Thinking about the past

Damn you classmates.com! A website where people from High School or College can find out what old classmates are up to these days. I've had a profile for quite a few years and get emails some times about people visiting it. I recently figured out that I can also look for college friends (I previously just thought it was mostly about High School connections). I had to grab my college year books to remember who people where. As usually with this site no one I liked or hung out with is on the site. It did prompt me to contact the Alumni department and get them to send me a yearbook for a year I didn't have! The yearbook and the search for old friends on classmates.com brought be down memory lane. So let me tell you a little bit about where I spent my first years out of high school.

I attended Whitworth College in Spokane WA. A small Presbyterian college set on a beautiful campus in a small eastern Washington town. I attended Santiam High School in Mill City OR population 1500 or so and the student body was about 200 and my class had something less than 40 students. So I wanted to go to a smaller college where I would have the chance to participate in all sorts of things and not be thought of as a number. Whitworth is a unique school I think. It has a lot of tradition probably like most Colleges do. There is a religious feel to the school but it wasn't overbearing. At the time I enrolled I had all sorts of ambitions. I started out as a Psychology major with the idea of being a youth councilor either through the church or professionally. Within the first year I realized that psychology majors where CRAZY! I also found a job within my first month on campus working for the stage crew. I was always into theater in high school and I even had a drama course I was taking. I quickly changed my major to theater at that point. I schemed my way into taking a winter term in London to study theater and funding it with my student loans. I spent the following summer living on campus and working to pay it all back. I ate spagetti-o's and Top Ramen all summer. The next year I took a computer programming class to fulfill a math requirement. Turns out I loved computer programming and was quite good at it. I got an A without trying too hard. So I switched my major again to computer science. I also found out that there was good money in programming and the hours were a lot more regular than theater. I spent my next summer working at a theater arts camp on California where I met my wife. I took a year off from school and then returned the following fall. It turned out to be too hard to work, go to school and be married all at the same time and something had to give. So I left half way into my 3rd year and moved back to Southern California where my wife's family lived and started my career in computers.

I have often thought about my time at Whitworth over the years. I don't regret making the decision to leave and my choices afterwards have led me to some great memories. But I do wonder what happened to the people I knew then. Where are they now and what type of choices did they make. It was a great time. I was young but independent. I lived in a dorm my first year and then moved off campus during my 2nd year. I hung out with the stage crew and the the staff the managed it. I didn't get involved in as many other groups or activities as I thought I would. The college was huge compared to my high school days. The other day I was thinking back about how we used to play Frisbee golf on campus during lunch breaks in the summer. The course was so unmarked that if you didn't learn it from someone else you'd never know where it was. So I googled Whitworth College Frisbee Golf and found this link called 95 things I love about Whitworth written by a student Dec 2007. Most of it I connect with except for the newer stuff since I was there from 81-84. Looks like the Frisbee (disc) golf is alive and well. Of course they are now called Whitworth Univerity, I don't know when that happened? When I ordered the missing yearbook I sent my payment in for it and got a letter back thanking me for my donation so I guess now I am an official donor to the school?

Anyway. Fond memories.

There is less of me lately

I've always been a big guy. I'm 6' 2" and large framed. I've always weighed more than I look like I do. In fact I remember once when I was at a amusement park as a teenager and they had a guy with a scale that would give you a prize if he couldn't guess your weight with a certain percentage. With the range he allowed for error very few people got anything. But when I walked up there he was amazed at how much I weighed compared to his guess. Wow, a prize for being heavy...who'd have thought?

My size was perfect for playing football at a single A high school for 4 years. I was one of the bigger guys so I played offensive guard and defensive end and was on the field for most of every game. After high school and on to college I wasn't as active and on went the pounds. I spent a summer after my 2nd year in sunny California and lost most of those pounds NOT eating the lousy food at the camp I worked at. It was the first and last time I ever had a tan too. I got married that fall and then the pounds started coming back on again over the years.

When I turned 30 I figured I REALLY needed to do something about my growing weight. So I put myself on a medically supervised fast and lost all of it in about 6 months. I wish I could go back now and tell myself to enjoy the huge weight loss but instead I really didn't change my life that much and in time I gained it all back and more. I did the fast again about 7 years later. Lost almost as much as the first time in 6 months again. I was good at the fasting with no food options but it makes you a little crazy from the deprivation and is hard to control your appetite when you go back to eating. You feel SO good for being so much smaller that you think you can eat anything. And I have always been able to eat a LOT!

Well it's been about 8 years since I last did the fast and with the working from home thing for the past 3 years I have really put on the weight. I didn't want to do the fast and wanted to make a change that would be more permanent. I also wanted to lose more weight but at a MUCH slower rate so I can keep it off. So a couple of months ago something in my head just clicked. I started eating the amount of food a day that I would if I weighed what I want to weigh. And over the past few months the pounds have just started melting off. Not something you could really notice since I weighed so much to begin with. Like I said I never look as heavy as I really am. I figure at this rate it will probably take me 2 years to get to a healthy weight but I will probably be able to keep it off this time.

At my annual doctor visit at the beginning of this year I weighed in significantly more than I did the previous year (a whole year of working from home at a desk). My doctor suggested I try to lose a few pounds before my next visit. He also suggested just trying to loose a little bit. He said the people who are successful at keeping it off are ones that loose it slowly.

