Life After Thirty

I turned thirty today and I thought it would be a good time to start blogging for my own records.  I don't really care if anyone else reads this, but hopefully someday I'll be able to share it with my kids.

Some important things about me today:

I've been married for just over two years, since October 3, 2009,  to my wife Maria. 

Our first son was born on July 24, 2010 and we named him Gabriel Isaac. 

Our first daughter was born just a few days ago on November 29, 2011 and we named her Emily Joy.

I am 6 foot 1 inch tall and weigh 201 lbs as of this morning, but I used to weigh 170 lbs back in High school and reached 199 lbs during the middle of my senior year in college.  During high school, I promised myself that I wouldn't let myself cross 200 lbs ever because I never wanted to be a fatty. 

Well, I am a fatty. 

I hit a high of 213 lbs in January of 2011 and have made it down 10 lbs this year so far.  Exercise and healthy eating is an important part of my life, but I consume too many calories from alcohol and then pigging out on food before bed so weight loss had been hard.

I've made it a goal to cut way back on drinking now that my daughter is born and I've already lost 2.5 lbs in 6 days.

I love video games.  I own a Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii, DS Lite, and PSP.  I am trying to buy less games and do more renting from Gamefly and Redbox.  I'm only partly succeeding in that and am still buying more games than I should.

I play World of Warcraft and have a 85 Undead Rogue and 84 Human Warlock (female that I named after my wife).  I play casually these days and just do daily quests, battlegrounds, and use the Dungeon Finder now and then to run dungeons.  I'm looking forward to the Raid Finder that was just released with the 4.3 patch that came out last Tuesday.

I work at a large Variable Annuity / Life Insurance company as a 'Software Developer I'.  I like the company I work for and the people I work with.  Sometimes it's pretty stressful, but the days go by really quickly.  I have to be on call once every 5 weeks and I don't really enjoy that.

I wish I knew Spanish but I haven't made it past the basics that I learned in a semester of Spanish that I took in college.

I wish I could play the guitar, and am trying to learn by playing Rocksmith and using Justinguitar.com.  I don't have a schedule that would allow me to take real lessons or the time to really focus on it.

My cholesterol is above the healthy level and is at 217 last time I got it checked (200 and below is good, 240 and above is high risk).  I went out and bought NFL Training Camp for the Wii in hopes that it would motivate me to do some weight lifting since most of my exercise involves running on the treadmill.

My blood pressure is usually around 132/90 which is well into prehypertension and almsot into hypertension.  I need to focus on lowering that and I am hoping that cutting back on alcohol and salt, and then weight lifting and losing weight will lower that back into a healthy range.  I want to be able to grow old to see my kids have kids.

I'm Catholic, but not a very good one.  I got to Mass and regularly go to confession but I don't spend much time praying outside of that.  I don't feel very close to God and haven't for a few years.

Overall I am happy with my life, but I am hoping to improve it even more.  I want to treat 30 as a time to focus on getting what I want out of life instead of a time to be depressed about getting older.  I'm not sure how often I'll be writing here or even what I'm going to do with this blog.

The only thing I know for sure is that it will be about my life after thirty.