Nat Arem's Blog

While I am not personally a big fantasy sports participant, I know that a lot of my blog readers and friends love this type of stuff. Therefore, I think the following will be of interest for a lot of people out there…

Cal from P5s has started a new site called fantasyfanatics.com. A number of other P5ers have come along to help him build the community. Here’s what Cal has to say about the site:

BigGunX, Dan, and I have started up a community site focused on Fantasy Sports, the other passion in our lives.

The link is: www.FantasyFanatics.com

We would love it if you Fantasy players out there would check out the site and join our community.

You will see a lot of familiar faces there already. Like this site, I think it’s going to be a very fun and informative place to hang out. We also have some pretty cool features. There is an Expert Advice forum where anyone can post a comment or question but only those qualified as Experts can respond. This will be a great place for new players to get advice and for experienced players to bounce strategies and ideas off of a qualified group.

We have a tag system that links all of our content and posts to Player Profiles. So, once the community is really rolling, you will be able to go to any player’s profile and get a veritable trove of information all in one spot.

Our Fanatic Points system is also going to add a lot. It lets the community decide who are the best posters. It will also make it easy to find the most valuable posts on the site.

Fanatic Member Profiles are also really cool and feature a Facebook style comments section. The new P5s profiles will be similar to these profiles.

We’ve got daily content, including video and audio coverage from our Lead Expert, Rob Shaw. These are just the features that we have available at launch. We’ve got a development team that will constantly be putting out new features as we go. I’ve had a lot of fun on the site so far just posting with the Experts.

I hope that you like what you see here. Even more so I hope that you’ll sign up an account and help us turn this site into something special.

I haven’t posted an AIM convo in a little while, but this is as good an opportunity as any…

I don’t know why, but I was cracking up through this whole convo. Maybe it’s because people always ask me these super wide-open questions on AIM like “do you know anything about laptops?” or w/e. It probably won’t be funny for blog readers, but I’ll put it out there just in case…

(3:25:24 PM) You feel a disturbance in the force…
(3:25:30 PM) yellowsub86: u know anything a/b cashing out of prima?
(3:25:36 PM) GIFAFI: yea
(3:25:43 PM) yellowsub86: lol
(3:26:21 PM) yellowsub86: …
(3:26:23 PM) GIFAFI: thx for asking
(3:28:09 PM) yellowsub86: haha
(3:28:12 PM) yellowsub86: u r infuriating
(3:28:25 PM) GIFAFI: did you have a more specific question
(3:28:55 PM) yellowsub86: yes
(3:28:59 PM) yellowsub86: how do u do it
(3:29:23 PM) GIFAFI: neteller last time i checked
(3:29:28 PM) yellowsub86: great great
(3:29:31 PM) GIFAFI: np
(3:29:43 PM) yellowsub86: check this site out
(3:29:55 PM) GIFAFI: www.nateller.com ?
(3:29:59 PM) yellowsub86: www.youarefkingworthless.com/natsucks/ihatehim.html
(3:30:16 PM) GIFAFI: good site

Yesterday I went down to Turner Field for the Atlanta Braves v Houston Astros game with yellowsub86, tbthanx and tdomeski. I hadn’t been to a Braves game yet, so sub was adamant that I get my ass down to a game asap. We got decent seats in the 218 section, but for most of the game we sat out on the deck area of the 755 club. It’s like a restaurant/bar out in left field of the stadium. Pretty nice place to watch a game. I took a few pics, although not too many.

Some subbage in MARTA on the way down. Screw trying to drive south on 400 at that time of day, let alone trying to park.

The line for the bus transfer thingy at the Five Points station. It was pretty smoothly run.

tb and tdome walking into the stadium.

That’s it for pics before/during the game. There just weren’t many good opportunities. Anywho, we went back to sub’s house for a little while after the game. Since we left after the 6th inning, we watched the rest on TV… it ended up going like 12 innings. While there, I managed to snap a pic of this beauty — a huge portrait of sub and his sister. I want a print of this painting.

Lastly, tb, tdome, sub and stoweski are moving into a house in Athens this weekend. Of course, part of moving into a house with your friends is determining the room picking order. Since Stow isn’t going to be around to move in, he’s automatically picking in 4th. So we decided to run out a random Omaha hand. First we dealt the flop, turn and river. Then we revealed one card from each person at a time. Here’s a picture of the completed hand…

As you can see, tdome made the stone cold nuts with top quads. tb flopped trips (and he appeared to be a decent favorite when we first started looking at hole cards and saw he flopped trips) so he got 2nd pick. And sub has a Q kicker w/ his pair of 9s on the board, so he gets 3rd pick. gg sub.

I made this post in the Health and Fitness forum on 2+2. Some blog readers might find it interesting. But if you have comments, please post them in the thread on 2+2. I am disallowing blog comments on this post for that reason…

http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=11512429

I hope this might inspire some of the people here who are trying to lose weight.

I started the year at around 250, maybe 255 or so. I am now 200ish, sometimes swinging up to maybe 203 or 204. I hope to be 180 to 185 by the later part of this year.

Here are before/after pics up until this point… I have a lot more if these two aren’t good enough for comparison.

Those are spaced about 6 months apart.

