The Column

Motto: Mottos are good for intros, but can be vague or confusing This column is dedicated mostly to things I thought about during my Thailand trip that didn't necessarily really belong on the last post. When contemplating things, I almost always make mental pros and cons lists - so that is the theme for today's post. Delta Airlines: For my travels to Thailand, I flew Delta. Normally I book travel through a Expedia or Kayak or some other 3rd party travel site; but for this trip I went directly through the airline's website. Here are some thoughts about that and about my experiences on this trip: Pros: Going directly through the airline's website makes flight switching and cancellations easier. Delta in particular offers a spectacular in-flight experience for international travel. Each passenger has a ~8 inch touch screen built into the seat in front of him. This screen rotates up and down to accommodate different heights. Things available for FREE: Movies....

Motto: "Sa-wat-dee-khrap" not "Sweaty Crap" The motto is phonetically how you say "Hello" politely as a male speaker in Thai. I usually just said "hi". This column is a recounting of my trip to Thailand and my engagement to +Melissa Hill . This post will have several pages worth of information, pictures, and one video. To keep the length of this post somewhat manageable, though, I'm going to employ my favorite space-saving technique:. The Trip Out : I flew from Kansas City to Los Angeles, to Tokyo, to Bangkok. I flew Delta. I will probably use them from now on if I have the option. More about Delta will follow in my next column (I already have it planned) I stayed up the night before my initial flight at 6am to try to nip jetlag in the bud. I couldn't sleep on the plane due to being 6'8" to 6'9" and generally giddiness. I had been awake for ~43 hours straight when I reached Japan. I took a sl...

Motto: AAAAAAAAAAA!!! ...AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!! Alright, now that I've got that out... let's get started. This update will remain "the most recent update" for, at a minimum, the next 11 days. This is because I am traveling to infinity* and beyond**. * infinity = Japan ** beyond = Thailand Melissa has been in Thailand for the past 80 days. This, as you can imagine, has been a huge bummer for me. What's more, she isn't returning home for another 82 days. This, as you can imagine, is going to be a huge bummer for me. Some people can go 162 days without seeing their S.O. and be absolutely fine - but not me. That's why I'm using the first time I ever got paid vacation to travel outside of the United States for the first time to see my girlfriend for the first time in 80 days. I leave tomorrow morning and, after 30 hours of plane flights and airports, will spend the next 7 days in beautiful Thailand with beautiful Melissa. Next ...

Motto: Shallow and Pedantic Forewarning: This update is all about me. I apologize for the topic, unknown readers, but it's pretty much the only thing I write about. What are you doing here, anyway? That was an inside joke. Sort of. I leave for Thailand in 4 days. But this post has nothing to do with that. That will be soon. Probably next time. What this column IS about, as given away by the title, is Fitness and a semi-dramatic system re-tooling within my life. To tell you that story, let me set the stage with the way things were. There was chaos. The streets ran wild with the long-forgotten children of who knows who. These kids knew they had to look out for themselves - nobody else was. Street fires burned for days. Fire departments had long since gone the way of the dodo and the police force. Did I say they were gone too? Yeah. They were gone. It was a pretty bleak scene. I didn't keep track of the foods I ate or where my money went to. Like...