600

Welcome to post 600 - in here you will find nothing special.  I just felt obligated to point out that I have published 600 bastard posts and y'all have read most of them.

Any other bloggers out there tell me what is so special about March?  Does anyone else have the same noticeable increase in traffic during this month?
March and April of 2012 were my biggest months at the time.  Then in 2013 it happened again where I had a spike during March and it continued during April.

As I sit here in 2014 March is currently less than 100 hits away from being my best month ever and I know it's not because I constantly churn out posts that you all are clamoring to read.  For the most part all of my new posts get about the same amount of views so I realize it's just the scandalous fun posts of the past that are getting all of the hits when people are trying to search for ways to inflate their penis or looking for chicks in Yoga Pants.
I just don't get why March (and assuming April) seem to have more of these people than the other months.

Honestly I shouldn't care because it's all about the small, loyal few who keep coming back for the newest babble that I have pushed to the world.

Today is March 25th and exactly one month from today at this very hour I will be enjoying my reception.  Shaking babies and kissing hands and thanking everyone for enjoying this feast which I have paid for and hoping everyone leaves soon so I can get to the baby making.
The past year has gone by pretty damned fast.  Honestly it feels like it was just a week ago that I was telling myself that there was still 100 days till I was married and I needed to hit up the exercise and cut back on the snacks.  70 days later I pretty much weigh exactly the same but I'm happy and I'm about to marry the love of my life and that is all that matters.

Life really doesn't get much better than this.
Though, in less than 2 months you'll finally get to stop reading about me and this whole nuptial thing and I'll have it all in my rear view mirror and move on to posting things that are more interesting.  Hopefully playing poker again and doing other fun degenerate things.
Oh the glory days - how I miss thee.

Under 225

Even though today is not Saturday and my last post was not Saturday and dealt with weight loss I wanted to share the results of yesterday's weigh-in.

I consider breaking this Quarter Hundred a milestone as well because this means just counting backwards from 300 I've lost over 75 pounds now.....  80 is just on the horizon.

Also, I find it funny that while I've been taking these pictures I seem to get a lot of feedback on my feet.
Everyone likes to make jokes from Hobit Feet to needing a pedicure and whatnot.
Haters.
I'll continue to show my toes off as I continue to reprogram my scale to show lower numbers in the biggest and longest April Fools Day 2014 prank ever.....
er....
maybe not

Last I checked where I was in Vegas only hit 112 but our high was 114.
It's 6:45 am and it's already 92 with a high of 115.
Stay inside and I hope you drank plenty of water YESTERDAY.
Drink Plenty of water today because Hydration Starts the day BEFORE folks.
And we appear to be Walking on the Sun!

500th Post - Nothing worthwhile inside

This, right here, marks my 500th post since I started doing this and kept with it.  The number would be a lot bigger if I never bothered to delete everything I had previously written (multiple times) to start anew but it is what it is.

With that I thought I should share another Milestone.

I glanced down at a red light the other day and noticed that my odometer had just passed the 100,000 mile mark.

This will be my last post until I get back from Disneyland.  We take off on Wednesday and will be coming back on Sunday.  I'm hoping to have a lot of pictures and a few good stories to tell.  Maybe even some clean ones.
I'm also hoping that 5 days out of town and eating poorly won't set me back too much.  Even if it does I'll just jump back on the path I have been taking and right my wrongs.

Today at work someone was asking me what I currently weighed and I told them.  One guy mentioned that he was 189 and he's never been as big as me.
I told him that by next April (by my wedding day) that I'd be down to his weight or less.
He told me he'd buy me two cheeseburgers if I got there!
Bet Accepted sir, bet accepted.

Here is a really good article on how Tim Tebow had to renounce Jesus and now Worships Satan.

Today the new patio door for my house got put in.
I need to go shopping and pick up a couple of pairs of shorts now that all of mine are way too big on me.
Losing weight is expensive.

Hope everyone has a great end of week and weekend and I'll catch up with y'all next week sometime!

One Hundred Thousand

Because I've been busy lately I just completely glanced over this and didn't announce it.

Because I've been making short posts lately I figure why not add another.

Words are for the weak, say what you want with pictures instead.

If I had a dollar for every "view" my blog has gotten I'd be f'n Rich!
I'd also accept a penny per view as well.


