Mr. Blue Sky is living here today

One last goals blog to write for the year as I sit in an imitation snuggie before actually getting to my to do list for the rest of the day.  Here goes.

1) Work Harder - for the month, total failure and I'm okay with that.  Exam week was rather busy but since submitting grades, I haven't as much as even opened up a math book.  Once I get back to Anderson, I'll have to start writing syllabi and prepping lesson plans, but that can wait another day or two.  I haven't lifted in three weeks and I've only run a couple of times this month.  For my lifting for the semester, my weight only increased by about half a pound so I did swap out some fat for muscle.  I just started from a worse spot than I originally remembered.  My bench max increased by 20 pounds and my dead max increased by about 50 so I made some decent gains that I'd like to push forward.  Actual marathon training starts on January 11 and that doesn't seem like much fun since its gotten very cold rather quickly.  Overall, for the year, I can't say that the year has been a resounding success.  It certainly hasn't been a failure what with getting back into a lifting routine that requires me to wake at five and the Indy Mini PR was a nice accomplishment.  If we're comparing to recent years though, 2011 and 2012, a.k.a the dissertation years, were certainly much tougher and the work then was killer.

2) Play Harder - Success in the early month with the trip out to Hot Springs.  Since then, not as much.  I did get out ice skating with Lindsey earlier in the week and now have some nice injuries where my skates rubbed my legs raw.  Overall, this has been a tremendous success.  I've traveled all over the place and really lived life by getting out and just doing stuff because why not?  I've been blessed with a girlfriend who is willing and happy to get out and try new stuff and we've had a lot of fun.

3) Read More - I finally got back into a good reading month.  I've knocked out Don Winslow's Savages, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Cormac McCarthy's The Road this month as well as starting Jeff Vandermeer's Authority which is the follow up to Annihilation.  Savages wasn't overly impressive and I have no idea why they turned it into a movie.  The Lovely Bones had a good premise but some of the stuff at the end just lost it for me.  I thought The Road was a fantastic book, which caught me by surprise since I strongly hesitated when buying it since I didn't think all that much of Blood Meridian and I disliked the movie version of No Country for Old Men, predominantly because there's no legitimate resolution.  The Road did give me a feeling of completion and I'd recommend it.  For the year, I'd put this the same as the work hard category.  I'm happy with all the stuff I've read (especially East of Eden - Thanks Luke!), but I can't say it necessarily qualifies as reading more.

4) Travel More - We've already covered Arkansas and I've spent the last two weeks up in Michigan for the Christmas break since being in academia is great.  For the year, this couldn't have been more of a success.  Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, Southern Utah, Kansas City, St. Louis, Red River Gorge in Kentucky, Mammoth Cave, Portland, Seattle, Menninga Island, Arkansas, Turkey Run State Park, Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, East Lansing.  Yeah, I'm satisfied.  Heck, my last post was basically me saying that I didn't need to set this year as the bar since I can't keep going at this rate, but I'll certainly have fun trying.

5) Drink better beer - I actually haven't drank very much this month.  I did stop by Grand Rapids Brewing last night with Brooke.  We originally planned to go to HopCat but it was packed and so we just walked down the street.  I had the John Ball Brown which is decent and the New Mission Organics which was really good.  We were even cool enough that our bartender came over and hung out with us to kill the hour or so until she went to pick up her friend.  Overall, I've wasted less time with crappy beer this year and my tastes have improved.  I've currently got a six pack of Spotted Cow ready to take home, courtesy of Sara as well as a couple Guinness Blondes thanks to Aunt Deb.  I'm strongly considering picking up a six pack of Lagunitas' Little Sumpthing Sumpthing because it is ridiculously good, but with the Sam Adams I still have in my fridge, I don't really see why I'd need 25 beers in my fridge when I should be trying to cut back so I can lose a little weight and get fast for the marathon.


Overall, this year has really been a blessing.  I'm starting to feel more at home in Indiana and am seriously considering actually settling here for good.  I had a relationship or three and am extremely excited to see where things go with Lindsey and that maybe, hopefully, finally, this is the one that works out.  There were some disappointments and indiscretions throughout the year, but all told, I truly believe that I became a better person this year and did a good job of staying true to who I want to be.  Thanks to all of you for helping to be a part of that and encouraging me when I needed it.