What I find amazing is that even though it hasn't even been 2 months yet the weight I have lost has made me feel like a whole different person. I already have more energy and am not as winded as I used to be going up stairs. I'm still a VERY big person and have a LONG way to go but I am encouraged by the way I feel already.

Here is a link to some calculators that might help?

Halloween Electronics

I'm kinda funny about electronics stuff. I'm a computer programmer, I own a solder gun, and I subscribe to Nuts n Volts (electronic geek mag). But I'm really not all that much of a electronics nut. I write programs on a computer and use one every day but I HATE opening up the hardware and touching anything inside. What a pain that can be. I have been known to solder a few things together but if I had to solder each component onto a circuit board it probably wouldn't work and I would be bored. I subscribe to Nuts n Volts just for the ads but I just scan the real geeky articles. I have always maintained that I am more like the Jeff Goldblum character in The Fly when asked by his girlfriend if he is a genius for inventing such a machine and he says that he works with geniuses that build the parts that he puts together. Yea, as a kid I loved electronics (my Dad worked for Bell Telephone and brought home all kinds of stuff). I had a radio shack 101 electronics experiment kit that I fiddled with. I built my own strobe light and color organ from kits. In the 80's I preferred to assemble my own PC's than buy them assembled (mainly to save money). These days most electronic components are so cheap and readily available that you don't need to build much yourself just buy the right parts and connect them together.

So, lately I have gone a little crazy with a company called EFX-TEK that sells small micro controllers and accessories for building Halloween props. A couple of years ago I had 1 of their controllers and used it to make a animated head of a grave digger. Last year I got more ambitious and bought a few more and built a complicated footstep effect for the display. I had intentions of converting the gravedigger head to a more sophisticated controller with better programming but didn't. This year my big plan is to build an animated skull using a more advanced controller. After our last meeting with the guys the run the company in Utah I bought a few more parts to make another project that Chris wanted (those candles you light in a church). Now I have quite a collection of their controllers and accessories. I need to find projects for them all and the time to build them. Most of the interest I guess lies in the fact that the controllers are programmed in BASIC which I am VERY familiar with. Just build a cable here, connect a part there and before you know it, you have a cool effect. Well, I'm having fun at least.

The Road Trip

We were invited to give our video effects seminar at a halloween gathering in Provo UT. Instead of flying I thought it would be a little cheaper and fun to drive.

We headed out after work on Thursday and drove to Penelton which is 3 hrs east. Stayed the night in a nice hotel (Holiday Inn Express). We drove the rest of the way to Provo on Friday. We stopped to eat lunch at a rest area and had to get gas a couple of times. We bought a GPS unit (TomTom) a couple weeks before and boy we were glad we did. I can't imagine making a road trip without one. It tells you how far you have to go and what time you will arrive. It will tell you how far to the next gas station and what hotels are ahead in the next town. It even tells you how fast you are going and if you over the speed limit.

We also bought a 12VDC cooler that we kept it plugged into an outlet in the back of the CRV. We didn't need to keep buying ice and everything stays dry. It was perfect for all our food and drinks for the trip.

We stayed in Provo until Sunday Afternoon when we headed home. We drove all the way to Ontario which is on the Idaho/Oregon Border. Stayed in the best hotel we could find which wasn't much. We then drove a few hours to La Grande where we met some haunt friends from Hauntcon for lunch. We then drove the rest of the way home.

It was kind of fun doing a long road trip. We hadn't done that in probably over 10-15 years. It was like the family trips we used to take when I was a kid. I'd love to do more of them but they really take a toll. I'd like to someday do a cross country trip and see some stuff.

Ashland

Just got back from our yearly trip to Ashland on Memorial Day Weekend. I always have a good time but this year it was even better.

The B&B we stay at called Oak Hill was TOTALLY EMPTY! No guests but us. We got to pick the best room of the house. The hosts Tom and Pat originally from Minnesota are fun to visit with and we were able to talk with them each morning at breakfast by ourselves. They even invited us to have a glass of wine with them and their friends Sunday evening.

This year we only saw 3 plays because there were no plays on Sunday evening. So we went to Jacksonville and had dinner at the Jacksonville Inn. It made for a earlier evening. We also decided not to make the drive up apple valley on the way back home Monday so we got home at a decent hour. The entire weekend was a lot less exhausting and more relaxing than usual.

I have a SONIC SCREWDRIVER!

If you don't know what a sonic screwdriver is then you have never watched Dr. Who. This one is a replica from the new series. Turns out the prop makers of the show liked the design of the toy version so much they asked for the molds and now the show prop is the same as the toy.

I'm going to put this one in a plexi-glass case and keep it out in my shop. It will have a sign that says "open in case of emergency".

I have a new flashlight

Last weekend I went to stay at my sisters new beachhouse in Ocean Park, WA. It was a old house that she and her man rebuilt into a nice 3 bedroom 2 bath vacation house. One of the cool things in Ocean Park is a big country store called Jacks Country Store. They have all kinds of stuff including some very unique old fashioned toys. I bought myself a "Space Boy" flashlight with morse code button and siren. Now who couldn't use one of these!