For the 4th of July this year, my wife and I traveled to Chicago. Because we had to pay for Shelly’s ticket, she ended up flying a different airline than me. As such, she left two hours before me and I arrived two hours before her. We paid $18 bucks each for a shuttle ride to our hotel, which was in down town Chicago in the Chicago Loop area. We got in late, so we didn’t do much that night.

The next day was Friday, the 4th. We started walking towards the lake. We stumbled into the Taste of Chicago. We had heard is was going on, but we had no idea where it was. Pure dumb luck caused us to walk right to it. The Taste is a big food party where restaurants around town all have booths and you can buy food. However, our first stop was not a food vendor, but the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). The guy there was great. He was so very helpful and full of places to go. Now I know were were going to take the train to at least two locations but he pointed out how we could ride the train/buses to most everywhere we would want to go, even the Airport. So for about the cost of our one shuttle ride the day before, we purchased three day unlimited passes. If you come to Chicago and are staying down town, the I highly recommend take the train. OK, back to the food. I had sweet potato hashbrowns (yum), Goat with fried plantains (the goat was a little tough) and sugar free cheesecake. From the taste, we walked towards the lake. We decided to walk towards the Field Museum of Natural history. Along the way, we found a tour boat that was selling tickets for the fireworks that night, so we purchased two (more on that later). The field museum was great. Now we purchased the based admission and tickets to the “Natural Disasters” exhibit. I wish we hadn’t done the extra ticket. It was so not worth the extra cost. The general admission sections where much better. I even go to see Sue, the T-Rex. We really enjoyed the museum.  Later that night, we went on our boat tour. Although the tour boat had two decks, they only sold enough tickets for the upper deck. Well, as we were waiting for everyone to board, this girl, who obviously was used to getting her way, showed up and wanted on the boat. First she tried the “but I called and they said there was lots of tickets left”. Then she went into the “but there is no one on the bottom deck.” She argued up and down with the captain. I think her first problem was that the captain was a woman and not some man she could use her feminine whiles on. Well, after arguing with the captain, she then went to a cop. I think she really thought she was going to get the cop to force the captain to let her on. The fireworks show was great. I even managed to video some of it. This was the end of the show.

Saturday was our most ambitious day. This was the day we were going to Superdawg. This is supposed to be the best hot dog in town, so we had to go. It was was to far from down town to walk to, so we took the blue line subway to Jefferson Park stop. Then we walked from there. Only, I didn’t realize that it was 2.2 miles from the train station (and yes, that is the closest stop). Both Shelly and I agreed that the dog was worth it. It was great (or maybe we were just really hungry after that long walk). After that fine meal, we decided not to walk back to the train station, so we hopped on the bus (the CTA pass works on busses too). We then took the Blue line back to the loop, transferred  to the red line and went to Wrigley field. Now the cubs where not playing, but stadium offers tours. They have two tours. A 20 minutes ($10) and a 90 minutes ($24). We did the 20 minute one and it was perfect. Basically, they walked you down to the actual field, sit you in the cub’s dugout, talk for about 5 minutes (giving you the history of the stadium) and then let you go and take pictures. After that took the red line back to town but got off at the Million dollar mile area. First we went to the world’s largest McDonalds. This is a two story McDonalds with its own escalator. Down stairs was your standard McDonalds fair, while upstairs was a coffee place with ice cream.  Outside they have a 1957 Corvette in its own building. The car was cool. Then we “had” to do some shopping on the Million dollar mile (OK, Shelly had to and I got dragged along). We had dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe.