The fine life is a beautiful thing

Going into the month, I knew December would be expensive, what with Christmas presents, one last big payment to finish off my student loans, car/rental insurance and my trip to Arkansas.  Its gotten even more so over the last few days, starting first with paying off the broken headlight that happened on that trip.  Yesterday, things got potentially quite worse.  At dinner, after my first few bites, I had an issue where I could no longer swallow anything.  This has happened a couple of times before and usually I'm just able to eventually take in enough water to choke it down or burp an airhole clear.  I've had it once before where it was bad and I couldn't even keep any water down but it eventually cleared up after not trying to ingest anything for several hours.  Yesterday was of this bad kind.  After an hour of continually coughing up water and vomiting up saliva, Mom and I headed into Urgent Care.  We waited in Urgent Care for an hour before I even got into triage but they sent me back right away after that where the doctor there confirmed that I had an esophageal obstruction from whence they sent me on to the ER.  Mom drove me to the ER where I haven't been in quite a while and there I got to experience a whole range of fun activities.  After consulting with a doctor, they sent me in for a chest x-ray which didn't show a whole lot; namely, they couldn't particularly see any blockage.  I was still puking up all my spit and wasn't even trying to keep water down so no one was going to accuse me of faking at least.  The next plan after that was to hook me up with a bunch of drugs to relax both me and my esophagus in the hopes that would help pass the roast that we believe was stuck at the bottom of my throat.  They gave me some anti-nausea medication in anticipation of giving me glucagon to help relax my lower esophagus.  At that time though, word came down from endoscopy to send me down there so I could get scoped instead.  I was then wheeled through the bowels of the hospital where I apologized to the nurses for making them coming in on a weekend while they hooked me up to a bunch of cords and tubes.  They knocked me out and from what I've been told, gave me an EGD (esophagogastroduodenoscopy) which consists of sending a scope down my esophagus to see the blockage and clear it out and then sent down a tube with a balloon which was then filled to dilate my esophagus.  They also took a biopsy which I fully expect to come back and say I have GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease) which basically means that stomach acid occasionally comes back into my esophagus and irritates it. EDIT: The biopsy isn't for GERD, which I likely have anyway through genetics.  Talking with Mom and Dad, its actually for something that has a name roughly a billion letters long that my parents don't remember and I never heard since this in the half hour or so from which I remember literally nothing. END EDIT.  All of this is fun stuff that I'll get to pay for since I have a high deductible health insurance plan and had to use it in the last week of the year before it rolls over on January 1.  At least I could have had this happen next week and gotten some significantly reduced elective surgery or something.

Anyway, maybe this is a sign I should stop trying to immediately catch up on all the traveling I may have missed out on and just relax and be happy.  I am hoping to do some house shopping this summer and hopefully settle down soon.  This certainly depends on what happens in my relationship with Lindsey.  One of my first exes once told me that some of the best advice she had ever gotten on marriage was "Don't marry someone you can live with; marry someone you can't live without".  This probably works for late teens/early 20s, but if its truly the case, I'm screwed because there's no one I can't live without.  I can't imagine how much it would suck to lose some of those close with me, but I've gone through enough now to know that I'd get past it and through it and God will carry me through, no matter how weak I am.  Instead of finding I can't live without, I'll propose marriage when I can't imagine any good reason not to be with someone forever.  I'm not quite there yet, but its heading that way.

