if you ain't great, your ain't giving it your all.

You cannot escape the gloominess out there. Even if you are not personally hurting financially you may be making cut backs in your spending as a preventative. It’s a natural inclination to look at this time as a survival situation.

It seems this is a time where many are sacrificing greatness for survival and that would be a mistake. You can be great in anything you do if your mind is right. Of course part of that is preparation, this does not happen overnight but there are clear steps a person to take to be prepared for greatness yet these are generally hard habits to create, thus so few people are truly great in life. Another part of this is being generous. If not with your money than with your time or at the least with your heart. Have a sense of gratitude that coveys a love of people and life without expectation of return, this is what changes the hearts of other people.

When it comes down to it, the government is not going to get this country out of a recession, it’s us the individual American who exudes appreciation that will do it. To add on top of that for us as individuals, there is very little difference between doing something good and doing something great. So be great. Don’t settle for survival. Don’t settle of anything less than excellent. Become indispensable in your relationships and in your office. Really there are only a very few things that each of us must do each day that are the most important things in our life; when you master those things and execute them perfectly we find the rest of our life gets better. The easier things we would want to do first either get done as consequence or they really didn't need to be done to begin with.

I know how tough it is in this economy to keep an honest account of finances. I have never shied away from expressing my money issues on CMS. Perhaps the moral high ground is that it is family medical bills and not dissipation issues. I struggle mightily with cutting back my financial footprint and being generous at the same time and I am certainly not great in all areas of my life. Its the application of getting better every day that moves a person from just surviving to being great. By making the hard decisions first, you grow the envelope around you to manage more things with less effort.

Be brave. Be Strong. Be courageous. Be great.

Rapt Attention

Mistress and Mo huddled under the blankets on the couch this morning to await the morning weatherman report. He teased his next segment with words like, 'Rain, cold and snow." Egad. Here in Phoenix could we have a snow day?

As it turns out the rain is down south, the snow far east, and the cold? Well the morning temperature will be around 48 degrees. With a snap of her fingers Mistress proclaimed, "Well Mo, looks like pants for the next two mornings."

Pants. The Phoenix equivalent of a snow day to a elementary school kid.

No, it will not be 17* today like in Chicago. Instead our daytime high is closer to 75*. I may be wearing my watch cap today and my down jacket. The sky may be cloudless and the sun not quite as bright, but I'd hate to get a bit nippy.

There's treasure everywhere.

up is down?

After my July trip to Seattle, I was weighing myself several times a day to judge hydration levels. After a couple months it just got a bit too much for me and decided to forgo what I considered an effort in staying positive. No one likes to see their weight up and down, day in and day out but never going the way you want.

On a whim I decided to step on the scale this weekend. Having not trained for the last seven months it is not something I wanted to acknowledge. I fit into the same pants but the waistband feels a bit more snug. I fit into the same shirts but they feel a bit tighter. I now look to see if I am going to wear a Large or X-Large.

Before I stepped on I thought to myself, "Okay, you're ten pounds heavier than the last weight you saw." I stepped on and was surprised to see I was the same. Actually two pounds less. Shock. I stepped off, tripped the reset and stepped back on. Same thing.

It goes to show that even though my nutrition has been only 75-80%, (read: late night snacking) what is getting me the redirection of muscle and fat. Nutrition is such a critical component to fitness and health yet what I truly need is to do is apply some progressive resistance with weights and cardio.

I am hoping that with a clean blood test this week, I can start getting back onto some sort of easy training. It is a stretch but one that I am willing to take, (and hold for a ten count, now that I think about it).

There's treasure everywhere.

Fueling your winter

I'm not going to lie, its effing gorgeous hear today. Mid-70's, no clouds, sunny. We're spoiled this time of year.

That doesn't mean I don't worry about being prepared for something that would knock out electricity at our house or disrupt my community. So I am reviewing my preparedness of cooking and heating fuels.

Don't misunderstand me. My number one priority is the safety and comfort of my family. Depending on the situation I will pack up and stay with family or friends in another part of the city or another city altogether until the scenario has passed. I never understood how families 'suffered' through winter power outages. We always drove somewhere close by for dinner and a movie. Worst case we slept next to the wood burning stove or in sleeping bags and skipped a shower in the morning.

