Speaking of accommodations, the Grand Wailea Resort and Spa is pretty close to heaven, and on returning to Chicago it was tough to make the adjustment back to our humble abode. The resort had a handful of restaurants, seven or so pools, and a network of waterslides. They also have the “Spa Grande” which is a nice way to spend a couple days on vacation. The spa featured five different mineral baths as well as hot tubs, saunas and more. Faith and I got a couple’s massage which was so relaxing I dozed off for a bit and started snoring. It was simultaneously the most expensive nap I’ve ever taken, and the best money spent on the trip.

I also learned a few things about myself in Hawaii, namely that I get motion sick in the water. Which is really a shame, because I was looking forward to our snuba trip more than anything else on our trip. However, once we got in the ocean to begin snorkeling I quickly realized that I had made a mistake. While the ebb and flow of the ocean waves was exhilarating for Faith, it quickly made me more and more nauseous. Combine that with the fact that I’m blind without my glasses, and snorkeling was pretty much a bust for me. I still tried snuba (we’d already paid our money) but that adventure ended quickly for me, and I spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the boat. But Faith had a great time though, so I have no regrets.

Incidentally, going on a trip with a group of people is a lot of fun. It was nice to spend a little time with the Gerard Design gang, getting to know them better. Plus, it’s fun to walk around and unfamiliar place and run into folks here and there. Both the first and last nights we had a group dinner where we could socialize a bit with the rest of the group. And on the final night dinner, Carolyn sprung it on us that she’s planning on setting regular goals for us to be able to make this Hawaii trip a regular thing – every two years.

For pics of our trip, check out our set on Flickr.

When we received the lists from our families of everyone to invite, it turned out that list was about a hundred people more than our reception hall or church would hold. Being politically sensitive about it, we decided we didn’t want to make any enemies by selectively cutting people from the lists.

Instead, we just cut everyone from the lists, and got married on our own.

No one was particularly upset about it, although I think my mom would have liked a wedding day. But everyone is relieved to not be paying for a wedding – especially Faith and I. We’ve got better plans for that money, like getting together a down payment on a house where we can start a family.

At the end of the day, the important thing is that Faith and I have made official the commitment that we’ve made to one another quite a while ago. She’s the one I want to spend the rest of my life with, and I couldn’t be happier (or luckier) that she’s settled for a guy like me. Now that I’m a husband, I’m going to spend each day making certain that she never forgets how much I love her.

What a difference ten years makes. When I first met Faith, I could barely see myself in a relationship � much less married. I never thought I would buy a house or have kids. When I looked at the future, it always looked a lot like the present. I’m at a dramatically different place now, and I have Faith to thank for it. No one else could have seen this in me, or had the patience to let these changes take their course.

Here’s a shocker: the purpose of exercise is to send your body messages about how you want it to change. It was a total surprise to me that you can appear to be eating reasonably well and exercising fairly regularly and be doing yourself more harm than good.

How to Exercise:

• Monday: Cardio
  Do 45 minutes of relatively low intensity cardio. You want to go at an intensity high enough that you can sustain that rate for the full session, but not so high that you are out of breath and have to slow down. This tells your body to burn fat.
• Tuesday: Arms and Cardio
  Choose a handful of weight lifting exercises to work your arms and lower back. Follow up your weight lifting with 20-30 minutes of cardio.
• Wednesday: Cardio
  Do 45 minutes of relatively low intensity cardio.
• Thursday: Legs and Cardio
  Choose a handful of weight lifting exercises to work your legs and lower back. Follow up your weight lifting with 20-30 minutes of cardio.
• Friday: Cardio
  Do 45 minutes of relatively low intensity cardio, but increase the intensity from the previous sessions. This is so you can increase your endurance from week to week.

When doing the above workout, there’s a few things you need to do. One is that you’ll want to have two routines for each muscle group: so two sets of exercises for Tuesdays and two sets for Thursdays. Alternate them from week to week for variety.

The purpose of weight lifting is to break down the muscle and give it time to repair itself. This is the reason you do three sets of each exercise. You want to do enough repetitions at sufficient intensity to push the muscle to the point of muscle failure. Doing this tells your body and it needs to build up more muscles of this type for future similar activities.