My strategy for doing it was very simple. Just eat less calories and maintain a very basic workout schedule (ie, 2-3 days a week, 40-50 minutes per session, not too intense). Sure I could have done it faster by running 5 miles a day or something, but I wanted to do it my way… meaning…

a) Something I would actually DO. It’s nice to say “I’m going to do this, that, etc, etc” and it’s another thing to do it day in and day out for the rest of your life. I would never keep up a plan that involves something I absolutely hate.
b) Something that wouldn’t be too stressful or intense. There’s a reason why I got fat — I tend towards laziness. I needed something that wasn’t going to burn me out.

So I just sat down early this year and tried to analyze my diet from memory. I then figured out what I could do without and what I should add…

Cut out: The most obvious expendable source of calories was from liquids. I simply didn’t need to drink 5000 calories a week (and I did, or more sometimes — soda adds up). So I completely cut out drink calories. I now only drink water and diet drinks.

Added: I basically searched for things that taste pretty good but were still relatively healthy. Since I wasn’t ever going to sit down to a dinner of steamed broccoli and cabbage, I realized that things like shrimp, chicken, burgers (no bun or cheese), hard boiled egg whites, baby carrots, chicken hot dogs, bananas and various other things were things I would actually eat. So I added a lot more of that.

Modified: My friends go to eat bad food way too often. I wasn’t going to stop hanging out with my friends. What was I to do? I just modified what I ate. Let’s say we were going to In ‘N Out burger. Instead of a double cheeseburger with fries and a soda, I would get two hamburgers w/o sauce and a diet soda. My meal still tasted great, but I cut out over half of the calories.

In the end, I’ve found my quasi-diet to be extremely effective and easy to follow. I rarely find myself craving things like I used to and I can’t say I’ve ever really wanted to return to my previous habits. I simply would never be able to survive on a diet where I ate an apple, a bag of nuts and a protein bar for a meal. For those of you who can, congrats. But for those of you who try those lifestyles and fail to keep up, try something like what I tried. It really works and it’s easy to keep going.

I’ll answer any questions anyone has and post more pics if anyone cares. Sorry if this whole thing is disjointed, I wrote it at 5 AM on a whim.

I am here to explain what happened with my LV experience. As some of you know, I posted a number of times (many of those entries are in my old blog, which I haven’t posted the archives of yet) about how LV was a very up and down experience for me. I made those posts even back in April, when I’d only recently arrived. Also, I left LV kind of abruptly — in fact, the first day of driving home was Day 1a of the Main Event. It’s kinda an odd time for me to be leaving LV.

I normally don’t blog about things like this, but I need to get some issues off of my chest… here goes:

The short story is that I moved to LV to live with a girl. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend and spent a fair amount of time in a long distance relationship. I made a few bad decisions on arrival that essentially screwed me over for my whole visit there. The first was letting her live in the apt that I was renting. Although I don’t know why, she changed almost immediately upon arrival. Despite past positive experiences in person, I don’t think we ever got along in our time together in LV. Of course, this made our living situation pretty unbearable for both of us. That being said, I wasn’t going to give up on the relationship immediately. Apparently, she did. According to multiple stories that I’ve heard, she was either going on dates or hanging out alone with another guy within a week or two of getting to LV. Some stories even involved her, in essence, stealing from another individual at a strip casino. I can’t confirm that it actually happened so I am not taking it as a fact, but a lot of things in the story do add up based on the facts that I know about her. In addition, I confirmed that she did hook up (and maybe more) with another guy after less than a month after we got there. She then continued the relationship over a long distance and supposedly is still with him today.

Either way, the whole situation put me on life tilt. I can deal with a girl deciding she doesn’t want to be with me — it happens. It was pretty clear that things weren’t going to work between the two of us anyway, so I don’t necessarily blame her for moving on. It was the way in which she moved on that was completely out of line. First, she never said “I’m done, I’m moving on, we’re over, let’s just get away from each other and each do our own thing.” Instead, she decided to hang around — she wouldn’t leave the apt and get her own place. I asked her to leave a few times and in order for me to get her out of there, I would have had to involve the police. I didn’t really want to do that even though, in retrospect, I should have. I’m sure that created a fair amount of resentment on her part, but in reality, I was just trying to separate our lives so we could each just go our own way and stop putting each other on tilt. I can’t tell you how many times I regretted letting her move in there — it was one of the worst decisions I’ve made in my life. On the one hand, do I have a right to know what someone else is doing or who they’re seeing? No, not really. But also, does she have a right to live in my place where I paid every bill and lie to me over and over? No, not really. If she wanted me out of her life, she needed to take her belongings and, as P5s OTers would say, GTFO.

In the end, she lied to me for months about things. I’m pretty sure she even went so far as to make up a month-long cancer scare, although I can’t figure out why she might have done that. What I do know is that the facts she relayed to me do not make sense on a medical level. I could go on and on listing all of the things that have turned out to be lies, but there’s no real point in doing that.

It ended in ugly, but necessary, fashion. I moved out when she was out of town visiting her boyfriend and, once I pieced together the story, I put her belongings into a storage unit (I guess I should make clear that she withheld basically all details about her relationship and where she saw our relationship heading … I only really put everything together when a bunch of things about her trip didn’t add up and I figured out where she actually was). I didn’t see any other way for us to finally separate. Being back in Atlanta has helped me finally get over the life tilt resulting from the endless lies, cheating and deception. Hopefully I’m basically done with her for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, there is one remaining issue between us that needs to be solved. It will arise at the end of the year and at this point she doesn’t seem like she’s open to any sort of communication, so I don’t know what her intentions are… I can just assume what she’s most likely thinking.

Let this be a lesson to everyone — don’t let people move into your place.