Currently I have enough canisters of propane/butane mix to fuel my Camping Gaz stove for several weeks. I also have a lantern attachment that provides some heat but enough light that equals a 80 watt light bulb. I also have 5 gallons of denatured alcohol for my WhiteBox stove. As it only takes 2 oz. for 20 minutes of flame, best described as a 'afterburner on a figher jet', I could get 300-500 uses for heating water and meals.

My propane is what I am really thinking about. I have a BBQ in the backyard that runs on the stuff. I have two 5 gallon tanks with one always full. In a conservation situation we will use the side burner and not the grill and get a lot more usage from the propane. I think I need at least two more 5 gallon tanks. Time to start looking at garage sales for extra tanks.

I have a fireplace but its never been used. I have no wood stockpiled. Had the economy not turned this year, we would have purchased a backyard fire pit and I'd have started stockpiled a cord of wood. In this part of the country right now we can simply sleep in our houses under a few extra blankets or sleeping bag and be quite comfortable. How different this is from my youth. Our home outside Seattle had a wood burning stove and 10 cords of wood cut and split lining our backyard wall. We usually cut down the trees in the spring, let them dry out in summer and split in the fall.

I know most of you live in areas that have tremendously cold winters. During a power outage due to a storm how have you prepared to heat and feed your family? Could you sustain that for several days?

Expected & Unexpected blessings

I got a call from my brother today. He is being deployed to Afghanistan in March with his National Guard unit. He will be gone at least one year. This is his second deployment. The first deployment was also for one year but he only had four hours notice. This news given to him on September 12, 2001.

Our family is not new to deployments. My father only retired from the military when he was forced out due to mandatory age requirements. I spent ten years in combat arms. My brother has been in for fifteen years now, currently as a Drill Instructor. A position I once held.

This deployment is not blessing but the location is. Had he been kept stateside he would have lost considerable pay compared to his normal job. Going to Afghanistan pays much better and is not such a hardship on the family financially. And yes its a bit morbid but if your going to be called up, we Mann's like going where the action is.

Mistress and I got some unexpected news today. We've been overpaying my car payment for two years and the bank is not happy. I get to skip my next two payments with no penalty so I am back on their loan track. That is a boat load of money and man that sure comes in handy with a baby on the way.

See. There's treasure everywhere.

A goal is not a life

Will you be a triathlete next year?

That is not a question I ask of myself. Its a question I ask of you. It doesn't matter to me if you are or not. What matters to me is that you do something you love; be it swimming, cycling, running or some other form of exercise. We all have our fads. We all have our goals that we'd love to hit, like becoming an Ironman finisher or complete an ultra-endurance race. But is it you?

At some point in our triathlon lives we stop looking at training as fun and more as a job. The dedication wears us down, way to early mornings, not enough sleep at night. Seems like all our nutrients are sucked through an aero drink straw, bottle nipple or foil gel pouch, most of it tasting like some sort of lemon-lime, citrus or fruit punch.

The answer to my question probably won't hit you till a year from now. When after a break you went back to your real exercise passion. Was it triathlon, or just plan running. Maybe something else like skiing or swimming.

Ultimately we all reset to what we get the most pleasure from, the thing we can do day in and day out and its not a chore, its a gift. Finding that gift is what makes trying all the other sports, so much more pleasurable for the time we do it.

There's treasure everywhere.

Be like Scrooge?

Wow. What a miserable weekend. Hope everyone else had an awesome, tremendous holiday weekend full of fun and love and merriment. Maybe even a little shopping. I think its okay to admit that my weekend did not go well and still be happy for that someone else had a tremendously great weekend. No reason to bum someones high.

I love this time of year and every day that brings us closer to Christmas Day is one more day that no matter what the obstacle, its hard to not smile.

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and no matter what issues we as a society are dealing with on a personal level, professional level, financial level or with our individual families, Christmas is the time to give of your heart. In the past our heart has been expressed with gifts. This year your heart may need to be more open. Its good for us. Instead of building up to one big morning (or night) of giving, give openly all month long.

Smile more. Give a stronger more intense handshake. A more sincere hug. Say hi and smile when you make eye contact with a stranger. Be a samaritan. Instead of telling someone, "Good Job", take a full minute to praise how pleased and excited you are that they did what they did. That would be 60x longer than "Good Job" but have 1,000x more impact.

Scrooge learned that lesson, though only in the last few minutes of his story. Being a good employer, friend, relative on every day of the year, is more important that how much you spend for one day a year.

There's treasure everywhere.