2sparrows

Test post from Dad’s iPhone to see if I can live blog.

Update 11:47 am:
Testing an update.

Update: 11:50 am:
Update number 2!

Twenty-one years ago on October 24th, 1987, Kelly and I started dating, and we’ve never looked back.  I know most happily married men think they are the happiest, luckiest, man alive, but I’d have to disagree with each one.  That man is me.  God has truly blessed me with the most amazing, beautiful, selfless woman I know.  Jack Nicholson (Melvin) said to Helen Hunt (Carol) in As Good as it Gets,  “you make me want to be a better man.”  Well, Kelly is so much a part of who I am, and I know I am a better man because of her.

Here’s to 21 years together…  as well as the rest of our lives. 

The Today show was running a series of anniversary/get-togethers on old movies, including Airplane, Footloose, and the 25th anniversary of The Big Chill.  So after seeing that, I wanted to see the movie again because it had been years and years and I really didn’t remember it all that well.  The movie is good, but there are a lot of drugs and some other things that go on that I don’t care for that much.  Maybe I’ve changed as I’ve grown older, as I don’t recall feeling that way when I watched it way back when.  The movie is still worth a watch,  as the thought of a close friend (from college) dying unexpectedly is sobering as we get older.  But most of the movie deals with that at a fairly superficial level while spending more time on less pressing issues.

After recently finishing the push up challenge, I found that I liked having a goal as well as a way to track my progress towards the goal.  When I used to do a lot of adventure racing,  I always had a goal on the calendar, and I had teammates I was accountable to…  But with the knee problems, and now slowly recovering but not racing much, and not on teams at all, I have found that I am more likely to miss workouts.   With all that in mind, I thought I’d set up some goals and track them.

At 1st, I started to do a full year’s worth, but that was a bit intimidating so I moved to a quarter’s worth instead.  But even then, I think that things are going to come up — family, business, injury, sickness, or just changing goals, so I made two goals — one fixed from the start, and one adjustable, in case anything comes up.

Here is what it looks like on google docs.  Most columns and rows are self explanatory, but I will go through them below…  First, let me talk about the tracking and the “on track” row.  Here you can see I was not on track for running…  All the other columns show a green YES, but that one shows a RED 21, meaning  I was 21 minutes behind my target.

But then I ran 35 minutes and got back on goal:

So first on the columns:

• push ups — normal push ups, any hand position or variation
• pull-ups — both hands forward, both hand back (really a chin up) or alternate hands (supposedly works on obliques)
• dips –obvious
• running — obvious
• biking — obvious
• other aerobic — stairs, elliptical, hiking, walking, paddling, etc
• yoga — preferably video or class though I have my own practice too, that will go here
• bodywork/strength — time spent on pull ups, push ups, and dips goes here too, but this also includes physical therapy exercises (stretch, strength, core) and other such stuff

For the rows:

• goals (fixed) — the goal I set at the start of the quarter — this one I will not change
• percent done — total to date divided by the goal (fixed)
• on track (fixed) — whether or not I am on track to meet the goal — I’ll show some formulas below
• the next three for “adj” are the same as the prior three, just for the adjusted goal, if I make changes due to unforeseen circumstances… So far this Q I have not. 
• days left — number of days left in the quarter
• total days in period — number of days in the quarter — I started 2 days early this time, thus the 93

WARNING:  Stop reading here if you don’t care for math and spreadsheets!

Now, there are some pretty interesting formulas here, so let me walk you through them.

percent done – this is just the “total done to date” divided by the “goal” displayed as a percentage:

=B8/B2

total days in period — using dates in formulas like this was new to me, but pretty nifty..  Basically “total days” = “end date” - ” start date”

=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),12,31)-DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),9,29)

days left – here it is just “end date” — “today”

=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),12,31)-TODAY()

Second warning — it gets ugly here!

on track — here is where it gets interesting… let me start with the full formula then break it down

=IF ((B2/$B$25)-(((B2-B8))/$B$24)>0,”YES”,(B2/$B$25)*($B$25-$B$24)-(B8/($B$25-$B$24))*($B$25-$B$24))

