Man’s 11-lb stool removed, that’s what the headline read. I have noticed that when it comes to internal organ some really bizarre things can happen to a person and they can still live. That is if I am to believe all the TV shows dedicated to the strange abnormalities of the human race. Things like giant worms in their stomach or weird worms that swim up your urethra, you can find a show about it. Used to be that you could only find that stuff on the cover of a rag as you checked out at the grocery store. Now they are on every channel. In the not so distant past things like this would happen but no one would know about them. The really large people who had to be carried out of their home on a bulldozer might have been a local story but now they have a reality show and you can see how they are doing every week. You can also catch up on what you missed by going online and watching old episodes. You can see surgery, pet surgery, live births, removal of foreign objects and any other kind of cutting people open on a number of cable channels. The idea that anything is off-limits has gone and in its place is a free for all showing about anything that can be sensationalized. I have to say that some of it is really interesting and in the days of only four channels I would have never been able to witness open heart surgery. Now I can eat my dinner and find out what happened to the poor fellows obstructed bowel pausing only for refills of my ice tea and to serve myself another helping.

For the most part I have tried to avoid games on my iPhone. I don’t have much time for them and I have never been very good at games. Even when I was a kid I remember being beaten by my sister again and again at connect four. Even as an adult I tried playing words with friends with my sister only to be pummeled. I know it isn’t the same but I just have never been a game person so spending much time on them, other than solitaire, just wasn’t my thing. Yesterday I made the mistake of downloading Candy Crush. I have wasted more time on this game in the last 24 hours than I care to tell. They hook you with a few levels and then just as you are one brick away from finishing the level it tells me I am out of moves and I can either buy more moves or try again. This of course is after it tells me I have to wait another 30 minutes for a new life, or pay for one. Good thing I am a total cheap skate or I could spend a month’s pay on extra lives and moves. I now think that in app purchases are of the devil, and just about the digital equivalent of crack! I think it is time to delete this app from my phone, that is after I use the lives I just got while writing this post!

Do you have days where you feel like the very act of getting up in the morning is more than you can do? How about sitting at your desk at work and thinking, If I just had a pillow I could sleep right here! I am not talking about full on depression but the working man blues. It may be that things aren’t even going that bad you just don’t feel like doing anything or everything you try to do is getting you nowhere. Maybe it was the ice cream followed by the chili cheese Fritos from last night that got me in his funk? Could be the juice smoothie I had for breakfast just isn’t giving me the energy I need. Whatever it is the usual things are not snapping me out of it. I got a cookie, which usually picks me up. I am on my fifth cup of coffee, nothing! Maybe I am coming down with something, I really feel like I need a nap. Perhaps it is that I need to find some new big goal to get motivated about, whatever it is, I am thinking that today is just a right off. Put it in the books as a, don’t count the calories, don’t write about it in my performance review, and definitely don’t put a star on the calendar next to this one. All I can say is tomorrow can’t come soon enough!

I have a hard time understanding the stock markets. Some things make sense, like buying stocks which are pieces of a company, but lots of times the reasons why one stock goes up or another goes down are baffling. One company has record profits and their stock goes down, another has a huge loss and the stock goes up. All of these make no sense. Our economy has been in the toilet yet the market kept going up and up. Oil prices fall, which is good news for me and the market decides to fall 1500 points. For what reason did it go up so high? For what reason did it tank? All of this reminds me of the Dr. Seuss book about the little bug that went Ka-choo. Somebody sneezed in China and it caused a tidal wave in the U.S. Because of this I will probably just keep my money in mutual funds that lose my money for me. That way I can complain about them without blaming myself for my money blunders.

AARP, you can keep your membership offer! Yes this is my year of being fifty, and to that I say, suck it! I ran my first marathon last weekend. Not just any but one to the top of Pikes Peak and back! Call it my mid-life crisis but I have spent the last few years getting in shape and planning to run this crazy race just so I could thrust my arms up in the air and laugh at fifty! It does feel good I am happy I did it, but now what? That is over, I put a ton of work into it but now I have to find something else to challenge me. I don’t want to go climb Everest or anything like that but I need to find something that will motivate me to stay in shape. If I don’t I will return to the extra seventy-five pounds because my other great motivator is food! I better find something quick with all the new recipes I see for bacon wrapped meat it won’t be a slippery slope it will be a sheer cliff!

