Moving, Starting a Business, and Changing Plans

Back when we decided to move from Fairfax to Virginia Beach nothing was certain. It wasn't certain that the move was even going to happen because it depended on more people than my wife and myself. We had to make one plan for moving and one for staying until we visited Virginia Beach in September of 2015 and I set a date. I stood on the beach and felt at home in a way I hadn't in Fairfax in a long time. I knew this was something that had to happen and I made it happen.

Once the plan was set in motion we had to figure out what we were going to do when we got to Virginia Beach. Our original plan, which I thought was a good one, was to sign up for a sight called Rover and use that as the linchpin of our pet sitting business. When Rover was first described to me it was described as Uber for pet sitters and from everything I saw of it when visiting their website that is what it appeared to be. Rover would let you put a profile up on their site and the clients would pick and choose from available Rover pet sitters. This sounded like a great way to get some business and so a couple weeks before we moved we created our profile so we could start taking bookings for when we'd be down in Virginia Beach.

After creating the profile we somewhat forgot about it with the rush to move and get the condo rented out. We should have realized there was a problem when we had heard nothing after a week from Rover, but we were to absorbed in moving to even notice, but once we were settled in Virginia Beach I asked what the hold up was and why we weren't live. My wife gave them a call and found out they had misplaced her e-mail that authorized the background check. Now keep in mind my original plan was to start taking bookings before we even moved and now here we are a month from when we created the profile and it isn't live and they lost the e-mail authorizing the background check.

After a couple of phone calls my wife was able to get this straightened out and we were back to waiting for them to complete our background check. Keep in mind that at this time we had a couple of paychecks left from our previous jobs in Fairfax but had no new money coming in. My plan was for Rover to help us find business so that we could have an income. We had acquired a separate phone line for the business, but the only calls on that were from advertisers and with no income coming in that wasn't anything we were in a position to do.

Here is the real fun part and where we really should have realized Rover wasn't a very well run company. Aside from them losing the background check authorization e-mail that is and never realizing it until we called after four weeks. One morning we got a notification that our profile was live. This excited us and we went out and tweeted and facebooked the link to it. Well right after we did that Rover pulled the plug on our profile and the links we sent out went to a profile of our dog. This was not what we wanted to send out to the world and it didn't make either of us very happy. My wife was back on the phone with Rover and a couple days later our profile was finally live, but not really.

Rover doesn't offer professional pet sitting care. Rover offers care from amateurs at a discounted rate and then takes their cut off the top. We understood that this is what Rover was and were prepared to offer cheaper prices to people that booked through Rover in order to get business and get established in a new area. What we weren't expecting was the hostility and blacklisting from Rover. Rover had made our profile live but had put us on a wait list despite having no pet sitters in our zip code of 23451 as this link proves.

After this we forgot about Rover. They weren't going to be the avenue for income that I thought they would be and they obviously weren't interested in having us help them out. I have to pause here a moment to reflect on the fact that I do not understand this business model in the least. How does it benefit them to shutout an entire zip code? They have no one currently servicing it and of the 16 listed available sitters only two are a reasonable distance away with one of those two being borderline.

Rover didn't forget about us though. Or more accurately they had our e-mail and we were on the mailing list. When we got an e-mail that provided tips for being successful on Rover I felt the familiar tinge of rage and I responded to the e-mail that the best help they could provide was taking us off the wait list and making our profile active. This started a chain of communications that wen't nowhere but only made me angrier with each one. The one that really set me off was when they respond to my question of how to get off the wait list with the form e-mail that had made me angry in the first place. All of their suggestions were for things our profile already had. We had nine glowing reviews and numerous pictures of the pets we'd taken care of in Fairfax. I explained to them time and time again that it would benefit them to have a pet sitter available in this zip code instead of trying to pass off that people in Suffolk, Portsmouth, and even North Carolina could be of service for mid-day dog walks for people living in the Oceanfront/Dam Neck area of Virginia Beach.

The last response I got from them they said if I wanted my profile to be live I'd need to book my current clients through Rover or market my Rover profile. The two problems with that are I am in a new area and all the clients that used us in the past are in Fairfax (not to mention we worked for a company in Northern Virginia and signed a no compete clause that would extend to Rover), and secondly if Rover is going to take money off the top and not market my profile by making it live then why am I going to market Rover? The entire purpose for the existence of Rover is as a directory for pet sitters. If I were to spend money to market my profile there is nothing from stopping someone that clicks through the line I paid to be marketed and shopping around on Rover. In other words if I have to pay for marketing then no one is taking money off the top and I'm only going to market myself and not all the pet sitters who are also on Rover.

