Changing Life (Change: part 3)

Weight:
Some number of years ago (no, I don't remember when, but I'm sure my wife could tell you), my wife and I dropped sugar from our diets. This was a significant change, especially for me. I grew up drinking soda and, when I say that, I mean I grew up drinking only soda. From a very young age, actually. I moved from apple juice to Coca~Cola, and soda was pretty much the only thing I drank for the next 30-odd years. Cutting sugar meant cutting the soda, which was one of the hugest changes I've made in my life. Ever.

The immediate result of that change was that I lost weight. A lot of weight. About 100 pounds in less than a year. At the time, I dropped to under 200 pounds for the first time since I was in high school. I kept all of it off for a while but, over time... well, you have to really stay focused, I suppose. At any rate, at my physical last year (during January or February), it finally hit me that I had let myself creep back up to about 245.

Well, that was enough of that.

So I started exercising again, something I'd let slide for a couple of years. [Seriously, why does exercising have to take up so much time?] And I started monitoring my portion sizes. When you don't eat sugar, it can make you feel justified with eating more. Well, me, anyway.

The short of all of that is that I am, now, under 200 pounds again, for only the second time since high school.

Coffee:
I think I have probably come off as a coffee drinker on here for years. I mean, with posts like this, I totally sound like a coffee drinker, right? But I was only barely a coffee drinker as I would only drink coffee if it was in chocolate. It took my wife a while to work me up even to that, because I grew up sans coffee. See above with the soda thing.

Basically, we could go to the cafe together because I could get a mocha, but my wife insisted that that wasn't the same thing. I... really didn't understand.

What we couldn't do, though, was sit around having coffee together when we went out for breakfast. My wife would have coffee, but I would just have water. (And, then, go to the cafe after for a mocha. heh) Again, I didn't get the big deal, but she assured me it wasn't the same as us sitting and having coffee together.

Well, she was right.

Long story short, I finally agreed to to try having coffee (just plain, old coffee) with my wife when we were out for breakfast one Sunday morning. No, I don't drink it black, but, I did buy her an espresso machine, something she has always wanted but didn't feel like it was worth it if she was going to be the only one using it. Now, we have coffee together every morning.

Beer:
As with coffee, I also grew up not drinking alcohol. Of any kind. My wife spent some number of years converting me to drinking wine (it was a slow process), but I still stayed away from beer. No, not on any kind of principle or anything; mostly, I just didn't like the way it smells. And not that my wife wants or likes to go hang out in bars but, every once in a while, she likes the option of going to share a beer in a bar. Except you can't do that when one of the people won't help share it. But, you know, I've been open to trying and tasting things over the years but, really, nothing ever really did it for me. Well, there was this one time years ago we got some blackberry beer at a local brewery, and I liked that, but they never had it again, and you can't buy it at the store or anything.

All of that changed this year. We were at an open mic night (probably the one where we first saw Parcivillian), and my wife got a beer... with the understanding that I was going to taste it. She got something called a Bitch Creek (because she liked the name). Well, we both loved it. Yeah, it was the first beer I ever really just liked. Or liked at all, but I liked it from the first taste. What we've discovered is that I like dark beers, especially stouts, which Bitch Creek was. That was not ever a thing we'd ever tried before. As it turns out, my wife tends toward darker beers, too, so that has really worked out, although she does have a broader palette than I do when it comes to beers and ales.

At any rate, we can now share a beer over dinner or grab a beer to share when we're out or whatever, so that has been a whole new thing for us, too, sort of like with the coffee.

Also, I have a new appreciation of the fact that some of the best breweries in the country are right here where I live.

How To Be... a Demolition Expert

When I was a kid, firecrackers were never quite enough. I mean, a single firecracker is rather wimpy. Not that you can get them around here. I don't think my kids have ever even seen a firecracker, but we used to get big bundles of them every Christmas for quite a few years when I was in that 10-year-old range. We got enough of them to get plenty creative with them despite being told not to. But, other than sparklers, we never got any other kinds of fireworks, so we had to do something with them to achieve more spectacular results.

That usually meant experimenting with bundling them together, emptying them out, and blowing things up. Really, though, my favorite was just dropping them into a Coke can. Simple and loud.

I want to believe that people that go into demolition started out that way, playing with firecrackers, but bigger. But I don't know that.

Actually, a good background in construction is necessary if you want to be involved in de-struction. Tell that to any two-year-old, right? My oldest loved to knock things over when he was that age. The only reason ever to put something together, in his mind, was to knock it apart. I sort of imagine demolition people never growing out of that, but, again, I don't know that.

At any rate, it seems that many demolition experts say that hands-on experience is the best training for this particular job. You can get training, especially in the military, but you really need to do it to understand it. Be involved in it. Getting apprenticeships with construction companies that do the kind of demolition you're interested in can be a great way to get training.

The kind of demolition? Isn't demolition just blowing stuff up?

Well, no...

You can excavate, undermine, wrecking ball, explode, implode, and just plain old knocking it over. The demolition expert will need to be able to choose the best option for the job. Of course, building implosion is probably everyone's favorite. It's pretty spectacular and takes a lot of skill and a lot of preparation. Months worth, because any error can be disastrous. An error can include imploding on a day when the cloud cover is too low, which will direct the shock wave out into surrounding buildings rather than dissipate upwards. Yeah, I never considered that either. I would hate to have been the guy to have made that mistake the first time.
Here's one that went as planned:

So, although you can become a demolition expert without any proper schooling, the military is still one of the best ways to get trained in the field. They offer a broader range of experience and one more focused on explosives. If you really want to learn how to blow stuff up, the Army might be a good place to learn.