I use three sets of 10-15 repetitions when weight lifting. I use the first set as a warm-up, lifting two-thirds of what I know I’m capable of doing. The second set is at the maximum weight I can lift. The third set is at a bit less than my maximum, to ensure that I have sufficiently broken down the muscle. I rest for about a minute between sets to give my heart a bit to rest. I also try to lift the weight as quickly as possible and then slowly lower the weight down, to get the most from the resistance of the weight.

To keep the pace of your workout moving along, you might want to use “supersets”. A superset is when you alternate two exercises back to back. For example, you might bench press a set of 15, and then do a set of 20 crunches, back to the bench press and then back to the crunches. I’ve been doing supersets, alternating three times before moving on to an entirely new exercise. Doing this allows you to not spend a lot of time resting between sets of one exercise, since you’re using different muscle groups when alternating.

When weight lifting, mix your exercises between using weight machines and free weights. Machines are great for beginners like me, but free weights use more and different muscles. When using free weights I use less weight than on the machines.

Keep a journal of how much weight you’re lifting and push yourself a bit from week to week. This way you can measure your progress and give yourself goals each week for how much weight to use on any given exercise.

How to Eat:

The menu below serves a few purposes. First, it teaches your body to burn what you take in throughout the day, speeding up your metabolism. Quite frankly, even if you excercise an hour a day every day, that’s only 7 hours of your 168 hour week. Teaching your body to work more efficiently with food goes a long way to getting you in shape. Here’s the diet I’m typically using now:

• 7 a.m – Breakfast
  A scrambled egg and some whole wheat toast. Or, if you’re crunched for time like me: a protein bar. My experience has been that the peanut butter ones are the most edible.
• 10 a.m – Morning Snack
  Either a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts.
• 12 p.m. – Lunch
  A turkey sandwich on whole grain bread and a piece of fruit.
• 3 p.m – Afternoon Snack
  Either a piece of fruit or a handful of nuts, whatever I didn’t have for the morning snack.
• 7 p.m – Dinner
  A dark green salad with roasted almonds, a chicken breast, a fistful of vegetables and a half fistful of potatos.
• 10 p.m – Evening Snack
  Some vegetables, some nuts or a small piece of chocolate or ice cream. Something to keep you from being hungry before bed. Try to make it a reasonable snack though, because anything calories you don’t use before bed will stored as fat.

Understand this: I have a wicked sweet tooth (talk to my dentist) and it’s safe to say that most things I eat probably fall into the areas of carbohydrates and fats. But this diet hasn’t been that tough (except for weekends). It’s mostly been making small substitutions, which haven’t been that painful. Instead of a handful of candy at work, it’s now a handful of nuts. Instead of eating a giant ham sandwich at Jimmy John’s for lunch, now it’s half a turkey sandwich at White Hen. When I really want a soda, a Coke Zero instead of a Mountain Dew. Not that bad really.

The most important things to remember about switching your eating habits are: eat a number of small meals throughout the day, don’t be so restrictive that you can’t stick with your diet, and remember that it’s not a diet – it’s a lifestyle change. Plus, if you totally screw up and eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream – don’t give up because of it. Just get back on the horse and do better. Lots of good decisions will add up, just not overnight.

In particular it was great to spend some time with my mom, and to see some great friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. I’ve made some great friends since moving to Chicago, and over time some come and go. But I’m thankful for those friends both from the past and present, whose friendship endures both time and circumstances. As I have grown older, these friends have truly become members of my family, and my love for them is just as strong.

This Thanksgiving has been a reminder that I have a lot to be thankful for: my fiance Faith, my family, my friends and a lot more.

1. I didn’t sleep the first two days
2. I believed that the more I drank and the less I paid attention to the craps table, the more I won
3. I started laughing uncontrollably at the blackjack table and ran off, leaving my chips at the table
4. I think I called Faith at 4am and told her I wanted to become a journalist, and that we had to figure out how to pipe oxygen into our apartment’s air supply
5. There was an unfortunate episode on the flight home involving a steak and turbulance

Details are sketchy past that. So this trip went MUCH more smoothly. Well, smoothly with the exception of our first morning in Vegas. We landed at 8am and had a lot of time to kill before check-in, so we wound up in a timeshare presentation. Long story short: the guy pitching us was a pleasant and elderly man named Sheldon (straight out of Glengarry Glen Ross, swear to god). The upside: we received $75 in cash and a pair of free tickets to the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay (where we got to skip to the front of the line). Plus, the presentation easily killed close to five hours of our day. That evening, we wandered somewhat aimlessly and made a blood pact never to go to one of those presentations again, regardless of the perks.

