When I saw a TV ad for the new iPod Nano last night, I felt rather old. The iPod Nano can record video, as well as play music and make you a peanut butter sandwich, evidently. It’s smaller than a deck of cards and probably lighter than one too. Yet, all I could think of was my dad’s first home video camera, which looked something like this, though the camera itself wasn’t as fancy.

Yes, my dad lugged a 10-pound VCR with a handle around the Baltimore Science Center taping the animatronic dinosaurs exhibit. The camera itself did not have a video tape holder. You had to plug the camera into the VCR and drag it along with you. The battery life wasn’t that long either. But now, you can just buy a Flip Camera that fits in your pocket to achieve the same goal.

When Dad was recording things with his huge camera, I was probably watching Inspector Gadget, a cartoon broadcast in the 80’s that was sort of a spoof of Get Smart, though if [...]

• Continue reading "The times, they are a changin’"

It was 12:38 and I wasn’t starving, shocking me enough to interrupt my typing. I double checked the clock in my system tray. How bizarre, I thought. I always get hungry by noon. Before I could blame one of my medications for lack of appetite, I realized there was an answer that didn’t involve reuptake inhibitors.

It was Daylight Saving Time.

While my computer clock said it was 12:38, my body clock said it was 11:38, so I got up to eat both earlier and later than usual. It happened again that evening after my short-term memory had cleared my earlier realization and I momentarily was amazed that I hadn’t eaten anything by 7pm.

These tricks with time made me realize how linked my eating is to the clock. I eat breakfast at around 7:30. I have a mid-morning snack, but don’t eat lunch until noon. Then there is the afternoon snack and dinner right when I get home. It’s not timed to the second, but I eat on a regular schedule. I wasn’t entirely conscious of it [...]

• Continue reading "Lunch time"

When I was in high school, I would hear adults complain, “I don’t have enough time!” or “There’s only 24 hours in a day.” I understood the meaning of those sentences, but I didn’t really understand what they meant. When I was in high school I watched TV after school or read books or lied around and did nothing. Sometimes I did homework, but usually on the bus on the way to school. I had lots of time to do whatever I wanted and I never appreciated it.

These days I have to work 8 hours a day. I get an hour for lunch. I spend an hour in transit. If I cook or exercise, that takes time. I have to sleep at least 7-8 hours or else my health suffers and I can’t focus or my head hurts more than it usually does. I try to stuff an hour or 30 minutes in there to relax and do nothing so I don’t go insane. Then I try to write quality blog entries, because I hate [...]

• Continue reading "Time management"

I’m glad I didn’t have to lose weight back in the 80’s or 70’s, and not just because I missed that whole Jazzercise craze. Occasionally I get e-mails from women in their 40’s or 50’s who’ve lost a lot of weight and tell me they only wish they’d been able to do it sooner in their lives like I have. I don’t think it’s fair to compare because I have several advantages over them that come from existing farther down the time stream.

I loves me the Internets. A lot of the information I have learned about fitness and exercise is from articles I’ve read online. Even though I didn’t start using the Internet until high school, it’s difficult to remember a time when I wasn’t skimming my eyeballs across an Internet browser for at least an hour or more a day. I think I was dependent on the World Book Encyclopedia for most school research projects, which was more readable and shorter than the huge Encyclopedia Britannica. It even had pictures! Now if I’m curious [...]

• Continue reading "Time is on my side"

In case you don’t read the comments, the blog was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal’s Blog Watch column yesterday. You have to have a subscription to read the whole column online, which I don’t. So I braved the cold Indianapolis winter and parallel parked for the first time in half a year to buy a copy from the bookstore downtown. Thanks, WSJ! Now that I am famous, I will need an entourage. Any volunteers? Sorry, I don’t offer health care. I’ll need some bling too, so my entourage’s first task will be to scour the local pawn shops for shiny rich stuff.

After two years of losing weight and blogging, I’ve lost 180 pounds and I got a nice mention in a national newspaper. What other things could I have achieved in two years?

I could have:

Gotten an associate’s degree in business, so when I take over the world I’ll also have a very nice marketing plan to pitch the cardiovascular benefits of trench digging.

At an episode a day, watched almost all of the 400 episodes [...]

• Continue reading "Two Years"