When I’m on a diet (which is essentially always), invariably at some point I’ll get hungry and go and do something stupid like eat seventeen orders of McDonald’s hash browns in a three minute period. When something like this happens (which is essentially always), invariably I feel guilty about it. Before you nod your head in vigorous agreement, let me explain my use of the term guilt. This isn’t about feeling guilty about falling off the wagon, or ruining my diet, or doing something “bad.” No, I simply feel awful that this “major problem” in my life is too much food and I’m painfully aware of how many people there are on this planet who don’t have enough food.

I already wrote about it here in January right after the last Christmas break. Go read that now (which includes a thoughtful excerpt from my book) and then you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

I’ll wait.

In the spirit of killing two birds with one stone, let me know what you think about this crazy idea: combine a hearty, sweat-breaking exercise with helping people less-fortunate. How’s that sound?

Well, that’s exactly what I did on two mornings during my last vacation up north. Morning number one was spent moving 5,700 pounds of food off a panel truck. Morning number two was spent bagging food, distributing food, moving food, and bagging food again. About five hours across both days. It was hot, sweaty work and I couldn’t have felt better.

Here are a few pics from the trip. Hover your mouse over each for more information. (And if you’re reading this via email or an RSS feed, come back to the site for the full effect.)

So the choice is yours: pay some monster gym fifty bucks a month to walk in place on a boring treadmill OR get a real solid workout and help out people in the process. Oh, and if for some reason you must spend money in order to exercise, the food pantry could probably put that fifty to better use.

About a week an a half ago I saw X-Men: Origins: Wolverine. For this review, I’ll assume you know nothing about X-Men, Origins, or Wolverine. That should put everyone on equal footing.

I’ll have to say the most memorable part of the movie was after I dropped off Rachel and Laura at the box office and parked the car. We had an unusually heavy rain hit us that Saturday afternoon. It also brought with it healthy doses of lightning and thunderboomers. As I stepped out of the car at the far end of the lot—CRAAAAACK-BAMMM—I looked up just in time to see a huge shower of sparks falling from the corner traffic light and a nice, accompanying puff of smoke drift over my head. “Hmmm,” I thought. “Well there’s something you don’t see every day.”

I headed up to the box office, waving my arms over my head to ward off any further lightning strikes, only to find the place completely dark. I found it ironic that only minutes before I worried about missing the trailers (something I hate to miss). Now my worst fears were realized: I was going to miss the trailers.

Time for Plan B: the mall theater. But first a quick stop home where the dog was most certainly digging through the kitchen tile in an effort to save herself from certain meteorological doom. She was, as expected, very happy to see us. I could tell by the 200 BPM heart rate and panting as if she’d just spent thirty minutes under water. Fortunately, the storm had blown through as quickly as it showed up, the dog was fine, and we headed out to a later show.

We arrived at the mall theater which was fortunately running at one hundred percent power. We bought our tickets and then I was faced with the ultimate dieter’s question: to popcorn or not to popcorn? I’ll tell you one thing, after a lightning bolt strikes seventy five feet from your middle-aged head, you order the damn popcorn.

Aside from functional electricity, the mall theater also has one other distinct advantage over the other theater: user-operated butter dispensers. If they sold these things at Lowe’s, I’d install one in my kitchen in a heartbeat. Imagine! Real hot buttered popcorn right in your very own home. Or a nice big bowl of hot buttered Cheez-Its. Or for breakfast, maybe some hot buttered Cap’n Crunch. Man, that’d be awesome.

Anyway, tune in sometime in the next month or two when I’ll review Pixar’s latest movie, Up.

What? Oh yeah, Wolverine. I almost forgot. It was good. Never mind the negative press, go see it. It had good guys, bad guys, and explosions. And that’s good enough for me.

I didn’t get a chance to write a post last night. I got up early to try and write one this morning, but that didn’t work out. I now have four minutes. It’s do or die time. Write a post or skip yet another day.

Okay, just as an experiment, let’s see what I can do in four minutes. First, I need a topic.

It’s “Leftovers” day, so … hmmm … anything goes. Let’s Google something for “Random Topic Generator”. Hang on…

Okay, first one got me this hit, “A synchronized proxy network for a high-level functional toolkit.” And only two minutes to go, if you can believe this small bit of writing already sucked up half the allotted time. Now for the post!

The other day I was at work and someone came into my office to talk about a synchronized proxy network for a high-level functional toolkit. I asked, “Okay, so what about this synchronized proxy network? Do you think it will work for a high-level functional toolkit?” My coworker replied, “Of course it will. It will also work for low-level non-functional toolkits as well. It can’t be beat.”

I thought to myself for a while and decided that instead of synchronized proxy networks, what we really needed was a trip to the vending machine for several fun-size bags of Cheez-Its. Because if someone ever comes up to you and asks you, “Functional toolkit or Cheez-Its?” you know what the right answer is.

Dang it. That’s four minutes. Time’s up!

I knew this was a bad idea…

Sarah, just finishing up her sophomore year in high school, brought home her yearbook yesterday. I flipped through it for perhaps a quarter hour, marveling at how the more things change, the more they stay the same. While the hair and the clothes and the number of pages printed in full color have changed quite a bit over the last blanky-six years, the basics are still there.

