I was watching the news the other day and they said that you should choose one word as a new years resolution goal and focus on it the entire year. This year’s word for me is “health.” I plan to obtain that resolution/goal in a variety of ways. It includes both diet as well as exercise, but also includes a lot of other things too such as staying away from foods I’m allergic too more than I did last year, looking for non-traditional as well as traditional ways of being healthy, focusing on environmental things that keep me from the goal of being healthy, de-stressing, focusing on health issues of those around me, listening to my body more, and a lot of other things. Happy new year to everyone.
Hope this year is a great one for you. Be excellent to one another!
These are a few 5″ x 7″ doodles on hard board. These works, among others, were presented to my brother in Texas as a Christmas present this year (we met them halfway in Oklahama City yesterday and drove all the way back last night getting home around 1:30 am – fyi – If you are looking for 435 in Kansas City, DO NOT TAKE 135 after the toll booth – take 35 instead! Also, there’s a nice little connector off of 435 that will let you hook over to just south of the Independence Mall that we found for the second time on accident last night – nicely done happy accident since that saved us some time – hard to miss that connector since it veers off to the right so it’s really an exit but seems to not be). Any work that is ‘from the imagination’ instead of depicting something like an illustration or drawing from life, I consider a “doodle.”
The color ones are mainly color pencil or color pencil sticks. The white one is china marker. There’s also a little China marker in some highlights on some of the color ones since I like to use china marker and prismacolor color pencils as top layers to add extra ‘punch’ to Crayola and Roseart (cheap color pencil) underlayers that get worked and reworked over and over. The white of the china marker can’t be beat nor can the pigment in the Prismacolor for the final touch.
Many artists use Prismacolor only and never use other brands. I think that’s just wasteful spending since Prismacolor color pencils average about a dollar a piece and on some really layered works I can rework an area enough to burn several pencils on one drawing sometimes. For underlayers expensive pigments in Prismacolor is not needed if you are going to work, re-work and then re-work again a few hundred times as I like. It is a nice touch for top layers, but for underlayers, it can get very expensive very fast for something that I’ll just essentially erase away and smudge to death so that the pigment itself isn’t visible anyways as it gets coated by layer upon layer of wax with more new layers on top.
In the upcoming year I plan to create many more 5″ x 7″ works. I love this size since it’s exactly twice the size of traditional “art cards”, exactly the same size needed for postcards or framed reproductions, and is just right for travel or hanging in a home vs larger works that work better in galleries that have tons of wall space.
I’m also starting to experiment a little bit with mixing color pencils and oil pastels with encaustic painting (wax painting that basically mixes oil color with a mixture of bees wax, paraffin wax and some manmade waxes to add more durability as bees wax and paraffin are both extremely brittle under certain conditions). I’m not sure I can do much with it since the encaustic doesn’t take the color pencils too well, but if the color pencils are the lower layers it might lead to some interesting potential as the encaustic can be layered three dimensionally much more than flat color pencils can by themselves.
I probably don’t have enough room for it now where we are currently located, nor will I for the next few years, but I’ve always wanted to experiment with mixing plaster sculpture and encaustic painting techniques someday. That’ll be many years down the road though. This upcoming year I really want to focus on the 5x7s and really ‘learn’ all the techniques and tricks I can about working on these small panels.
Probably won’t post about pen and paper roleplaying much here anymore. Last Saturday I donated my role playing book collection to the public library since we are working on un-cluttering our lives a bit. I did read some here and there in the books up until they were gone, but haven’t really utilized them to do real live roleplaying events as a player or game master for many years, so it’s time to move on. There were about 5 or so boxes full of rpg books including Palladium Books like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Beyond the Supernatural, Heroes Unlimited, etc. as well as a lot of Old World of Darkness books from White Wolf and various other oddball games like a few gurps books. The full collection used to take up about 3 library shelves that were about 3 feet wide and 2 feet deep that literally went from one end of the book shelf to the other with no space in between and some books piled sideways on top just to make it all fit in there. Not having to haul all those books around any more literally has taken a heavy weight off of my shoulders that I’ve been carrying around for about 20 years now.
In the donation were also a few of my last books on computer programming since I just don’t have the time or the left brain to really get in to that too much like I used to try to do when I picked up the books. This was the last of my programming book collection since about 2 years ago we did another big donation like this that had just about twice as many books in it.
I did keep a few books on html and web design since those actually do have some uses for me still.
Progress is slower than it should be since I probably gained a few lbs after grandma’s funeral a few weeks back due to stress eating, and because I haven’t been super focused on working out daily or watching carb intake. Last week I missed a few days of working out since I tried an advanced workout tape that was just a little too much and I was sore from it a few days after that. Today I managed to get in an exercise tv tape in the morning and 3 mile walking tape in this afternoon. Tonight we are going shoe shopping. Hoping that will help with the exercise since working out in shoes that are slightly falling apart from overuse just makes things a little rougher than it should be…
Lost about 8 lbs this week alone. Amazing what happens when you work out every single day. I’ve started doing Leslie Sansone’s walking tapes daily every day this week… and then today, on Saturday I did 20 nonstop laps of the breaststroke around the outer edge of the pool this morning.