Sunday was the big game. We had purchased tickets to the White Sox game. We took the train to the game (the red line runs right next to both ball fields). We got there early and found out that they give out “free” stuff to the first 10,000 people. We got free hats. Way cool!!!!! Even though our seats were all they way to the top, they were still great seats and the game was great. The train ride back was interesting as it was REALLY crowded. We where really crammed on. When we got back, Shelly and I decided to just walk around town. We walked over to the Chicago river and walked along it for a bit. We found this cute little open air restaurant on the river. It looked pretty upscale, there was a nice bar, the hostess was dressed very nice, even the prices were in the “nice restaurant” range. However, there was a dark side. First, the food came on plastic disposable plates (at least we had metal utensils). Then, we got this bowl of ice cream with chocolate syrup. The syrup was Hershey’s chocolate syrup and the ice cream was cheap vanilla that had been melted and then re-frozen (the ice crystals in it were huge). The what really set this place a part was the bathroom; it was a port-a-potty. I kid you not. I about fell over laughing when I saw that. After our meal experience, we continued our walk and ended up at the Sear’s Tower. They were open, so we went up. Now the Sear’s town is the tallest building in North America and the third tallest in the world. It was really cool. I kind of wish we had done this first as it gave us a good lay of the land. I really recommending paying the extra for the audio tour. The give you a portable player and you play it yourself, but it was really worth it. That was really cool.

Monday was a travel day (for Shelly anyway as I am working in Chicago that week). We took the train back to the airport. Give yourself about 45 minutes to go from down town to the airport. (I would say that we got our money’s worth on those train passes.)

Overall, it was a great trip.

If you travel enough, bad things are bound to happen. This last week I had my rental car broken into. Now I stay in a hotel that is right off the highway, in a business area. There are no houses around at all. I hotel has security and there is usually a cop in the parking lot, just sitting there (no idea what is about). So I felt a little safe so I left my GPS in the car window (it was an inexpensive model from WalMart). You can see what is coming… some idiot broken in and took it. Now I don’t call him an idiot because he was a thief, I call him and idiot because he was a stupid thief. Instead of just breaking the window to get into the car (which is a relative easy thing to fix), the idiot first tried to pry to door handle off? WTF???? What was he thinking? (I actually don’t know that is was a male the committed the crime, but I am old school English and was taught when in doubt, use the masculine.) First of all, it takes time to pry off a door handle and once you get it off, then you have to tinker with the inner workings to get the door to release. Only after he realized the door handle was a bad idea, did he break the window. Here are the pics:

The police were called and came out, looked at it, filled out some paperwork, handed me one piece of paper. I know officially they will do everything they can to catch whoever did this, but in reality, this will never be solved or even looked at again. I got the feeling the paperwork is so the rental company and insurance company will be happy and believe me when I say it wasn’t my doing.  Understand that I am not trying to case dispersions on the police (either in the Chicago area or in general), it is just that this is a very low priority crime. He did a couple of thousands of dollars of damage, that is it. They would spend more money trying to solve the case then it is worth. Not a good ROI.  What did surprise me was why they didn’t finger print the door handle, door lock and window where the GPS was. You know this guy is going to get caught one day (he is to stupid not too). If you had fingerprints for this crime then you could just tack it onto whatever he go caught doing. Case would solve itself that way.

I will say that the rental car company was great. They sent me out a new car and everything. The people at the hotel were great.

Everyone that I have personally met in the Chicago have been great people. But one bad apple does ruin the whole bunch. It just reminds me why I don’t want to live in a big city (Boise is not a big city). That and the evening news where every other night you here of someone that was killed on the local news.

This week was a very busy one for me. First of all, the weigh in. I have now lost 39.4 pounds on weight watchers. I lost 1.7 pounds this week. Which is good since I would up one pound last week.

On Tuesday night, some people for work went to see a White Sox baseball game. This was my first Major League Baseball game. I had a blast. I liked the stadium as even from the cheep seat, I had no problem seeing the game. Sadly the game was a bit of a blow out, but the first 5 innings were close.

Then today my wife’s company, Workspace, had their company picnic. Since they had such a problem with the caterer last year, they decided to do all the cooking themselves this year. Since I have done company picnics before (and enjoy doing it), Shelly volunteered me to cook. They had 100 people RSVP and though we would need 3 grills. Now I have done company picnics for 250 and did just fine with one. As such, I told the other people that brought one to not unload it. As it turns out, my one grill was just right. I had no problem keeping up with demand. What they don’t realize is that not everyone is there at 12 for food. People naturally stage themselves, making only one grill enough. The picnic went pretty will and I think everyone had a good time.

