Random idea

I was driving to lunch this morning when I decided it would be cool to name your band "Rock Slide." It sounds all hard, and you'd have a ton of signs all over advertising your band.

TV

We got a DVR about a year ago, and it's totally changed how we watch TV for the better. It's been great for Zoe since it lets us line up educational TV for her to watch whenever we let her have a little tube time. We can watch what we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. I know my family aren't early adopters of technology, and at this point they wouldn't be for this one either. But seriously- go get one. They're easy to use and really nice.
So I've been taping all kinds of things because it's so easy and have found some interesting things. Mostly I've found that Saturday Night Live is in a death spiral. It can make pretty much any band sound like crap. I liked Kelly Clarkson through her American Idol days, and I like her on the radio. On SNL she was awful. It was like she didn't want to be there. I just watched U2. They're a good band. On SNL, they made me want to die. They put some heart into the performance, but the sound quality was like an 8 track.
I have been enjoying Sons of Anarchy. If the trend of gangster shows set in places I've lived (the Sopranos was the first one) continues expect the next one to be set in central Texas.
My Name is Earl is my other favorite. I don't think karma is as simple as they depict, but the characters are likable.

September goal conclusions

In September I managed to do:
870 push ups
905 crunches
810 squeezes with my hand grippie thingie
51.1 miles on the bike
With the getting to work earlier goal I ended with a deficit of 33 minutes. Not awful.

The bike was probably the easiest and most fun, which led to finishing the target goal a week early. Finding the time and energy to do a lot of the tasks was tough. It was easy to leave the hand grip thing at work and then I wouldn't be able to work on it over the weekend. It squeaks so it was distracting to do at work even with my door closed, but it was good stress relief in long phone meetings.

One weird side effect of these goals was that I put on 4-5 pounds. I'd like to think that some of it is muscle- my legs are bigger, my abs are more defined and my arms are definitely stronger. But I've also been eating too much fried food and fat. I need to scale those down in October, and maintain the muscle.

My birthday was nice this year. Zoe had play practice and I had war company practice on the actual day so Stef and Zoe did presents and cake for me the day before. I got a bunch of great books, a metronome/tuner I've been wanting, a couple early music CDs (which I forgot to thank my aunt for, so Thanks, Mary!), and a computer game called Spore which I'm loving. War company practice was fun, and good exercise. My buddy Michelle gave me a cookie the size of a pizza, and after practice almost 20 of us went to the Dog and Duck for dinner.