I’m going to try to use the walking tapes to keep me motivated to actually work out daily. When I was doing the Slim in 6 a while back I was having problems doing the workouts every single day so it wasn’t giving me the amount of calorie burn I crave since my body couldn’t keep up with the workouts as I just wasn’t quite at that ‘level’ yet in endurance/strength. I could do the workouts but I was pretty sore after some of them, etc. I’ll probably do the walking tapes til I’m comfortable doing at least 3 miles every day for 6 days a week before I try integrating in too many other workouts… then I might do Power 90 again or something… or use the walking as the cardio days on power 90 or something like that. Feeling great. It’s awesome that I’m below 260 lbs again. Hope to stay here and keep going with this!!! I’m well on the way to where I want to be.
Not much to write home about… just tinkering with filters and stuff that I haven’t touched for years. Perhaps it’s time to get back in there and start playing around! 🙂
265.2 lbs in today’s weigh in. I’ve been bad with the exercise regimen the last week or so it’s got to be the diet that’s causing it a little.
Found out a couple of weeks ago I’m allergic to wheat, soy, chicken, and corn, and a lot of various pollen, including maple and pecan, which probably means I’m partly allergic to maple syrup as well as pecans. I don’t think they tested me for almonds but those always tore up the back of my throat so I think it may be that too. Got rid of all of that stuff from the diet over the last few days, so I think that this new eating clean diet is helping a lot. It’s a struggle daily, but it seems to be paying off already after only a few day! It’s amazing how many hidden ingredients there are with corn and soy in just about everything everywhere you look.
The What’s in this stuff app has been an enormous help with shopping. Highly recommend it. It has a keyword search thing so like if you type in soy it brings up a bunch of various keywords tied to that that you’ll find on labels. It’s not a comprehensive list though since I’ve found even more words and keep emailing the developer asking them to add more and more, so hopefully over time it’ll be the most comprehensive word database on this type of stuff around…
For instance, under one of my many lists on that site, I have
Acesulfame Potassium, Acetylated Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono and Diglycerides, Ammonium Chloride, Artificial Color, Artificial Flavor, Aspartame, Azodicarbonamide, Benzoate, Benzoate of Soda, Benzoyl Peroxide, BHA, BHT, Bleached Flour, Blue 1, Blue 2, Brominated Vegetable Oil, Calcium and Sodium Propionate, Calcium Disodium EDTA, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Propionate, Calcium Saccharin, Calcium Sorbate, Calcium Stearoyl-2-Lactylate, Carmine, DATEM, Dimethyl Silicone, Dimethylpolysiloxane, Dioctyl Sodium Sulfosuccinate, Disodium Guanylate, Disodium Inosinate, EDTA, Ethoxyquin, Ethyl Vanillin, Ethylene Oxide, Green 3, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, L-Cysteine, Methyl Silicon, Methylparaben, Monosodium Glutamate, Partially Hydrogenated, Partially Hydrogenated Canola, Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Corn Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed, Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed and Soybean Oils, Partially Hydrogenated Oil, Partially Hydrogenated Palm Kernel, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oils, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Polydextrose, Potassium Benzoate, Potassium Bisulfite, Potassium Bromate, Potassium Metabisulfite, Potassium Sorbate, Propionate, Propyl Gallate, Propylparaben, Red 3, Red 40, Saccharin, Sodium Aluminum Sulfate, Sodium Benzoate, Sodium Bisulfite, Sodium Cyclamate, Sodium Diacetate, Sodium Glutamate, Sodium Nitrate, Sodium Nitrite, Sodium Propionate, Sodium Stearoyl-2-Lactylate, Sodium Sulfite, Sorbic Acid, Sucralose, Sulfur Dioxide, TBHQ, Vanillin, Yellow 5, Yellow 5 & 6, Yellow 6
It’s crazy to think that some of that ties in to soy allergies, but based on a lot of reading I’ve done on numerous blogs and websites the last few weeks it all ties in in various ways… the whole food industry hides stuff from you behind weird chemical names.
I’ve started tracking things a bit with some open office documents. I’m going to try to re-start my exercise program in the very, very near future.
I probably won’t count 1000 days like I was back a while ago since that just got to be too darn tedious, but I am planning on updating the above file to reflect current weight loss. Blue Line is weigh ins that I have recorded in this blog and in more recent things in the file at home that I may not have blogged about yet. Red line is following a goal from starting out one lb above where I started this tracking to where I think a great BMI weight would be in 5 years from now.
I like setting up a chart like this to track things since it’ll help me maintain a goal that is visible… I’m a highly visually oriented person so nice charts like this help me stay on focus and realize gains and losses far more powerfully than just putting it all in some other format.