So here we are two and a half months since we moved and Rover was a giant bust of an opportunity. If things had gone the way I had wanted I'd be happy to take all my business through Rover but they never put in an ounce of effort to help us out and every question or concern I had was deflected or met with a defensive attitude. I had wanted Rover to be the linchpin of my business, my chief source for pet sitting jobs, but Rover made that impossible.

Here's the thing about meeting opposition. You can let it defeat you. Give up and go work for Target or try and find an office job, or it can strengthen your resolve. I'll let you know which one I choose by paraphrasing Pedro Cerrano, "Fuck you Rover. I do it myself."              

Five Tips for Continued Commitment to Fitness

You always hear the advice that reaching a goal is just step one and fitness is no different. Whatever goal you've set for yourself whether it's to lose a few pounds, bench a certain amount, run a mile in a certain time, or complete a 5K the next step is always the more difficult. Once you accomplish your primary fitness goal the journey shouldn't be over. You always hear how these fad diets or home workouts don't work because a vast majority of the people that complete it soon after put the fat back on and that's because they go back to their unhealthy lifestyle. Fitness isn't a 30 day or 90 day program. It is a lifetime commitment and that is hard for a lot of people. So here are my five tips for sticking with it past that initial goal.

1. Reward Yourself

Go look at any diet plan. Pick one. Paleo, Primal Blueprint, the Whole30, what is the first thing they tell you? Give up foods that taste good, and even more frightening give up alcohol. With the craft beer movement in full swing and some of the best tasting beers (chocolate stout) being the worst for you this is not a good time in the course of humanity to just be giving up alcohol. My tip is don't give it up. Don't give up delicious beer or pizza or burgers or milkshakes but limit them and limit them to rewards. You can do this in a variety of ways. I like to after leg day go and grab a bagel or if I go to the gym five days a week I'll hit up a brewery on the weekend and grab a pizza. Most of your weekday meals should be filled with fish, chicken, green vegetables and other foods that you know are good for you, but if you accomplish all your tasks for that week or even one task on a certain day go ahead and give yourself a reward. It will keep you motivated and won't suck all the joy out of life.

2. Do What you Enjoy

Running is a great exercise. It has scientifically been proven to be one of the best exercises for you, but guess what? I hate running. I find it boring and just getting started with a running program is brutal on my body. It isn't fun. What is fun is for me is lifting large amounts of weight. This might not be fun for you and you might instead enjoy running or you can't stand either but you like yoga or CrossFit or TRX or kickboxing or taking your dog on a hike. It really doesn't matter how you stay active just that you do.

3. Change Things Up

Say you're in the gym one day and just feel sapped of motivation. You've been doing the same three day a week 5x5 program for six weeks and you're just bored of it. The fun is gone from the exercises, your progress has stalled, and parts of your body are starting to cry in pain when you're working them. Stop doing this activity and do something else. Working out might be called work but that doesn't mean it has to feel like a chore. It is perfectly fine to do an activity for a limited amount of time and then move on to something new. In fact it could even be quite beneficial. The body isn't just a machine for raw strength or endurance or speed and switching up the training every now and again is both going to keep you engaged and help the body to develop in different ways.

4. Listen to your Body

Minor aches and pains happen when working out. It's coming to feel discomfort in muscles and joints from the stress of working out but sometimes those minor aches and pains can develop into major injuries. Pain is your body's way of telling you that something is wrong and maybe what you're doing is causing that pain. If the pain is too much to work through or in an area that worries you like the knees or lower back then stop doing an exercise or program and go ahead and apply rule number three and switch to a different program. Our bodies around made to go to the gym every day and lift hundreds of pounds. It's good to take a break every once in awhile and let the body heal but don't take a full break. Keep your workout time slot filled with some sort of activity even if it is a lower intensity activity. Think of it as the equivalent of the High Intensity Interval Training practice of active rest applied on a larger scale but instead of high knees between sets of burpees its a week of daily morning hikes instead of weight training.

