Category: Essay

I’ve determined that being forty-something is a survivable condition.

My research will now be focused on whether or not being fifty-something is a survivable condition.

VOTE

Black Lives Matter

(I wanted to make my post about this issue way too complicated which led to me not posting at all. I’m pivoting towards simplicity in my life. This seems like as good of a place to start as any.)

I run.

I’m not a runner.

Now the preceeding two paragraphs aren’t some sort of riddle or baffling logic challenge, but they are both true. I run, more than fifteen miles a week.  I’m also not a runner.  A runner, in my mind at least, has a passion for running and runs for enjoyment. While I don’t hate running, it’s not exactly my favorite thing to do.  So why run then?

Because it’s necessary.

It’s been over four years since my diagnosis.  I wanted to blame it on the sweet potato fries I ate just prior to the appointment, but it takes more than one order of fried starchy vegetable to bring on Type 2 Diabetes. It takes years of second helpings and stops at convenience stores and extra large pops while sitting at my desk to bring on what ultimately is the root cause of my illness – morbid obesity. I one-hundred-sixty pounds over my weight when I graduated from high school – and well on my way to being twice what I weighed then.  There’s polite ways to say it, but I will just call it what it is.

I was fat.

Now we could get into the physiological or psychological reasons why I was the way I was, but that would only be pertinent to me.  The thing is, I look around at many male friends and family my age I see many of them suffering, more or less, from the same affliction that I, quite frankly, am still suffering from.

Why?

Now, I’m not going to debate whether the Creation story is not, but I will assert that evolution is true. I’ve seen it in my lifetime. Think about it for a minute. Technological advances have so manipulated our personal environments that it takes no effort to live at all.  Automated processes – cars, computers, remote controls, and all – do all the work for us and give us a very comfortable existence.  At the same time, food is so abundant and plentiful that we can consume until we are well past what we need to live.  In other words, lots of energy consumed that we no longer need.

You would have thought the diagnosis would have been the turning point and, for a short while, it was.  Soon enough, however, all the short-term gains were gone.  I lived another two years that way.

The actual lifelong turning point was twofold.  The first part is carrot.  My wife started taking better care of herself.  I won’t tell her story – it’s hers to tell – but she started making better choices in her life.  What’s more important, she stuck to those choices.  Soon enough, it began to show real results.  To be honest, she has a better story to tell than I do and (not so subtle hint), I wish she would.

Ms. Boss, you have truly been an inspiration.

When I refer to the first part of a carrot, you know what comes next.  The stick wasn’t anything dramatic, but for some reason it seared itself into my brain.  We have a pool that, because I’m lazy, doesn’t always have the ladder stuck down in it.  After swimming one day, I pulled myself over the side an onto the pool deck… and just laid there.  Water and fat are an awesome mix – it makes you feel lighter than you are.  When buoyancy is taken away and gravity is the lone force acting on your body, it’s a real slap in the face and while I had the strength to get up… eventually, I lacked the will.  I decided then and there it was time for a change.

Have you had a similar moment in your life?  Think about it.  Think about it really hard.  If you have, you need to do something about it.  If you don’t, your quality of life will start slipping away.  If you’re really unlucky…

…you’ll die.

For me, it started with walking and hiking – two things I’ve always enjoyed – combined with dieting.  When that didn’t work as effectively as I wanted, I decided to join the ‘couch to 5K’ craze.  It was a struggle, but I set my goal and got ran my 5k.  Working toward the goal sucked, but the reward was awesome.

While working toward the 5k, I did end up injuring myself.  Happy with myself and not wanting to injure myself further, I gave up running… and the results are what you expect – the weight started coming back.

I was never so happy when I realized that ‘shoe choice’ was the reason for my injury, not running.

With the tremendous and constant support of my wife, I ran a half-marathon.  It’s something I can’t even believe I did, so I’m repeating the feat this weekend.  Ms. Boss, who will also tell you she’s not a runner, is running the first 6.8 miles of my race with me during her own race.

I’m still not a runner.  I’m still overweight and will often eat things I shouldn’t which means my weight has barely budged in four months.  I often dread my long-mileage Sunday mornings (for the record, not only is Ms. Boss an effective carrot, she can be a pretty good stick as well) because I would much rather sleep in.  I acknowledge, however, that they are necessary because I have set my fitness goal as being able to run a half-marathon with two weeks notice.