The reason for the red line in the chart is because of some reading I was doing the last few days on some blogs related to the NO-S diet and some tips and tricks some other folks were using or have used in the past to lose weight. One blog entry talked about a book from the 1970s or so that talked about charting your goal weight loss on pen and paper and if you go above the line you eat less or exercise more and if above you go below, give yourself a little leeway, etc.
I’m planning to workout about 10-15 minutes daily in the morning… using various workouts on video and/or off of online sources like youtube. Somedays I might tweet about the morning videos from time to time… at https://twitter.com/JeffThomann in case you want to follow the videos I’m using, etc. It’s mostly going to be hasfit, bodyrock, and various other random stuff off of youtube, etc. However, finding those links can be tricky someday, so following tweets might make the search for great 10 minute workouts for you easier since it’s been a little, ok a lot, of a chore for me to gather them together…
Then at night I’ll do a longer 20-30 minute or longer workout, probably using some other youtube type sources as well as various workout dvds we’ve purchased over the years (some of which only were opened a few weeks ago even though we owned them for about 3+ years already!).
I like putting videos on tweets like that because it feeds in to facebook a lot cleaner than doing it via this blog.. also it’s a lot easier to just click the little bird icon for twitter on youtube, etc. than it is to post on the blog here… I like blogging, but for every day stuff like that tweets are better…
I’m hoping I can get to BMI goal weight by 5 years from now… I am giving myself that much time, but am hoping I’ll actually reach it much quicker than that… If I do I do, if not, not… I’m just trying to mainly get in shape, and getting to target BMI is THE WAY that traditionally has been recommended by doctors and the exercise science folks as the way to do it…
Portion control on eating is hard for me…. so it’s back to the NO S diet if I can help it. I like that diet since it’s habit based and long term based – which is something I definitely need since short term fad diets just don’t cut it for the type of long term health I’m aiming for here…
so I’m going back to my old trick I mentioned on NO S forums a while back of not carrying money with me… only putting in wallet license and other little stuff to identify me, etc. like insurance cards, etc… and then using debit/credit cards/gift cards, etc. only if I really, really, really need it – sort of hiding it from myself so I don’t use the money in gluttonous ways as I have in the past. I figure if I don’t have the money on me, it won’t go to the cafeteria at work, the snack machine, the atm machine so that I can use it to feed a vending machine, etc. Our budget is a bit tight at the moment since Tekla’s still going to school too – so that helps me not spend in excess as I might have let myself in the past…
More exercise based blog posts might be coming in the future. 🙂 😉
I am back to working out every day again as much as possible. Plan to keep it up this time! (I did want to keep it up the last few times too, but got off track with that nasty knife stab wound, hernia surgery and calf injury…) going to take it nice and steady at a slow pace this time… No big hurry. No big rush. Trying to do 10 or 12 minute workout in mornings before work and a longer session after work. I’m starting with some low impact stuff, and might get in to higher impact stuff later on. I eventually will likely lean towards Bodyrock in the morning, but for now am going with Hasfit, and a few other odd workout videos I found on youtube, etc. when I’m not just going on my own swinging a kettle bell or medicine ball…
Probably won’t blog about it as much this go round, but am keeping logs on my home pc since doing so helps me keep motivated and on track.
Power of 45. Goal with diabetics food planning and loosing weight/weight maintenance with blood sugar levels, etc = 45 carbs per meal.
Food Pyramid bogus…
45+45+45 = 135 degrees.
visualization techinique involving yourself as Link holding up the triforce… food balancing.. 3 meals a day…
May not add another post or explanation since the above may explain it all really.. amazing what short little lines can do vs long winded posts sometimes… lol. Ok, maybe will add some visuals later…
5th day after the stairwell accident/incident. I guess today’s the first time I posted about it here?… One of the muscles in my calf tightened up coming down a stairwell last Tuesday. It caused me much pain and my Department’s Assistant Manager took me to the urgent care right after it happened. Since it was technically during a lunch break they are not considering it work comp. However, I have had the last few days off of work with sick time.
Finally started getting off of the crutches yesterday. I see a doctor for follow up Tuesday Night. There is still some pain in the leg, but I got on it to walk a little yesterday and has my amazing massage therapist help it a little with a deep tissue massage. Still a little sore today, but the soreness is more dull and achy rather than sharp unnerving pain like it was the first few days. On the first day I could put no weight on it. On the third day I was able to put about 25% weight on it. Yesterday I was walking without the crutches a little. It still was sore yesterday if I had too long of a stride. If the left foot goes too far back the calf hurts like hell and starts spasms a little. Stretching and massage for the next few days I think. I will likely not use too many stairwells and will stick to elevators for at least a week.
