Today is February 29. Happy Leap Day!

Today is also a really special day. Other than it being February 29 (a once in four years occurrence), it’s February 29 on a year ending in 00 (a once in four hundred years occurrence). Plus, it’s a special day for me…today is the day that I’ve officially started my training.

Training, you ask? Well, here’s the deal. In the past, I’ve not liked things about myself. I point out my flaws quite often, especially when looking in the mirror (and they’re not always physical ones). I would look at myself and say, “I wish that I didn’t waste time. I wish that I read my Bible more and had a quiet time with God. I wish that I ate healthier and that I worked out every day.” And on, and on…

Then I decided to do something about it.

Thus began the formation of my creed. It’s not posted anywhere on this site, but here’s the gist of it…I want to better myself in these areas:

• Spiritually
• Physically
• Mentally
• Financially
• Temporally

So basically, I’m wanting to become closer to God in Bible reading and prayer. I’m wanting to become stronger physically and keep my body healthier by working out and eating better. I’m wanting to expand my horizons and become sharper mentally. I’m trying to spend my money more wisely and make it work for me, instead of me for it. I’m wanting to use my time more efficiently; not to the point where I have everything scheduled and I don’t have any free time or fun, but where I get done what I have to get done without waiting for the last minute before it gets done.

That’s a mouthful.

It’s also a lot to undertake at once. But I’ve started it this morning (it’s about 8:30 a.m. as I write this), and I really am feeling better about myself already. I’ve had a quiet time with God, I’ve worked out (yes, I’m a weakling on the bench press, but that’s okay…it’s going to get better. Plus, my arms and chest are actually sore for the first time since high school!), and I’ve eaten a reasonable amount of cereal for breakfast. (That’s right, mom, I ate a half a bowl. And not half a Jethro-sized bowl, either. 🙂 ) I feel really good. And I’ve got a full hour before class, and I’m ready to face the day!

I know that it’s not always going to be easy to get up three hours before my first class every day so I can go work out, and there will be times that I’m really going to want a burger. But I figure that the end result (a happier me) will be worth sacrificing some of the little things.

It’s Leap Day…and I’m taking a big one with this training regimen.

As a child, I always read the comics. (Some things don’t change as you grow up, and for this I am thankful.) Of course, the first one on the front page was always “Peanuts”. On how many newspapers was it not?

I didn’t usually laugh at “Peanuts” back then. Looking back, I realize that it’s because I didn’t understand the humor. Now that I’m older, and perhaps a little wiser, I can understand a little more about Charlie Brown and the gang.

“Peanuts” was never about physical humor or obvious one-liners, though as a child I did usually laugh when Lucy pulled the football away from Charlie Brown and caused him to miss. (I don’t laugh about that anymore; it’s probably because I was a kicker in high school.) But things that they said back then that didn’t strike me then do now. For example, in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”, Lucy is complaining that she always gets stupid toys or clothes and that she never gets what she really wants. When Charlie Brown asks her what that is, she replies, “Real estate.” I, personally, find that quite humorous now.

Another thing that “Peanuts” dealt with was unrequited love. That’s a subject that I’m familiar with, though probably not to the extent that Mr. Schulz was. But Charlie Brown’s perpetual crush on “the little red-haired girl” is something that I can really identify with. Charlie’s interest never changed; mine, to this point, always has, but the point is that I understand what he is going through. I identify with what Schulz was trying to communicate, and it brings an important point to light; sometimes comic strips are not about making you laugh. Sometimes they’re about making you think.

Charlie Brown played the lovable loser for the most part, but sometimes he had his moments in the sun. He hit a home run one time to win a game and stop what certainly is one of the longest losing streaks in the history of sports. He even got to give the little red-haired girl a kiss once; he didn’t remember the rest of the night because it made him so delirious with joy, but Linus was there to retell it all. And the interesting thing is, knowing that Charlie Brown won sometimes makes you, the reader, feel good. It gives you hope for your own little troubles and anxieties, even if they’re not as important as winning a game is to a child.

It took me a while, but I finally understand a lot about what “Peanuts” means. And now, Charles Schulz is gone. 50 years of work is left behind. 50 years of insights into the human condition. Many thanks to the real Charlie Brown for performing this labor of love.

Because now I understand.

Yesterday, it snowed at the University during the course of a semester for the first time in four years. And I mean snowed.

Surely if you’ve been keeping up with the weather recently (as of the time of this writing), you’ve heard all about the freak snowstorm that’s been going through the South. Well, at roughly 10:00 on January 27, 2000, snow started falling at the Baptist Student Center, where I was.

Now, I’m a big fan of snow. I come from a place that doesn’t get it much, so seeing it and being in it is a big deal to me. But I thought it really interesting that two of my friends who were there with me were witnessing their first snowfall ever. I mean, they’d seen snow, but they’d never seen it falling before. And these are college students. Seeing the look on their faces was like getting a view at a 6-year-old’s face on Christmas morning.

And what do we do when we find out it’s snowing? We have a snowball fight, of course. Right out there in the parking lot of the student center. Roughly 15 college students acting like little kids in the snow. A block away or so, out on the Quad, I heard that hundreds of other students were doing the same thing.

Now, like I said, we were all college students here. But this was all perfectly sane for us to do — because it was snowing.

