I got an email from Adam, our favorite airman in Iraq. The first shipment of our chocolate drive has landed safe and sound.

Hello Trint and Tammy,

The package arrived today and it’s in perfect condition. Even the most sensitive chocolates were perfect and not melted! Thank you very much for what you have done, I am sure the patients will enjoy these treats very much. The variety is amazing, I have been here for only two months and my mouth started to water as soon as I opened the package! I can’t wait to see their reactions, believe me they will be blown away!!!

Again thank you,

God delivers,

Adam

I thought about harassing Adam for using the phrase “blown away” in reference to already wounded soldiers, but I decided that was too crass, even for me. (But not too crass for my blog!)

I’ve been lucky this year. I’ve dodged the various bugs and ickies going around. But this weekend, I finally got hit. I thought I would “work from home” on Monday, but that turned into sleeping on the couch all day long. Worse yet, Tammy’s got it now too. I hate being a transmitter because I know exactly how bad she’ll feel over the next few days.

I got a major part in this year’s Christmas musical at the church. I’m Joseph, Jesus’ step-dad, so to speak. It’s a very challenging role because there’s a lot of emotion involved as Joseph struggles with the fact that the woman he loves is pregnant with someone else’s baby and her story is too wild to believe.

And now for Tammy’s big story of the day:

Power FM, the best Christian rock station ever, has been doing a long running give-away contest called “the Battleship Game”. Each morning a randomly selected caller (They use a computer program to randomly select which line is the winner.) takes a shot. If you get a hit, you take another shot. If you sink a ship, you get a prize.

Tammy has always had supernatural fortune (See I don’t believe in “luck”) in these kinds of things. She’s won more stuff off the radio than I can even remember. But today, she out-did herself.

Over the last few days, all the misses around a recent hit have been eliminated. Everyone knew today someone would sink the ship. Tammy was lucky caller 2. (First time she’s gotten through since the contest began weeks ago.) They were going through the formalities before she took her shot when the phone line went dead. She wasn’t even on a cell phone. No one knows what happened. The DJ’s agonized over it. The phones were jam packed with people wanting to play so there was no way they were going to get Tammy back on the line. They fired up the program, selected a new random phone line and started over. Line 10, which is more lines than they have, so they had to hang up on several people to cycle through to the tenth caller. “Hey, you’re the lucky caller on line 10!” “YES!! This is Tammy!!!”

Unbelievable.

She won a Zune, Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the iPod. (We may eBay it and buy an actual iPod instead.)

I have a very good friend who serves in the US Air Force. I met TSgt Adam Page while I lived in Colorado Springs. He’s now on his second tour to Iraq. Adam is a dietitian for the 332nd CASF. (That’s the Air Force equivalent of a MASH unit.) Adam also works on the team that transports casualties to and from the unit. He spends a lot of one-on-one time with our wounded servicemen and women.

He sent me a request a couple weeks ago. Due to the climate over there, chocolate is a rare commodity. But during the winter months, it’s possible to ship it safely. Every day, Adam goes through the wards talking with the patients and offers them some chocolate candy bars. He said it’s been amazing to see how much these guys light up when they see chocolate. It’s a bit of home that some of them have not seen in over a year.

Seeing as it’s Halloween shopping season, and our kids at church are looking for ways to serve people, I put a big box up at the church and explained to the kids I was taking donations of chocolate. We got a pretty good response. Then Tammy and I both sent out emails to our coworkers. The response has been huge.

One of Tammy’s coworkers even tried to get Hershey’s on board, but they, understandably, have some policies about donations that we can’t meet… yet. I’ve also gotten some pretty nice cash donations that I’m going to use to buy more candy when the post-Halloween sale prices hit.

This is all really exciting and Adam and I are both hoping in continues to grow. Adam has promised me that when he ships out, he’ll pass the word to his replacements and we’ll keep chocolate moving. Of course, we can only ship it safely two or three months out of the year, but the good news is that those two or three months are when chocolate is most available in stores.