My mind asks me why these things keep happening to me every time I’m ready to go gung ho on exercise. I’m wondering if it’s some sort of curse from the anti-exercise gods or something… First there was the knife stab about last September… then the hernia in December or so… Now this in late February. Whatever it is, I will persevere! No major exercise for at least another week or two probably, but I will keep at it, slowly recovering. All of these battle scars just make me want to get healthier, so maybe they are good things ultimately. I will persevere! I will persevere!…
This digital photo collection of bricks is available for purchase now at Turbosquid. This collection is great for pulling textures from for your various 3d projects.
This digital photo collection of bricks is available for purchase now at Turbosquid. This collection is great for pulling textures from for your various 3d projects.
pretty productive day even though it doesn’t seem like it was… got laundry done. dishes done. downloaded a ton of video tutorials from 3d buzz for motionbuilder and a few other things for concept art, etc., and various lightwave tutorials on youtube. Thinking about getting back in to doing a little digital art.
I’ve been working on trying to do a ‘poet-trait’ type of thing in Adobe Illustrator yesterday and some last weekend, using text to sort of paint a picture, putting the words in the shadows of the art using splines and words on the splines. It’s a fairly time consuming little process…
Working through that project is making me want to get back in to digital art a little more… even if it is extremely time consuming. I have tons of fonts on this computer that I have never used in any project before… might be time to start changing that.
Not sure if I’ll finish the project or not, but at least it’s got me thinking about getting in to digital art more again.
Here’s what it looks like so far…
If you have more than a few fonts on your computer, I’d suggest using AMP FONT VIEWER to help you visualize what they look like. Nice little program.
———
Also, tonight started reading a book for a MOOC that I just signed up for earlier this week that ‘officially’ starts tonight at midnight. This is the first one I’ve ever tried to participate in one. It’s kind of exciting experiencing this type of thing. It’s been so long since I had to do ‘home work’ I’d forgotten what it was like to be given reading assignments.
Massive open online courses are a relatively new version Open Courses. These are FREE online courses you can actually sign up for and take with others at various universities and other learning institutions offering them.
MMOCs are different then traditional Opencourseware because they let you actually sign up and take the classes where as typical opencourseware is just stuff the universities and institutions put online for free as a learning material… typically in the past opencourseware was sort of historical artifacts from past classes that are now open for the world to look at such as recordings of classes, syllabus, texts that professors put together, reading lists covered in various classes, etc.
MOOCs are different because these are classes you actually sign up for, and do homework for as they are in progress, etc. A nice aggregator I’ve found for opencourses can be found at http://www.class-central.com/ . It’s nice because it lists classes from several of the places offering them instead of just the classes at one location.
On a side note, currently there is a huge debate going on with the University of Missouri and several other universities in regard to whether a syllabus is a copyright protected document or not. The trial will be starting in a few weeks. The issue has been in the local papers for the last year or two since the issue came to light. It looks like those instigating the suit have been keeping a blog about the issue. It will be interesting to see what comes of this lawsuit. If the courts side with nctq many more courses might become available to the public as opencourses even at universities that don’t want to open their courses to this type of thing.
Second side note:
As far as I know, the University of Missouri, including UMKC does NOT do opencourseware or MOOCs. However, you’d think UMKC would be interested in doing it since soon Google’s super high speed fiber will be in Kansas City. Having that much bandwidth available would be a fantastic thing for a place offering MOOCs. Something like that might have kept the recent Coursera problem from happening.
Maybe behind the scenes, the google fiber thing will increase the speed at Universities in the area due to the Internet 2 consortium?
Edit 5/27/2013
Got off of the workouts a few days the last few days and didn’t watch carb intake either. Going to try to get back in to it going forwards… Anyways, since it’s Memorial Day, here’s a video from this memorial day and one from last. If I remember, I’ll try to take one every year to show progress because I DO PLAN TO GET TO MY BMI GOAL WEIGHT BY AGE 45!!!
Memorial Day 2013:
Memorial Day 2012:
===============================
==============
Today is my birthday and I’ve decided that it’s time to restart the daily workouts after this weekend. I’ve had enough time to rest and recover after the surgery a couple of months ago. So.. here’s a new ‘before’ video…
Weigh in 2/8/2013: 277.5 lbs.
======
Here’s a couple of Birthday Self Portraits. Many other artists do annual self portraits on birthdays, and I started this little tradition last year, so figure going forward I might try it more often.
=====
The self portraits got me thinking about things so I started some photo self portraits shortly after that…
=====
………..
