New Treadmill – Now I Have To Use It

Today we went and got us a new treadmill. This was something we have been saving some money to buy. The old treadmill got hit by lightening a year or so ago. It has never worked right since then. However, it would work sometimes. Just frustrating to try and use. But, how can I complain much when the unit only cost $10 at a garage sale?

Picture of the treadmillThe new treadmill is a Spirit Fitness XT685. We bought it from Used Gym Store near Hickory, NC. It took the better part of the day to get there and back, but I think for the quality of treadmill we bought and the price we paid, it was worth the trip. The lady who owns the place was very patient while we asked questions and did some research on our phones to make sure we were really getting what we were expecting. Would highly recommend a purchase from them.

I know most people don’t like running on a treadmill. I don’t know that I would prefer it over an interesting place to run. But, I have found that I am pretty bored with my neighborhood. To give me the motivation I need to do something consistently I have gotten to where I am depending more on the treadmill.

I find that if I plan a trip to the beautiful state park that is just 10 minutes down the road to do a run, I tend to never make it there. In fact, I think I have planned to run at the state park 4 times in the last few months. I never made there a single time.

As I mentioned in a recent post I have a challenge going with some folks that I work with to walk or run at least 1 mile every day for the month. The treadmill is definitely a help to that challenge during these colder weeks of the year. I am excited about having one I can depend on.

Severe Weather Alert — Need to Raid Local Stores

winter-storm-advisoryWe are under a severe weather alert for our area of East Tennessee. We could get several inches of snow this week. Certainly nothing like the north eastern United States has gotten over the last couple of weeks. But, this is our first potential bad weather for the year.

The main problem is that we haven’t been to all the local stores and raided them of the essential supplies. Today is the day after Valentine’s Day and I know all the candy is on sale for half price. We haven’t made it to Walmart to stock up on these needed supplies.

If East Tennessee is anything like Florida where I lived for several years, then as soon as the advisory started hitting everyone’s weather apps on their phones they rushed out and bought all the milk and bread the stores had on the shelves. Likely they forgot the important complementary items to the milk and bread such as peanut butter. But as long as they leave the candy alone until I get a chance to buy my six-month supply, then I am OK with that. November 1 is when we buy the next 6 month’s worth of candy to round out our year.

[It is nice to know that there is a Red Cross Shelter in Columbus, OH in case we need immediate help. “Pile into the van kids. We are going to drive 6 hours through a winter storm to go to the closest Red Cross shelter for help!”]

2014 Reading Summary: Fiction

I am not much of a fiction reader. In fact, I was surprised to find out that I read 4 fiction books this year. Then I remembered the reading challenge we have at our library each year. Two of the fiction books I read this year were for the library contest. The other two were more research type books for me. I had read about Will Eisner’s book, Comics and Sequential Art, and wanted to know more about him. I was not impressed with his subject matter, but he did a good job with communicating through pictures and text. One thing about his work that I was impressed with was his use of text as pictures.

Fiction:

Genesis Force is a book from the Star Trek universe.

Understanding ComicsGoing Postal was clever and weird. The book was mostly good. It seemed that the author did a good job of not using profanity (which seems to bother me much more when I read it than when I hear it) in the first part of the book. He got around profanity by making up his own humorous words that conveyed a strong emotion but didn’t mean anything. But towards the end of the book he let it all out. Because of this, I’m not interested in reading another book by him.

I hate that participating in the library reading contest requires reading fiction. But I got a nice coffee mug out of it. 🙂

The Last Knight by Eisner was a retelling of Don Quixote.

The Contract With God (also by Eisner) was not worth flipping through. Because of the content I can’t recommend it in any way. And, furthermore, I am never interested in looking at another Eisner book. I did read Comics and Sequential Art later in the year. I should have just stuck with the two excellent Scott McCloud books about visual communication (Understanding Comics and Making Comics). He said everything Eisner said in a much more understandable and less offensive way. I did a review of the book Making Comics a few years ago.

2014 Reading Summary: Biographies

I probably won’t do a detailed review of many of the books I read last year, but I did want to at least list them in some way. This is the first in a series of 6 or 8 posts about the different categories of books I read.

In my book summary I said that I read 3 books in the Biography category. Here they are in the order that I read them.

Biographies:

The Mark Inside: A Perfect Swindle, a Cunning Revenge, and a Small History of the Big Con. This book by Amy Reading is about J. Frank Norfleet who was swindled by a con man in 1919 in a stock market scam. Not learning his lesson the first time, he got taken again. But, then he wised up and spent the next few years hunting down the gang that had taken his money. He did this by learning how the con worked and conning other con men to give him the information he needed to get his money back and put the perpetrators in jail.

Though I like biographies, I really like ones that teach about the business the protagonist is involved with. In this case it was about con artists and the police and detective work that went into catching the criminals. I really enjoyed the book and was glad to serendipitously run across it at the library new book shelf (which is where many of the books I read come from).

If you want to know a bit more about this story, there was an NPR story about it. The host interviewed author Amy Reading.

My Life on the Run: The Wit, Wisdom, and Insights of a Road Racing Icon by Bart Yasso. As expected, this book was well written. The reason I expected this is Mr. Yasso works for Runner’s World magazine. Even if he didn’t know how to write, Runner’s World has a great team of editors.

This book is a chronicle of his running life up to this point. He has run over 1000 races and competed on all seven continents of the world. Like many people who take up running as an adult, he was prompted to better his life and health due to poor choices made as a younger person. Running changed his life and has given him a purpose and a job for the last few decades.

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. I have read another book by Mitnick, The Art of Deception, which was about how social engineering works and how he used it to his advantage to hack into many companies. This newer book, Ghost in the Wires, is more about his exploits of escaping the authorities during the manhunt for him.

I am not necessarily a fan of Mitnick or his choice of occupation, but like the book about the con artist ring from 100 years ago, I love learning the tricks of the trade. Mitnick is a con artist extraordinaire.

Mitnick did the majority of his illegal hacking in the days before the Internet and Windows computers as we know them. Much of what he does is social engineering where he convinces people to give him sensitive information by posing as a friendly co-worker. However, today, instead of doing this for illegal purposes, he is paid by the companies he is hacking into for the purpose of testing their internal security protocols.