Long overdue pictures from ''Mr. Smith (and family) goes to Washington''

What can I say...I'm the person who still has boxes and boxes of unfiled, loose pictures to deal with; unlike my mother who has my entire life story neatly chronicled in several binders of pictures.

Here's my Picasa slideshow of pictures from our trip to DC to experience the inaugural event and festivities. I still plan to caption but enjoy!

Finding meaning and flow .....

As I stared quickly at my 'out of date' blog and wondered what I could do/say to get into some sort of 'flow' here, my thoughts spun to Jordan Loughren and his valiant, on-going fight against cancer. Jordan is wrestling with a recurrence of lukemia in his bone marrow. Jordan is only 5 years old. Those thoughts immediately put my trivial concern into perspective and fueled this post.

Check out Jordan and his wonderful family - Trey, Lee, Joe and Khaki on his site on CaringBridge.

If you're so inclined, consider making a donation to support CaringBridge and the wonderful support service they provide to families like the Loughrens. I am.

We work smarter, together ... wow, what a tagline!

Ed Brill, Lotus blogger extraordinaire, just shared this video via his blog, and I have to echo his sentiments.

I know a number of folks, working at other companies using Lotus Notes and struggling. I can honestly say that some of the possibilities being unlocked by the lates version of Lotus Notes and products like Lotus Connections and Quickr are truly delivering on the promise of the tagline.



I hope my friends at the aforementioned companies don't rush off too soon before also realizing that they can 'believe the hype'.

Doh, read the instructions, dummy....

I realized when I got home and more closely examined the Blogger dashboard that posts sent from mobile are set to ''draft'' by default. So, my first attempt 'failed' because it (blogger) worked as designed. Doh!

So, expect a couple of belated, ''after the fact'', but contextually accurate blog posts before I finish this weekend.

''Fifty by Fifty'' - my weight loss / health goal

I know I owe everyone an update on our trip to Washington, D.C. for the inauguration of our 44th President, Barack Obama, but I had to share some news.

As some of you know, I've set a goal to lose 50 pounds by age 50 - hence ''50x50'' or ''Fifty by Fifty'' I think 'publishing' your aims and goals in some way helps to keep you (or at least me) on track. To that end, I'm very pleased and proud to report that I'm down to 246.8 pounds as of today!

My starting weight was 261.5 pounds as measured by last visit to doctor. My blood pressure was borderline hypertensive and my cholesterol levels remained higher than desired. Something 'just clicked' and I've been 'on it' since early December. I'm keeping it simple and simply ''Being more active and eating less fat'' I've adopted a quasi-vegetarian diet and I'm currently up every morning between 5 am and 6 am working through a cross-training routine on elipitical machine, strectching and soon, free weight exercises with dumb bells.

As the old Nike campaign slogan suggested, 'Just Do It'

Is trying something for the first time.

In a word....WOW!

Wow, wow, wow! It's not even 8 am on Monday and I am just blown away by the festivities and feeling here in DC.

Saturday morning we woke up and meandered next door to the adjacent mall in Pentagon City and picked up some souvenirs of our visit for friends and family. Then, using our favorite and preferred mode of transportation for the weekend, the Washington Metro, we headed into the city.

I insisted that we pick up our commemorative SmartTrip cards right away and not miss out out on having and using while we were here. I'm glad we did because we heard they were 'sold out' online.

We then headed toward the capitol building and had a chance to get into the Library of Congress (at Cameron's request) just before it closed. You can only take picutues in selected areas, but trust me when I say, it was awesome. We saw the Gutenberg bible, looked over into the 'reading room' and spent time examining various maps of the world including the 1507 Waldseemuller

My dear friend Ava then picked us up and we toured the city including driving the parade route, passing by the new Native American Museum and scooting by the site of the actual inauguration. This is as close as we'll get to the podium, but, man, what a shot.

Sunday, we woke up and got a workout in at the hotel fitness center (I love my in-home Precor EFX, but I know which one I want to get next) and then headed off to church. We attended St. Augustine's Catholic church - the same church we attended when we lived in DC and the church where Coretha and I were married 20+ years ago! We then took the metro down to the ''We Are One'' concert that kicked off the weekend's events. When you see the scenes on TV and you see the Washington Monument off in the distance, imagine standing directly in front of the monument overlooking the scene and this is what you'd see


I'll try to be more timely with 'today's' post, and I'll upload all the pictures I'm taking - the good ones anyway - and include a link to them so you can see them, but again...wow!