Dear Santa Clause,

First, you should check out the new look of my blog.  I have changed the format to fit the festive season.  Second, 2007 has been a great year for me, just like the other past 29 years except this time I have been extra-extra good.  Thus, I figured that sharing my Christmas list with would be a great idea.

1. Cool Math Ties
2. Neat Math Games like the one called set
3. A non-stick sauté pan
4. Sandal, like Teva or Chaco
5. Gift Certificate to Best Buy
6. A road bike
7. Gift Certificate to Campmor
8. A Disc Golf Bag like this one
9. Reflective Vest for Biking
10. Video Games for the game cube
11. Gift Certificate towards a nice telescope
12. Trip to OutterSpace
13. grey running socks
14. white under shirts size L
15. boxer short briefs
16. Unique foods
17. DVD car system
18. 8qt oval stock pot like this one or this one
19. Sport Coat (just kidding!)
20. basketball

There you have it Santa!  Sure, there are plenty of other special things that I would love to have but these are the first 20 items that come to mind.  Thanks for reading.Warm Hearts,Selfwalker   

Tomorrow is Charlie’s 10 month birthday!  If you square 10, that means 10×10, you get 100.  This is my 100th post on Selfwalker’s Blog.  Subtracting 4 from 100 you get 96, which is the amount of money I saved shopping on Black Friday.  I bought a $115 coat with a 75% discount.  $-)  Moola, moola saved.  Plus, I bought a special Christmas present for my nephews that was 25%.  Add the two discounts, 25% and 75%, and you get 100%.  Take half of 100 and then minus 4, you get the total amount of miles I commute to work  and back.  Yup, I drive 46 miles every day.  No need to continue with this special number.   Let’s just celebrate all of the 100s that pass our lives.  One last one.  What is 10^100?  Is is one of my favorite numbers: googol, which is more molecules than in the entire universe. 

The amount of information out on the web is amazing and the availability is just as impressive.  Just a few years ago, I would love to be driving home from a camping trip on a Sunday evening because I could catch This American Life; a radio program out of Chicago.  Today I can listen to this program anytime I want thanks to it being offered as a podcast.  Podcasts are a recorded show in digital format that can be listened through the internet or downloaded to an MP3 player.  I listen to my podcasts when I walk in the mornings and during the morning commute.  Listening to these shows is like being in a life classroom where I am constantly updated on topics in Science, Music, world culture, philosophy, technology, and anything else I feel like checking out.  Here is a list of the podcasts that I subscribe to, in alphabetical order.  Each show is linked to their webpage.  Check them out, read about their shows, and listen to a couple of them.  An expansion of what you listen to is just a few clicks away.  Have fun.  :lol:

1. In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg
2. In Over Your Head
3. IndieFeed: Hip Hop Music
4. iTunes Street Official Real Talk
5. Logically Critical
6. The Naked Scientists
7. Radio BSOTS podcast
8. The Relaxed Back
9. Skepticality:  The Official Podcast of Skeptic Magazine
10. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
11. Stones Throw Podcast
12. This American Life
13. WNYC’s Radio Lab

This morning Mr. Lance Armstrong talked to me again. Yup, I did say again. I heard him last week too! Yet, I cannot quite say that he was talking to me; it was just his voice recorded congratulating “me” on achieving my fastest time for a 1 mile. For the past month, I have been using my Nike+ combo that I got for my birthday. (See the shoes I designed here They have “Selfwalker” stitched on the side) How does all of this work? Basically, there is a sensor that fits inside my shoe, that sends signals to my iPod, which keeps all of my walking information. Then this information gets downloaded to my computer and then it is automatically sent to a webpage that makes all the data look really cool, such as time vs distance graphs and some sweet bar graphs. All of this has been my motivation in getting out of my bed at 5:30 am to walk 1.5 miles around my neighborhood. Right now my goal is to walk 20 miles within four weeks, which currently I am on pace to do. I am still in the honeymoon phase of my walking routine and this new technology has made it more exciting. Walking, running, or working out has never been my thing, as you may tell by string bean physique because I used to be active outside. Not anymore though, so I have to make sure I get some exercise into my day. As my uncle once told me,

“Walking your dog every morning is one of the best activities you can do for your body; even if you don’t have a dog!”

