Category: True Life Adventures

Now it hurts…

My weight has gotten to the point where now, it hurts.  And not just hurts in a way like my knees hurt or back hurts, though I’ve been having issues there as well.  It hurts to wear jeans.  I’m usually a size 34, but now those jeans cause my physical pain around the waist to wear.  Ouch.

So once again I try to refocus myself and concentrate on the weight loss.  The last time I lost any significant amount of weight was back at the start of the year when I was in the Do it for your selfie Challenge with my pal John.  I lost about 13-15 pounds.  That contest sort of fizzled out for various reasons, so I lost focus and gained it all back.  And then some.

My goal has always been to get to 160 lbs, but that is far, far away from this point.  I then revised my goal to just lose 10 lbs.  Now my goal is to just get through one day of eating right!  Ugh.  It’s awful.

So now I’m wondering if there’s anyone out there who’d love to jump into a challenge to try and drop some pounds before the end of the year.  I know the holidays are tough with the cookies and treats, but I think we can do it.

The winner would be the person who lost the most percentage of weight in the given time, say December 1-31.  No need to post weights anywhere or even share them with me, I trust you my dear friends.  We would just check in every week with the percentage lost.  I just think the ‘challenge’ idea works for me as it did earlier this year and I’d love to find someone to challenge.

No prizes.  No loser humiliations.  Just a weight loss challenge.

Anyone up for trimming down?  Let me know in the comments below or via email grant @ throwing toasters . com (no spaces)

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The Habit Journal

I’m addicted to buying journals on Kickstarter.  I’ll just go on there, type in the word ‘Journal’ and pledge and pledge and pledge!

I picked up the Passion Planner and while I love the idea of it (managing your goals into smaller goals and then achieving), there’s something about it that made me hesitant to start using it once I got it.  I can’t say what it is.  Perhaps the layout looks like it’s a lot of work?  I don’t know.  I bought one last year, never used it and then bought it for this year and never used it.  Funnily enough, I’ll probably buy one for next year too.

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Then I found the Habit Journal.  The thing I immediately liked about it over the Passion Planner is that it is more open ended.  There’s not dates in there, you can start at any time, albeit on a Monday.  I also like it’s broken up in 4 week sections.  So you focus on one goal for 4 weeks and then reflect on how well you did and then modify and move on for the next four weeks.

Each page has one or two days that you fill out.  At the end of each day, you check in (reflect) and fill in how well you did and the same at the end of four weeks.  I love that it has some profiled boxes (Sleep, Exercise, etc.), but then it has empty for you to fill them in with more specific things related to your goals.

So, starting Monday, I’ll begin my first four week stint and I’ll report back letting you know how it goes.

The Ultimate Nerd-ament is back!

It’s back!  The show that Russ Walko and I created for Stan Lee’s YouTube Channel, The Ultimate Nerd-ament, is back with brand new episodes.  Last time around, we wanted to find out the most popular superpower.  This time we’re attempting to determine: WHICH AVENGER WOULD YOU RATHER BE?!

The first episode is here and it pits Iron Man versus Thor!  A legendary battle to be sure!  Check out this new episode here:

We were a little nervous that this Nerd-ament wouldn’t resonate as well with people as the last one did.  For the last one, people could really personalize the two superpowers in question.  For this one, people are just picking between two superheroes.

We shouldn’t have worried though, people have very strong opinions on which superhero they’d rather be and the end result is awesome!

If I was going to legitimately answer the question of who I’d rather be, Iron Man or Thor, I think I would have to side with Stanley and pick Thor.  When I was reading comics growing up, Iron Man was just never interesting to me.  I did read a lot of Thor though.  I always thought reading a Thor comic book was a lot like reading Shakespeare in high school.  People were impressed when they realized you could understand it.  Okay, no one was impressed.

Anyway, I hope you’ll check out this new season and follow along on World of Heroes.  We have a few ideas for a third season, but more about that later.  In the mean time, who would YOU rather be?

Iron Man or Thor?

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Senior TP Night

Here’s another blog entry you can read or listen to as I recorded it for the Grantcast.  If you want to subscribe to the Grantcast, you can do so with iTunes, or by using this feed in your favorite podcatcher.  Enjoy!