The time has come.  Get up.  Get up, right now.  Put your phone down this instant and do something for yourself.  If you won’t do it for yourself, think of someone to do it for.  If you haven’t run in months, years, or decades, go out and walk thirty minutes – that’s the first workout of couch to 5k.  If I can do it, barring some health issue, you can do it.

Want to ‘kick it up a notch’?  Start eating better.  Get rid of the junk food and sugary drinks, eat less of what you do eat.  Beer?  It is no longer your friend.  There will be set backs, forgive yourself and move on from them.  Build on this base and take your life back one step at time.

What are you waiting for?

It was the Summer of 1995 and I was part-time in grad school when I first encountered the Internet.  Dialing into the university’s server with my 28.8k connection, I used a book (remember those?) to find telnet sites, multiple user domains, and chat rooms. Part of the adventure (and frustration) was finding which sites were dead and which ones weren’t.  All of it, every single bit of it, was command line.

One day, hanging out in the computer lab, I sat down in front of one of the newer computers that had an icon labeled ‘Netscape’.  Being a bit adventurous, I clicked it.

Since then, the world has become a much, much smaller place.

Ever since elementary school, I have craved information.  I could never get my fill of everything from thing that nearly everyone knows like state capitals to what year the oldest tower at the Kremlin was constructed (1491, is the answer, one I’ve been lugging around since 6th grade).  My favorite Christmas present? A World Almanac, every Christmas. I am the Trivia King.

It was addictive.  It’s still addictive – a World Wide Web filed with information that serves up a link where you can go for more information and another link for more information and on and on and on.  It was made for someone like me.

With that in mind, I must sheepishly admit that my site doesn’t ‘web’ to anywhere.  Seems kind of pointless, doesn’t it?  Let me fix that…

hackaday.com – My ‘day job’ is working as technician. I’m a bit of a jack of all trades, but, as the saying goes, master of none. Hackaday is a site I visit every day for knowledge and inspiration.  There’s a little bit of everything ‘maker’ on this site. More than one of my projects have benefitted from a visit here.

xkcd.com – Another favorite site, this one filled with nerd humor. Believe it or not, I’ve learned quite a bit from this site as well.

stackoverflow.com – You may find this difficult to fathom, but part of my job is dealing with information. It was just in past couple of years that I discovered that the best way to wrangle information is to build the tools for parsing it myself.  Stackoverflow is my go-to source clues on to solve my Python problems.

I’ve yet to mention, but I have four daughters – ages seventeen, twelve, twelve (yes, twins), and almost ten.  Today saw the younger three and myself clearing brush from our property.  The youngest, Kate, is always eager to help, so it wasn’t the least bit surprising when she wanted to prune branches with a hand saw like her sisters.  With a penchant for being as responsible as she is helpful, I agreed to let her.

Things progressed fine for over an hour when Kate suddenly announced that she had cut her finger.  A glance at the finger told me it wasn’t just a nick.  I took her in the house and ran her finger under the faucet which revealed two significant cuts.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always calm in a crisis, but that’s when the way forward isn’t clear. The action needed here was clear.  After a brief moment’s hesitation, the decision was made to take her to the emergency room.

I tried to play it down, especially since I knew stitches were in her future, but Kate’s anxiety went through the roof once she learned we were headed to the hospital.  I held her hand, talked to her in soothing tones, and generally tried to keep her mind off things.  The admission process was quickly navigated and we were taken to our room.

Our small town hospital provides quick service and our doctor visited and had a plan of action within a few moments.  While all the adults in the room knew that stitches were coming, Kate still wasn’t in the know, but she was still quite anxious.  When talk in the room turned to giving her a shot to numb the pain, Kate began to sob uncontrollably.  As her father, it was time to move to action.

I grabbed her hand.

Parenting four daughters isn’t easy nor is it fun.  It’s challenge after challenge where you’re called upon to have the right answers or do the right thing.  I’ll be the first to tell you – quite often I miss the mark when it comes to parenting.  Even more often, I feel completely and totally inadequate.

When I grabbed her hand, Kate turned her head to look at me.  While the emotions on her face changed to fear and pain and anxiety, they always came back to one emotion.  Her eyes met mine with a deep emotion I had never seen before.  Her gaze pierced my soul and made me feel worthy.  Recounting the story to Ms. Boss later, she finally put the words to feelings.

