog about cooking. I found this recipe and thought it would be good to try. All it is, is the white cheese dip from the Mexican restaurants. You know the one, the dip that you want to get but don't because it is so bad for you but ohhh, so good :-) .

Ingredients

1 C. shredded Asadero cheese
4 oz jalapeno chilies, drained and chopped
1/4 C. half and half
2 T finely chopped onion
2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. salt

Directions

Heat all ingredients over low heat stirring constantly until cheese is melted. Serve with tortilla or corn chips.

I got this recipe from Recpe4living.com.

Enjoy

A good weekend..

Well, the weekend is over and all in all it was a pretty good weekend. My mother-in-law came in this weekend for mothers day and it was pretty good. She got to see her new grand baby and helped out.

We went to the Farmers Market and then went to The Flying Fish for lunch on Saturday along with the Discovery Museum for Megan. It was pretty fun. I am looking forward to next weekend, as I am ready to eat some crawfish. As some of you don't know I have started a yearly tradition here in Little Rock, AR. I have a crawfish boil every year. It started last year as a house warming party, but I want to do it ever year for a party for friends and family to come visit and just have a good time.

Just to give out a link to another blog that I read, Slashfood. There is a good article on Souther Sweet Tea for anyone that is not southern, it is a good read on some good tea.

Later.

The Doctor's office

I went to the doctor's office last week to get some new contacts and to get a new pair of glasses, now a week later I have my glasses. I decided to get a good pair of glasses that would make me wear them more, so I got some nice Nike glasses that are a flex frame (bend easily) with some clip on polarized shades. I spent some money on them, knowing that I want to wear them more than I have in the past.

So now that I have them, they feel weird. I feel myself working to focus when I look at different things. Typing this post, is relative easy on my eyes because I am not having to refocus, but if I look away, say the tv about 30 feet from me, I have to readjust my eyes and it hurts my eyes and head some.

After playing with my glasses, I decide to go back to the doctor thinking that that maybe my percription was wrong on my glasses because I did not have to strain with my old glasses and my new contacts were fine also.

So now back from the doctors office, it seems that I astigmatism in my left eye. For anyone that does not know what astigmatism is to put it simply it is when the human eye is not shaped correctly. Typically the human eye is round like a marble, but with an astigmatism, the human eye is curved, less round and more oval. About 30% of humans have astigmatism but most never notice it.

I am now going to try out my glasses for a few weeks to see if I still strain while looking at things and if my head still hurts. If it continues to hurt after a few weeks, I will go back in for a recheck.

So now you know you know about my trip to the doctors office and that I have an astigmatism.

Later...

New Pics...

Well, I know it has taken some time, but here are some pics of Megan and Mason. Not much going on here other than the baby.

I stoped playing WoW, so don't expect to see much WoW talk. I really don't expect to start back up. My focus has changed since moving to LR, more family and less computer. What I really need to do is get back into Linux/Unix for hobby use.

Ever since getting married, my focus has changed and now with a job shift I need to get back to what i enjoy, learning new things.

As I mentioned before, here are the pis of Megan and Mason...


Nana with Megan and Mason
Mason Laying down
Megan enjoying being a big sis
Close up of Mason
Mason at birth
Mother and Brother trying to figure out which end is up :-)

Hospital Pics..

Here is a link that I found from the hospital when they took pictures of Mason. I will try and get some pics up that took later today.

Hospital Pictures

Mason..

I will have some pictures up soon. Mason William Olmstead was born on April 11th, at 11:40 am. He was 5 pounds 11 ounces, and 18 1/2 inches long. We will be bring him home along with mommy tomorrow. Keep coming for updates.

Later

Its been awhile

Well, I am back to updating my blog.

Well, April 17 is the date that we will have a new addition to our family. We went to a Big brother big sister meeting at the hospital the other day and it was pretty good. I did not get one thing though. Get this... It cost $12 for the class, in which they teach the sibling about the new addition to the family, pretty good imo. They sell a shirt at the end of the class but give out a beanie baby. They should forget about the beanie baby and just give the child a shirt saying i am a big brother/sister.

Just another rant of mine, and Tiffany agreed.

I am thinking of backing off on WoW for a bit. I have been getting to much into it and other things around the house have been suffering. Also the weather is getting nicer outside and frankly I would rather get out and get some sun. There have been other things that have been pushing me this way too. I think that it is what i need to do.

Will keep updating, later..

Vid of Megan

Here is a video of Megan at her "Show Me Day" at the Little Gym. Enjoy...

Goings on..

Well, a lot happened since the last time I posted. Over the weekend my whole family got sick. We all got the stomach bug, but luckly (don't know how lucky) I got it later than both Megan and Tiff. So we were fighting that Sunday and Monday.

It was pretty much done with on Monday evening for Megan's show me day at her tumble class. Here are some pics. I have also been doing pretty well in my opinion with my health. I have not had the time to go to the gym this week, but last week I went 2-3 times. When i get home today, I am going to try and do a workout that is on the 8-week workout page, that can be done from home.

Here are some pics.















Enjoy the pics, will try and get a vid up soon.

Till next time.

New Year, New Me..

Well, I started back at the gym, and now just got to get my eating in order. I got to talking to a buddy and he started on Mens Health Belly off club. After looking at it, it does not seem that hard to get into. Easier than other workout plans. It already started this past week, so I am a little behind, but I have been going to the gym.

Again, eating will be my hard part. Some things that Butch, my friend mentioned is that he baked a few chicken breast in the beginning of the week, and when dinner comes around, he cooks dinner for his wife and child and then just pulls out the chicken breast from earlier in the week, warms it up and adds some veggies. Quick and easy. I am going to try this out for a week and see how it goes.

My lunch will be the hardest part. I have to find something easy, might go out and get some turkey and mustard and bring it up to work with some bread, and make my sandwich up here instead of making it at home.

Past Weekend..

Well, I played a lot this past weekend, probably more than I should have. Got me thinking some more. Last night I went into Shadow Labs with a Pally tank and after looking at his gear, I thought to myself, that I will pull agro with my shadow priest, but that was further from the truth.

I was surprised at how well, he was holding agro, and not on just one mob but all of them. I have a pally tank, Kersplooge, and my gear is better than what he had, my I don't believe that I could have held any more agro than he did. He had mostly greens, but all dps gear, he maybe had one or 2 pieces of real tanking gear.

This got me thinking, that I need to relook at my gear, and start getting 5-man gear, so that my threat can increase so I can hold agro better in 5-mans. For the most part, the Righteousness set is what I need. It balances a good mix between defense, stamina and spell damage. Time to start running those 5 mans to get my gear. I pretty much need everything from every instance, so I can start anywhere.

Back to work...

Well, I am back at work. Trying to get into the grind of things again. On to some Warcraft talk...

I keep debating on whether or not I want to switch my priest back to healing. I have amassed a decent about of gear from Kara as a shadow priest, but now that I have a tanking pally, I guess I miss the healing. I can tell you that I will not change my pally to healing. There is something about hitting one button to heal, that does not seem right.

Something like this build is what I am looking at.
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bxg0zhLzbZcxxcf0qVhc
I have about 1500 to healing right now, as I was a healer when I started into Kara, and pre-BC. Not sure what I want to do.

Started doing dalies. One of my new Years resolutions is to get my epic mount, so I can farm faster on my tankadin. The faster I can mine the more money I can make by selling.

Now for some non-warcraft talk. I am starting back at the gym. I need to get back into it since now I have a bike that I can ride outside, it seems only natural that I try and get healthy in the gym. We have been starting to cook more, witch is a good thing. Will keep you updated on how it all goes.

Not much going on other than that, till next time..