The hernia issue happened October 29th, 2012. I overdid it on doing a Power 90 workout. Up til that point in time I was using 10 lb weights on each arm for most of the exercises. On that day I upped it to 20 lbs on each arm for the exercises, with was just too damn much… so I got hit with a hernia and had to have it repaired with a surgery. The doctor said that it was an odd type of hernia unlike one he’d seen before because it wasn’t a tear all the way through. Instead a very long piece of fatty tissue had essentially come out from the back area up through where it should not be and the overdoing it caused that to just strain all of it much worse than it should have been which caused the surgery to be needed. The surgery was in the early part of December and I was out of work a couple of weeks to recover from that. Then I went to work about a week and half and was on a scheduled Christmas vacation that was planned before the surgery thing came up… I kind of have not gotten in to the working out too much since then. I tried a time or two to do some of the workout videos, but the strain on the area where the surgery was for some of the kicks, crunches, etc. was just too much at the time. I am hoping that I’m now ready to re-start fresh now that I’ve had another few weeks of down time that I have not been doing much exercise.
Past videos and weigh ins on the weight loss journey up til this point in time:
10/2/2012:
273.6 lbs:
9/3/2012
292.6 lbs
I went up above 290 since the ‘rest’ I had to take to let the stab wound heal was days I gorged and ate extremely badly. That was a HUGE setback!… Hopefully junk like that won’t cause me to have setbacks again in the future.
…
Video of ‘The stab wound’ the monring after it happened. Sorry for the crappy video quality. I was using a low resolution webcam since it was the only video recording device I had available on that day. I accidentally stabbed myself with a steak knife while doing dishes. It was in the rack drying with the point up, but our sink is very small so I just moved wrong while washing a dish and accidentally the knife went right in. I bled a ton when it happened. Very scary situation since Tekla was not home when it happened. Very hard to hold the phone and call 911 when one of your arms has to hold a towel to stop blood and the other is bleeding like crazy.
…
8/21/2012
284.6 lbs
8/16/2012
285.3 lbs:
8/9/2012
281.8 lbs
8/1/2012
284.8 lbs
7/24/2012
286.2 lbs
7/17/2012
289.2 lbs:
7/14/2012
288.6 lbs
Before then
6/29/2012
292.1 lbs
6/24/2012
296.5 lbs
Memorial Day
May 28, 2012
4/30/2012
4/10/2012
Weight Chart prior to the videos:
Just as a reference for this old chart…
135 kg = 297.624 Lbs
130 kg = 286.601 Lbs
125 kg = 275.578 Lbs
The chart sort of outlines my ups and downs… The time when I was at the heaviest was a very dark time. It seemed like death was everywhere I looked.
I think I was in a pretty deep depression at the time due to many family deaths those few years and various economic problems, as well as a lot of stressful political bullshit at work… One of my coworkers quit/got fired in a big huge spat that happened after several months of building up to it. They fought her getting unemployment checks, and that all ended us all in a courthouse type of setting in Jefferson City… one of the most nervous days I’ve ever had… It was a big fiasco. I’m not sure if she ever got her unemployment or not, or if she sued in a real lawsuit or not like she was planning to do… but anyways, in some of it I had to get sworn testimony in there about how the Associate CFO, who was sort of the head of our area had pounded fists on a table in a meeting a few years prior to this in some heated contractual negotiations, etc. (she was trying to argue something about a hostile work environment, etc.)… A few months after that whole fiasco, I was told that there just wasn’t room in the budget for me any more, and I was ‘reassigned’ to another department.
There was quite a bit of hostility in myself after that retaliation for speaking up… which is exactly what I still think that was all about… add in that type of getting pushed around to depression, etc. and with my personality being to overeat when feeling down or nervous, and it was just a horrible situation all around… I was a walking time bomb and heart attack ready to hit. Luckily, my rationale side, and amazing better half kept me sane during these insane times – so I didn’t buy up big bulks of fertilizer to use as a weapon of mass destruction, and stuck with causing havock in video games like Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, San Andreas, various old NES games, etc. Entropia Universe, the video game, was a part of the depression, etc. as you can read about in my other blog as the developers in that game love to make promises they can’t and just won’t keep… and the love to break expensive items and estates in game that you pay for with real cash after you pay for it, sometimes for months, or years (taming still isn’t back since version update 10, etc)… However, even despite all the bull shit with that game, it was something I had some control over in my life… sort of this little escape from reality that was always there since I started playing it in 2007. There was some documentary on Eminem I watched on youtube the other day that talks about how his alter ego existed vs his real name use because it was this sort of alter ego he went in to deal with reality sort of and have control over… the documentary said that lots of folks that grew up in some conditions similar to his had the same type of issues sometimes. I think my avatar in Entropia has sort of turned in to that type of alter identity for me. I guess, like Neverdie, I am my avatar.
(note – blog link in above paragraph is now on a private blog, so it won’t work… new blog for entropia can be found at https://entropiascams.wordpress.com/ – I had to start the new blog and make old one private (although backup does exist in xml file that you can find a link to over on the new blog if you use a password in one of the posts over there… hint: password is a simple name that most folks that have played entropia a long time should know… it starts with an M and ends in an O… 🙂 ))
(August 2015 update on the job issue… currently working as a Dual Rate First Responder/Security Officer at the Isle of Capri Casino in Boonville, Missouri. Â I’ve held this job less than a month so far. Before that I was only a Security Officer a few months, and prior to that worked as a Steward at the Casino. I have a few updates to resume still needed.)