I did a Google Image search for 100000 tits and this is what came up (All of these are within the 1st 10 and that counts the porn entries as well)

The last one was for Rob

Tree Hundo and the winds of change

This is a big number here. 300. It’s a magical number, a mystical number. 300 is the amount that I had to see on the scale before I realized that I’m a bigger fat ass than I had realized. 300 is also the name of a really shitty movie, but that’s neither here nor there.

300 is the number that belongs to this post. I wasn’t going to bother to do a reflective post until probably hitting post number 500 but it was the significance in my life of 300 that I figured I should just do it now instead of later.

Maybe it’s also the fact that I really like to hear myself talk. Like to hear myself type? Like to hear my fingers beat off of the keyboard with that lustful rhythm that they have? Oh, I love me some me.

The reality is that I’ve had portions of this post written, deleted and then re-written a few times over the course of the past week as I knew that 300 was approaching - I was just going to make some long (or maybe short) winded post about how hitting 300 posts is a great accomplishment and how the next milestone is in a couple of months when I reach a full year of continuous blogging. However, over the course of the last week a lot of other stuff in my life has started to come together thus revealing the fact that it’s not just my 300th post but it’s really a whole lot more going on in my life around this particular “milestone.”

As most of you probably already know from myself or from Carmel the whole house situation has basically sorted itself out. Starting on Monday (probably Monday, maybe Sunday) I’ll be moving myself and my parents back into the house. This is mainly to give my parents a better sense of security as they approach the last quarter of their life or whatever the hell it might actually be. You never know if you’re going to live another 25 years, if you’re going to pass peacefully in your sleep or if you’ll have a freak bungee jumping experience where the cliff is 50 feet deep but the cord they gave you is 75 feet long. Life is full of surprises and as such you just have to go with the flow and live everyday to the fullest.

With that in mind I wanted to give my parents some peace of mind in these “golden” years of theirs. They never have to move again. Their rent is not going to increase (well, shit, I might start charging more just because I’m a greedy bastard). Some stability. I am a rock.

On top of that it looks like I’m going to begin the next portion of the year with a new job as well. Thursday I not only received a call for an interview for a management position at another store, but 30 minutes after that I received another call from a 2nd store offering me a position that I had applied for (though they said they won’t know the financials of it until Friday).

I’m not big on making decisions. I like to let life come at me and roll with everything. Had I received the offer before the interview phone call then there would be no issue. But now I’ve got things to think about, I’ve got decisions to make.
I have to choose between the easy path and the more challenging path.
I have to choose between comfort and the unknown.
One of these positions would be very easy for me because I’ve done it before and I’ve been in that department a whole lot. The other one is going to be more difficult because it’s More departments (but not more pay) and I don’t know them so I’d be forced to learn a whole new segment of the business that I’ve been apart of for the last 10 years.
One of them offers up an entirely new management team and the other offers up a manager I have worked with before and know what I can and cannot get away with.
Both are about the same distance from the house and give me approx 20 minutes travel time.
I’m over thinking everything, every aspect, every nuance. I know this but this is what I do.

To illustrate how much I hate to actually make decisions and the way I have dictated the way my life will work. When I was applying for college I sorted through the 13 million applications and recruitment letters that came to my house and narrowed everything down to maybe a handful of schools that I would be willing to attend. I then looked over the applications and chose to apply to the only school that did not make me write an essay as part of the application process.
Yes, I’m not making that shit up. I wanted to attend Pitt because of my love of all things Pittsburgh. The Steelers, the Pirates, the Penguins, everything. However, their application had either 1 or 2 essays that I’d have to write so I discarded it.
Instead, I applied to Penn State because there was no essay portion. After looking at the applications and the campuses I decide that I was going to Penn State - not that I was going to apply but that I was going. So, Penn State was the ONLY school I applied for and I never thought twice about it.
People in school thought I was stupid and asked me what my backup plan was. It was hard explaining to most of them that I didn’t need one, I was going to be accepted and there was no other way about it. In the end I was accepted and my life choices have led me to where I am and where I have been.
This is how I run my life. I make decisions and they just happen.
I totally forgot where I wanted to go with that, but much like everything else I’m not going to go back and re-read it and fix it up and whatever else. Those words stand on their own (or I hope so) and that’s that.

