A Hole 33,000 Feet Deep

Good evening. I feel that I left my last blog entry rather abruptly, and I apologize. I really am trying not to take up hours at night blogging, and my ability to ramble on and on means I may be mid-thought when I run out of time.

I covered my weight and my desire to lose in the last blog. Tonight I want to devote a little time to the other big weight I'm trying to lose - my debt. NOT counting the house and our two cars, as of January 1 we are $33,665.94 in debt. We've had a couple of rough years with medical expenses from Josie, Maxx, and most recently me, and the debt just has grown and grown. The debt situation is going to be our biggest obstacle in selling our house and getting moved out to St. Peters - another goal for this year.

We're determined to reduce the debt in a big way this year. Our first strategy is to NOT have a kid this year.  We're hoping that one will be successful! We're also going to do something called Financial Peace University with Stephanie's parents and brother. It's a video series that I think will pretty much teach us obvious things to do to save money and pay off debt, but doing it with other couples will hopefully help us be accountable for practicing what we learn.

I don't feel that I do a bad job managing our finanaces - it's just that we've had more money going out than we've had coming in.  Stephanie and I have already discussed ways that we're going to try to pay off the debts, like attacking the smallest one first, and snowballing the money into the next one, and so on.  But I think the best thing that we can do is keep from spending money that we don't have.  And hopefully at the beginning of next year, the size of the debt will be smaller than it is now...

Start at the Beginning (What a Novel Idea!)

I'm finally doing it. I've wanted to blog for a long time now, but have always found excuses not to. Even more so, I wanted to start a blog at the beginning of last year, to help motivate me to improve our finances and be accountable for my weight loss goals. The arrival of my third child one year ago today, and the extremely rough first several months of his life, provided an excuse not to blog, and I never got it started.

The ideal weight of TWO 5'9" men
standing on my scale at home...

So let's start with the point of this whole thing - I'm a big fat guy, and I don't want to be anymore. Okay, I'm not fat - I'm OBESE. According to Answers.com, a healthy weight for a 5'9" man (that would be me) is anywhere from 145 to 175 pounds. My household scale rang up at a whopping 354 pounds earlier this week. And no, there weren't two of me standing on the scale. So I am TWICE the size of a healthy version of me.

My goal is - as the blog title states - to become half the Dan that I am now. 175 pounds is an ambitious goal - especially when I've been completely unsuccessful in losing weight anytime in the past, except for during a brief period of time after my brain surgery in 2003 (I'll discuss both the successful weight loss AND the brain surgery in some future post). I have to be successful - I've been blessed with three amazing children, even though weight is an obstacle in producing children (in both fertility and logistic terms).  I don't want them growing up without a father, and I know that if I don't lose the weight, that's more than likely what's going to happen.

I'm hoping to be able to do this in chunks. It's a three year plan - lose around fifty pounds a year - culminating in a trip to Disney World the summer before Noah starts high school and Josie starts kindergarten. And of course, I'm now out of time for today. Trying to keep the blogging time to twenty minutes or less, which I've already failed to do.

Good night, nonexistant readers. And Happy 1st Birthday Maxx!

-D