If God meant me to eat that stuff he’d have given me long ears and a bushy tail

If I had a dime for every time I’ve said that about fruits and vegetables, I’d be a very rich man. But God has a way of making me eat my words (pun fully intended).

One day about a month ago, I had an opportunity to get on a scale and saw, to my horror, that I weighed 340 lbs. Now while that’s not quite bury-me-in-a-piano-box fat, it’s still Omar the tentmaker fat.

I haven’t always been this fat.  In fact, for nearly a year, while I was installing Satellite TV 12 hrs a day, I was wearing size 38 jeans and they fit quite comfortably. Now, I can’t even get into size 48 jeans. Yes, this is not good.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I decided to take a walk around my building . Before I had walked all the way around even once, my carotid pulse was nearly 200. That just scared me. So I made an appointment to se my doc (thankfully he didn’t win the senate seat from Dick Durbin) and my BP was 140-ish over 90-ishand my resting pulse was like 106. Time for a stress test.

Standing at the treadmill at Hinsdale hospital, the ursewas hooking up my leads for the EKG, etc. My pulse was 117 and we hand’teven started yet.  She had me lie down for about 10 minutes and it went down to 104. A normal resting pulse is between 70 and 80. So we start the  stress test, and 5 minutes later, my heart reaches my maximum heart rate for my age (164) and we’re done. The cardioilogist says everything looks OK except my high heart rate (in medical terms, tachycardia).

The bottom line is that I need to lose weight. Lots of it. According to most health charts, in order to get my BMI to a healthy level (it’s 50 right now) I should weigh somewhere between 165 and 170. The least I’ve ever weighed as an adult was 185, and I think that was when I was in my thirties.  So to reach even that, I need to lose 155 lbs. The thing is, diets have never worked for me. I have probably lost somewhere around 400 pounds on diets over the years, and gained them all right back again.

No, what I need this time is a lifestyle change. One day, God sent me a message about Raw Foods. fruits and vegetables. If I can take something I love to eat that’s unhealthy, and replace it with something I love to eat that’s healthy, my body will become a healthier place, my digestive system and metabolism will change, and I’ll lose weight. Oh yes. Exercise is necessary as well, but we’ll cross that bridge……

So I’m avoiding processed flour, sugar, not buying stuff with fructose, corn syrup, or other chemical stuff. I’m snacking on carrots and celery instead of chili dogs and burritos, and I even bought some fish to throw on the grill this week. deserts are now fruits and smoothies instead of ice cream, and I’m eating much smaller portions of meat and filling up on fruits and veggies.

My doc gave me a prescription for a medicine that has lowered my heart rate and blood pressure, and I’m able to do a lot more without getting winded. This is really good! (Resting pulse rate right now is 72)

I don’t know how long it will take me to get used to this… buying and eating this stuff, but it’s clear to me that I wasn’t being a very good steward of the body God gave me. Now, maybe I’ll live long enough to make a difference somewhere.

Your prayers are all welcome.

Oh yes.. and many thanks to Gwen and William at work for pointing me in the right direction! Bless you both!

Too Many Tools – Too Little Talent

I think it’s a sign of my general insanity that I become so frustrated trying to “pretty up” my website.

I know it doesn’t define me in any real sense, but, like a good haircut or a freshly pressed shirt, I want it to create a good first impression. I want to put my “best foot” forward. (My ADD wants me to explore that a little right now, but my Vyvanse will keep me on task).

There are hundreds of software products on the market to develop and maintain web pages. Some from established vendors like Microsoft and Adobe, and others on Open Source.

My problem is, that I never learned how to use any of them. After all, I rationalized, I’m an IT manager, or a Project Manager, or a consultant, or what ever job I held at the time, and I have no need to learn how to design and/or build web pages.

Yet here I am, in 2009, trying to “fix” the web pages that a friend of mine built on my website hosted by GoDaddy, www.pxkandassociates.com. You see, in 2004 when I was starting my own consulting business, I needed a website that reflected the professional image that I wanted to portray, but I had zero budget.

So instead of hiring one of the big firms to do this for me, I asked a talented friend for help and he designed and built my site for exactly the correct price. Zero. It fulfilled the old Hebrew proverb: “Cheap is good but free is better” (No offense is intended to any ethnic or religious group in the prior statement).

Now, I want to do it myself. Partly because my friend moved to Phoenix and no longer even uses a computer, and partly because I want to learn how.

Microsoft used to sell a product called Front Page. Or is that FrontPage. And, as apparently Microsoft loves to do, as soon as everyone got used to the product and really liked using it, they discontinued it and created something “better”.

I, of course, never learned FrontPage, but I have struggled along trying to do this.

Here are the methods I’ve tried so far (with between moderate and zero success):
> MS Word – Like driving a 10 penny nail into concrete with my
forehead – only more painful
> MS Publisher – Actually pretty successful but I don’t own a copy
and was using the copy at work
> KomPozer – A neat open source program for people who really could
just write the stuff in HTML and be done with it
> EvrSoft FirstPage – Another open source program that I couldn’t
even get to launch on Windows Vista Ultimate

So, as you can see, I’ve gotten about 3 feet off the ground, but not much farther. In fact, when I open my page today, it looks a lot different than it did when I previewed it in Publisher yesterday.

So what’s a poor guy to do?

I may have ot break down and actually buy something.

However, I’m loath to buy something I have never used. I don’t want to spend over $100 and not be able to use the product.