I know it doesn’t sound like a whole lot but for a guy who likes to take everything with a laid back attitude I’ve just got too much going on right now. I’ll be dying for a week of uninterrupted rest by the beginning of October.

Cleaning, Packing, Moving, Cleaning, Unpacking, Interviews, Deciding on a new job and a new store, Having two different sets of visitors in town to entertain amidst everything else.

Anyone want to give me a nice relaxing sensual massage with a happy ending to help take the edge off of my nerves?

Weight Loss Day 77 and 50k

Yesterday was the magical day.

Even with August being a month where I cut my blogging by about half I still managed to hit the 50,000 views mark thanks to all of you loyal peeps who come and check out my words daily.

Of course I do have some help from some great guest posts by Splitter, Flops and RVP (my new secret identity alias for Rob over on Rob Vegas Poker).

In other news my weekly Weight Loss post is tacked onto my 50k post.

It's been a few weeks since I decided to post about this but it's about time I get back into the routine.

The past 3 weeks I have done good throughout the week with controlling what I eat and shedding a pound or two only to have it all blown up by a great night of indulgence.  I'm not complaining about it because for about two months now my weight has stayed very consistent, I haven't been gaining anything back even though I'm not the healthiest of eaters out there.

This week I made a change and that is I stayed in on Saturday - not really by choice but by force.  My drinking buddy flew out of town yesterday and the other person who I have been spending most of my time with worked until 11 pm or something.

I wanted to hit up the comedy show at Shifty's but I decided that since I had to get up at 5 am in order to get  to works quarterly meeting that it would just be better if I stayed in and took the night off.

So, no pre-planned over indulgence like I wanted but the good news is that I have actual results and progress in the weight loss category.

I had been hovering around 268.2 and today I came in at 265.8 or a 2.4 pound loss.

Now I look ahead to September and see that it's going to be quite the busy month, too much going on to fit into the normal 27 calendar days. 

At the end of the month I have visitors coming in, two sets of them in fact and I really want to push myself to be under 260 by the time they arrive.  This will put me 40 pounds lighter than my heaviest and the lightest any of these folks would have seen me in a long long time.

My parents Anniversary is in September.

Monster's Birthday is in September

So, until about the last week of the month I really have no excuses to not lose weight. No visitors, no pretending to be a tourist, no nothing.  Just packing, cleaning, eating healthy and maybe playing some video games.  Money is of the utmost importance since I actually have budgeted a negative cash flow for the month and as such no eating out, no bar beer, no "oh lookie, I really wanted a elephant trunk jock strap."

Also for the first time ever I find myself asking an important question - How many pant sizes should I drop before I stop tightening the belt and just buy new clothes?

I think the answer is going to be 4-5 because I'm a cheap MoFo!

So, I leave you with this.

The amount of weight I have lost thus far is best represented by the amount of pot in the picture below - 34 pounds.

Oh Glorious Post 200

All hail it in it's full glory, this is the 200th post of my current blogs tenure.
What started off as a poker blog with minimal updates back in June and July of last year has morphed into something that occasionally talks about poker but focuses more on life in general.

This particular run started in November and saw me establish a routine of actually keeping up with writing and gaining some loyal followers (38 subscribed and many others who follow anonymously).

Looking back on my first post I see that I had a lofty goal of trying to post at least once per week and starting to hit the gym again.  In regards to the gym that's still one of my goals.  I did it for a month and gave up and I really want to start it up again but laziness behooves me to stay at home in the A/C (which has not worked since Friday FFS) and watch TV shows on Blu-Ray, play Video Games, read books and Comic Books and whatever else I can find to pass the day away other than getting healthier.
In regards to posting once a week it appears as though what I really meant to say was "once per day" as it's become such a routine for me to shit down and type away my daily thoughts.

In November I also posted about my love for The Lord of the Rings which I'd like to give a short expansion on now.  I'm now up to 4 copies owned of the movies which really wasn't my plan.  Buying the regular editions on DVD when they came out and then years later when they started releasing the extended editions, special collectors edition extended editions with book ends and other goodies at Best Buy, I splurged on all of those as well.  Then Blu-Ray came along and I ended up waiting for the Extended Editions before actually purchasing again because I thought I'd be saving myself money.  Well 9 months later I found myself buying the regular editions as Best Buy (once again) released something I desperately needed - Steelbooks.  yes, each movie with it's own steelbook looking pretty as a MFer and being that they were on sale and then a week later on sale further I gave into temptation - I now own 4 copies of Lord of the Rings (and oddly enough, all 4 copies are sealed).  To this day I have never watched the Extended Editions - though I hope to reconcile that soon with a one day marathon.

