Being a child of the eighties, I grew up and felt privileged to be exposed to what I think are some pretty awesome toys and cartoons. Some of them just off the top of my head are…

• Transformers
• G.I. Joe
• He-Man
• Looney Toons
• Tom & Jerry
• Thundercats
• Scooby Doo
• Dino Riders
• Smurfs
• Batman The Animated Series
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• The Flintstones
• The Yogi Bear Show
• The Jetsons
• Jonny Quest
• Superfriends

I have some really good childhood memories of watching these cartoons and playing with these toys. Toys and cartoons that, to this day, I still enjoy and collect. I am really looking forward to the day that my children and I can enjoy them together.

When I turn on the TV nowadays, I am embarrassed by the cartoons (which all seem to be computer animated now and not hand drawn) that networks broadcast to children. What the hell is Sponge Bob Square Pants anyway? I don’t even recognize the Transformers anymore and their toys just look scary to me.

I am going to go on a Transformers side rant here. So bare with me.

Anyone who has been following my blog knows that I am a die hard, old school, Transformers fan. (TILL ALL ARE ONE!) Something about that cartoon and the toys just clicked with me on an emotional level when I was growing up and I think that is why I am such a fan of them to this day. It might be because it was one of the first toys my older brother ever got me. It might be because when you see an old school Transformer cartoon or toy transforming it makes sense. Just by looking at the thing you can get an idea of which pieces need to move where and when to transform it. I never needed an instruction booklet to transform a Transformer. Because of that the toys made me feel smart. Like I was teaching myself and learning something at the same time. But nowadays you open up one of these “newer” Transformers toys or watch one of the movies or cartoons your head just hurts. Nothing about it makes sense.

Whenever I go to the store, I always check out the toy sections (because I am a kid at heart) and I am applied by what I see. Isles of action figures that don’t look fun or easy to play with. I have also noticed that they have not moved from their shelf from one week to the next. No one is buying this crap. I find myself spending the most time looking at Hot Wheels toys because they are about the only thing in the toy section of stores that I used to play with when I was a kid.

One of the few stores that still carries old school Transformers products is Hot Topic. Whenever I travel down south from Alaska, I make time to go into a Hot Topic and I ask the clerk every time “Do you sell more old school Transformers Products or the newer Transformers Products. Each time for years the answer has been the same “Oh we sell way more old school Transformers. It’s hard for us to keep them in stock.”

Now if that is not telling about the current state of Cartoons and Toys I don’t know what is. I have also noticed this with Transformer cartoon DVDs. The local stores can’t keep the old school stuff on the shelves, but every week, I still see the same new school DVDs on the self right where they where last time. I said it before and I will say it again. No one is buying this crap.

Even Legos have changed over the years. How the hell do you screw up interlocking plastic bricks? Well somehow they did to the point where they are not recognizable anymore. It used to be that kids had buckets of legos from which they could build anything they could imagine.

• Cities
• Planes
• Spaceships
• Cars
• Trucks
• Boats

Last week I felt myself getting sick. Both my wife and mom where sick the week before and it all but knocked them out. I took care of them as best as I could while they suffered through sore throats, stuffy noses and fevers. During this time, I knew there was no way I would not get sick myself. So, in preparation, I started taking vitamin C. During this time I also manage to bit my cheek in my sleep which of corse turned into a Canker soar.

By the start of last week, I had a full-blown Canker soar in my mouth and felt a scratch on the back of my throat. I knew that if I did not start doing something to try and combat this soon, I would be laid up in bed and calling in sick to work before the end of the week.

I immediately started drinking a lot of water. I’m talking over 64 ounces a day. It sounds like a lot of water, but if you keep at it through out the day it really is not a big deal.

I also did some reading online and on that same day started washing my mouth out with salt water. This was amazing. It stung in my mouth because of my Canker soars, but shortly after my mouth stopped hurting.

So, in doing the salt water mouth wash a few times a day and drinking a lot of water resulted in not feeling all that sick this last week. I never ended up with a sore throat and even through I am only slightly congested it is nowhere near my normal level of congestion I have had in the past.

The salt water as also sped up the Canker sore healing process as well as made it tolerable to eat when the soar was at its worst.

Do you know of any remedies to reduce how long you might be sick or to make canker soars feel better and heal faster? I would love to hear them. Leave a comment below.

When I checked out the application on the Mac App store the other day I saw loads of comments from people who have already used it publish their own books and that it was very easy.

But will I use it?

The answer is yes and no.

I will use ‘iBooks Authoring’ to post ALL THAT MATTERS so it will finally be available on the Apple iBooks store. I plan to do that as soon as I am done writing MIRROR IN TIME. While I have been writing my second book, I have been planing in the back of my head to hire a third party to code out the book for the Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and other e-book readers. Coding out the first book took up a lot of my time and I just assume put that in someone else’s hands who has more experience than me at doing it.

I love soda. I love how it tastes. I love how it makes me feel. As soon as I have finished one bottle, I am jonesing to open the next one.

Soda is my drug when I need a fix. It’s my cigaret when I need a break. It’s my coke when I need a hit. It is my one true addiction that I just can’t break. It is my vice.

I have read in the ’4 Hour Body’ book that diet soda can prevent weight loss. That anything more than a can of diet soda a day will mess with your goal to loose weight and it is true. I have been tracking my weight daily since I started the Slow Carb diet and it’s clear that my recent plateau is a direct result of the diet soda I drink daily.

I have already started to ween myself off this insane addiction and it already feels like an uphill battle in the cold of night. With all the ingredients in diet soda like Aspartame, Phophoric Acid, Potassium Benzoate, Phenylketonurics, and Phenylalanine there is no way this is healthy for anyone on the planet. These two dollar words on the side of my diet soda bottle are probably the reason why I am addicted to it like heroin in the first place.

