Iced Tea Forever

Last week we took the girls to the Potawatomi Zoo, and they loved it. We had a good time.

I posted some of the pictures in a Facebook photo album.

Before we left we went back and looked at the tiger for awhile. He was pacing around in his cage and coming over right to us. I got a video of him jumping up and pawing the glass right above Jewel and Allison.

When we have talked about number before, it was about money. This time we’re going to talk about numbers again but it’s going to be about weight, or fatness.

I’ve never been skinny, but there have been periods in my life where I’ve been fatter than others. When I was first stricken with Crohn’s Disease back in ’01, I was playing collegiate baseball and in the best shape of my life. I weighed in at probably around 210 pounds.

I got deathly sick and lost a lot of weight, fast. Several months later after I turned the corner and started recovering, I was skin and bones and down to 147 pounds.

I gained weight pretty quickly, but the bad part was I didn’t stop. After not being able to eat for three months, now I couldn’t stop eating. Over the next several years I slowly kept gaining weight.

I was probably around 260 when I was working in the Den of Iniquity, and working there kept me from going much higher. So when I quit, I unfortunately resumed my weight gain regimen.

So by this spring, I was about 315 pounds. One night I was almost asleep and my wife said to me, “I signed us up for a weight management class through the hospital” (where she works). Whatever, I went to sleep.

Then next morning I had a bad feeling. I said “Now WHAT did you say to me last night ?!!!!” Sure enough, we were going to Fat Class. Oh joy.

I was the lone male in Fat Class, it consisted mostly of older women. We would weigh in every week, I wish we would have had a “Biggest Loser” style weigh in where we would compete for the most weight loss every week, but no dice. They kept everything boring and confidential.

I did really well and was losing 1-3 pounds every week. But 7 or 8 weeks in to the class was when I got hit with this latest flare of Crohn’s. By then I was under 300. A month or so later being sick and in the hospital and on TPN put me down to about 275 or 80.

So that was nice, but there was a problem. I was on a boatload of medication, including prednisone. For awhile I was on 100mg a day, and it started to do a number on me. My face has become huge,

and I’m constantly ravenous. I can’t stop eating. I was weighed yesterday and tipped the scales at 319. Goodness. And I think most of that is in the face.

And I’m afraid to cut my Absalom hair, because it will make my face look even fatter!

I played this video for my daughter. Jumping up and down, Mandy exclaimed, “Daddy’s singing! I like Daddy’s singing.”

Not everybody’s reaction when I open my mouth to warble, but hey, that’s understandable.

“Daddy sing a more again.”

That’s not everyone’s reaction when I’m done either!

A couple weeks ago I went and heard my friends Garment of Praise give a concert not too far from here. Jason was telling me afterwords, hey, AHQ is on YouTube as the A Cappella “Army” Quartet!

I went home and scoured YouTube and sure enough, there we were. Arvin Wynn has a YouTube show (his channel is HymnTimeGospelSongs) where he plays a wide variety of Southern Gospel music. In fact, I had just recently subscribed to his channel. Somehow he got a hold of some video footage of AHQ from ’03 or so (I don’t think I even knew it existed) and posted us singing the Wayne Hooper tune “Keep in the Middle of the Road” on one of his clips.

I think the Army part was just a misunderstanding of “Harmony,” it’s since been corrected in the title.

Thanks Brother Arvin.

There’s an obsession with aviation in my family line, both sides. For as long as I can remember a few uncles on my Mom’s side have been completely nuts about planes. Some of them started building a plane years ago, and in more recent times Ron has become an airplane mechanic. I learned one summer working with Arlen that whenever an airplane flies overheard you stop what you’re doing and gaze up for awhile watching it fly by. And he could usually identify the model from a long way off.

My brother John has been a pilot for years. And in fact, my Dad once started taking flying lessons. I remember playing with his flying textbooks as a kid.

I even have several friends who are pilots. But despite all these connections, I’ve never ridden in a small plane. I’d really like to.

So anyway, the avenue of aviation that I want to pursue is RC! I’ve always been fascinated with radio control, and I want to get an RC plane. The good thing is that in the last few years, electric rc has really improved and it is way cheaper and easier to get into than it was years ago.

It used to be that you had to spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars building a balsa gas plane, and somehow learn how to fly without crashing it to bits. Now you can learn on cheap flight sims and start out with easy and cheap electric foam planes.

RC master and YouTube star Dave Powers is one of my internet heroes, and his top recommendation for a cheap beginner RC plane is the Wild Hawk. It’s only $80 and is a complete ready-to-fly package. Have to get me one of those sometime! Or I’ll just tell my mother in law that’s the other thing I want for my birthday.

I generally am pretty slow to pick up on the latest social-type internet phenomenon. When I first heard of blogs and Blogger, I couldn’t understand why anyone would care what Joe Blow thought about anything. Twitter continues to mystify me, I can’t see it finding a place in my life ever. Myspace? I’ve always avoided it like the plague. Internet chat of sundry kinds? Dabbled with and currently won’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

I was forced into creating a Facebook account when I was using a program called Broadclip (now Flycast). They changed it into a Facebook app only (at that time), so I had to go to Facebook to keep using it. Then, much to my chagrin, people started finding me on Facebook! So I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of FB.

Once in a great while I would log on and deal with Friend requests and quickly log out, I avoided it like the plague. Recently though I’ve come around somewhat, and I enjoy Facebook for what it does well. I look at is as a micro-blogging platform with a pretty handy photo album feature, I enjoy keeping up with people that way. And I re-connected with my old buddy Mark from the Den of Iniquity!

I’ve been playing around with the photo album thing (here’s one I just posted), and I think I really like it (I know Rob, Picasa! Picasa!). I might have to post a bunch more pictures I have sitting around.

Another thing I really enjoy about FB is “liking” things. Especially my own. I’m getting more trigger happy all the time with the “like” click. I’m starting to regularly scan down the page just lighting it on fire clicking the “like” link.

And I like that it automatically posts my ITF posts. So anyway, that’s my Facebook saga.