All that Prichard has to offer

I have heard many people in the Mobile, Alabama area talk bad about the city of Prichard, which is located just north of Mobile.  But many of the negatives I have heard about this city are just simply untrue.  I work in Chickasaw and every time I go to or leave work, I have the pleasure of driving through Prichard.  So why does Prichard get a bad reputation around the Mobile area?  Well, yes, it is true that corruption in the government has sapped the city fund dry and they no longer pay out pensions and sometimes can't pay the police or fire fighters (wait, do they have fire fighters?).  But is that really such a big price to pay when you have the pleasure of driving past more abandoned buildings then operable ones??  I don't think so.  Plus, where else can you say that the favorite restaurant in town had the ceiling fall in and then had the building condemned?  R.I.P. Tice Cream.  One cool thing about working in Chickasaw is that we are a part of the Prichard water system, which means it comes out of the faucet looking like tea.  You just have to add sugar, and instant sweet tea!  Then who can forget the two Country Bears homes on the main drag.  That's right, these old style shacks are lacking running water and electrity and you can watch as the crackhead residents scavenge the streets for wood to burn.  Don't forget that most of the neighborhoods are project housing.  That means that the sidewalks running through them actually make for really good lunch runs.  But be careful of the occasional hypodermic needle that is laying on the sidewalk, excellent agility training!

But, I have to say, my favorite part of Prichard is the hookers.  Yes, now that the police are not always getting paid, they don't seem to mind the hookers running the street.  So you can spot this odd form of wildlife near where the Tice Cream used to stand.  It is usually the same two or three, but sometimes you see a new one.  The new ones are sometimes hard to distinguish from normal crackheads.  Yesterday, I actually saw one wearing a livestrong bracelet.  That's right, a crackhead, possibly even a hooker, standing on the corner with a livestrong bracelet to complete the outfit.  Ahhhh, crazy characters!  So to celebrate these denizens of the dark (well, not just the dark in Prichard), I have now added a Hooker Tracker to my side bar!  Yep, you can now count hookers along with me every day of the week!  Enjoy!

One tubby, tubby, tubby!

I have never been a skinny person.  I am the oldest of 5 and the only one that is not a stick.  I'm also the fastest eater out of all of us.  I think I learned early on that if I was not the first one done eating, I didn't get seconds!  When I was little (like 5) my mom told me that I should play soccer because when I run around so much, I'm not as fat.  And then on my first day at a new school she told me I should suck my stomach in when I walked around so I didn't look so chubby and the kids wouldn't make fun of me.  I think I actually managed to hold my breath that entire day at school.

Well, with my frame size, genetics and eating capabilities, gaining weight has never been a problem for me.  I used to spend ALL of my spare time either on the baseball field or lifting weights, so I got pretty big while playing through college.  I was a catcher, and at 6' tall, I topped out at 225 and found my best playing weight to be 212-216.  When I graduated college and was no longer playing at an extremely competitive level, I switched to something else that I could excel at. Drinking.  I was damn good at it but found that my playing weight rose a little bit with this new sport...

It wasn't long before I had grown bored with this new challenge and moved on to triathlon.  I never raced as a clydesdale (200+) although, for my first few races, I definitely could have.  My first real year in triathlon, I took off training like a mad man and my weight plummeted.  I bottomed out at 168 and was lighter than my brother for the first time ever!  Over the offseason however my weight rose again and I have been struggling to get down to the 169-172 range, where I feel most comfortable racing.  But now, my stomach, which I have named Albert, must die.  If I am going to step my racing up, I need to not be carrying around all of this extra weight.  So I'm going to list my weight on the sidebar every day so that Matt and Marcia and anybody else that might happen to read this blog can give me grief.  Maybe this will be the last bit of motivation I need to get to the weight I should have been at in March.

How bad can you be??

Well, when it comes to blogging, the answer is pretty bad.  With the triathlon team that I am on, good ol' Gear and Training, I am supposed to be posting race reports after each race.  Yeah, that hasn't happened.  I think I'm three races behind.  We'll call that a no bueno!

So, I am going to get back on this thing and just pretend that somebody reads what I write here!  Also, I think I need to change up the design and add some stuff, but I'm not quite sure how to do all of that, so if anyone (actually reads this and) has any ideas or suggestions, than message me!

Also, I want to keep a running total of 2 or 3 different numbers on the side bar, any idea how to do that?