The “IF” is just:

IF (test, then value, otherwise value)

So in other words, do some kind of evaluation, and if it is true, use the “then” value, and if it is false use the “otherwise value.”  My test is (B2/$B$25)-(((B2-B8))/$B$24)>0) which basically breaks down to if the “goal divided by the number of days in the period”  (which gives you a target count per day), minus the “total to date divided by the number of days left”  (which gives you a required count per day for the remaining days), is greater than 0, then I am on track…  So, if “target per day” - “actual per day” is positive, things are good and I put a “YES” in the value.  Then I use google spreadsheets coloring to change the cell to green when ever it sees YES.

It may be best to work through an example…  Lets use running, so for B change that to E.  (For $B leave that as B!)  I have 500 minutes as my goal for running, and the total days in the period is 93.  So 500/93 = 5.37.  That is my “target count per day,” in this case 5.37 minutes.  If I ran 5.37 minutes each of the 93 days, I would reach 500.  (Of course, I normally only run 1 or 2 times a week, so it is more like 36 minutes a week is what I need…)

Next we look at “total to date divided by the number of days left” to get a  required count per day for the remaining days…  In the 1st screen shot above, I had run 22 minutes, so I had 478 minutes left to do in the remaining days.  478/85 = 5.6.

Now, 5.3 - 5.6 is negative, thus I was not on track.  Anything 0 or above is on track, and gets the big green YES.

Now rather than just put NO if I am not in track, I want to see how far off I am — or what my deficit was.  So I have:

(B2/$B$25)*($B$25-$B$24)-B8)

Let me break that down down too…

That is the (goal divided by total number of days) multiplied by (the number of days remaining) minus the total to date.  (The parenthesis are important!)  Again an example would be useful, so going back to the screen shot where I had a goal of 500 minutes but had run only 22 in the 1st 8 days, and was therefore behind schedule…

So (goal/number of days) = 500/93 = 5.37.  Multiply that by the remaining days, which in this case was (93-85) = 8, so 5.37 * 8 = 43…  That is how much I would need to run per day to reach the original goal.  But I have already run 22, so 42-22 = 21…   (I am rounding so that shows up as 22 in the example above.)

Got it?  :-)  I admit it took some experimenting and trial and error to get these formulas right!

Now there is more to this — there are pros and cons to tracking this way, but I will save that for another post.

Back in June, I decided to take the 100 straight push-up challenge. In hindsight, starting this at the beginning of a summer filled with lots of travel, both personal and business, was not a great idea.  While I quickly worked up to week 5 without any problems, week 5 is VERY tough, and it did not help at all that I was missing many of the days, and even a complete week!

However, now that Septemeber is here and the kids are in school, our travel schedule should be much more sane, and I’m ready to recommit myself.  So here it is, week 11 from when I originally started, but I am jumping back in with the week 5 workouts!  Spreadsheet is here.

Wish me luck. 

Once I can do 100 straight, I plan to work on 15 straight pull-ups!

This is certainly a movie I would not have seen, based on the violence in trailer, if it had not won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2008.  I do try to see all the Best Picture movies, so, despite my initial thoughts from the trailer, I watched it.  Now, The Departed, which is also very violent and which won in 2007, was, at least to me, a much better movie.  This one had a ton of gratuitous violence.  The Departed was similar, but for some reason, the violence there seemed more warranted, and I can’t quite put my finger on why.  Maybe organized crime vs. something so random as depicted in No Country for Old Men?  That’s my only guess at this point.  Also, the storyline didn’t catch me as much as The Departed…

(Now, I do agree that Javier Bardem was probably deserving of Best Actor in a Supporting Role (though I have not seen all of the nominee’s).)

The movie did have some good lines, or some thought provoking views/philosophies here and there, but overall, I was not that impressed with it.

