…is who came to play against the USC Trojans this past weekend.  My dad and I flew down to see the game and hang out with his friend Jerry.  I was surprised that the USC fans were so polite, we were only booed once and it was actually in fairly good taste (as good as booing can be).  I expected a little more than what we saw.  The USC campus was very nice and equally as large.  What I liked was that as we walked around campus, people were tailgating all over, it showed a lot of community support as well as tie in with the university.The game was a mangled head up of spread offense.  The worst part wasn’t that we lost, rather, that we had that glimmer of hope that came with the first touchdown.  After that it was that nauseating repetitious beating of the ducks.

To ease our pain, we filled out bellies.  We were frequent patrons at Senior Fish, often, I found myself knee-deep in Scallop a scallop burrito.  They had the most fantastic salsas, there is a chance I might try to replicate the fresh salsa, it was so good I could have eaten it solo by the spoonful. Don’t get me wrong, the scallop is one tasty bivalve.

Other than watching our beloved ducks being creamed, we hung out at Jerry’s sipping fine Mexican importsm admiring his new porch, and making crude but slightly insightful jokes.

Once back from the Portland Airport, I gathered up my few remaining things and jumped into my car to be Grove-bound only to find that my hobby-needing mother had plastered, hid, tucked, wrapped, and nestled a something that had to do with USC throughout my car.  In my gum, on my blood donation key chain, on my side mirror, between seats… and there are still more to find I am sure.  As she states it, that was payback for the many trips to restaurants where I semi-steal a spoon, apples, toothpicks, crayons, or honey packet and drop them into her purse.  For some reason, she never finds the hidden goodies until she is out of state teaching a class.  I just want her to be prepared.  That aside, at 11pm on Sunday, I was safely back in the Grove, another weekend gone, but wisely utilized.

Sorry, the quality isn’t fantastic, it’s a cellphone camera, what do you expect?

About a month before the school year started, I was informed by a text message that I had been drafted into the Staff Mustache Race.  As Knutson said, “there are no winners in a mustache contest”; here they were on the last day of ’stashness:

 Yes, that is a month’s worth of lip hair growth on my face.  Yes, I know it’s barely visible.  Yes, it is bald in the middle.   Yes, I am ashamed.

As of this morning, I have offically lost 20% of my original body weight of 300 pounds.  Now that I am at 240, I have only 10 pounds left to shed before I reach my inital goal.  As for my main goal, I’m striving for 40 more pounds.  Honestly, I don’t think I have weighted so little since freshman year of high school.  My weight on my drivers license now out weighs me by 20 pounds.  If it didn’t cost money or use up valuable time, I would have like to get a new license, just kind of a reminder for myself. 

There have been so many different benefits from this, it has truly changed me.  I sleep better, I feel happier, people treat me differently, I get sick less, I run faster, I work out longer, I get angry less, and I have a overwhelming burst of self-confidence and a positive self-image.  My only regret is that I didn’t do this years ago, how much of my life could I have made brighter if I had implemented self-control and a workout routine?  I guess that sometimes, one’s head can only be removed from dark places at specific times in life… luckily, I pulled my out when my chance came along.

This has honestly been the hardest, yet most fulfilling and affirming 10 months of my life.  Here’s to taking a scary situation and making it work for you.

We here at Box of Whine like to beleive that our content is wide and varied, as well as entertaining.  With that, here are the top three search terms for 9/24/2008:

It’s been a while since I’ve had a bizarre dream, so I guess I was due, here’s the dream:

While out golfing with the administrators of my high school, I went to reach for my golf clubs but I came to the startling realization that instead of bringing a bag full of clubs, I brought a vacuum.  Ashamed of my mistake, I desperately tried to locate golf clubs within the vacuum but with every compartment I opened, all I found was vacuum accessories.

I’m not sure if this says something about my golf game (of which I have none), my cleaning, or my school… either way, I’m not sure what that statement would be.

Apparently, if you take the long way to LaPine and take the more direct way back, it’s still unbelievably long.  Still, one of the other coaches and I did take the opportunity to name every player.  From the top of my head:

‘Cano, Beetlejuice, Donny, Irish, Bulldog, Farcus, Soubcheck, Pillow, Cleetus, Snackshack, Norris, Clay Aiken, Bea Arthur, ‘Mater, Spiccoli, Aquaman, Big Tuna, The Stones, Ralphie… 

not bad committing all of those to memory even with the 5 hours I slept before getting back for work.  LaPine’s varsity team shows up here tonight. 

A big shout-out to Mr. Chris Pratt for showing up at LaPine on his unplanned visit to the Bend/Redmond area.  Thanks for the support, buddy.

A scary notion:

Seeing as all those partaking of Box of Whine are diligently observant (especially with my typos) you’ve have surely noticed the little icons appearing throughout the site.  These are gravatars, gravatars (as I’m sure a lot of you know) stand for Globally Recognized Avatars.  The ones you see when I post or when I comment are connected to my email address.  Many other sites use gravatars and so my icon is the same across all of them.  You may asking yourself, “Self, I would surely enjoy having my own gravatar so that when I do comment on Box of Whine, my icon may appear in all of its glory.”  To answer such deep-seated questions, here is the solution: go to http://www.gravatar.com and sign-up.  It will associate a picture that you will have uploaded with your email and then sites, such as this splendid venue, will proudly showcase your icon of choice.

Of course, adding a new feature to this site has never been easy, something always goes wrong (I have learned my $150 lesson), therefore I always backup when there is a new version of WordPress.  After installing, activating, and customizing the latest plug-in to have gravatars, I started getting messages that the database for this site was nowhere to be found.   There was at least 15 good minutes spent panicing and cursing myself for once again hobbling my site.  Thankfully, I think the server was just having a hiccup episode, not long after everything started to come back, but not before my blood pressure spiked. I don’t see how people can do this stuff for a living, it’s hard enough as a hobby.

Another weight update which for some reason precludes anyone from commenting. 

Down to 243 as of this morning, making a total loss of 57 pounds, 13 pounds away from my goal and 3 pounds away from hitting the 20% total body weight loss.  The 20% mark is my closest goal that I’ve been pushing for, when I finally get there I’m going to celebrate by eating like I do every day, less than 2,100 calories of total intake; it’s going to rock!

Current issues: exercise; as perdicted, finding time to excerise is hard with football.  For a while I was getting up at 5:30 in the morning and getting an hour work out in but I think that came with negative consequences.  I was no longer losing weight, in fact, I had gained some poundage back.  The conclusion I came to was the lack of sleep was negatively affecting my plans.  So I excused myself from getting up so early and working out, narrowed my eating, and moved exercising to the weekends.  Hopefully it pays off.

I’m not sure what I found more interesting; was it that a student was trying to defend how the swastika is “cool” or that I could easily hear Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” being blasted from her headphones.