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..