I do have a few quotes…

• paraphrase:  “after kids stop saying sir and m’am, the rest falls quickly”  [on the violence and sensless behavior of the day -- and this was in the 70's! ]
• maybe not quite exact:  “even in the conflict between man and steer, the issue is not certain…”
• “Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”
• at the end of the movie, on dreams Josh Brolin had:

Alright then.  Two of ‘em. Both had my father in ‘em . It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember to well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he’s gonna give me some money. I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past… and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. ‘Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

• “I’m looking for what’s coming…”   Response was “no one ever sees that!”

Riley has been wanting me to see this for a while, ever since she first saw it.  A  friend highly recommended it for the kids…  It was pretty good, though maybe the love story was a bit mature for a 5 year old.  I guess if I let her watch Star Wars then I can’t say much about this!   I don’t want to be a hypocrite between “man movies” and “chick flicks”  :-).

This did have me thinking of Wild at Heart, which uses movies throughout the text.  And it is funny how different men and women are with respect to movies.  The “true love” theme of this one surely is a hit with women and girls alike!

Also, I didn’t care much for the dragon at the end…  Seemed a bit contrived.

Following along on my Twain kick, I just finished A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  I had actually bought this and read the 1st 20-30% of it before I got and read both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.  I then had some other things to read, and finally came back to this one.

It started out with great satire and was pretty funny and good over all, but it ended very dark, and kind of mysteriously.  The introduction of this edition explains why this is likely the case — that Twain had lots of success with Sawyer and Finn, but lost most of his what little fortune he got from those successes, and that this book started in a good time in his life, and finished in a much more cynical state of mind.  I’m sure there are much deeper explanations out there on the Interwebs than that, so go find them if you are interested.  :-)  Or I’m sure any edition you pickup will have more info as well.

A few quotes, as always:

• when red headed people are above a certain social grade, their hair is auburn

• many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising

• but the minute [the thing] came into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before suddenly became hellish [the thing in this case is slavery, but the point stands for many other things as well]

• it is the spirit that stoopeth the shoulders, and not the weight…  for armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it….  [i.e. it depends on what you are "carrying" in how you handle it... something good, you carry well... something bad, you don't carry well]

Well, I wouldn’t “highly” recommend this unless you are on a Twain kick like I am.  And unless I run across a book of his short stories soon, I will be off my kick. 

Several years ago I made two push up challenges for myself…. 600 in one hour and 100 straight. I accomplished the first goal, but got bored with the second and never finished it. I think the final tally was 78, but definitely under 80.

In the past five or six weeks, the topic has come up in a number of places — a conversation here or there, a couple of blog posts, etc. So I think it must be time to pick it up again.

First, here is the latest web page that I happened to come across, and it actually has a schedule to follow over six weeks.

Second, I created a google spreadsheet that will help me follow the schedule above, which you can view here. If you want me to share with you an empty spreadsheet, let me know, and I’ll send it over. Then you can track your own progress.

If you need some accountability, update the comments here with you initial test and a link to your schedule! My initial test was 50, though I have done as many as 60 straight in the past couple of months, but I was tired when I attempted.

Good luck!

Rudyard Kipling is the author of “If,” one of my favorite poems. It just happens to be the first thing I ever posted to my reading notebook, long before blogs existed. I also recently posted his The Law for the Wolves poem, which is fitting since I’m an NC State Grad (wolfpack). But beyond that, I have to admit I have not read much of his work. (I have of course watched Disney’s version of the Jungle Book with the kids, but I’m sure that takes liberties with Kipling’s.) So now, after watching this, I have added some of Kipling’s other work to my Amazon wish list.

This movie is based on the poem of the same name:

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”

Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

I have to admit, it took some time to get used to seeing Kim Cattrall in this role… And it will probably be that way for any other role she plays for some time, for that matter! And I’ve only see one Harry Potter movie, but Daniel Radcliffe will be Harry to me for some time!

I’m not exactly sure why, but my recent movie list is dominated by World War 1 era movies for some reason — Legends of the Fall, A River Runs Through It, Atonement… (I think I’m missing one there…)

Finally, this movie goes along with the Wild at Heart book (which I have now finished, but have not posted about yet), in terms of how that book portrays being a man, even though I heard about this movie from an entirely different and unrelated source.