5. Schedule a Feat

Why are you working out if death is the only guarantee of life? This is a thought that creeps into my mind every now and then while I'm working out, but this isn't the case if there is something I'm working out for. Not so much a goal anymore but a feat. There are plenty of physical feats around. Many local gyms offer power lifting or bench competitions, there are a million 5K's and if your a bold endurance athlete schedule a marathon or triathlon, then there are the obstacle races that are so popular these days. Go ahead and lay your money down for a spot in one of those and you're going to want to train up. Human nature leans towards vanity. No one wants to finish last in a 5K or fail to climb the 8' wall in a Spartan race. The possibility of failure and humiliation can be a strong motivator. As well as wasting the $100 you laid down to participate in the feat, and when you accomplish it you'll feel better about yourself and ready for the next challenge.

Welcome Back

On February 1 I sat in my recliner bored out of my mind. I had my brand new X-Box One control next to me but the system launch had unfortunately not come with many good games and I needed something to do. That is when I turned to X-Box Fitness. I had recently finally healed from a torn rotator cuff but had also quit my membership to LA Boxing which was now UFC Gym. I wasn't used to seeing a fat out of shape me in the mirror and it had to end. So I figured the X-Box Fitness was free. I started out alternating between a longer workout on one day and a short ten minute one on the next and then I progressed to two or even three workouts a day.

The biggest thing I did though was I didn't stop. My ankle, knee, shoulder, and wrists all took turns hurting but I didn't back off the workouts. I was careful with the areas that were in pain but I knew if I let my body stop me I'd never get back to where I needed to be. Fast forward a few months and I started walking down to the community gym every other morning to use the dumbbells and cardio equipment. I mixed that in with the X-Box Fitness and started to see even better results.

The Path to 1000 Push-ups Begins with 100

The photo on the left is from March, a month after I started working out, and the photo on the right is from this past Saturday. The lighting in the two photos is a little different and I am in a slightly different pose but you can see I've made some progress from then to now. The big reason for this post though isn't to show before and after photos. The photo on the right was really taken as a before photo, because for the first time in my working out I've set a real goal.

Hiking and Wining in Deleplane Virginia

Living right off of interstate 66 can have its benefits. The highway often creates a wall of traffic so impenetrable that it feels like I live in a walled city from which there is no escape, but on a beautiful Sunday morning in late June and heading west traffic is not an issue. As escapes out to the country go Sky Meadows State Park is among one of the best. It lacks the majestic waterfalls of White Oak Canyon or the views of Old Rag, but it is less of a drive and still provides a good hike.

It is easy to forget how steep the North Ridge Trail is until you're halfway up it and covered in sweat on a cool 70 degree morning. The entire loop which includes the North Ridge Trail, the AT, and the White House Ambassador Trail is somewhere between four and five miles long. You get some good views of Paris, Virginia and can even see Washington DC on the horizon if you look for it. Sky Meadows provides a good hike to start the day and that was what we were looking for as visiting some of the local wineries was our main goal.

Focus on What you Can Control

Recently I've developed a new outlook on life. For a couple weeks I was feeling overwhelmed by forces out of my control. I was reading other people's thoughts on social media on how people like me are everything that is wrong with the world. I was thinking of writing a counter to this, but it would do no good and maybe I'm a little too afraid of opening myself up for criticism (I should work on that). The fact is we live in a society that claims to value individualism but at the same time is quick to stereotype and has whitewashed many of our identities. Think about America like a stew full of beautiful and unique ingredients but if any stew is cooked too long it becomes a brown indistinguishable mush.

The other aspect of life out of my control that was bothering me is what has become of the American Dream. People have lost the focus on the actual American Dream and only think of the stuff. The American Dream is the little house with the picket fence and two and a half kids. Those are the benefits of the American Dream but it is not the dream itself. Think back to Thomas Jefferson and the ideal American, the yeoman farmer. The self sufficient man. The American Dream isn't having a great credit rating so that you can go into massive debt and have all this stuff it is to be financially independent.

The Easiest thing to do is Quit

I've reached a point in my workout routine where I look in the mirror and don't see the results I was expecting. In the first couple months of working out I saw amazing results. Belts that I wasn't even able to fit into before starting now can be pulled through to the second loop on my jeans, and I can fit into pants I haven't worn in ten years. Now that I've seen those results I want more, but as I've gotten in better shape the improvements have slowed down.

It is a little disconcerting to go from seeing very fast results to not seeing results because the progress is that slow, but progress is progress and while the desire exists to simply give up that isn't an option. Even if I don't make any progress forward going backwards is the worst thing possible. When you've dug yourself into a hole the first thing to do is to stop digging. While in four months of working out I haven't gotten to where I want to be I am in a hell of a lot of a better place than I was.

