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My year started under grim auspices as I was briefly an uncle and to one less person a nephew.  My grandmother moved from temporary care in a nursing home to permanent resident, a move that still haunts her and the words “this dresser and closet are all that I own” still haunts me.  I got fired along with some 95 other people I considered my friends and my weight loss slowed to a halt.  This was a year largely without affection for me and I seemed to have gone through two best friends in a span of 12 months.

But punctuating this gloom were some moments of joy and in two rare cases, stretches.  Each month held something fantastic:

January Chicago Visit

Cloud Gate, Chicago

From 2012-01-07 Chicago

 

February Cincinnati Visit

From 2012-02-16 Cincinnati, Union Terminal and Melting Pot

 

From 2012-02-16 Cincinnati, Union Terminal and Melting Pot

March St. Louis Trip

From 2012-03-09 Missouri Botanical Gardens

 

From 2012-03-10 to 11 TI: St. Louis

Florida Trip, also in March.

From 2012-03-22 Atlanta Botanical Gardens
From 2012-03-24 Orlando, Fl Beach and Dinner
From 2012-03-25 Mythbusters in Raleigh, NC

April Trip to C2E2

From 2012-04-13 Chicago Architecture Walk
From 2012-04-13 Chicago Architecture Walk
From 2012-04-14 C2E2

May Trip to NYC and Memorial Day

From 2012-05-25 NYC
From 2012-05-25 NYC
From 2012-05-26 to 27 House Party

Oh yeah, and John Hewins got married as did Chris Sollars.

June Zombie Obstacle Survival 5k

From 2012-06-23 Run For Your Lives Zombification
From 2012-06-23 Zombie 5k

July Trip to Cincinnati

From 2012-07-07 Fireworks
From 2012-07-12 Ketosis Pictures

August Trip to NYBG

From 2012-08-22 NYBG with Janine

August Trip Road Trip to Dragon*Con

From 20212-08-26 Fountain Pictures
From 2012-08-30 Dragon*con Thursday
From 2012-08-31 Dragoncon Thursday
From 2012-09-01 Dragon*con Saturday

September Trip to Rochester

From 2012-09-26 Rochester Bridge Pictures
From 2012-09-25 Pat, Clara, and Cats

October Trip to New York City Comic Con

From 2012-10-12 New York Comic Con Day 1
From 2012-10-12 New York Comic Con Day 1

November Barcamp Philly

From 2012-11-10 Barcamp Philly

December John Roderick and Jon Coulton, One Christmas at a Time

From 2012-12-14 One Christmas at a Time Show

So by the end of the year, this was me:

From 2012-12-14 One Christmas at a Time Show

In the past 12 months I:
Lost 50 lbs
Got a better job
Took 35,000 photos
Put 45k miles on my car
Grew beard
Shaved beard
Grew beard
Passed first actuarial exam since college
Went to my first comic convention
Wore my first Halloween costume
Ran first half marathon
Ran first 10 miler
Ran first 8 minute mile
Had first case of blood pressure below 115/75
Sold my first photographic print

To 2013

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I purchased a 1.5 gallon wine glass.  Here is how I chose to fill it:

2012-12-31 19.11.37-1

This an English dessert called a trifle.  To make it authentic, I should have added liquor between each layer but wished intoxication to be independent from entering a food coma.

The layers are Nilla wafers, banana pudding, graham crackers, chocolate pudding, oreos, vanilla pudding with chocolate chips, blueberry reduction, whipped cream, and a cherry.  In total, it contains about 15,000 calories and enough sugar to kill someone who weighs less than about 110 lbs.  If I were to eat no other carbohydrates and to stay on keto, it’d take me about three months to consume it.  The dessert clocks in at about 10 lbs and should feed about 35 people in my opinion.

Let us see if Randy and Kelly’s guests are up to it.

 

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Kara Hurvitz and I got together for a late dinner.  I fell on ice in the parking lot.  My ass is far less padded than it used to be.

A PedEgg does not work well as a way to zest a lemon.

The fanciness of a berry coulis comes from having to shove boiled berries through a sieve.

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The standing desk experiment has been largely embraced by my coworkers and small benefits have started to roll out of it.  More people stop by in the course of the day as I make eye contact with many more people.  This particularly applies to people who are at least 5’10”.  I now know the schedules of some of the people who use the women’s restroom that is next to my cube (particularly the taller ladies) and I throw off some people as being simply a disembodied head, an effect caused by the height of my cubical wall.  This set up does have some limitations.  Some activities are so cognitively draining that standing is distracting.  I can’t stand and study nor can I stand and read some of the math-ier professional papers.  I also sit when I eat my lunch.  A final byproduct of standing is that I’m less interested in walking during lunch and I take fewer constitutionals.

The trade-off then becomes that if standing reduces the amount I walk per day by on average 2 miles or more, I’m actually not burning more calories by standing.  These are the times I’m glad I use a pedometer.  Let the month of data begin.

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I was 221 lbs so down 199 from my starting weight of 420.  I wanted to lose 210 lbs to be half the person I used to be, but after four three months of working downtown I had stabilized here and I thought this would be a good weight to make my new home.  Maybe surgery would remove 10 lbs of whatever and I would reach my target but this seemed unlikely.  So, with heavy heart, and a soon to be empty wallet, I called to schedule two procedures to get rid of an excess of me.  Time to shrink.