This brings up an interesting point. Falling snow in Alabama is one of the few things I have ever seen that can take all kinds of people, each with their own troubles and cares, and bring them together to forget all of that and just be free. It allows them to release all of that worry, replacing it with the fear that the next snowball thrown is going to knock you smack in the head. In other words, it made us childlike again. It made us pure, in a way, like the very snow that was falling.

I loved it. We got about 5 inches or so of it. By the time morning came around, the snow had turned to a steady rain, and most of the snow had been turned to slush and water by it. And with it, you could feel a part of the kid in all of us leave.

Sometimes I wish that we’d have a snowstorm like this more often, so we can have more times like this. But I also realize that having them only every once in a while makes it special…it helps us to see it not from the weary eyes of college students, but from the bright eyes of children ready to get out and catch flakes on their tongues and build snowmen. It lets us relive, if just for a little while, those times when we were didn’t have to think about so much and were more innocent. More pure, like the driven snow.

I don’t remember exactly where I heard it — it could have been on an episode of “Frasier” — but I remember someone one time speaking about the “tyranny of the blank page”. That is to say, when one is trying to write for whatever reason, the first few words are always the hardest ones to get out. The same thing happens to painters…the first brushstroke is the hardest one to make on the blank canvas.

Today, after staring at my monitor, fingers not moving, for about twenty minutes, it occurred to me that this could be extended to web site design. I mean, think about it. You’ve got nothing but a blank screen except a

<html>
</html>

staring right back at you. What are you going to design?

The situation combines the problems of the above two. You have total control over both text and graphics — compounding your situation. You want everything to mesh, to make sense when looked at on the whole. You want it to say something…to speak to the viewer, whether it makes them laugh, cry, or think.

In addition to that, you’ve got the worry that anyone will look at the thing at all. If you design a site, you like the idea of people coming to your site and looking at it. Otherwise, why are you designing it? When you start thinking about that, those two lines of HTML etch further into your brain.

Sometimes I know exactly what I’m going to do when I sit down at the computer, ready to design. Other times I don’t really know, but I get inspiration from somewhere. But I’ve had a lot of those times where I just stare at those two lines and say, “What am I going to do with this?”

So I don’t really have a solution. But it was fun writing about the problem. In this case, for me, it alleviated it.

Fall is finally really here. And I couldn’t be happier. Finally, the wavering between 60-degree days and 80-degree days has stopped…

Autumn is one of my favorite times of year. There are plenty of reasons why.

First off, I like cold weather better than warm weather. It’s brisk and it just feels good to me. It also means that I can wear cold-weather clothes again (which I like better than warm-weather clothing), especially flannel. This, of course, is a good thing. (A corollary to that is the occurrence of the now annual 1122 Flannel Quest, the third edition of which took place this past Friday.)

I like the changing of the leaves. I take a drive along River Road (they call it Jack Warner Parkway now, but it’ll always be River Road to me) every Thursday in the fall semester to watch the progression of the changing of the leaves. I don’t think I could live in a warm-weather climate, because I’d miss the leaves turning.

It’s also football season…which, of course, I like.

I the biggest thing to me, though, is the fact that a triumverate of special days for me come in fall and the resulting winter. My birthday’s in October…and then Thanksgiving and Christmas come. Those holidays will begin to take on added importance to me because now my sister and her husband will be visiting then. When I see my sister and her husband during Thanksgiving (at least, I think I will), it will have been over three months since I saw them last. It will be over two months since I last saw my parents.

Fall is a special time of year to me. Most people consider spring the time when all things are made new, but to me autumn holds that distinction too. I remember my own birth, football season comes back around, school starts up again (I only get to say that one more time until I have kids of my own!), and I see my family again.

So yeah, the temperature drops and the wind starts to blow. But my spirits generally start lifting as the leaves start falling.

I got my cable disconnected two days ago. I sold a few old CDs that I don’t listen to anymore. I also finally got a local ISP connection up here (I’m not using the university’s dial-up system anymore).

Big deal, you say.

Well, each of these in and of themselves probably aren’t a big deal. They’re simple little things. But when combined, they’re going to mark a big change for the good in my life.

How, you ask? Easy. I don’t have cable anymore. I discovered this week that there are only two days out of the week that I truly care anything about watching television. The rest of the time I spend watching TV is purely out of habit. I come home, I flip on the television, and two hours pass before I realize what’s happened. I figured out that the two nights that I really care about watching something weren’t worth the time I wasted watching it or the money I spent on cable. So I went and got it disconnected. There are a lot of things that I plan to do with my new-found time, and when I watch Friends I can watch it with friends.

The CDs were along the same idea. I didn’t really listen to them much anymore, and I figured that it would be better for me to get CDs that I actually did listen to instead of just keeping the old ones. So I sold six of my old ones to a used-CD place and bought two new ones.

The local ISP was also a no-brainer. I had wanted to go that route for a long time, because the university’s dial-up connection only allows you to stay on two hours at a time (I don’t normally spend that much consecutive time online, but it can be a pain downloading stuff) and because you can never get a connection when you need it. Realizing that I had an extra $30 each month from the cable to work with clinched the deal.

So, let’s see…I no longer have in my life one of the biggest wasters of my time (cable TV), things that I never used anyway (the old CDs), and a somewhat useful but often-irritating ISP. I now have lots more free time, new CDs that are useful to me, and a better dial-up connection, not to mention $15 saved per month.

Simple little things. All I had to do was just put forth the effort to make the changes. And there probably a lot more of them in my life that I haven’t noticed yet. Look for these…individually they might not mean a whole lot, but collectively they can really change your life for the better.