Another gorgeous week of weather here in North Carolina. The leaves have been fabulous all week, illuminating my commute with brilliant colors. I am bit surprised the colors have been so vivid since we are in severe drought: 14 inches of below normal. The leaves are a large tourist attraction up in the mountains. If you drive through the mountains on the weekends, you can spot many “Leaf Lookers” as they are driving 10 mph below the speed limit and constantly tapping on the breaks. I have not heard of any reports about if business has been down because the leaves may be more dull this year. But, I wonder if the leaves have ever been dull? Or is it that I am forgetting what bright leaves color looks like, such that as another year passes I am lowering my perspective of what bright leaf color is? This possibility can be compared to an idea called shifting baselines. From the Shifting Baselines website:

A baseline is a reference point to the past — how things used to be. If we allow these reference points to shift, we loose track of our standards and eventually accept the the degraded state as being “natural.”

This philosophy can be applied to many areas of my life. For example, perhaps this can explain why I am fine with car smelling like sweaty butt and being filthy dirty. Overtime I loose track of what a clean car is, and I just accept that that the dirtyness is just the same as the cleanliness. Maybe? Anyhow, back to the leaves. I hear people say, “Oh the leaves were brighter last year, and two years before that they were even brighter!” I don’t know about that, as I have already said, the leaves seems to be the exact same brightness ever year for me. But the point is not to have a debate about leaf color. Rather that I never loose sight of why it is so amazing to travel to the mountains and see the leaves; it is that I can look across rolling mountains of colorful trees or be in a valley immersed with colorful trees and simply be in awe of environmental changes. Hopefully these trees can stick around and if they begin to disappear, I don’t forget just how impacting the fall season can be in my life.

For our first weekend in November we went to check out the Fall colors in the mountains. We are just 20 minutes from Wilson Creek, an area within the Pisgah National Forest, so it is one of the more frequent places we go to because of the convenience. We drove to a spot that has a gorgeous view. Yes we drove right to it, courtesy of a mangled forest road. We could have walked to the lookout point, but I feel much cooler and manly being able to drive my vehicle over ruts and stones, as if I have some 4X4 truck. The leaves were in peak color and they filled the entire valley that we were gazing at. As we were sitting there trying to watch the fall color with one eye and watching Charlie with other so he would not eat the fall color, April said,

Ahhhhh….wouldn’t it be great to have this view from our backyard?

My obvious answer was yes, but shortly after that I began to ponder how many people have said that before her about the spot we were at. Luckily though, there were people before us that had the same idea, yet they thought that everyone should have this view for their backyard. So thanks to all of those people who have designated public land, such as National Forests, so that I can have many backyards to see such spectacular views.

Well I promised the Almighty One that if it didn’t start raining here in NC I would not blog. A month has gone by and NC is still in an extreme drought. That is when I finally learned never to make deals with the A-1.

Just the other night I really felt like a real life family Dad, after realizing just how much more fun the holidays can be with a kid. For Halloween, we dressed Charlie up as pumpkin. April sewed some fake leaves on a hat and our baby sitter bought me a pumpkin outfit. He looked adorable. I threw on some overalls and, viola, I was the farmer who harvested The Great Little Pumpkin. So we took Charlie out trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. This basically means that we stopped by our neighbors and chatted how cute he was and then they gave us treats. We also walked around our neighborhood. April and I walk around our neighborhood a lot, and we have never seen it this alive. Cars were lined up the street, parents and kids filled up the sidewalks, and many residents had their light on, passing out candy. Charlie loved all the action and I did too. This event was like one big block party and the invitation was to have children to take trick-or-treating. So the two previous years I missed this bash but now I really look forward to the next one. I actually wonder if all of this just means that Charlie is my excuse in feeling excited about being able to participate in kids activities again. Could this be true? Do people have children because they themselves are not grown up yet? Well, I guess I will just pretend that I am mature adult who cannot wait to let out my inner kid to start playing out the park, rolling in the grass, running around senselessly tagging people it, making a mess out of toy box of toys, riding my bike through a big pile of leaves,….oh wait I have been doing those for the past 30 years. Shocking news, yes I know.