Happy Birthday to Me!

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So a week ago I celebrated the 13th anniversary of my 25th birthday, and what did you all get me? Anything? Gee, all I wanted was the most popular personal website of all time, and maybe for a few of you to click on some ads and buy something at Amazon so I could pay for it. That wouldn't have cost much!

For my birthday, I received a few phone calls, I got to work pretty much all day (a treat, considering the company I work for and the state of the economy), and I ate what might be my last chocolate. A few months ago, just to see if I could, I went 3 whole months without any chocolate or heavy sugar. No cookies or ice cream or cake or anything like that. I've had my pop-drinking down to about 1-2 cans per week for quite a while now, and that was the only real sugar I had in that 3 month period.

Well, after getting to eat my annual Cadbury Egg, which they started selling at the beginning of this month, I decided that they were WAAAAYYY too expensive to ever get again. The truckstops are charging a dollar or more for them, and even Walmart wants 50 cents. So, like I always do when I get disgusted at the price of something, I quit buying it. I buy pop only when I can get it for $6 or less for a 24 pack of 12 oz cans, I don't buy Doritoes unless they're $2.50 or less per bag, and unless I'm really weak, I won't pay more than 50 cents for a candy bar. Anything higher is a rip off.

The problem comes when they put them "on sale" for the normal price. If your tactic to stop buying crap is to get disgusted at the price, and then the price comes down, your disgust goes away. That's what happened with my previous candy strike. I quit eating it, they dropped the price, then they dropped it again. Then they introduced a new type of candy that I really wanted to try, and so I gave in. But now, even though they're putting the stuff "on sale" again, I've decided I'm going to do without it.

This time, I've got a little more than my disgust at the prices to help me out. I'm also disgusted by the way it robs me of the body I want to have. I lost 50 pounds last year, DESPITE eating candy once in a while (and binging on it a couple times), but so far this year, I've held pretty steady, fluctuating over about 10 pounds up and down. I'm eating better, too. More fruits. I can't hardly stand vegetables, but vegetable juice is surprisingly tasty. My sister turned me on to Kashi cereals, and that's about all I eat for breakfast now. (I'm still working on the next installment of my health series, and I'll tell you more about that then.) But the point is, I've decided that if I don't make my health a priority while I still have it, I'm going to lose it. I've been lucky I haven't gotten sick hardly ever, and that can last forever if I take it seriously.

I've seen the results of my new strength-building workout, and they're unbelievable! An average performance gain of 35% in just 4 sessions spread out over about 8 weeks! If I can find a way to burn fat that fast, I'll be unstoppable. Seeing these results gives me far more substantial hope for the future than I've had in a long time, and if I'm going to be around 200 years from now, I may as well be able to enjoy it, you know? I'll see you when we get there, okay?

One final note: I noticed some sort of browser hijacking going on recently, but I was under the impression that it was the wifi connections I was using. After all, this site is run off of a major internet company, and the chances of them getting hacked are infinitesimal. But that seems to be what has happened. The interesting little plug-ins I had - the interesting things to ponder and the pick-up lines you should never use - seem to have been hijacked, and that was what was screwing up the site. Man, I'm so sick of those hacker/spammer bastards ruining the internet for everyone. If they'd put 1% of the energy they consume into trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to destroy it, we'd probably all be rich by now.

I want to thank that guy I know from one of those Swedish countries for helping me figure out what was going on. When he said the site was trying to send him a trojan horse virus, I knew something wasn't adding up. Thanks, T-bone!

Oh, and hey, could someone please buy something from Amazon through one of these links for me? Please?

Got Lobstah?

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I feel like I'm pretty well traveled, having just recently upped the number of states I've been to to 45. For a long time, I had been waiting to get into South Dakota, and a few months back, I finally did it. There was a time a couple years ago when I was in Minnesota and I had to go to Montana, and I had to choose between North Dakota or South Dakota as the way to get there. I figured with all the driving I was doing, it would be harder to get to North Dakota a second time, so I went that way. I had no idea it would take about 3 more years before I got into South Dakota! I only nicked the corner of it, though, and only because I went a little out of my way to do it.

Then a few weeks ago, I finally got to go somewhere else new. I love seeing new places, and I haven't been in hog heaven like this for a long time. First, they sent me up through the Adirondacks to Lake Champlain. I've never been in that part of upstate New York before, and I figured that, since I'd never been closer to the northeast corner of the USA than Boston, looking at Vermont from across the lake was all the closer I was going to get to it.


Wrong!

Next thing I knew, they wanted me to go to Maine! Woo hoo!!

So I continued up to the Canadian border until I got to within a mile of it. There's a bridge across the lake there, and you can see Quebec from it. Then I headed down through Vermont, then across New Hampshire and the White Mountains, until finally I reached Maine. Just in the Adam's apple part of it, not the face or the head.

Unfortunately, lobster was out of season when I went through, drat the luck! But at least I got to miss out on the snow storms that raged on to the south.

For a good 48 hours, I was in Terra Incognita, and it was awesome! Knocked out 3 new states in one fell swoop. Now I just need to get the northwest corner and my collection of continental states will be complete.

Haven't gotten around to updating my list of places I've been yet, but I'll get to it in a while. I've been pretty busy lately. For the most part, they've been keeping me busy, which is good. Surprising that it's been somewhat good; apparently the economy is recovering.

All right, that's all I've got for you for now. Tune in later as I continue with my serieses.

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