I took this out my hotel window in Chicago. I ran it until my battery died.

OK, so I am doing pretty good on the diet. I have lost 32 pounds so far. When I lost 25 pounds, I got this award from Weight Watchers:

If you could read it, you see that is have "25lbs" engraved on it. I put it on a chain and wear it around my neck.

Weight Watchers also has a special award when you lose 10% of your body weight. Since I started to 301 pounds, my ten percent when lost 30 pounds. You get this really nice key ring.

I wish my phone took better pictures. The key ring is very nice but I am afraid to use it as I would probably ruin it.

Can you tell which girl is from Idaho in this picture?

For Memorial Day, my wife and I traveled to the "Blue Bucket Claim" in Eastern Oregon. The Blue Bucket is an LDMA claim and my dad is an LDMA member (I am only a GPAA member). My dad and I planned to do some gold prospecting the whole weekend. We got there Friday night and was able to setup the tent before it got dark. (My parent had a very nice travel trailer they were sleeping in.) In order to make sleeping more comfortable, I purchased this inflatable, elevated queen sized bed. It was pretty easy to set, even without the instructions, which were missing. The only problem I had was with the valve. It came with a cap and this rubber thing. It looked like the rubber thing should go into the valve, but when I tried to put it in, the would just pop out when I tried to put the cap on. Without it, the bed would slowly leak air over night. It wasn't until the last day that I finally figured out how the thing was supposed to work.

My parents had been there for a couple of days and my dad was already all setup at one dig sight and had managed to clear the 1 1/2 feet of overburden to the bedrock. If you look at the pictures, you can see the really nice classifier that my dad built. It allowed us to process a lot of material in a very short time. We worked Saturday morning on that site and after we ran the material through the High Banker and then panned it, we realized that there was very little gold there. So Saturday afternoon we found a new location (with a killer view). This was much easier to dig as we could get two trips in in a half day. A trip consisted of 8 x 5 gallon buckets, 1 x 4 gallon bucket, and 5 x 2 gallon buckets. Once we filled up the buckets with the classified material, we would drive to the High Banker and run it through that. After our first panning, we realized this was a much better spot. The weird thing was that the bed rock wasn't any better than then the overburden on top of it, so we processed it all. Over all we had a great trip. The only person that didn't like the trip was my dog. I think it was too noisy for her as we were camped right next to freeway and very busy train tracks.

Well, it has been about three weeks since I last wrote about my weight loss and you might be thinking that it is because I have been gaining weight. Well, you would be wrong. Two weeks ago, I lost 1.6 pounds, last week I lost 1.4 pounds and this week I lost 5.4 pounds. I have now lost a total of 24 pounds on Weight Watchers. From my heaviest weight (two years ago) I have lost 54 pounds total. I FEEL like I have lost some weight, but it really hit me when all my current clothes were just too big for me. I went to the store and ended up trying on pants until I found the right size. Now my current jeans are all 44s or 42s. I was shocked when I found that 38s now fit me. I can't remember the last time I was in 38 jeans. In fact, I had a pear of pants I kept as a "I'm going to were those one day" reminder. Well, today is that day. They now fit me very well. I have also gone from a XXXL to a XXL in shirt size. That means all those T-Shirts I got for participating in various events now fit me. I was surprised at how many of my clothes were to big for me and how many clothes I had kept because the were special, but didn't fit. I managed to redo most of my wardrobe and it didn't cost me much.  I won't be so lucky next time. Even my wife is doing great. She has lost over 20 pounds and has dropped two pant sizes. I had no idea how much of a diet boost clothes could be. I also have been keeping up with my running too. I managed to do two miles on the treadmill this last week but only one mile on the open road (the head wind on the return trip didn't help either). This last week, the show NOVA on PBS had an episode on how they took 12 people where were not very athletic in their lives and in 9 months, trained them to run the Boston Marathon. It was very interesting and I learn a lot about the body and running. I also was very encourage and now know that I will be able to run at least the 1/2 marathon in the City of Trees Marathon next year. I might even be up to running the full marathon, but I'll wait and see. The guy that sits next to me at work is running the Chicago Marathon this next weekend. I wish him luck.

