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I had a doctor visit today and I can’t remember when I was last this excited to see my doctor. When last we had seen each other I weighed 402 lbs and I was on my way down from my peak of 420 lbs. After a paperwork update and some preliminary paperwork I was in an examination room and waited. I had dropped 150 lbs from my last visit and the back and forth with the doctor sounded like this:

HIm: What the hell are you doing to yourself?
Me: Eating less and exercising.
Him: Good job. I see you have a question for me.
Me: Yeah, I’d like to talk about getting a medically covered abdomenoplasty.
Him: That’s tough, what are your symptoms?
Me: Chronic skin abrasion again my clothing, difficulty sleeping, and some lower back problems if I’ve been leaning forward at all during the day.
Him: I’ll add it to your record. Keep up the good work. See you in a month?
Me: See you in 10 lbs.
Him: Don’t get cocky.

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John and Val Hewins and I went to New York City today and caught the train out of Hamilton Station. We took Hamilton to Penn Station, Penn Station to Grand Central, and Grand Central to the New York City Botanical Gardens. On each of these stints I got to either listen to an audiobook or sleep and I gained a new appreciation for not needing to entertain married couples.

Val was a delight to watch at the Gardens as she has the keen mind of trained scientist. She would find a plant with some interesting mechanism and reason backwards why it was that way based on the biological and environmental forces placed on the plant. As Dawkins points out it is not the case that biology makes sense with evolution but biology only makes sense with evolution.

After the Gardens we hit some key sites and wandered south for ramen at Minca Ramen. I asked if we could go to the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop and they hesitantly agreed. When we got there, Val was surprised “wow, it’s actually called the Big Gay Ice Cream shop. I thought you were just being… you.”

Throughout the day I became aware that I walked much faster than Val and John such that were were three minutes late to everything. We were in no rush and their company was nice so it proved to be no bother. Another benefit of John and Val was that we seemed to all enjoy kind of just drinking in our surroundings but wanted to make conversation so we had long stretches of silence punctuated with commentary on what we had just seen since our last silence break.

Best Rose

Rest of the pictures:

[flickr album=72157631490843356 num=20 size=Thumbnail]

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Kyle Anderson and I have been trying to re-unite a bit more often than before and after our first failed attempt to go skating we checked the schedule for Grundy Arena and tried there again.  The parking lot was full (good sign) and people were walking (better sign) so we confidently strode in.  There was no person at the ticket booth (bad sign) and the pro shop was closed (worse sign) and we were surrounded by gaggles of 7-11 year old girls dressed like figure skating stars.  Kyle noted that we probably looked very out of place as two men in their late 20s and I replied that everyone seemed so self-absorbed that we didn’t need to worry.  We had missed again but now know what pedophile heaven looks like.

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Patrick died today due to what I think were respiratory complications.  He was my nephew, my brother and his wife’s son, my father and mother’s grandchild.  It was like five people had died.  This was communicated to me over gChat at around 2am.  His birth announcement was made to me via text message and his updates came as Facebook posts and emails.  His was a life that was communicated to me almost entirely in electronic text.

Goodbye, Patrick.

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There was an all hands meeting today with the new Chief Executive of my firm and he used no less than 11 figures of speech like “knock it out of the park” and so on which generally makes me dismiss what people have to say. After about 20 minutes of this with 25 minutes still left on the clock he asked for questions. I raised my hand, asked one, and received a non-answer, after clarification, other people were able to answer the question. After the meeting, my coworkers were a mix of hopeful and skeptical about the direction of the department.

I stayed late that evening and ran into the CEO and asked another question. He answered it and followed up:

CEO: What’s around your neck?
Me: Headphones.
CEO: What do you use them for?
Me: I listen to audiobooks or music when I’m doing certain repetitive tasks.
CEO: We don’t listen to music here.

I don’t know if I’d rather that be an arbitrary dictum, him getting back at me for embarrassing him at today’s meeting, or me being punished for bothering him on his way out.

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I get along with my best friend’s girlfriend and this is new to me. Generally I don’t either just because of personality differences or because there’s some type of rivalry for the person who we represent the two tallest pillars of their social temple. She can wear the descriptors supernal and grounded contemporaneously.

Our first get together was supposed to span a few hours at most and wound up taking 13. Today, we got together “for a quick bite to eat” that lasted seven hours. From now on, anything that involves her in my Google calendar will be flagged as an all day event.

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The day after a large Scout event is usually a clean-up day for me as I pack up materials and compose notes on what to do with the event next time. After I cleaned my atlatls and wrote up the notes from the end-of-event staff meeting I had run out of Scout things to do. I went for a run, played TF2, and baked a cake.

If this is the future of my involvement with Scouting I’m fine with it.

Editor’s Note: I think this title sets my record for hyphens.

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The Council Cub-o-ree mobilized about 400 participants and around 100 staff volunteers making the camp have as many bodies in it as a very light week of summer camp. The participants were smaller on average being Cub Scouts and slightly more diverse from the smear of white teenagers I usually work with. The camp was in good shape and the weather perfect.

I passed the atlatls over to the group running the station and gave them a primer on using them. I moved on to the group activity stations I had come up with and waited for the staff to run them which never arrived. This freed me to simply take pictures. So I did.

Picasa album

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Tomorrow is the Council Cub-o-ree, the first event of its kind that the Council has done since I can remember and I was asked to provide program for six stations and walk around and take pictures. I had also done the web page and set up registration but this was peanuts compared to what I normally do for an event.

Normally I run things and the feeling of unimportance regarding the Cub-o-ree was wonderful. My presence or absence would probably just nudge the success or failure of the event but not cause it. This realization has created a rule for me that I’m going to try to follow in the future:

“What I will provide: a pair of hands to run program, the materials for a program, or the idea for a program. Choose one.” I don’t mind doing photography or web stuff, but the above rule is something I’ll try to stick to for most future programs.

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Tuesday was my first day where I put reasonable effort into finding an actuarial job and I went through the short list of Philly firms I really wanted to work for. One of them, Towers Watson had a section for recent graduates and there I found two very bad pictures of people that had graduated with me from Temple University. The shots were poorly posed and the flash had flattened all detail. This is sometimes referred to as “DMV” lighting and it makes everyone look bad. I found a position to apply for and a part of me wanted to include “I will improve the pictures on your web page” as part of my cover letter.