A Worthy Goal from a Petty Reason

The impetus for change can come from many sources. Some people wake up one day, look in the mirror, and decide they are tired of the person looking back at them. Others see a friend make a life altering change and wish to follow in those footsteps. Others still may be inspired by the story of the stranger that has made a great change in their life. My reason for getting back into shape was not so noble.

My wife's college friends picked this summer to have a reunion of sorts. I've met a couple of them intermittently throughout my association with my wife, but I've never gotten to know any of them. Essentially they are strangers. The important part isn't the friend's I've met that will be there it is the one that I haven't. When my wife was in college she had a boyfriend as many college females do and this boyfriend and her were friends with the same people. The big point out of all this rambling is that her ex-boyfriend, the only other male she had a long term relationship with, will be there.

Sprinting to a Finish Line that is Miles Away

When working out I've always had one problem. I have a tendency to push myself too hard. I have the constant feeling that I am not pushing myself hard enough because my body fails at certain things and it is when the body is tired and at the point where you feel the lactic acid burn that the real work is done. Because of my anger at those failings I push myself whenever I get the chance. My weakness in working out has always been core stability. It is because of this that I attack that weakness with plank jacks and mountain climbers. I find them difficult and need to push myself to get through it, and once I get into the mindset of pushing myself I don't stop.

That first paragraph is a lot of rambling to get to the point of this post and that is that the week before last I pushed myself to three workouts a day. It was a very hard week. I ended each day more tired than I'd been in a long time, but I made it through. The next week wasn't that difficult and I decided to continue doing three workouts a day, but I would make the second workout more intense. This could have been a mistake or the other mistake could have been to ignore what had been until this week a minor pain.

Getting Into the Fourth Best Shape of my Life

Let's start this story with an old advertising slogan. One that was popular when I was a youth and used to describe a product I enjoyed then and still do, and that slogan is, "Bigger is better." Where I heard it most was to describe professional wrestlers like Earthquake and Typhoon. It didn't matter that they were fat, they were bigger and that was better. My real idols at the time were Macho Man and Brett Hart. I enjoyed putting my four year old nephew in the Sharpshooter and running around the house in my underwear doing elbow drops off the back of the couch.

At that time I am going to say I was eight years old, and I wanted to be big. I made my mother buy me some dumbbells and I started lifting them as best I knew how. The next time I went to the doctor I asked him how best I should lift the weights. I figured if anyone was going to know about how to get big and strong it was the doctor, but instead of telling me to just work on running and body weight exercises while my body grew he told me to not lift weights until I was sixteen. With weightlifting suddenly taken off the table there was only one path left to me getting big, and that was cramming lots of food down my throat. This could have been done in a healthy manner as well but no one told me that one either.

Driving in Snow: The Most Important Thing I Learned in College

The only real explanation for why am one of the dozens of people in Northern Virginia that knows how to drive in the snow is because I spent four years of my life going to college in Rockingham County. During the winter down there snow was a regular occurrence and everyone knew how to deal with it. There was none of the Northern Virginia escapades of drives either making themselves an obstacle by over reacting or being a hazard by pretending nothing was going on. The normal flow of traffic dropped by about ten miles an hour and everyone went along with it, and when there was an incident the emergency responders knew how to deal with it.

That was my main issue this morning. I knew there would be plenty of idiots on the road and I knew there would be incidents, but I had to be where I had to be and venturing out in this mess wasn't an option. In Rockingham County an army of sand trucks would have been out through the night and plows would have been working overtime to keep the roads clear and nothing would be shutdown for 4-6 inches of snow. It would've been life as normal, but Fairfax County isn't Rockingham County and my only home was that most people would stay in their homes.

Why I Quit on the Job Search

I went to have dinner with a friend last night and during that dinner the talk turned to jobs. My friends and family for the past year and a half have been trying to help me find a better job. I am one of the millions of American that is currently under employed. I have a four year college degree with a major in English and a minor in Political Science and I spent the first five years of my life in the job market enhancing various computer skills. I can program a CNC router using Alpha-Cam or MicroVellum and I am also certified in AutoCadd. These skills as well as my ability to read, understand, and translate construction plans are valuable skills, but I never want to work in the construction industry again.