My brother sent this to me. I am not sure if it's true, but now I know what I want to do when I retire….

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BANNED FROM WAL-MART...........
This is why women should not take men shopping against their will. After I retired, my wife insisted that I accompany her on her trips to Wal-Mart.  Unfortunately, like most men, I found shopping boring and preferred to get in and out.  Equally unfortunately, my wife is like most women - - she loved to browse. Yesterday my dear wife received the following letter from the local Wal-Mart.

Dear Mrs. Johnson,

Over the past six months, your husband has been causing quite a commotion in our store.  His behavior is something we can no longer tolerate; therefore, we've been forced to ban both of you from the store.  Incidences involving Mr. Samsel's behavior are listed below and are documented by our video surveillance cameras.

1. June 15: Took 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in people's carts when they weren't looking.
2. July 2: Set all the alarm clocks in house wares to go off at 5-minute intervals.
3. July 7: Made a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the women's restroom.
4. July 19: Walked up to an employee and told her in an official voice, "Code 3 in house wares.  Get on it right away."
5. August 4: Went to the Service Desk and tried to put a bag of M&M's on layaway.
6. August 15: Set up a tent in the camping department and told other shoppers he'd invite them in if they would bring pillows and blankets from the bedding department.
7. August 23: When a clerk asked if they could help him he began crying and screamed, "Why can't you people just leave me alone?"
8. September 4: Looked right into the security camera and used it as a mirror while he picked his nose.
9. September 10: While handling guns in the hunting department, he asked the clerk where the antidepressants were.
10. October 3: Darted around the store suspiciously while loudly humming the "Mission Impossible" theme.
11. October 6: In the auto department, he practiced his "Madonna look" by using different sizes of funnels.
12. October 18: Hid in a clothing rack and when people browsed through, yelled "PICK ME! PICK ME!"
13. October 21: When an announcement came over the loud speaker, he assumed a fetal position and screamed "OH NO!  IT'S THOSE VOICES AGAIN!"
14. October 23: Went into a fitting room, shut the door, waited awhile, then yelled very loudly, "Hey! There's no toilet paper in here!"

OK, let me get this out of the way. As you may have noticed, I didn't post my weight for last week. I can honestly say it is because I didn't go to the meeting. However the reason I didn't go was because I stepped on the scale at home and saw I had gain 2 pounds. I know that I should have gone anyway, but I didn't. Instead, I did my first outdoor run (more on this later). However, I did go to this last meeting and I have lost another 5 pounds. That makes 15 pounds on Weight Watchers and 45 pounds from my highest weight. It has been a very long time since I was in my 280s. I even broke out my skinny pants (yes I have a pair). I don't know why I kept these. I'm not even sure I have ever worn them and I have held onto them for several years now. Well, they were a bit tight, but I could get them buttoned and zipped up. That's more than I could before. I am really liking Weight Watchers. It really seams to be working for me. My only issue is that I just can't eat all the points I am supposed to. I am actually eating at where I should be when I reach my target weight. And it's not like I am hungry. I am actually following the plan and eating more foods that have a lower calorie per volume. The only way I could eat all my points is to start making bad choice in my foods (more fatty foods). I decided I would eat right and take the heat for not eating all my points rather than start eating bad again. It was kind of funny when I talked to one lady there about it. She recommend I eat more carrots and fruits, all of which are low points, fill you up foods. If I was only a few points short, that would be one thing, but I average around 10 points per day short (and that's not counting my exercise points).

OK, speaking of exercise, there are two parts to Weight Watchers. The first is setting your weight loss goal. This is easy for everyone. The second is to set a life time exercise goal. What they mean by this is to pick up an exercise that you will do for the rest of your life. Well, I picked one. At the office where I work, there are a lot of people that are into running. So I decided to pick up running. My goal for this year is to run a 5K without stopping or walking any of it. My goal for next year is to run the 1/2 marathon in the City of Trees Marathon. After that I might try a full marathon or just keep improving my 1/2 marathon times. I haven't decided yet. So, here is my work out plan. Monday-Wednesday I work out in the gym at the hotel. Saturday I actually do some road running and Sunday I spend the day doing manual labor around the house (the wife has lots of projects lined up for me). I am pretty excited about it and feel I am doing pretty well.