I called to schedule an initial pre-op visit:

*chatter about scheduling*

Receptionist: Everything will be fine, the doctor is quite skilled.
Me: I’m not worried about the doctor, I’m worried about the anesthesiologist.
Receptionist: Don’t say that.  Everything will be fine.
Me: What?  He’s five times more likely to kill me than the surgeon.
Receptionist: STOP SAYING THAT.
Me: Hey, I’m an actuary, I know these things.
Receptionist: Well, I’m sure the anesthesiologist is good too.  Have a nice day, actuary.

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I burn about 400 less calories each day at my current workplace compared to where I worked before and my weight loss has ceased.  Standing at an Instron has been replaced by spreadsheets and walking across the building to bullshit has been replaced by yet more spreadsheets.  My solution was to build a  standing desk from the design I found here and I raided an Ikea to get the parts to assemble one.  Yesterday evening I assembled the stand and today I brought it onto the Regional Rail line to get it to work.  The day after Christmas saw light traffic and few people gave me guff about the snow plow/censor box that I had held around my waste to keep it from moving in the jangling train.  I then walked it through Suburban Station, past the clothespin, up an escalator, and into an elevator.  Placed upon my desk, here it is:

2012-12-26 10.55.31

The desk didn’t quite prove to be tall enough so I propped it up with reams of paper.  The laptop to the left is held up with a 10 ream paper box and things seemed pretty comfortable for the first three hours or so.

Then I made a critical miscalculation by putting on these:

2012-12-26 12.20.54-1

I had meant to try ice skating at the UPenn rink earlier, but this was the first day I had scheduled the time to do so.  I had stood for three hours then went ice skating for two.  The benches on the SEPTA car have never proven more comfortable.

The rest of the day passed without much pain but I was quite glad to again sit when I took the train home.

 

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My offices uses Microsoft Lync but turns off message logging for “security reasons”.  This frustrates me to no end as conversation logging is infinitely useful when one works with people who will write three or four paragraph IMs with important information in lieu of an email.  A coworker and I installed Pidgin to deal with this lack of logging and it was nice to have a unified messaging platform on my computer.  The coworker and I chatted and explored the fuller functionality of Pidgin like logging, psychic mode, and showing previous conversations but slowly our chatter became more informal as we both reminisced about using Pidgin in college.  This was fine, but the breaking point came after we picked apart the hair and clothing choices of our coworkers and I linked him to hahgay.com.  This site is profoundly useful but probably in violation of my firm’s diversity policy.

1) I removed Pidgin.
2) I deleted the Pidgin conversation log.
3) I now understand why logging is disabled.

 

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Crucial to the actuarial craft is estimating how losses will develop.  Say someone gets in a car accident, it’s easy to figure out how much fixing the car will cost but it can take years for all the costs of an injury to come to light.  If a firm has enough history, you can calculate a loss development to pull those losses forward based on loss data but often the data can be spare so one has to use another method.  One of the most popular is the Bornhuetter-Ferguson method often abbreviated to “BF method”.

This creates an odd scenario:

Coworker #1: The paucity of data makes LDF selection tenuous.
Coworker #2: I think we should go with the BF value I selected.
Coworker #1: Your BF is poorly supported.
Coworker #2: My BF is better than yours, I think.

I’m glad my grown coworkers get to argue about who has a better BF.  I really wanted to chime in with “which of your BFs brought you flowers most recently?”

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I’m participating in a Secret Santa at work.  The format is 3-4 small gifts of no more than $5.00 and one final large one.  I requested mechanical pencils and almonds.  So far I have received two sets of chocolate despite listing “no sweets please” on my Secret Santa request form.  Today I received another gift drop and it was a pencil sharpener.  The colors are very nice, but I don’t think they’ll work well with my mechanical pencils.

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Deer

I had on my favorite dark blue dress shirt and sweater vest when I received a call that someone wasn’t quite sure how to get to my house for the party I was having that evening. I walked outside to the ledge overlooking Bristol Rd and saw hazard lights blinking, and heard the sounds of broken glass as other cars drove around the stopped vehicle. I ran down my driveway and out to the car and saw two teenagers standing off to the side of the road shaking next to their car which had struck a deer.

Me: Are you ok?
Them: *shiver* nod.
Me: Have you called for help?
Them: *shiver* nod.
Me: Ok, I’m going to push this deer out of the way and then we need to move your car. Do you feel comfortable driving?
Them: *shiver*
Me: I’ll do it.
Them: *shiver* Ok.

Deer shoved, car moved, help called. Time to wait.

Girl #1: Who are you?
Me: My name’s Terry.
Girl #1: Why are you here?
Me: I live in the house behind you and I saw your lights blinking so I ran down.
Girl #2: It was odd to see you come out of the fog.
Me: I suppose it was.
*car pulls up*
Me: This your ride?
Girl #1: It’s my mom, yeah.
Me: Do you feel comfortable driving back?
Girl #1: *blank stare*
Me: Would you like me to drive back?
Girl #2: Thank you.

I drove them back, we chatted during the four minute drive and the girls’ mother drove me back. She made an off hand comment about there not being food in the house so when she dropped me off, I asked her to wait a second and assembled a plate of baked goods from the food at my party. Then she was off into the night.

Everything Else

I think I invited enough people that the group shards could enjoy themselves.  The cluster of Scouts got to have a rope argument while others played Jungle Speed and yet more just ate.

121215-11796-ChristmasParty.jpg

Top View-Nice shot, Sam.

121215-11660-ChristmasParty.jpg

Constrictor Hitch-This is what happens when six Eagle Scouts start drinking.

The party went well, and this time I had a lot of food left over instead of an embarrassing amount of food left over.  Most people left between 1 and 2 am.

121216-11889-ChristmasParty.jpg

With a cherry on top

I feel this is an entirely acceptable way to round out 2012.