One of my more popular posts was about how I won my dog in a game of craps.
November was a decent month for me, it was the start of something beautiful.  Wordy, but beautiful.

The only thing I want to point out in December was that this is when I was introduced to C.S. Splitter who I think is an excellent up and coming author. In a post I talked about his first two books which I really think everyone should go out and read.  Upon introduction I was told I'd probably like his one book and where to get it for free, instead I paid for a copy (99 cents - balla!) and downloaded it for my Kindle Fire and immediately afterwards went and grabbed his second book.  Since then I have been in communication with Splitter and actually feel like I have developed a friendship from our interactions.
I bought both books the day they hit print and am told that they are getting lots of autographs - From the cover artist, from the editor and from the author as well.  I'll believe that the day they actually show back up in my mailbox though :)
The 3rd book is probably coming out sometime around September and once again I'll pick it up the day it comes out - not only because I love Splitters writing style but because I've heard rumblings that there is a a character based loosely off of me in the book (and I understand I will not be dying a horrible violent death).  This will have me giddy to no end and I can't wait to read it and tell the world (by world I mean my 50ish readers give or take) about it.  So, once again - everyone reading this that has not downloaded a copy of it should go and do so.  both books won't set you back the price of a Subway foot-long I believe.

On Feb 29th (that's right, Leap Fucking Day Biznitches) I posted about how I hit 25 followers and 10k page views.  Both of those are serious milestones to someone like me.  Back when I started this blog I was getting like 10 hits a year and had one follower - Carmel - but I felt like she didn't count because we were dating and she was practically required to follow my blog so that it wasn't so lonely.
However, here I sit now with 38 followers of the Cult of grrouchie and almost 35,000 page views in total awe that you all keep coming back to read my babble.  I'm addicted to your comments - and if you read between the lines this means LEAVE MORE COMMENTS!!! heh, do whatever you want - I just had to beg once :)

So, back to present day instead of harping on the past.  This is a long post already and that last sentence means that it's about to get longer.  That's right - you can't split this post in two. You can't have a 200th post part one and 200th post part two.  Part two would be 201 and thus ruin the whole continuity of everything. It would probably rip a hole in the space/titty continuum (two u's back to back - that's one messed up word right there. It's right up there with hemorrhoid with the RRH in the middle) and ruin life as we know it.

I originally wanted to talk about my debt a lot on this blog but have pretty much ignored it and left it out like a bastard step child.  However I am down to under 3 grand in non-house debt and that's pretty damned exciting.  I consider myself debt free when I only have the house to worry about and as a Dave Ramsey devotee I will go outside and make a nice and loud primal scream and then move on with my life.

Now that the debt is basically gone I have a new focus in my life and that is getting healthier.  As I hit 300 pounds I realized that I was within a few cheeseburgers of a heart attack and that shit kind of scares me.
I truly believe that I'm immortal (until proven otherwise) but hitting 300 and at the same time reading about Lightning talking about his heart attack - it got me a bit motivated.

Since that point I have dropped over 20 pounds, I am close to dropping a pant size, I'm still not exercising but baby steps people.  I didn't get fat over night and I won't get thin over night either.  Well, honestly, I won't get thin at all.  But I'll become less fat.

By the way - I wrote this immediately after post #198 but won't publish it until after post #199 which I'm thinking about writing right now just so I can get #200 out of the way.
Someday's I have nothing better to do than just sit and babble.

I'll leave you with this final thought (probably):
As I trudge on towards financial freedom I hope to post about how I am investing in my future and letting you all watch my money grow so that I don't have to be a broke joke when it comes time to retirement (which is the pace I am on now - giving hand jobs for warm sandwiches).
As I trudge towards a healthier me you will all have to suffer about how tasty my salad was and how I measured out exactly one tablespoon just to realize how f'n ridiculous it is to have that as a serving size when eating a large bowl full of lettuce.
As I trudge towards just being a better person in general I won't mention any of that shit at all, instead you'll get to hear about the stuff that I hate, what pisses me off and how small my penis really is.

grrouch out readers!