If you’d be interested in donating to the cause, you can donate money via PayPal (in the side bar). We aren’t organized enough to offer tax deductions or anything, so this is just a gift from the heart.

Yes, I had to remove a post. There’s some cool stuff still to say though.

At lunch, I posted about an event my employer is hosting. It’s really cool and has a very high geek score, but the event is hush-hush, not to be publicized at the behest of some of the attendees. Sorry. Let’s just say I work at an amazing company that is changing how email is done.

Now, what’s really neat is that less than an hour after I clicked “Publish”, our companies marketing manager got an automated email from Google letting him know there was a new blog post that linked to our company site. How cool is that?

Of course, he quickly came to my office, and in a very friendly, non-KGB, non-Jack-Bauer way asked me not to publicize the event. My bad. I didn’t know it was hush-hush. Intriguing, eh?

Okay, so, like, you know all this talk about WeightWatchers lately? You know how I’ve said that I get 28 points a day and stuff? Well, I’ve been living for the last three weeks on that 28 points a day (more or less… okay, mostly more) and I’ve done pretty well. I’ve figured out at which places I just can’t afford to eat and what foods just won’t fit in the points budget. I think I’ve been a great student.

So why would I be upset? Well, you know me. I didn’t really read every word of instructions when I signed up. I’m a guy. Worse yet, I’m a geek – a web geek at that – and when I sign up for some web service, I pretty much feel comfortable figuring it out on my own.

But somehow, somewhere, I missed the part where you’re supposed to “click here” to take your “target point quiz”. See, even the name doesn’t really tell me what’s really going on there. The “target point quiz” is where you “confirm” your height, weight, age, and gender, and pick whether you want to maintain your weight or lose weight. I figured that since you asked me all those questions when I signed up that the 28 points that showed up on my profile was correct. But noooo.

See I stumbled across the “target point quiz” purely by accident late last week. I “confirmed” all that information and clicked “save” (Why it’s “save” and not “calculate” or something more descriptive, I don’t know.) and then noticed that my point total changed from 28 points a day to 37. 37?! Good grief! That’s HUGE compared to 28. I could eat like a relative pig and not use up 37 points a day (plus the 35 “extra points” I get per week).

I took the “quiz” several times and the result was always the same: 37. I crawled all over the web site trying to find out how to set it back to 28, how to fix my calculated result from the “quiz”. I even googled the points and found a chart that showed, for my weight, I should be at 28:

225 to 250 pounds = 28 Points

Finally, I relented, and sent an email to support. Two days later, I get this response:

Based on your information 37 POINTS® is your correct POINTS Target. It is possible that you were viewing your POINTS® Target before you took the POINTS quiz. After the sign-up process you would have been assigned a POINTS® Target value that is based solely on your current weight.

So what you’re telling me is that 28 points is correct for a person that weighs 250 pounds, but is… what? …a four-foot-tall, ten-year-old girl? How could they make such a retarded assumption. They already had all the information they needed, but somehow they assigned my points target based on only one criteria. I’vE BEEN EATING LIKE A BIRD FOR THREE WEEKS WHEN I DIDN’t HAVE TO??!!

Never mess with a large, hungry man. He may not have the energy to curtail his ham-sized fists of rage.

So anyway, that was last week. I’m pretty much over being mad. I know I should be happy that I’m allowed to eat more now. But somehow I feel cheated. I feel like three weeks of happy eating has been stolen from me. Granted I’ve lost almost ten pounds, but the victory is as hollow as my stomach has felt for the last three weeks.

I’m going to have some ice cream now. About a half gallon. With a bottle of Hershey’s on top.

An open letter to the guy in the dressing room at Kohl’s this Saturday:

I’m sorry. I guess I just assumed too much. You see, in my mind, it’s always been a simple fact: If the dressing room door is closed, it might be in use, so either knock or use the next dressing room (you know, the one on which the door was standing open at the time).