Let's go get lost anywhere in the USA

1477.8 miles, 24 hours, 42 minutes and 13 seconds plus roughly $150 for gas and another $120 to replace a broken headlight cover.  This last Thursday, I took off around 10 a.m. in the morning to go make some memories in Arkansas because why not? My previous list of Arkansas memories consisted of changing seats on a Southwest flight that had a layover in Little Rock and I didn't even get out of the plane.  As I said, I left around 10, getting into Harrison at around 6.  Just before then, while on the freeway in the complete dark of 5:30, I was startled when some white object either fell off the car in front of me or was thrown by its driver and collided with what I originally thought was my hood.  Later, I was relived to see that I didn't have a huge dent in my hood only to even later realize that the object had missed my hood and taken out half of my headlight cover instead.  Friday morning, after a fitful night's rest, I took off at around 6 and drove intermittently through fog and clouds first to Hawksbill Crag for one of the iconic Arkansas hikes, if Arkansas is allowed to have iconic hikes, then through more fog for two hours up to Signal Hill, the highpoint of Arkansas (a 0.4 mile hike to a high point with no view) and then for another hour and a half up to Petit Jean State Park and the Seven Hollows Trail, which was a fantastic hike that I had to rush through because it was mid-December and I didn't want to be out past four because it would be getting dark.  I knocked out the best known trail in Arkansas, its high point, and a trail that Backpacker named to its 100 best dayhikes and over the course of the entire day, I ran into one other person out on the trails all day and I think she was just running the Seven Hollows Trail.  Technically, since I encountered her in the parking lot, I didn't see another person on the trails all day, but heck, if I can get two great hikes in and have a full day of glorious nature and solitude, that's a darn good day.  At the end of the day, I still had another hour and a half drive down to Hot Springs.  Saturday morning, I checked another National Park off my list as I explored Hot Springs National Park, one of the oldest and definitely the smallest national park.  Sunday morning, I drove.  Sunday afternoon, I drove.  Finally, at 6, after 10 hours of being in the car, I made it back home to Anderson.  My longest walk that day out of the car was from the gas station parking lot in to use the bathroom.  It was a long, boring day, but it meant I got to spend another weekend out doing what I love.  I don't know when I became a road trip aficionado (possibly the same time I gave up using paragraphs in blog entries), but I've had four different trips of over 1000 miles since the start of May.  There was the 1400 miles exploring Utah in May, 1200 miles out to Kansas City and St. Louis for a long weekend in June, 1100 miles down to bourbon country and Red River Gorge in Kentucky in July and these 1400 miles.  Add in the 500+ mile trips to Michigan and Chicago and Chicago/Wisconsin and Mammoth Cave and I've spent entirely too much time in my car, if not for the fact that its allowing me to start exploring this beautiful creation.  I've already got three potential road trips planned for next year.  I want to go explore some of the California national parks with Luke, northern Michigan with Lindsey (only 800 miles) and potentially a massive Northeast hiking/camping trip with Lindsey that I should think about scaling back.  This is great fun and this is why I'm so glad I chose to pursue the career I have - namely, so I can pursue these other interests of mine that make me so incredibly happy.

That'd be one fine day

Friday was the last regular school day with exams coming up this week.  All I have left for this semester is grading.  I went ahead and booked my trip to Arkansas because I just want to get out of the Midwest real quick and because the only time I've been there before, I changed seats on the plane but never even made it into the airport so, hahaha, that doesn't even merit consideration for being there.  I'm going to try and knock out hikes to Hawksbill Crag, Signal Hill and Seven Hollows Canyon (all in different parks) on the same day and then check out Hot Springs National Park in the following day or two.  My usual end of the semester celebration with a Five Guys burger got bumped up to tonight since I didn't really want to stop for one for lunch in the middle of St. Louis and have to drive another four hours with that bloated feeling just taking over my gut since I can't not eat way too much every time I go to Five Guys.

Friday I also made my last student loan payment.  Instead of paying the minimum of $80/month for the next several years, I just went ahead and knocked out the last $5000 over the past six months.  It took me 10.5 years to pay back my loans to Trinity, but nearly eight of those years was in deferment thanks to grad school, so all in all, it wasn't actually that bad.  It'll be nice to be able to keep the extra cash come January but it may be even nicer just to realize I'm debt free except for the month's bills on the credit cards.  Ideally, that would all change come the end of summer when I find a nice house if I decide I really want to settle down here in Indiana (I'm close, but the lack of mountains....) and then I can start all over again with mortgage payments.  That'd suck, but it sure beats rent payments since I actually get something of permanent value out of it.

The world has turned and left me here

A quick update on November will look very similar to October because that's what happens when you get in the routine of school.  We did have the Math Christmas party last night where I learned that some of my students are too scared of me to ask questions.  I don't actively try to achieve this but I really don't mind this too much.  I don't think I'm all that intimidating but I could be wrong.

1) Work harder.  The status quo remains.  I did run 40 miles in November though so at least some progress is being made.  I'll find out a lot more next week as max day is this coming Monday.  I'd love to combine for 500 in the bench and dead but I doubt it'll happen since I tried doing deadlift reps at 295 yesterday and my from went to pot on the second rep.

2) Play harder.  Nope.  Just the usual.

3) Travel more.  Nope.

4) Read more.  I read Jack London's Call of the Wild.  I could have sworn I read something in between Gone Girl and Call of the Wild but a quick perusal of my shelves didn't turn anything up so I guess I read a grand total of 85 pages in November.  That counts as failure.  I will make amends for this over Christmas break.

5) Drink better beer.  It just seems sad when this is the category I have the best success in for a month.  I went back to Michigan for Thanksgiving and had the misfortune of going to a grocery store so I could see all the great beers Indiana doesn't have.  I picked up a six pack of Humalupalicious to share with Lindsey's family.  I checked out Brewery Vivant with Brooke and sampled several of their offerings and brought home a four pack of Big Red Coq and you can make any jokes you want about that.  I also went back to the old standby of Boulevard's 80 Acre because not every beer has to be from Michigan.