I have grown to love my new job… so sometimes the God(s) do have a plan. I actually kick ass at work now since I’m 3000% hyper focused. Also, I don’t have the constant man hating bullshit that I had to experience daily in my previous department. At one time back then my Supervisor back then actually hung up the phone and outloud gabbed about how the problems they were having was all his fault because he was a man. It was highly funny/ironic/sad at the time because the only other guy in the area we worked in and I had to go to a human resource training session the day before that talked a lot about how sexual discrimination was so bad to have in the work place, etc. In that department, at least at one time there was a massive amount of sexual discrimination of men in the department was happening by the female supervisor and boss… All the while chitty chatty brown nosing gossipy bitch who sat in the cubicle next to mine got a raise. They never really did this discrimination stuff openly. What they’d do is this stupid crap of creating a new position that did the exact same job of who they wanted out… then after they purposefully got the job duties overlapped enough they’d assign the old worker they wanted out the bullshit jobs like manually closing out 50,000 or so accounts in a huge database where a pulldown menu had to be selected to close it, and this backlog of unclosed visits existed because the brown nosers never did their job but did a good enough job of hiding that fact until months later that they were never reprimanded… and then after assigning the crappy job they’d say that due to the overlapping of duties, there just is no need for the person that was there longest, etc. It’s all political bullshit…
However, luckily the new position I’m in now has much less of that type of stuff going on. For the first time in my life I work for a Department Manager that actually gives a damn about what her employees think! Just the other day I had an hour long meeting with supervisor and department manager just to discuss a handful of emails I’d sent where I explained some concerns I had about processes in the office that I didn’t agree with. At no other job I’ve ever had in the past has anyone ever taken the time to care that much… That’s an awesome feeling. It’s nice to have control over your own real life world a little, and have coworkers that actually care about what you have to say and think. Also, even though I do have to listen to some coworkers and their phone conversations nowadays, it’s nothing like the hateful bullcrap I used to have in my old department where the brown nosing bitches like to slam phones down after the call, call names to the other party after that, and then repeat back the entire conversation they just had voicing out loud with as much hatred as possible why the other party was wrong, on every paragraph in the conversation, EVERY time they take a call or make a call, either on the office phone or on their own private cell phone… That type of venomous poison is easily spread as it’s yelled out daily. Kinda sad to say it but it’s almost too bad that rattlesnake they found in the hallway outside of my old department didn’t find it’s way in the mail slots. Might have adjusted some attitudes in that area, but I doubt it would have done any good. Hopefully some of the self-loathing venom being spewed from that old office can recede from that area in the future as it really just causes endless cycles of negativity to draw itself in more and more daily…
Hopefully, as I continue down a healthy past in the near future, this control over my own life can only get better and better over time. We are now in the age of Aquarius. Enlightenment that was just beyond grasp is now within reach! 🙂 😉
http://january2013scanphotographartetc.shutterfly.com/ – link to a little bundle of pics I uploaded to shutterfly tonight. Most of them are ancient sketchbooks from the late 1990s, but the acrylic paintings, encaustic paintings and photos are very recent stuff.
I might crop some of them and put them here on the blog later. Some of them are multiples of the same image because I like to shoot several pics of one work and pick the best of them with fewest blurs, bad contrast, etc. for various things. I’m not sure – I may have scans of some of these somewhere in the blog already?… Oh well, multiple images of the same thing isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Lighting was not very good on many of these… I was using interior lighting and that’s never good for shooting art. It’s too cold to go outside, and I don’t trust the wind outside when shooting photos of artwork on paper since paper tends to catch in the wind too easily. A few years back (a couple of months before we moved out of Boonville) I did try to shoot a bunch of artwork outside and a lot of it got caught in a big gust of wind. The same day a wind gust knocked over the tripod and busted the screw connector at the bottom of the camera that was on the tripod at the time. That poor camera finally died on me about a month ago or so… it’s had a hard life. I haven’t thrown it out yet in hopes that maybe it will get some life again someday… (I think something’s gone wrong with the battery connection or something).
Shooting photos of art is much faster than trying to scan them. I also scanned a bunch of my ‘morning pages’ today from the last year or so. I have not consistently done that every day, but there’s still a heck of a pile of paper. I probably won’t publish that to the public since there’s a lot of private thoughts on it… but might upload it somewhere secure for a backup like in email or google docs. Scanning those is not super time consuming since I’m going on very low resolution of 100 dpi or so for the scans since there isn’t any real big drawing/painting to it even if there’s a sketch or two here and there from dream scapes I tried to outline the architecture of, etc. Many of my dreams have a very architectural feel for them… various locations tie in together in various ways with hallways, placements of architectural elements, etc. It can sometimes get intricate in how I try to detail my ‘morning pages’/diary or whatever you want to call it because of that… Jung had archetypes. I have archetypes and architecture that those archetypes act in. All the world’s a stage…
#legacy
If you don’t want stuff online – don’t put it online… If you enjoy life as a curmudgeon with no social interaction with anyone on the internet, stay offline. If you enjoy life, sharing, and friendship, go ahead and get online and share your life stories with everyone.