So I guess I either have to find a way to trial something new (the MS FrontPage replacement – Expression web), see if something old will run on my Vista OS, or actually buy Publisher.

My problem with the “buy Publisher” option is that I don’t want to buy a screwdriver when I need a tool to drive a nail.

So here I sit, with a whacked out web page (hit counters, links and text in the wrong places, funky layout, etc.

I guess that’s what I get for being a nearly-56-year-old mainframe geek in a webserver world.

What? Me Worry?

Does anyone remember Mad magazine, with those goofy pictures of Alfred E. Newman on the cover?

I used to wonder at his attitude. I mean, with all the stuff that needs controlling around this place, how can anyone not be completely consumed by fear, doubt, low self esteem, and that gnawing-at-the-pit-of-your-stomach worrying?

I used to worry about everything. Did my breath stink? Were my socks the same color? Did I still have both buttons attached to my button-down oxford shirt? Will the Cubs win the World Series?

Oddly enough, the one thing I almost never worried about was money. And it’s not like I’ve always had money. When my first wife and I were married back in 1973 (Crap, I”m old!), our combined salary was $11,000 a year and we were living in New York City. But with noodles and gravy, macaroni and tuna casserole, and a good amount of soy mixed into a little beef, we always had enough to go to a movie on a Friday night.

There were good times, and there were recessions, but there was always plenty to worry about. After all, I had people to fix, situations to change, and I had to make everything “better”.

Then, on September 7, 2001 I found Jesus Christ. The circumstances of that rebirth are indeed fodder for another blog, so I’m not going to digress that far on this one. But suffice it to say, that ever since then, a tiny immeasurable bit at a time, I was learning to trust more and worry less. I still spent years of my life trying to fix people, places and things, especially those closest to me, but it was ever so gradually getting better. It was so gradual at first that it was like watching the earth spin from your front porch…. but then when God realized how dense and self absorbed I can be, he started dropping railroad ties on my head to get my attention.

I was fired from the best job I ever had (for very good reasons which, again, are a story for another day), got kicked out of my house (the beginning of the end of my second marriage – and again part of that other story I’ll get around to one day), and shortly thereafter, while doing a good deed for a friend, I fell and shattered my thigh bone just below my hip. Oh yes.. and was out of work for nearly three years with no unemployment.

NOW He had my attention. My progress feels more measurable since then. I still threw away that second marriage, and as the result of that and some very foolish spending patterns on my part, I find myself in really steep credit card debt.

And I worried about that a lot for a couple of weeks. And then it became clear what I had to do. So I went and did it. So now between my debt consolidation payment, the money I pay my ex-wife(#2) to cover my part of the home equity loan (the part used to pay off more of my debt), I find myself at the end of each month with a substantial negative cash flow.

And you know what? I’m not consumed with worry over it.  Somehow, when I was out of work for those few years, God always put something or someone in my path to help provide me with what I needed, and a humble enough spirit to accept whatever it was. Standing on my feet for $8 and hour making boxes for lamps, climbing 30 ft ladders all day and half the night in all kinds of weather to install satellite TV, throwing newspapers at 2:00 am every day… whatever. And I was fine! In fact, I was in the best shape I’d ever been in!

So now, seeing that negative cash flow, I went and got a secdond job at a major discount warehouse place part time. It pays well above minimum wage, and it’s a job I’ll enjoy. But there’s just one thing. They can’t print my official job offer paperwork until March.

So… What? Me Worry? I have learned that things happen in God’s time not mine. I know that if it’s His plan that I not get this job, he’ll show me something else. Maybe even something better. But in any case… there’s something he wants me to learn from the situation I’m in.

Oh, and have I mentioned that I’m about 130 lbs overweight? That’s right, there’s two of me in this fat old body of mine, and while my head (and the rest of my body for that matter) tell me I need to do something about it, somehow, there’s always a really compelling reason not to. And that too has God’s hand in it. No, I know he doesn’t want me to continue to desecrate His temple, but I also know that when it gets too painful being the way I am, I will change.

A really good friend of mine, Dave Fink, once told me: “God loves you just the way you are. And he loves you too much to let you stay that way” I’m living proof of that.

My point (in case it really did get lost in all this verbiage): While there’s never a shortage of things to worry and fret over, if you believe that Jesus will indeed take care of you as he has promised over and over in the bible, then there’s no reason to worry.

And since worry makes you feel like crap, and serenity makes you feel wonderful, I pick serenity! Thank you Jesus!

Hello world!

I have to confess that this is a bit more baffling that I had originally anticipated. I mean, all I wanted to do was set up a blog on my website. You know the one: www.pxkandassociates.com.

I consider myself to be fairly intelligent, and I’ve been in this IT business since Wilma and Fred were just dating (since it was called Data Processing), so I figured it wouldn’t be that difficult.

RRRNNTT!! Wrong answer!

I started out simply enough… the provider that hosts my site offers WordPress as a free application. So I had them install it, just the way they did with my Photo Gallery, and I figured I was all set.

Boy was I ever wrong. I have to admit that this process is not a very intuitive one. At least not to me.

So I figured I’d work my way backwards. Get on this site, post a blog or two, maybe play with an occasional theme, and see what happens.

I have come to realize that everything is easier when I have no expectations. If I expect to get this whole blogging thing down in an hour, then I’m probably going to be disappointed and frustrated. So I have to surrender that expectation.

I guess I’ve babbled on enough for one evening… now I’m going to see if I can figure out how to get from my website to here…..

Wish me luck!!