But, clearly, you did not accept that fact, or at least it had not occurred to you. So, yes, I’m sure it was my fault that you opened the door to my dressing room while I was using it. I should have hung a sock on the door knob, or maybe brought along a Sharpie and scrawled, “ES OCUPADO” on the door on my way in. How could I have been so thoughtless.

Then again, if you did it on purpose, because you’re some kind of freakish pervert, then I only hope it was good for you, cuz I didn’t particularly enjoy it.

I’m sure you picked up on the hints last week. I’ve signed up for WeightWatchers.

I have a few friends who’ve had great success with WeightWatchers’ online point system. One young man in our youth group lost 70 pounds last year. It’s easy, inexpensive, and you don’t have to buy any special foods, just be more conscious of the things you already eat.

Ultimately it came down the the fact that most of my “XL” shirts have become uncomfortably snug and my clever tactic of doing nothing about it was not working out for me.

Today marks the first day of week two. I am allowed 37* points a day, with 35 points of overflow to use throughout the week. I did really well last week, averaging about 30 points a day, until the weekend. My in-laws were in town and we spent the whole weekend together shopping and eating and site seeing and eating and eating and eating. I honestly surprised myself when I tallied up the points for Saturday and topped 50 points. That’s much closer to what I was eating on a regular basis before I started. Not every day, but at least a couple of days a week.

I weighed in this morning at 1 pound less than last Monday. I could probably lose one pound by getting a hair cut, so I’m calling the first week a wash. But it was a learning experience and that’s better than nothing.

Yep, I got one of those emails. The one with the two pages of forward headers at the top and five ‘>’ at the front of each line. But this one had some gems in it. And since I am from Amarillo, I have to share a few lines

You know you are from Amarillo, Texas if…

• Friday night high school football is a sell-out.
• You laugh at out-of-towners who actually attempt to eat the free 72 oz. steak.
• You think that trees naturally grow leaning to the north east.
• You know where The Canyon is.
• You’ve never seen smog, but you’ve been through a dust storm.
• You know that the Cadillac Ranch isn’t a real ranch.
• 40 mph wind is, ‘a little breezy.’
• You’ve had to pull over and remove tumbleweeds from the grill of your car.
• You’ve seen rain, hail, sleet, and snow all in the same storm.
• You’ve seen tires on the roofs of trailer houses and you know they’re there to hold the roof on.
• You know how to pronounce Dumas.
• You accept the fact that the most prominent vehicles on the streets are pickup trucks, SUVs, tractors, then cars (in that order).
• You can get a sunburn one weekend and the next weekend it snows!
• Some mountain weirdo or hill country hippie has called you a ‘flat lander‘ and you were proud of it.
• You tell people you live in a red brick house with a tan shingled roof and and a tiny little tree in the front yard, and then realize that describes every house within a 5-mile radius.

It’s Wednesday, the unofficial cut-off time for posting a new white board quip. You’ll have to wait for next Monday. Sorry about that.

I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. I swear today feels like Monday. *Peeks around the corner to see if Rod Sterling is doing an introductory monolog about me.*

A couple weeks ago, I got a new cell phone. Not just any new cell phone, but the cell phone over which I have been drooling for the last two or three years. A coworker got a new phone and was ready to part ways with his Treo 700wx. I picked it up at a great price with all the goodies and extras to go with it.

With the Windows Mobile OS on the phone, I’m able to sync it with my computer for contacts, calendar, etc. All of which is way cool. Plus, since Sprint was nice enough to transfer all the data from my old phone, I’m finally able to access the pictures that have long been trapped there.

That brings me to the “Old Story” part. Remember waaay back in March of 2006 when I busted my arm? Well, I finally have the picture that I took, while sitting on the curb, of my road-rashed elbow, mere minutes after the event (long before any swelling or bruising showed up). I took the picture so I could see what was going on over there, since at that time, I couldn’t twist my arm enough to see the damage. I thought I’d share this bit of history with you.

If you’re curious about the shirt I’m wearing, I did the artwork and you can have one for yourself. Just check out Dave’s CafePress page.