To confirm my suspicions, I headed out to the garage for a few minutes and extracted my own yearbook, from senior year. My high school always had a great yearbook. After all, how many high schools can say that Ernest Hemingway wrote for their yearbook? I’m guessing just one: ours. Not to mention all our other notable alumni, including (voice of Homer Simpson) Dan Castellaneta and (D-list star) Kathy Griffin.

I flipped open the book and almost right off the bat discovered on page 26 the photo reproduced here. Yes, that’s actually me in the highlighted circle. Apparently I am attempting to outwardly declare my strong belief that the sporting team associated with my particular institution possessed abilities exceeding that of the teams of all other similar institutions. No, I don’t look anything remotely like that anymore.

The novelty of exploring the book’s innards soon wore off and I began reading all the scribbles people left me at the time. Here’s one, for example:

Charlie,
I think I’ll write about all the things we did that made French fun. Qui, que, quoique, jusqu’a ce que, quoique nous, and Point a Pitre. There I think that’s it. Oh! And also the great drawings you drew– of the unicorn and of the one where I’m falling out of the window. Bye bye!
Amy

I have absolutely no idea who that is and I don’t recall any drawings of anyone falling out of any windows. I’m sure such memories could be recalled through the heavy application of hypnosis and/or beer, but some things are better left alone.

Here’s another:

Charlie,
This year has been great, my best ever. You’ve been a great part of it. I loved talking, joking, and singing with you in Architecture. You and Bob really made the class worthwhile. I loved your chicken-clucking rendition of “It was a very good year.” This class has been my favorite, as are the people (especially you) in this class. I hope to see you over the summer (call me: 555-1275) we should go out. Take care. Love, Col.

To answer your question, yes, she actually left a real number. To answer your other question, no, I never called. Am I an idiot, or what?! She probably could’ve hit me with a brick and I wouldn’t have noticed. Sheesh!

The majority of notes, however, went like these:

Let’s be honest, I probably wouldn’t have gotten through programming with you watching over my shoulder.

Thank you for all the help in computers.

I want to thank you so much for all the help you have given me in comp. programming. I don’t know what I would have done if you didn’t explain all the errors to me.

I know this makes me look like an expert, but keep in mind, this is back when computers were still steam-powered and programs were written on papyrus. Programs were transferred between computers via carrier pigeon. All this “help” I doled out boiled down to explaining “x = 1″ is how you assign the value of “1″ to “x”. It’s a bit disheartening that’s all I was remembered for.

But that was then. Keep checking the “Notable Alumni” section on our Wikipedia page. Someday I’ll be there right below Ernest Hemingway and above Ray Kroc. That is, as soon as someone stops deleting the entry I keep adding.

Back in February and March, I took five of my Leftovers posts in a row to go through Twenty-Five Odd Facts and Figures You May or May Not Already Know About Me. Of course, no one has just twenty-five things about them and I found it difficult to narrow my life down to just that. So after much internal debate, I’ve decided to present Things 26 through 30 out of 25.

26. I have one tiny, minor, little OCD type quirk. When I’m at work in the kitchen and following a recipe, I have to go down the entire ingredient list again with each new ingredient. For example, if the recipe calls for: eggs, milk, bananas, chocolate chips, corn syrup, and Froot Loops, then I read it like this: eggs; eggs, milk; eggs, milk, bananas; eggs, milk, bananas, chocolate chips; and so on. I’d love to be able to finish one ingredient and move right on to the next. It would save me so much time.

27. I used to have a really great memory. Friends and fans alike never ran short of amazement at what my head could store. Everything from calendar dates to license plates, I was a regular Rain Man, with the one exception that I knew a new car costs more than a hundred dollars. But all that’s gone now and I’m definitely blaming years of Cheez-It overdosing.

Some time last year I decided to memorize pi out to as many places as I could manage. I made it to 107 places and that lasted a few weeks. Then I stopped thinking about it and it all went away again. I can now go this far without thinking: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288. After that I pause a while and can then come up with 419716939937510 … then I’ll drop a few and eventually find my way back out to the 100th digit or so. I find it fascinating that there are holes in the sequence but then I can pick it right back up later on down the chain.

However, I’m sure most of you find this much less fascinating and have already moved on to #28, so I’ll just shut up now.

28. Someone once asked me, “If you could meet any person in the whole wide world, living or dead, real or fictional, for just an hour, who would it be?” I replied without hesitation: “Me … when I’m eighty years old.” I’d somehow have Future Charlie rent a time machine, travel back to now, bring me a copy of Grey’s Sports Almanac, and let me know all the stupid things to avoid between now and then. My biggest worry? Future Charlie asking me, “Why oh why did you spend so much time on that stupid blog?!”

29. I used to have a really great memory. Friends and fans alike never ran short of amazement at what my head could store. Everything from calendar dates to license plates, I was a regular Rain Man, with the one exception that I knew a new car costs more than a hundred dollars. But all that’s gone now and I’m definitely blaming years of Cheez-It overdosing.

30. Along with my memory, I’m also slowly losing my only other superpower: my ability to stay up late. And enjoy it. I remember a time when going to bed the same day I woke up was considered an extremely early turn-in. Now I greatly look forward to those evenings I turn in around 9:30. Before I know it I’ll be eating dinner at four in the afternoon and planning vacations to Branson, MO.

Well! Now that I’ve broken the Twenty-Five Count Barrier, who knows how far this string of posts could go? Forty things? Sixty things? Maybe even 107. We’ll see how many of you hang on that long!