In other words, SOCIAL NETWORKS exist for BEING SOCIAL…
If you don’t like your pics shared on facebook, don’t put them on facebook and other websites, including but not limited to studio photos websites, youtube, photo sharing sites, etc.. If you want them shared, put them online. If you want to privately share them with one individual, email exists… Anything on facebook has a link to share next to it, even if your privacy setting is set to private – SO DON’T THINK SOME SILLY LITTLE PRIVACY SETTING WILL MAKE THINGS COMPLETELY PRIVATE AND NEVER PUBLIC – doing so you are fooling yourself — much like someone who wants to protect their money by putting it in a pillow case or something – that’s the first place people look… If you do put them on websites and want to limit who can see them, password protect them and only share the password with who you want to see them… however, after they lose the password, or you do, don’t expect to ever see them again since they are basically buried in an online dusty ol closet… from dust to dust… photos that are never seen are no good since art exists only when there is a viewer of what is created. Photos never seen are like phone calls that are made in to a cell phone that is turned off. Even passwords are not 100% effective in protecting things… ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS CONNECTED TO SOMETHING ELSE ON THE INTERNET… As long as there is anything online it can potentially be seen by someone someday. It may take a hacker a little while to get your password figured out, but someday, as long as the server exists and someone can try to get it they will get at it… for some breaking passwords is much like solving crossword puzzles… it’s a hobby. Your little password isn’t going to stop someone that really wants what your password is protecting, just like a glass window isn’t going to stop a burglar from breaking in even if it has a siren on it.
Matthew 5:15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. …. When lamps are put under beds or in dusty old closets they tend to burn blankets, clothes, etc. after a while. All photography is a form of capturing light… lights typically come from light sources such as lamps. This little light of mine – I’m gonna make it shine…
One reason that I like things to be public is because it’s kind of nice to know that someone someday may see that I existed here that may never have known of me before… a legacy is created… words of wisdom passed on to next generations. Images of our lives are made to have a meaning that is passed on down in our culture hundreds of years from now after the hard drive on whatever computer I’m using today is long dead and gone… but backups of photos and statements and ideas are all out there on multiple servers backed up for the many or even just one to eventually find.
If the afterlife does not exist (I think it might just exist personally, but sometimes I, like everyone else question it), all we have is this life. It’s a short, fragile thing… It’s definitely worth sharing with others, don’t you think? Have you started creating your legacy yet? Isn’t it time?
Goal 1 of the day – 3 single space ‘morning pages’ – complete.
Goal 2 of the day – half hour practicing on the midi keyboard – complete. Mostly practiced the C Scale using 123-12345 fingering. Prior to watching a piano practice app/youtube video the other day I was always in the past following the 12345 way of fingering the keyboard that is taught in some entry level books. It’s far more difficult to do the 123-12345 way of fingering the keyboard, but it is more professional and it seems like it will ultimately be an easier way of doing things and learning the full keyboard eventually. With 123-12345 you put thumb on c, index on d, and middle finger on e, then thumb goes under those to f, and so on up to the next c. With the other hand it’s little finger on c, then ring finger on d, middle on e, and then move middle over those to f… that move with the left hand is more difficult, especially on the way back down the scale since fingers are going under instead of over… I did a little bit of ode to joy in the middle in this practice. I recorded the practice just so I can reflect back on it later at how bad I was just starting today, and to see improvement over time, etc. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B5pC9Gwr9zBIZC1QWEhsSG93OEk
Goals for this afternoon/night: make some art, and do some working out. Tekla and I are going to try to re-start the Power 90 from scratch at the beginning… but this time we are doing it together. I am so very happy that she will be joining me this time. I really think that will help motivate me to keep going.
I’m hoping I can help motivate her too.
We bought new yoga mats last night! That was an exciting purchase we made together. The mat I was using prior to now is really a ‘camping mat’ so it didn’t have trenches in it, so it created a bit of a suction cup effect on a sweaty back if when doing crunches, etc. if there was no towel or tee shirt on top of it… this new one should avoid that problem since it’s got some breathing trenches in it.
I believe that “The Age of Aquarius” has now begun… The new calendar has begun now that the Mayan one has ended, and it is a new one of love, peace, prosperity, and many blessings.