As the talk turned to jobs and what I could do or where I could find jobs I shied away from it. I, like most people, don't like talking about my failings, and I've found the current job market impossible to navigate. Eventually my friend told me that if he had my writing skills he would put them to better use. That a first person account of what it is like to be under employed in post-recession America would be something people would be interested in reading. For lack of a better term it would be real.

Finished

I didn't sit there staring at the final poem or call a friend and tell them i was done. I didn't even post a message on social media. My 100 days of writing project became a private affair and when I finished I kept it to myself, but it was more than that. I had no feeling of relief or accomplishment. I was finished with this large project that I had poured myself into, and yet when I finished I had no feelings about it. I was done and that was it.

I had planned out the final poem for about a month. I had figured out what it would be about and was only waiting for day 100 so that I could write it. Which brings up the question of when is something written. Was this poem really the work of day 100 or was it from day 70? Is a poem written when it is put on paper or when the idea is conceived? I cannot give the answer to that, but if I had to I would say it is the latter. I do most of my writing in my head. Often times the act of putting fingers to keyboard is a final motion. The draft, first revision, and sometimes the second or third revision have already happened in my mind before my index finger makes that first keystroke.

The Best Game I Don't Want to Play

One of the first computer games I ever played was Sid Meier's Pirates, but I never beat the game. I've owned this game on no less than four separate occasions. It was given to me on a floppy disk and then when we owned a computer without a floppy drive I bought it on CD. After that I ended up buying a downloadable version on one of my laptops and finally I bought the iOS version for my iPAD. I've never stopped enjoying the game, but to me the game wasn't about finding the lost sister. It was about being a pirate and taking over the Caribbean for whatever country I was representing.

Now, 26 years after Pirates was first released there is a new pirate game and my feelings about it are much the same. I am talking about Assassin's Creed IV. I've played the game for a bit now and I should be deeper into it than the fifth chapter, but I don't want to play the actual game. I want to roam the Caribbean causing mischief and mayhem. I want to take down ships, improve my ship, and then take down bigger ships. I find the game extremely fun, but the main quest feels like a side adventure in the life of a pirate, and as of right now I've left it far behind me and have spent much more time pillaging and raiding the Spanish Main.

The hallmark of a truly great open world game is that it gives you the freedom to create your own game. All the times I've played Pirate my game was to take over the world. I turned it into a game of Risk with pirates and as of right now I am playing Assassin's Creed IV in much the same way. I don't know what will happen when I have the ship fully upgraded. I am sure I will finish the main quest. It hasn't gotten that intriguing but I am generally curious to see where it goes, and you have to play the main quest to unlock some of the better equipment in the game.

Some of my feeling about the main quest line might be that I enjoyed Assassin's Creed III immensely and the best innovation in that game was the combat. That is gone in IV and Edward Kenway plays much weaker than Conner. Conner flowed through combat and taking down large groups of enemies wasn't much of a challenge. There were more than a few times that my entire play session involved me running through the wilderness reenacting scenes from The Patriot.

I found the combat to be the best part of that game, and that is what I find lacking in IV. With all that being said I think I am going to enjoy IV more as a game. The navel battles and the joy of being a pirate are what make it fun. The Assassin's Creed part of the game feels like it is almost an afterthought, and I am ok with that, because like Sid Meier's Pirates years ago I don't need to even play the game to have fun playing the game.      

The Government Shutdown and the Dystopian Future

The current state of American politics is like something out of a science fiction novel, and not a particularly good one at that. I can almost see a down on his luck writer sitting in the SciFi Network offices pitching this story about how one day the United States government collapsed because they just couldn't get along anymore. The entire point of politics became too much about figuring out which side was more to blame than getting anything done and then nothing got done and before you knew it mountain lions were roaming the streets of Washington DC. In real life there is allegedly a mountain lion roaming the streets of DC.

This is a great symbol for the current state of things as the biggest aspect of the government shutdown so far is that national parks are closed. That means the government has deemed the Grand Canyon closed. Think about for a second. The Grand Canyon is closed. Bull fucking shit it is. The Grand Canyon is huge. private helicopters can still fly over it so people can see it and I am sure hikers could get past whatever flimsy barriers the government has put up. If they really wanted to close national parks they would fill in the Grand Canyon with concrete. Maybe put a strip mall on top of it. Tarp over the waterfall in Yosemite and put a cork in Old Faithful in Yellowstone. Now that is a real shutdown.