Senior TP Night
By Grant Baciocco

There was a tradition at Burlingame High School that, the night before the first day of school, the Senior class would give the front of the school the TP treatment.  Meaning, they would cover the beautiful sequoia trees in the front of the school with toilet paper.  I must say, I can still remember my first day of my Freshman year, pulling up to the front of the school and being awed at the sight of that toilet paper hanging off the trees.  It was intimidating, “What have I gotten myself into?”  The annual TPing of the school was something that you didn’t think about too much as you progressed through the years, but it was always in the back of your mind, “When I’m a senior, I get to do this!”

I was in band all four years of high school.  A drummer.  And for band kids, school actually started two weeks earlier in the form of Band Camp.  We didn’t go away or anything, we just came to school each day and worked on our marching and pep rally type songs for four hours or so.  Because of this, we were around the school for several days before the year began.  Senior year, as the start of school creeped closer, thoughts of being able to TP the school started to creep into my head.  I frequently discussed it with my two close friends, Dan and Jeanette.  We were all excited about this tradition it was now our turn to partake in.  There was only one problem, we were band kids.  As such, we didn’t often interact with the ‘cool kids’ who’d be the main ones TPing the school in just a few days.  But then I had an idea.  “What if,” I told my pals, “We did something else?  What if we TP’d the school in a different way?”

Dan, Jeanette and I discussed the different possibilities of achieving this and suddenly we hit upon the idea of, while the other seniors were toilet papering the outside of the school, what if we toilet papered the inside?  This idea excited us all but we quickly realized that we couldn’t just break into the school and, on top of that, the school did have an alarm.  Then a guardian angel appeared.  Now, I will not reveal who this guardian angel was but I will say it was someone who was very knowledgeable about the the workings of the alarm system of the school.  Not how to disarm it, but just which areas of the school were alarmed and which areas were not.  We were told that a large open hallway area between the band room and two english classrooms were not alarmed and that would be our best bet as a place to wreak our TP mischief.  This angel gave us a map showing which doors and windows to stay away from and even discreetly hinted at how we could enter the building without a key or breaking any windows.  We were all set.

The night before school we drove to the campus and drove right past all the other seniors TPing the front of the building.  We drove back around to the band room and parked and found our way to the secret entry point.  In seconds, we were in.  We knew going in, that the hallway would be harder to toilet paper than a bunch of trees, so we brought a long scotch tape to help us hang the toilet paper from he walls.  Also Jeanette, being crafty, made some hilarious signs to hane above the doors of the classrooms.  English teacher Mr/ Morgan got ‘Glen’s Pad.”  Mrs. Caret got ‘Elaine’s Bungalo of love.”  The band teacher, Mr. Kimura, got ‘Mr. K’s,’ which was also the name of a local nightclub in burlingame.

We spent about an hour making everything perfect and, when we were finally satisfied, to honor the moment, we snapped a few pictures of our handiwork and carefully snuck out of the building and into the night.

The next morning I was so excited to get back to school to see the reaction of the people as they walked into the band room area hallway, I parked and made a bee line to the door to the hallway.  I ran up to the door, flung it open and…the entire hallway was spotless.  There wasn’t a square of toilet paper anywhere.  The signs were gone from above the doors.  It was your average, everyday hallway.  I was crestfallen.  Jeanette and Dan arrived and they too were majorly bummed out.  We had worked so hard.

Apparently, what had happened is the janitors had arrives earlier, found the mess and cleaned it all up before anyone else arrived.  Insert sad trombone sound here.

Not to be deterred in letting people know what we had done, I wrote an anonymous letter to the Burlingame B, the school’s newspaper telling everything that had happened.  And I included one of the pictures of the toilet paper hanging in the hallway.  The letter ran and the world knew.  But it would have been much better had they seen it with their own eyes.  I read the printed letter and the picture accompanied it.  Under the photo, a byline, Photo by Grant Baciocco.  Oops.  Maybe I should have just shut up about it.

I was never punished or anything.  But that was the story of the one time the inside of Burlingame High School was toilet papered.

©2015 Grant Baciocco/Saturday Morning Media

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