1. Exercise Regularly, and avoid setbacks like the stab wound, hernia surgery, Bursitis, etc. from this year. If a set back does come my way, get back on course and stay on it with a quick recovery. (no more weeks off at a time). I’ll probably start light with once a day workouts. I don’t know if I’ll go back to the twice a day like I was doing before the hernia (which wasn’t technically a hernia, but was close enough that they had to do a surgery). I probably won’t keep up the 1000 day tracker thing any more since that is ultimately still the goal, but tracking it puts too much stress on myself (might be part of the reason these set backs came about? The UNIVERSE/Subconscious/Collective Subconscious/Gut Feeling is telling me that’s not the right way to do it. I still will track things, just not exactly that way)…
I DO PLAN to still eventually get to my goal BMI weight over the course of roughly 1000 days or a little over 3 years, regardless of if I’m tracking it or not. I HOPE that it won’t take that long… but if I do things slowly and only workout 20 or 30 minutes a day, I suspect that it might take that long or longer… the two a day workouts exist basically to increase the calorie burn per day to get to goal faster. Time-wise though, I’m not sure 2 a day workouts are really feasible… I might try walking on breaks at work again to help with that, but am not sure about that or not. ‘breaks’ exist to take a break and center/calm… adding more stress in the form of physical activity at those time might not be the best thing to do?…
2. Get back in to creating art regularly. This includes drawing and painting at the moment, both digitally, and on paper/board/canvas, etc. It might eventually include creating 3d models too, and probably will include photography, but only time will tell if those will be main focuses or not. I will likely have to fire up the ol laptop to get the scanner running again since it doesn’t work with this computer… However, instead of scanning stuff, I might try shooting it with a camera instead?… I’ve never done a very good job of shooting my works with a camera, in part due to lack of practice. Might have to change that?
3. Learn to play music. I’ve had this midi keyboard for years, but have never really learned to master it yet. I’m not just going to do midi though. This includes some other stuff too probably. I found this learn to play music app/youtube thing the other day – and so far it’s taught me that I have been playing wrong up til now since all the beginner books teach you the wrong placement of fingers… 12312345 is better than 12345. I’ve read/heard some interesting info about studies on how music can help those with Alzheimer’s. It helps them increase verbal skills/patterns, etc. I don’t think I have Alzheimer’s, but I do think that the more I get in to visual art, the more tendency that I’ll have to get some symptoms that are similar somewhat. It has to do right/left brain usage. The more I dig in to the visual pattern thinking mode, the more I start loosing memory due to loosing connections verbal pattern thinking mode.
If I study music and visual art simultaneously I’m hoping to overcome that hurdle because even though I think having memory loss, etc. is not a ‘bad’ thing, it is an annoying thing. It’s never good when getting so deep in to creating a painting/drawing that you forget where your keys are, forget pieces of conversations you just had 2 hours or less ago, forget where you placed some tool you just had in your hands less than 10 minutes ago, etc. In the past I’ve overcome that sort of thing by mentally just telling myself it’s ok… When it first started happening many years ago, it would freak me out big time, and I’d go on crazy panic attack induced searches around the area for those lost keys, tools, etc. til they were found. I learned that it’s not as important to do that the more that I studied/learned the connection between that sort of thing and right/left brain connections. However, I’m hoping that learning music can help that sort of thing just get bypassed… also am hoping that maybe it can help me stop the eventual possibility that I’ll actually develop true Alzheimer’s down the road as it does run in my family a little.
Learning to play music will probably include learning to do some remixing type of stuff, and possibly writing some music, etc. I’d love to be able to integrate visual and musical arts sometime down the road… but only time will tell how that will happen. I don’t necessarily like animation since it takes so many hours of work to get just a few seconds of results. However, I’m not going to limit myself and say I won’t do animation/3d type stuff. I likely won’t upgrade Lightwave though since it’s expensive. I might possibly try to learn blender, but that seems like a difficult task. Only time will tell what I’m going to actually do. However, I do know that I want to try to set aside some time to learn to create music before I try to teach myself to manipulate it as background noise for visual arts since that’s a skill I’ve needed to learn for a long time but never took the time to really master yet.
4. Eat Right. I’m probably going to try to do more of the ‘No S’ Diet… “No snacks, no sweets, no seconds, except sometimes – on S day(s).’ I’ll probably try to check sugar more regularly too maybe. I’m say maybe because the Doctor says that if I keep on track I probably won’t have to check it but about once a week or so… the trick is staying on track… it’s so easy to fall off track…
5. Write things down. I’m going to try to do ‘morning pages’ from The Artist’s Way again. I’ll probably also blog some since that is sort of similar to doing that. I will likely burn through a lot of paper, and it won’t all be on acid free stuff that will still be around after I’m long gone for many years as it will age and turn yellow, but that’s ok. I might also try keeping multiple notebooks to notate various things like I’ve tried in past years some…. I might get in to using sketchbooks more too, but we’ll see. I’m not sure I can afford to buy a ton of sketchbooks regularly, at least until after Tekla graduates from Massage Therapy school in about 8 months.
Jeff Thomann's Blog 