Last Sunday was my birthday. I spent the day washing my truck and we went out to dinner to my favorite restaurant: Wingers. For those of you that don't live near a Wingers, it truly sucks to be you. They have the best wing sauce. Now understand, I am not a fan of Franks Hot sauce. We had a great time. My adopted niece, boyfriend and their baby joined us (I got to play with the baby). My niece got me the coolest present. A few months ago I mentioned that I saw a bumper sticker I really liked and she went and found one for me. I promptly put it on my truck. It says:

Yes, this is my truck
No, I can't help you move.

That is just too funny. I love it. I put it right next to my "My dog is cleaner than your honor student" bumper sticker.

Well, I hope this finds you all well. Cheers.

Since I am traveling to Chicago each week, I thought it was about time I did a blog entry about some of the highlights. Now to be fair I really haven't all that much of Chicago, just the airport and roads to the hotel and the work site. But I have seen some so I thought I would share.

Now I fly into the Chicago Midway airport (not O'Hare). At this airport, towards the A concourse, is a very nice exibit on the SBD fighter/Bomber aircraft of World War 2. They actually have a real, fully assembled one hanging from the ceiling (see photos). They also has a display that talks about the plane and it's role in the war. There are even some TV walls that talk about various aspects of the plane. It is a very nice display and I highly recommend it.

On this last trip, I actually had a "Chicago Style" hotdog. For those of you who don't know, Chicago is famous for thier deep-dish (aka Chicago style) pizza and a Chicago style hotdog. for those in the know, the debate between Chicago and New York on these two food items is something akin to the debate between Evolutionist and Creationist, Isreal and Palistine, or even Microsoft and Linux. I am not that passionate either way, but being that I was in Chicago, I thought I would try a Chicago Style hotdog. First: what is on a Chicago Style? You start with a good hotdog. This was grilled and placed on a poppy seed hot dog bun (I found this an odd choice). On top of the dog was placed chopped white onion, chopped green onions, tomato slices, mustard (plain yellow), jalopenos peppers, and with a big slice of dill pickle on top. That is "Chicago Style." How did it taste? I can honestly say that I am not a big fan of "Chicago Style" hot dog. First, I am not a big fan of plain yellow mustard. Second, the jalopeno peppers just over powered the entire dish. The rest of the dish was pretty good. The dill pickle was a nice surprise. It actually goes well with the dish.

Well, those are my highlights of Chicago for now. I will spare you the stores of the cold weather and the terrible conditions the streets are in. Cheers

All around there are light a more,
it is night, (the guy next to me does snore).

The no smoking sign and fasten seat belt sign
a gentle glow, but steady they shine.

Two rows ahead there shines a reading light.
A few more throughout the cabin, a spotted illuminating sight.

A glow from a seat, a laptop I guess.
Watching a movie, doing some work or cleaning an inbox mess?

Far down below, the lights of a city I spy,
thoughts of home make me yearn and sigh.

Out on the wing, flashes of red,
a light on top of the plane, over my head.

Now in a cloud and a wing tip white strobe,
reflecting water droplets, a sight to behold.

All these lights both steady and blinking
bring warmth and comfort to a long crowded evening.

But there is one light that annoys me no end.
It's a personal attack, I count it no friend.

If we have the technology to fly at such a height,
then way can't someone fix the short in my blinking reading light?

By Mike Chrisman
Written one night on a long flight.

Finally, we geeks have our song!!!!!!

I recently saw this sign in a men's restroom and it made me wonder, which was worse; the fact that they felt the need to put up a sign instructing men to flush (like we don't know you are supposed to?), or that they had to add "after use." Are there really men out there you think you flush a toilet before you go?