I am starting a business. Wrote a business plan, going to advertise, open a business checking account, the whole nine yards. Check out greenflipflops.com to see what’s happening!

If you steal the title of this post for your domain name, I will hunt you down and… be very disappointed with you.

This is the decision I’m faced with every week night. I’ve worked all day, consumed enough caffeine to make a small woman or child have convulsions, picked up the kids, and it’s about 7pm. If I want a meal, I have to cook it, and clean up after myself (novel idea), but I’m already cooking for the kids, so maybe a little extra work would be worth it? Or maybe I’ve got plenty of reserves (yes, I mean fat) stored up in my body already to tide me over until the next time I eat?

Usually, I decide to just make food for the kids. I try to drink some water to fool myself into feeling more full. And if I’ve just gotten back from the gym? Forget it, I’m definitely not eating. So here is the $64,000 question- is this helpful or hurtful for my “diet”?

I’ve heard that skipping meals has a negative impact because it teaches your body to go unexectedly without food, making the body try to store up energy (yes, in the form of fat.) That logically makes a lot of sense to me. But it’s a little bit counter intuitive because how could I gain weight by not eating? Maybe I’m just gaining fat, not necessarily weight. That sounds right - in the long run, skipping meals makes my body less healthy, but it doesn’t necessarily cause weight gain.

So here we are - meal or no meal? I can tell you that what I’m doing (skipping the meal most of the time) is not really working. I’m not losing any weight compared to when I was eating dinner everyday. So, I believe it is better to bite the bullet and make at least something half-way nutritional to eat, whether it’s a full-on meal or not.

So I go to the gym to pick up my kids from the nursery, and I see the youngest one sleeping. There are two rooms for the kids, one for younger kids, one for the older ones. As I try to make my way into the room with A., the youngest, the employees tell me I need to go into the other room. I start to protest that I’ll just get A. first, and I hear my wife’s voice coming from the other room, where our oldest son is. She’s calling my name, semi-frantically. Read the rest of this entry »

We have heat now. Of course, it’s going to be a high of 60 and a low of 50 for the next few days, but should it dip below 66 degrees in the house, that furnace will be firing. Thanks to my dad for fixing it! He explained to me that there is a roll out or something that acts as a safety device in case the flames shoot out from where they belong, and it needed to be reset or something. I don’t really get it, but I tried to pay close enough attention that I could fix it if it came up again. I’m glad to have that working anyway, one less thing to worry about!

I didn’t really go anywhere. Well, I went out of town for business for a week. I got trained on a product - we’re using ektron for a client and I am now certified to develop sites using their software. I really enjoyed the class, and I can’t wait to start using the product. It’s a CMS for the .NET platform.

Then it was Thanksgiving week. No, I have not lost any more weight. Yes, in fact I probably have gained weight. The whole premise of this blog has gone to shit with me not really being on a diet anymore, but I’m still kinda fat so “Fatblog” still works for me. If you came here to read about how to lose weight, here’s my tip: consume fewer calories than you burn.

The big news-worthy event, drum roll: Read the rest of this entry »

Dammit, I need an extra 8-10 hours a week. One extra “work” day, as it were. So I can do the shit I want to do, not just the work I have to do. I want to build cool Ruby on Rails apps, and use cool PHP frameworks like Zend, and design money user interfaces with cool JavaScript libraries, and make awesome looking PhotoShop/Illustrator graphics and designs. Hell, I even want to make fun .NET apps. And basically just work on sites that don’t suck the life out of people. That’s freaking impossible with kids (not doing that cool stuff, but getting the time to do it all.) I can have 2 extra hours a day, as long as I get up earlier or stay up later. Neither of which are all that appealing to me. What else can I do. I need a solid chunk of time, all at once, not small bits throughout the week, that will never work. Just when I get momentum I’ll have to stop. Think. Options. Alternative ways to be at a computer. In the car? I wish. Put that time wasted sitting in traffic to some use. Ride a train? To where? From where? Plus I’d need a laptop. I don’t have one, and I don’t really like them anyway. Nope. No train rides. Hmmm. Read the rest of this entry »

We signed a “decorator’s agreement” for our house, and this weekend we were allowed to start working on things we wanted to change. Number one on the to-do list was to build a fence, so we can let our dogs out. That is 99% done (still need to install the lock, but I didn’t have my drill bits with me, they’re in storage.) The fence looks fine, matches everyone else’s, and will serve it’s purpose. It’s a 6′ privacy fence (peek-a-boo or board on board style.) Nothing fancy, and fortunately it only required me digging two holes. It did make a bit of a muddy mess though. Hopefully it’ll rain soon and wash that away.
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