I just spent the last few days in Boulder, Colorado. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Boulder it is a very unique place. To illustrate this point I will tell you of my interaction from Monday morning. I was walking back to my son’s apartment from the Starbucks which was a few blocks away. I had purchased my usual bucket of black coffee and a small coffee cake which I had planned on enjoying later as a snack. As I walked along the sidewalk a woman came up to me, she was pushing a baby stroller which I was unsure actually contained a baby. As she approached she asked me if I had any money for food. I am not a big giver of money to people on the street, I am cynical and so I don’t think the money will go for actual food. I do however believe in giving food so I said to the woman who I didn’t have money but she could have my coffee cake. She thanked me and took the bag but before I could move on she reached out to me and said “No, I am a cat and can only eat milk and mead”. I grabbed my bag back and promptly walked away. I spent the rest of the morning thinking I must have not heard her correctly but when I explained that story to a friend they said that he would agree that I misheard her only if I was in any other town. While the story is crazy I also can’t believe that if you are really hungry that you would turn down food, cat or not. I grew up hearing that beggars can’t be choosers, or in Boulder speak, meow meow meow meow!

So I have been using the same MacBook pro for the last seven years. I bought it to be able to run my ministry and keep track of everything I do. It has been awesome! I have over the year’s upgraded memory and hard drives and it has gone through multiple batteries. when it has had issues I have mostly taken care of them myself, although it has been back to Apple a few times. Yesterday it died! A moment of silence please…
There is a possibility of fixing it, the part isn’t that expensive but it is the age-old question. Is it time to replace it? For most computers seven years is two life times. I don’t think I have had another computer which has lasted this long. It still runs the latest OS and seems to still have pep, but just like a car it is showing its age. Some computers get replaced out of want, we just want something new. Some computers it is out of need. Mine is teetering between both. I haven’t named it or anything weird like that but if it is time for it to go to the big motherboard in the sky I will shed a little tear. You have been a good one old friend, and I will judge all others by you!

Sunday is the day! I have spent the last few years leading up to this! I am running the Pikes Peak Marathon! That is a trail running race where you run to the top of Pikes Peak (14,125 ft) turn around and come back down. It is a full 26.2 miles and an elevation gain of 7,815 feet. I am a little freaked out right now. Am I ready? Will I die? This is stupid, why did I sign up for this? For my fiftieth year on earth I am celebrating by killing myself! I have trained so the likelihood of death is small, but it is still gonna hurt. I picked this crazy thing to give me a goal that was not easy and would require discipline and hard work to reach, to test myself. I turned fifty and I need to know I can still do whatever I set my mind to. I need to know that I am not dead yet, nor am I close. I still have a lot of things I want to accomplish in my life, things I have not been able to do yet. This crazy weekend tells me I don’t have to give up yet, they are still out there for me to achieve and the effort I give toward them is still worth it! So to all my friends and family who are over fifty, I say, let’s go get um!

I am not a fan of rotisserie chicken, but not for the reasons you think. It isn’t the taste, they are pretty good even from Walmart as long as they are warm I can eat them and like it. It isn’t the cost, they are cheap, and for a few bucks you get a whole chicken ready to eat. No, I don’t like them because of the fight that will happen about them. I only want white meat and so does the rest of my family, so we will pick at it and eat around all the dark meat. My wife will have some just to shame me but she wants the white meat as well. So I will still be hungry after dinner and then the carcass will sit in the frig for a week with nobody touching it. My wife will occasionally call out, “would somebody eat the chicken” to which no one will answer. Sometimes statements about starving children in Africa or the waste of perfectly good food get thrown in for good measure but none of it will motivate anyone to actually eat it. If we were really good people we would throw the whole thing into a pot and make chicken soup out of it. My mother would then freeze the soup to be used the next time a cold or flu come around. We are just not that good so the only thing it will do is feed seagulls at the landfill.

I guess it all started back in the eighties when someone spiked Tylenol to kill his wife. What I am talking about is those annoying safety seals. They started just on medicine which I can understand but soon expanded until everything has one. I opened a bottle of bleach and it had one. Why? Is someone going to open up a new bottle of bleach and see a seal and think, oh good this is safe for me to drink! The ones that really drive me crazy are the ones on the jar of peanut butter or Mayo. You try and pull the tab, but it only pulls off the tab. So I try the other side only to get another small chunk leaving the rest to be torn off in little bits. Then for the rest of the time that jar has anything in it the last piece, which I could not remove, becomes a catch for half of what was on my knife and all the drying out parts of the jar. I am sure the monkeys that they tested this with could get the whole thing off in one piece, but I cannot. The Tylenol thing turn out to be a hokes yet its lasting legacy is a poorly constructed seal which makes us all regret having opposable thumbs, or at least the big fat ones I have.