On Thursday, May 21st, authorities in Baltimore arrested Jerri Althea Gray and took her son, Alexander Deundray Draper, into protective custody. A warrant was issued for Mrs. Grays arrest in South Carloina on Tuesday after she failed to appear at a court ordered hearing. During that hearing the judge ordered that the boy should be taken into state custody due to medical neglect.
With the way things have been going in the economy recently I’ve been thinking a lot about where I spend my money. Specifically, where it goes after I spend it. I’ve been doing a lot of my grocery shopping at Sam’s Club recently, which in the realm of “keeping your dollars local” is about as far off the mark as you can get. I realize that, but I also realize that I have to feed my family and that right now every dollar I spend on groceries has to go as far as it can (I am determined to be out of debt with the exception of my house in the next five years and must stick to my grocery budget).
All of that being said, when I do find the occasion to actually go out and spend some money I’ve had a very strong desire to make sure that it’s going to stay here in the community. When Alex and I went out for lunch a few weeks ago we went to Evo’s, for example. I got a cake earlier today from a place here called Cakes by Carolyn and I’m very excited about the fact that there is a new book store near my house called Books at Park Place that carries a decent selection of gaming, science fiction, and fantasy books.
My desire to do this really makes me wish there was an active St. Petersburg blog and I’m half-tempted to start one myself.
So those of you who live in the ‘burg…tell me…where should I be going?
We here at ShrinkGeek are not scientists. We are not doctors. The closest we come to being official “health experts” would be our resident personal trainer, Rob, and he is the first person who will point out he is not a dietician. Much of the advice that we give here is based strictly on our own personal experience and the struggles we have had dealing with our own health and fitness issues. Whether you agree with us or not I can promise that you’ll never see us make a claim or give advice that is in any way based on anything but what we truly believe is the healthiest option available.
Those humble statements aside, it’s really nice to have folks with fancy letters behind their names confirm one of your core beliefs.
When I originally started my life of dieting twenty or so years ago the tools I had to help me do so were pretty much limited to a paper journal and a scale.
My how things have changed.
The modern dieter has a plethora of toys, gadgets, and gizmos available to aid in the weight loss process. There are paid sites like eDiets and Weight Watchers eTools, calorie counting applications you can download for your iPhone or Blackberry, pedometers and heart rate monitors, digital scales, electronic body fat measuring devices….The list goes on and on.
Developer Mark Rickert has decided to add one more tool to the arsenal by creating an application that utilizes everyone’s favorite new social networking service, Twitter, to track your weight online.
Image Courtesy of roland
Ah, telecommuting. That dream within a dream for the working professional. While most of us are stuck in traffic or trapped behind a cube wall while the person next to us listens to “Come On, Eileen!” for the tenth time the telecommuter is sitting at home, sipping home brewed coffee in their pajamas and basking in the serenity that is home life.
Well, that is how we envision it is, anyway. The truth of the matter is that working from home, while it has many advantages, is not quite the golden apple that those of us in the cube farms picture it to be. While the telecommuter may not have to deal with Lundberg face-to-face, he or she has to deal with a whole variety of productivity hurdles that someone in an office is safely isolated from; Kids, pets, door-to-door salesmen, distracting spouses, telephone solicitors, and the perception that the fact that working from home is not really “working” and as a result you should somehow be expected to drop whatever you are doing at a moments notice to deal with the latest non-work related situation that has cropped up in your life.
There is one other major challenge that the health conscious telecommuter has to deal with. Staying in shape. Having just finished a period of over four years in which I was telecommuting about 80% of the time I can assure you that while it is easier to avoid the weekly doughnut trap in the break room there are a whole series of roadblocks to being healthy that appear when you start working from home. If you find yourself fortunate enough to end up with a telecommuting opportunity there’s a few things you can do to help minimize the negative impact on your physical AND mental well-being.
Weebl and Bob are copyright j. picking
According to Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich there we must all accept that there are certain inalienable truths : Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old (and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders).
Oh, and Pie is greater than Cake.
Not many people are aware that Ms. Schmich included that in her original column. Unfortunately that line was omitted from the printed article by a delusional cake loving typesetter named Gladys who worked for the printers. It’s true. My wife told me. My wife….Morgan Fairchild! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
When you hear the term “Geek” what do you think of? If you’re a self-proclaimed Geek perhaps you think of a highly intelligent person who enjoys some of the less mainstream entertainment in modern society. Perhaps you think of someone who is good with computers or who always has the latest technology. Maybe you just think of someone who likes to wear black t-shirts with sarcastic sayings on them.
If you’re not one of the Chosen, though, you might have a different view of our society. You might see Geeks as being socially awkward, unwashed, and out of shape losers who live in their mothers basement and work in a comic book store. Society, on the whole, doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of Geeks as a general rule.
Sometimes you just hafta take what life gives ya, ’cause life is like a mop and sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and bugs and hairballs and stuff… you, you, you gotta clean it out. You, you, you gotta put it in here and rinse it off and start all over again and, and sometimes, sometimes life sticks to the floor so bad you know a mop, a mop, it’s not good enough, it’s not good enough. You, you gotta get down there, like, with a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta, you gotta really scrub ’cause you gotta get it off. You gotta really try to get it off. But if that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, you can’t give up. You gotta, you gotta stand right up. You, you gotta run to a window and say, “Hey! These floors are dirty as hell, and I’m not gonna take it any more!”
– Stanley Spadowski, UHF (1989)
When I started out this project I specifically picked a group of folks who I knew had some very different takes on the whole weight loss and fitness field. I did this for a variety of reasons, but primarily I did so because I know there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution when it comes to weight loss and fitness and that having multiple perspectives on certain subjects is a great way to help our readership find out what works best for them.
Take, for example, the article that Rafe wrote the other day about doing something other than walking in order to get in your daily exercise. It’s a fine article, and the exercise he mentions certainly seems challenging, but in reading it I felt the need to write a response and give you all the “other side” of the coin.
America is, undeniably, getting larger around the waist line. As a matter of fact obesity has become such a problem here that back in July of last year Senators Chris Dodd, Tom Harkin, and Jeff Bingaman introduced the Federal Obesity Prevention Act of 2008. This bill was in response to what Dodd called “a medical emergency of hurricane-like proportions” in our country, and would have established a government strategy for preventing and reducing obesity. This strategy would have included short- and long-term goals for childhood and adult obesity rates.
Which, in Orwellian terms, meant that the United States Government may have taken a direct interest in America’s waist line if this Bill had passed (it was referred to committee back in September of 2008 and has not been brought back up in the current session).