Day two, we did a bit of sightseeing on the strip and saw “Le Reve” at the Wynn hotel in the evening. There wasn’t much story to it, but it was a very visual show. Our seats were a bit more interactive also, since we were sitting in the aptly named “splash zone”. Between watching incredible feats of stage design, acrobatics, and dance were were also constantly looking to see if we would be hit from an errant wave kicked up by the action. After the show we wandered in the surrounding hotels a bit, but I started to get tense because they all started to look the same after a while, and I didn’t know what we were doing at that point. We retreated back to our hotel on the old strip, and started having fun again playing blackjack at the $2 table. In an effort to create a dramatic memory, when I felt I was done playing, I bet all my winnings on my final hand, and lost. Would have made a great moment to have won, but I was only out $20 in the first place, so it wasn’t much of a hardship.

Day three, we got a lot more organized and learned about the $2 shuttle that travels up and down the strip. We went to Mandalay Bay to cash in our free Shark Reef tickets. We got to pet a small stingray, and watch sharks, jellyfish, and more. Afterwards, we went over to New York, NY and rode the roller coaster. Incidentally, the coaster was quite a bit more intense than either of us had planned for. After the coaster, we went to see “Zumanity”, a semi-explicit show by Cirque du Soleil. We liked that show a bit more than “Le Reve” because it both included nudity, and was funny to boot. After the show we went back to the old strip to play more blackjack and get a lesson on playing craps.

We both lost a little money gambling, but compared to eating or seeing shows in Vegas, losing money at a $2 blackjack table is a real bargain. Ninety minutes of “Zumanity” cost us over $150. Three hours of blackjack only cost us $20 each, and we got free drinks during that time. Not that it mattered ? all the money we gambled with was courtesy of our timeshare experience anyhow.

High point: Faith showed me a little area where you can sit by an indoor pond and watch koi swim. It’s very relaxing. I might come back sometime with my iPod and watch the fish swim a soundtrack of Brian Eno’s “On Land” or Daniel Lanois’ new album “Belladonna”.

The poor teenage girl running the drink stand – she looked shellshocked, and for good reason. While standing in line waiting for my soda there were no fewer than three screaming children surrounding me. Two more and I would have had crying in full 5.1 Theater Sound.

But other than the droves of lollipop kids, it was a good trip. I got a good look at exactly how large a walrus is (really big), and enjoyed watching otters and seals play in the water. I also saw a pygmy hippo (bigger than it sounds), and a family of apes, and a lot of other great animals.

However, I still prefer Lincoln Park zoo. The layout of the grounds is much more navigable, they have a small lake with paddleboats you can rent, an underwater viewing area for the polar bear, and you can get much closer to the otters.

And for some reason, I’m not upset about it. Yet.

I have a strange calm about this loss of over 320GB of my music. A collection that has taken me years to compile. A collection that has meant more to me than a music collection should.

I will rebuild it. And it will be better than it ever was.

Regarding the new year, I’ve done a lot of thinking about 2005. Most of 2005 was a banner year. I got engaged, and I saw more concerts than ever before in my life – including 3 festivals (Coachella, Intonation, Lollapalooza). And I switched jobs to a healthier work environment. On paper, I’d have to say it might once again have been the best year of my life.

But there was that whole "getting laid off thing" which was just purely awful. Not that the actual outcome of that event was bad – quite the contrary in many ways. But it was the experience of getting laid off that was so awful. I have what is possibly an unusual amount of self-doubt on a normal day, and getting laid off gave me the impression all of a sudden that maybe all that self-doubt was warranted. The experience left me stunned for a few months. I hadn’t prepared for a situation like getting laid off: my finances were fairly messy, and I hadn’t saved like I should have been. I was spooked like I hadn’t been in a long time. Maybe ever.

But all drama aside for a moment, I was only unemployed for two weeks. And after a few job interviews, I had secured a full-time position with Gerard Design heading up their web work. So I guess it wasn’t really all that awful. What was awful was the realization that up to this point I had still largely been living like a teenager, and that life might require more responsible planning to avoid the drama of life’s surprises.