“She trusted you.  She trusted you completely.”

Kate did well as they put five stitches in her finger.  She was joking by the time we were discharged.  On the way to lunch afterwards, Kate and I filled Ms. Boss in on what had happened.  I handed the phone to Kate so she could say a few things.  One of the last things she said – “Dad was a good dad today” – was all I could ever ask for.

This past Friday morning saw me sitting at my desk doing what my employer pays me to do when a text from Ms. Boss (my wife, if you haven’t figured that out by now) arrives. A friend of a friend, it seems, writes a blog and featured a post she felt compelled to share.

‘I would love to see you and support you in doing something like this,’ urged Ms. Boss.

Knowing that Ms. Boss is a) wiser than me, and b) someone I don’t wish to disappoint, I took her up on the offer – and went all in. No, I didn’t go to Blogspot or a similar space where they would gladly host me for free, I went all out and purchased my own domain name and parked it on a web host. This is because I a) am occasionally filled with hubris, and b) am an obdurate male. Thus, ‘The Life of C.L. Boss’ entered my life.

Saturday rolls around and a small crisis looms at Boss household. After months of resisting our daughters’ pleas to get a dog, we finally gave in the previous Monday. We found the dog for us – quiet, calm, small, housebroken – it was almost too perfect. In fact, it was too perfect – the people who gave us the dog hounded and pestered us until they got the dog back. Ms. Boss and her brood were quite beside themselves. We spent Saturday looking in vain at shelters. On Sunday, we found the newest member of the Boss clan. Thus, ‘Ozzy’ entered our lives.

Other than the fact that the two words rhyme, I have discovered early on in my relationship with the two that a ‘dog’ and a ‘blog’ have some eerie similarities.

1) Both need care and attention: Unlike our cat, Ozzy needs cared for quite a bit during the day. It doesn’t help that he isn’t quite housebroken yet.  While a blog won’t poop in your house, it also needs love lest it devolve into a mess.

2)  Both take time:  I wasn’t much of a dog person growing up.  The one dog I had growing up was either extremely low maintenance or my parents shouldered a lot of burdens I wasn’t aware of.  A blog?  Let’s just say I haven’t been able to put as much into it as I would have liked early into the progress.

3)  I have no idea what I’m doing:  Ms. Boss and I have scoured the Internet looking for sources on how to take care of our dog.  While some of it has worked, we’re still cleaning up our fair share of accidents.  As far as the blog goes, I have a few vague ideas of where I’m leaving from, but I haven’t found the right star to steer towards yet (see yesterday’s haiku).

4) It’s still early in the game:  A scant two days have passed since both the dog and the blog came into my life.  Who knows?  Ozzy could grow up to be the bestest dog ever.  ‘The Life of C.L. Boss’ could be the bestest blog ever written.  Both are unlikely, but the possibility remains if I can put the proper effort into it.

For now, I’ll remain ever vigilant for the next great idea… as well as poop on the floor.

Hello world, indeed.

For those of you not familiar with all things technical, a ‘Hello World!’ program is the first program that you learn in any computing language.  When run, it’s sole purpose is printing those words on a screen.  It doesn’t get any simpler than that.  After that, well, it’s up to the programmer.  Who knows what kind of journey they want to take?

It’s with that first clue we open the journey of discovering who I am and what I’m all about.  An when I say ‘we’, I mean ‘you’ and ‘I’.  I’m forty-five years old (HA! – another clue!) and I’m still trying to figure what I’m all about.  Every year, every experience, every morsel of information I gain changes me, molds me, reshapes me until something just the tiniest bit different.  It’s the spaces created by those changes that result in growth… and ultimately what makes life worth living.

If you want a theme for this blog, there it is:  life.  My life.  My experiences.  What’s meaningful or interesting to me.

To the few humans that read this, ‘hello’.  Thank you for caring.

C L

P.S.  Is ‘C.L. Boss’ my real name?  Yes and no.

‘C’ is for someone very important in my life.

‘L’ is for a group of someones – only one of whom I ever met – that are very important my life.

‘Boss’?  ‘Boss’ is for someone I love unconditionally who has molded me, shaped me, and influenced me in so many ways – it is impossible to overstate her importance in my life.  I hope great things come out of this blog and I dedicate all those great things to her.