To get off this addictive nectar I am taking a couple of approaches. The first one is just a slow ween off. Everyday I am going to slowly reduce how much diet soda I drink till I am off or at least get down to 1 can of diet soda a day as recommended by the ’4 Hour Body’ book. (The author of wich admits to be a huge addict of Diet Coke and states that reducing how much he drank was very difficult.) As I ween myself off of diet soda, I am going to supplement my caffeine needs with green tea. Green tea is great antioxidant and good for your metabolism.

As far as my weekly cheat day goes, I believe I am still going to drink a lot of soda. But on my cheat day I have always drank real sugar soda like Jones Sada, or Pepsi Throwback. The ingredients in these sodas are fewer and you can actually pronounce them unlike the ingredients in diet sodas.

I can understand a place like Seattle not keeping their roads clear of snow an ice. Weather conditions like the ones they have recently suffered, have been dubbed SnowPocalypse or SnowMageddon, are not a daily, monthly, or even yearly occurrence. They are just as random as achieving a critical hit in Dungeons & Dragons. So I can let places like Seattle slide on having bad to unsafe road conditions every few years. It’s hard for a city to justify having plow trucks for a meteorological even that happens randomly and lasts for such a short time.

A place like Juneau, Alaska on the other hand is much harder for me to forgive. The city and state know that each year it is going to snow. They know each year what the roads are going to be like. Yet, for some reason this year they do not seem to be taking the task seriously.

In years past I could rarely drive down any road in Juneau and not see a city plow truck scraping snow and ice off of the streets during the winter. This year it has been a rare occurrence that I have seen a city plow truck and when I do they are not scraping the streets as they plow the snow. This has resulted just about every road in Juneau is covered in ice. Everyday that I have driven to work or driven home in the last several weeks I have seen a car accident of one kind or another.

What is more astonishing to me is that it is currently January, almost February now, and the city has still done nothing to correct this behavior. Even after citizens have complained. Sadly, I think it is going to take a vehicle accident involving some kind of official for them to step up their responsibilities to normal levels.

I laughed when my friends showed me this video a few days ago. Event though it is a joke it is still scary to me how much of our personal information we post on sites like facebook and how openly available it is to anyone looking for it. It makes me glad that I quit facebook for personal use.

Since just before the start of the new year I have been studding to get my Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification. My goal is to be well versed in all the CISSP information and get certified within five months (hopefully sooner). I have been delving deep into giant study tomes on CISSP and taking several legal pads worth of notes in the process. I have learned a lot from reading this study information and I have also had a lot of ideas and principles I already knew reenforced. But in the end I still have to pass the test and I am just as nervous about that as anyone else in my shoes would be.

I have also been making time to keep working on my second book that I have recently titled ‘Mirror Through Time’. Several days a week after work I have been visiting the local library to get in a couple of hours of writing in. Because I am studying for my CISSP work has slowed down on my book, but not stopped. Not in the least. In fact, I have recently started the second draft of ‘Mirror Through Time’ and I am so excited to finish it and get some other eyes on it for feed back.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a great band located in Oak Harbor, Washington that went by the name of Wearing Black. My own band at the time, Kira’s Modern Mourning, was occasionally lucky enough to play gigs with them in and around the Oak Harbor area.

Wearing Black originally consisted of two acoustic guitar players and an electric bass player. Their music was amazing and it was guaranteed that whatever venue they where playing at, they would fill it up.

‘Root For The Bad Guy’ was one of Wearing Black’s' popular songs. People at the time loved to hear it and would sing along with the band when they played it. The song is an anthem to all evil doers and bad guy in fictional genres.

The band eventually disbanded leaving only a few recorded songs on-line for their fans. About a year after the band broke up it’s lead singer and guitar player, Saul Nathaniel McCartney, recorded a solo version of ‘Root For The Bad Guy’. Well, I really liked the song a lot. So, over the last 8 months I worked on a type of music video for it and uploaded it to YouTube. I hope you all enjoy it.

• I Lost 30 Pounds!

2011 started off with a book, ‘The 4 Hour Body‘. This book had a huge impact on me. Because of this book I have lost thirty pounds and I have kept it off! This is amazing to me because my weight is something I have struggled with my whole life. Now, I don’t feel like I am struggling anymore. I feel like I have it all under control.

• I Got Married!

As far as importance goes, my marriage should be the first thing on my list. But I have decided to do my 2011 list in chronological order rather than importance.

In April, I got married to my beautiful wife Hannah, and I can’t think of another person I would rather spend the rest of my life with. After being together for seven years we had an amazing wedding with our family and friends. We can’t thank everyone enough for showing up and supporting us on our special day. But please know we are thankful and grateful for each and every single one of you.

• I Wrote My First Book

Lots of people have their own ideas and techniques on writing. I just like to write using the outline as my guide. The key word there being ‘guide’. While you are writing chapter 1 your thoughts and writing may go in a whole other direction. Some aspect of the story may grow out of your typing organically. That is perfectly fine and I encourage you to follow that flow. I find that a lot of my writing is till very organic and spawns lots of ideas. But by the end of it, I have touched on all of my outlined points. If something I have written was not a specified in my outlined point and it turns out to be really good I will add it to my outline should I ever need to reference the chapter I put it in.

Remember that your first draft should just be used to get your ideas out. To write the story. The first draft for me is more of a brain dump. Ernest Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit”, and that is how I treat it. Not until the second draft do I scrutinize over everything letter, word, and comma.

As far as words are concerned and how they should be used, I will not waste your time. The truth is that far greater writers than I have written wonderful books on how words should be used. I encourage you to seek out at least one of these books and read it before you start writing your first book. My personal favorit is ‘On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft’ by Steven King.