Gnome Easter Egg

So I have been stumbling around the Internet (read www.stumbleupon.com) and found an easter egg site and one specifically for gnome.  If you are using gnome hit <alt>+<f2> and type free the fish.  Then you will get this “cool” wanda fish swimming across your screen.  It’s only one at a time and I have yet to figure out how to make it go away again.  So anyway, i thought it was neat and I don’t really post enough on this site anymore.  So if you want a cool fish that is on top of EVERYTHING then go ahead and type it in.  It’s fun, no really, too bad I can’t find the process to shut it off now…

Praying to Zeus

So yesterday at work we had our formal change of command ceremony.  Our old commander is gone and the new guy is here, whatever his name is.  Seriously, I should probably know his name, but I don’t and the bad thing I don’t even know if I care.  That’s neither here nor there.  So anytime at a military function we always have the arrival of the official party, the entering of the flag by a color guard, the singing of the national anthem, all of this followed by an invocation.  No problems yet, right?  This is how every official military function goes and it’s typically done without any bumps.  Well yesterday during the ceremony the chaplain gets up, who I already don’t like very much anyway.  I mean, nothing personal against him I don’t know him, but I doubt he could be pastor over a church where he had to get voted in by the people.  Although I’ve only seen him in official functions and maybe he is better in ‘normal’ church than at these functions.  At least I thought this until yesterday, now I want to go out of curiousity more than anything.  He starts his prayer, “Oh Zeus, god of thunder and lightning, hear our prayer oh god.”  Now mind you we do work at the weather agency and since it was the weather commander who was stepping down, maybe he thought it would be cute.  I also want to mention I’m not being some sort of religious bigot here either, I was not the only one who started to look around.  I didn’t even know people prayed to the greek gods, and I wonder why he chose greek, wasn’t there a roman god who also was god of thunder and lightning?  Why didn’t he choose that one.  Now I would have felt just as awkward pretending to pray had he been praying to Buddha or Allah or some other diety.  So this was the talk of the office yesterday afternoon, and I was not the only one who found this extremely odd.  I didn’t even know christians (to include catholics) were allowed to pray to other gods like Zeus.  I assume he is christian, I guess he could be mormon, he doesn’t look Islamic.  I thought mormons were even more strict about who they were allowed to pray to?  I don’t know much about their religion.  Either way, our chaplain is out there in right field all by himself, or at least he was yesterday with his prayer to Zeus.  What are your thoughts on this?  Am I just being dumb?

Weekly Weigh-in (254.4)

Well, I am at least losing a little weight although I feel like I am falling further and further behind where I want to be.  Since I started tracking my personal weight loss (outside of the 20 pound weight loss thing I was doing with coworkers), I have lost almost 11 pounds.  So it has taken me 8 weeks to lose 11 pounds, thats not too bad, I mean I have done better than just 1 pound per week I guess, but it’s nowhere close to where my goal of 2.2 pounds per week is.  So I have made some changes and will try and be stricter on my diet and see if I can reverse things.  Right now I am looking at around 225 pounds for my wedding, which is about 10 pounds over where I wanted to be.  That is when I will re-address my weight and fitness goals and might start trying to maintain or I might try and continue losing weight.  I have in my head what I want to look like when running around with a shirt off.  I think that 215 pounds will get me close to that goal, but at the same time, I’m not sure.  Looking at just my BMI charts, I think that 190 would be very ideal; it would get me to a BMI of 22 which in my head seems like a good idea.  I think the BMI is somewhat retarded whenever you get past a certain height, since a guy in my office is extremely skinny, same height as me, and has a BMI of 24.  Well so I have broken out into working out twice a day now to increase my metabolism early in the morning, burn some extra calories and then workout in the afternoon again.  Right now in the morning what I am doing is lifting weights 3 days a week.  I do a whole body workout and it is almost as much of a cardio workout as it is a traditional weight lifting workout.  I want to see where I’m at after this week and I might change it up a little.  The other two days of the week I do high intensity interval training (HIIT) which I do on the treadmill.  I read about it on the site, www.fitnessblackbook.com a great site that I would suggest anyone look at.  I’ve read almost every article/entry on it in the past 2 or 3 weeks.  The HIIT that I do works like this; it starts and ends with a 5 minute warmup/cooldown which is 5 minutes of walking (3.5 speed).  From there I alternate 1 minute of running and 1 minute of walking.  I start running at 7.0 and every running interval I do I increase the speed by 0.5, it is definitely intense.  In the afternoon I am continuing to do what I was, Monday I run 1.5 mile to check my time, Tuesday and Thursday I have PT, and follow it up with a spin class.  Wednesday I do a 45 minute long run to where my goal is more than 6 miles in 45 minutes; this would place me at a 7:30 minute mile steady for the entire time.  Friday afternoon I want to start swimming before going home for the day (I might wait until it warms up just a little bit more).  Then I want to start coming into the gym on Saturday and Sunday early.  Currently after I do my morning routine, I workout on an empty stomach, I eat a 0 carb breakfast (3 egg whites).  This allows me to not really have any carbs until lunch time with my sandwich so ideally I am still burning fat this entire time instead of just burning carbs.  This is probably the hardest part of the day, I am so hungry and today for instance I had maybe 10 pretzel sticks which immediately curbed my appetite until it was time to eat my sandwich.  The only other problem I have had is just making sure I stick to my diet without faltering; I think once I get that discipline back then I will definitely start to see 2 or 3 pounds a week just flying off without any problem.  I am currently 7 pounds over where my goal was for this week, so I have a lot of catching up to do, but I don’t think it’s possible.  We will see.  Wish me luck, and good luck in your own weight loss goals.