Goals

If you're like me then you think New Years resolutions are pretty much worthless. Yeah, it's nice to think about how nice it would be to set a resolution and then complete it within the year...but I don't try to come up with any New Years resolutions. I do however think setting some goals is important - lately it has been a financial goal or something pretty easy. Maybe save a couple thousand dollars a month or invest some extra money into an IRA or something - I've been enjoying doing some money management the past few years. The fact that Laura and I actually have money is exciting, but right now we are just saving it and putting it away until we decide what we are going to spend it on...

While financial goals are fun, I am working on coming up with some goals which might actually require some physical strength on my part. Last weekend we had our college track/cross country alumni gathering and it was a little difficult to watch the college kids run so 'effortlessly' around the track...add to that a few guys my age mixing up the top 4 in the mile (sub 4:35) and I started getting a little upset with myself for getting out of shape. I started pondering some running goals, hopefully that will motivate me to get my butt in gear and start actually running again...

Let me backup and say that the past 8 weeks have been particularly difficult for me. Exercising just didn't happen, at least beyond scooping snow. The quick onset of darkness after work, combined with the ice,snow, and god-awful winds didn't help me any.

The last time I stepped on a scale, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, I was starting to feel in shape and actually had been maintaining my weight really well. I was eating what I wanted and that was what has got me in trouble today. I stepped on the scale last week and I had gained 15 pounds since Thanksgiving! WOW! This past week I have been exercising 30 minutes or more each day and tonight I jumped on the scale to see the progress I was making - OH MY! I gained 4 more pounds. This is the heaviest I have ever been 209 pounds! Yeah, I am brushing 210 easily... Geez. This past summer I was holding an easy 190 and during our ultimate frisbee tournament in Omaha in August I was down around 180 after a full day of frisbee.

Quite frankly, I am dumbfounded by what I just saw on that scale, 210 pounds! No wonder running was tough this week, I'm carrying around 30 pounds that I don't need, and if I would get in good shape I probably could lose up to 40 but more likely 35 would be about right.

So, it's time to sit down and come up with some weight loss goals and while I am at it, I think I am going to come up with some tough running goals as well - nothing crazy, but something that will make me work and get in shape again.

I'll come up with something this next week and my next blog will be those goals in written form - something I can hold myself too because they are written down...

How about I finish this depressing blog off with a picture of Emryk enjoying one of his favorite candies!

Until again

-=Nolan=-

2010

So what year is it? Twenty-ten or two thousand ten? I think it's twenty ten, but then again, I thought it would be awesome to say twenty aught nine (or whatever year it was). That didn't happen very often though. Either way, people tend to like to use the easiest method and I tend to think that is twenty ten.

So far, 2010 is off to a good start. Nothing too exciting is happening but nothing too dull either. We got our car back from the shop, lucky for us there wasn't too much damage and it was fixed for a reasonable price. The timing belt broke while Laura was driving down the Interstate - lucky for us the '97 Contour is a non incorruptible engine otherwise that car would be done! Although, it did get us thinking about looking into other vehicles. Our feeling is we are nearing the mini-van era of our lives. I tend to believe you buy a vehicle and drive it until it won't drive another inch - then you tow it to the junkyard and that's that. So, our feeling is we need a relatively nice vehicle to use for all the driving and traveling we like to do, and vehicle with lots of cargo space is what we need - summon the mini-van. So, we are keeping our eyes open for a good deal.

My winter project at work has been to digitize about 600 historic aerial photos of our district from the 1930's. I actually worked with these photos before, back in college I spent a summer indexing them for the University - little did I know at the time, I would be doing much more work! Although I have only finished one county, (1/3 of the district) I feel like I made a major accomplishment to get that done. 200 photos, and each photo requires me to find landmarks in the historical photo and match it up to a current aerial photo. I then 'pin' the landmarks together and that stretches the photos to match each other. It's a long process, I usually try to pin at least 8 and as many as 12 locations on each photo (a photo is about 3 miles x 2.5 miles roughly). So with 200 photos I have over 2,000 'pins' just for Phelps county. Here's a low quality photo to show my results so far. The photo is pretty big, so it will take awhile to download!Click on the photo and you can see some more detail. The red line shows the county boundary. It's pretty neat to see these old photos and see what the land once looked like. Just for reference, here is a current look of the county.All-and-all, 2010 is off to a good start and it looks to be a busy year - no surprise there!

Until again

-=Nolan=-