Birthday lunch.

 

My mother took the family, minus my brother that lives in Utah to Perkins restaurant for a birthday lunch today and what a deal it was.  As we are being seated the first thing that my mom says to the waitress is “Do you guys have balloons we can put on his wrist for his birthday” as she is pointing right at me.  Instantly I wanted to duck for cover under the table or a big rock. I do the palm to face thing thinking, “oh come on Mom”.  So that was the start of it. 

As the the time went on I was privileged to hear the “when you were born” story that I hear every year.  I was supposed to be born on the 19th and mom was in labor and Dad was right there with her but after a little while  everything stopped and the Doc said  “sorry folks but not today”  Mom keeps saying  I was being stubborn and wanted to wait till the 20th.  They sent my parents home and the next day  Dad went to work.  A few hours later  my Grandpa  calls dad and says  “hey  you better get to the hospital because you have a new baby boy out there”.

Then your told about the excruciating pain she went through and your riddled with guilt for causing such pain  to your mother and you say  “Yes mom I'm sorry”over and over.  Again you feel like crawling under the table or a rock.      So yeah for 39 years I’ve been dealing with guilt that  I had no control over???????  What the Heck?? Thanks Mom.   Ha ha ha ha   Guilt, that’s a funny word too.  LOL.

Then for some reason the conversation turned a little dark and we were talking about jerky people and my little brother talked about a guy at his work who was a jerk and said that if the guy kept pestering my him, my brother was going to kill him.  My mom out of the blue said “ well if your going to kill him make sure you use the other K’.   We all stopped in mid conversation  looking at mom who didn’t see us looking at her as she was looking at her dinner plate and we asked each other,’  Do you know what the other K is?  I don’t know, I know it’s a letter in the alphabet.  So my sister turns to mom and asked “what do we kill them with?”  Kitchen?  Kitten? Kite? ummm mom did you want us to kill the guy with a koala ? Mom looks up at all of us and shakes her head and said  No, Kindness,you fools,  you kill them with Kindness.   Leave it to mom to turn something dark into light.  Anyway had a good time and thank goodness there were no surprise balloons.

Thank you mom for taking us all out today and most of all thank you for giving birth to me. 

This Weight loss bit.

So, for the past several months I have been working on getting myself better and creating a new me, let me tell ya its been quite The ride.  There have been ups and downs and  lets be honest here, when the downs came I just wanted to say screw it, I’m done,and forget the whole thing  but I am still working at it because I never want to go back to the way I was ever again.  I can easily say the ups have out numbered the downs which is nice to know.

I haven't been on the scale in a while but I think I am starting to come off that stupid plateau I have been on for almost a month or two or three or four or five  ha ha  no just kidding, it’s just felt like I have been on one for a long time.  I am looking better and feeling like a million bucks, that’s the best way I can describe it. My clothes are awfully baggy and my new ones feel like that actually fit the way they are supposed to.  I still have a ways to go but I know I am on the right track.

I wanted to take a moment and tell all my family and friends how grateful I am for your love and support.  I could never ever EVER have gotten this far without it.  As I said before  I have tried this a few times in the past years ………….and failed.    I also wanted to specially thank my friends that see me every day I am out there walking: Thank you for keeping me going. 

In Remembrance of the Space Shuttle Challenger.

25 years ago today the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded just shortly after lift off killing all on board. I was 14 years old at the time and still remember sitting in class at the Burley junior high school listening to the announcement as it came over the intercom. I still remember how I felt bad about the situation and the people involved and there families and for everyone. It has always been my biggest fantasy to be an astronaut ever since I can remember.

The loss of the crew of the Challenger still cuts deep in my heart. Today my thoughts and prayers still go to there families

The Astronauts: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair; Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik.

Time to get back into the blogging business again!!!!!

 

I am not a writer of poems, novels or even a paper back book.  I will leave the writing of those things to the very talented hands of my wonderful sister in law and future popular author. But I wanted to write in this blog and tell my life story.  I do have a journal that I write in day by day but here I can go into better detail about certain events but not write the every day mundane things (such as oh look I blinked).   I hope you enjoy my thoughts, feelings and adventures good and bad.  

The year 2010 has come and gone and it has left some scars on my family.  We have dealt with losing jobs to dealing with depression which lead to a serious health issue.   After receiving the news that I had Congestive Heart Failure I went into a tail spin emotionally.  I couldn’t help but think what was going to happen now?  I have no job, no insurance and I was scared.   There were several times I thought that it was the end for me on this earth and I was scared to go to sleep but my body made me sleep and I kept waking up. 

On a good sign all the tests that I had showed that I was in good health in other ways.  My cholesterol is normal and I'm not a diabetic.  Then I got some good news.  The doctor said that if I could get my weight off my heart would be better.  That is what was killing me was my weight.  I had tried losing weight before but it always ended badly and I regained the weight again.  Then I realized I was doing it for other people and not for me.   When I was told that if the weight came off and that  I would do better, I had no idea what to do.  Then it came to mind.  Heather was always going to see her grandmother at the care center to play cards.  I decided to with her and while she played cards  I would walk the halls.  at first it was not fun.  I could only walk so far and when I would pass the rooms the residents would look at me like I was some evil entity that invaded there home and I wanted to quit.  It was the encouragement of my friends and my new friends at the care center that made me keep going. With that encouragement  I have lost a grand total of 35 pounds and am still going at it.  

Anyway to make this soon to be very long and very wordy story a short one, 2010 was hard but we made it through faith in Heavenly Father.    I know that 2011 will be great for me and my family.

Interesting People.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37910015/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

Some one either knew they were coming or he just walks around town that way.  Either way its an interesting read.   Enjoy!!!!

Monkeys in the tree.

I have monkeys swinging in my tree.  Our house is a center of attention at times.  When Heather and I are out sitting in the swing allot  of times neighbors will see us and come sit in the chairs we have and we will have a big conversation with everyone.  So while we are talking to the parents  there kids love to skateboard, ride bikes in the driveway, color with the chalk on the sidewalk and now the big attraction is climbing in our tree. 

As long as no one gets hurt we  don't mind.  Heather and I are not going to be like old lady Benson that lived on my block when I was a kid and got mad every time we road past her house on our bikes.  Its not our fault that her dogs trampled her flowers every time we went by.

Windows Seven features.

Ever wish you could just tell your computer what to do instead of having to type it on the keyboard or move the pointer with your mouse? Will pretty much now you can. Back in the good old days of windows XP there was a program that was developed that could help you dictate words to text by using your microphone called Dragon Naturally Speaking. In my opinion the program was OK it did what you wanted it to do except there were a lot of words that it could not handle and that you had to manually type. Was also very expensive program to. While I was working for dell I spoke with many people who used this program most of them doctors and lawyers as they dictated their notes about their jobs.

With the new operating system windows seven, this speech to text program is now integrated into the operating system. All you have to do is go to the control panel and select speech recognition. Now Windows Vista has the same program. But in my opinion windows seven has made advances on it.

Now I am not going to get all techy and start saying things that will go over your head but not only can you dictate but you can command you computer with your voice. You can tell your computer to click the start button as well as opening programs, going online and hitting your favorite website as well as opening your email.

Now I just want you to know that throughout this post I have used the keyboard four times just to make minor adjustments the rest has been all my voice and I think that's pretty cool. So give it a try check it out you might just like it yourself.