Braving Whole Foods

Whole Foods wasn't always the hip trendy hell hole that it is now. It once was called Fresh Fields and it sold all the organic foods and that type of thing but without being overpriced and pretentious. My mother used to like to shop at the Fresh Fields in Springfield for produce because you could find things there that you couldn't get anywhere else. They had star fruit and kiwis and mangos before they became vastly popular and could be found everywhere. They also had a wide variety of melons and other exotic fruits and vegetables. They were basically nothing like they are now. It was mostly the worlds largest produce section. They didn't have much else and definitely didn't have all the growler filling stations of food preparation stands. They were a small operation grocery store offering specialized food that was hard to find at other stores.

Then other gourmet stares started to pop up and they offered all of the produce plus other things. I remember the first time I went into a Harris Teeter I thought it was magical and then I went to a Ukrop's and eventually a Wegman's. Each experience was better than the last, and each store was offering more and more and going to them was more like an event than grocery shopping, and then Whole Foods took it to another level. Fresh Fields was re-branded and was now going to be the organic super store of everything wholesome that would make you and the world healthy, and people bought in. Saying something is organic is a quick an easy way to double the price of anything. Going to other gourmet grocery stores may feel like an event for the shoppers but Whole Foods actually tries to make it an event.

The Obligation

Sometimes I feel an obligation to write. Part of that is I enjoy writing and I have fallen out of the habit before. Even if you enjoy something it is easy to stop doing it. You just start doing other things and then sooner or later you find yourself only doing other things, and so I have to force myself to write at times in order to make sure I set apart a little bit of time each day to do something I truly enjoy. The other part of it is that I am working on something I've named, "100 day of writing," and now that I am over the halfway point I can say that I've run out of ideas. The poem I wrote today was actually about being out of ideas. As of right now it feels like I am trying to squeeze juice from the pulp and rind that is left over after a citrus fruit has been juiced.

The real thing I need is to do something. When I first started out with the 100 days of writing it was because my mind was full of ideas. Now I have emptied out those ideas, refilled it, and emptied it again. I also did a good amount of hiking and other activities early on, but after 50 days I've allowed myself to fall back into the routine of daily life. I get up, eat my Coco Puffs, go to work, eat lunch, sit around wasting time, eat dinner, and go to sleep. There is plenty to do around here and the main inspiration for this project was discontent at how this area rejects history and nature. How Norther Virginia is nothing but a bedroom community. That there is no here here.

Dark Fantasies and GTAV

Have you ever expressed to someone who is a close friend a thought you have? A momentary desire formed in anger or frustration from the dark recesses of your mind, and their reaction is to say that isn't normal or it is weird. First let's start with a little story so you know what my dark, evil thoughts look like.

It is a common thing in this area for parents to wait for their children to get home from school. They also do this in the morning but the arrival is more scattered so not as bad, because the morning largely depends on children getting ready. The parents that have been at home all day or are coming home in time to pick up their children aren't on any time crunch and therefor gather early and in mass. The worst part of this is because they are waiting for their children they believe laws don't apply to them and will park their cars at a stop sign. This is especially bad on roads where there isn't normally street parking and because these roads aren't made for street parking more of the road is taken up.

Walter White: The Modern Anti-Hero

Stop reading this if you don't want the latest episode of Breaking Bad spoiled for you. Now with that warning aside I will write an introductory paragraph that doesn't talk much about breaking bad. I don't do much writing at night because I don't like writing at night. I feel wasted and spent at the end of the day, but with this morning's events at the Navy Yard my focus throughout the day was elsewhere and I also didn't much feel like revisiting fictional violence in a world so full of real violence. I really have nothing to say about the events at the Navy Yard as all the facts aren't known and speaking without facts is a quick way to become foolish.

I had these thoughts for a couple days. Even before Ozymandias aired I knew what was going to happen. Hank was going to die. He had to die. Before the season began that is how it had to happen, but this episode was Walter White's move from modern anti-hero to tragic figure and then it will swing back somewhere in between for the final two episodes. The exact moment was when his family was huddled together on the floor crying while Walter White screamed that they were a family. Everything he has done has been for his family and like any good anti-hero he has his own sense of morals that runs counter to society's at large. Walter White never saw it as a big deal that he was cooking meth or becoming a crime lord because he was doing it for his family, and a lot of this was rationalizing for him because in more than a few ways Walter White is very similar to Jay Gatsby.

What is Going on Here

There is this gas station on 123 and during the middle of the summer I got gas there on a regular basis. It sort of became my go to gas station because I drive by it multiple times on my work route and it is easy to get gas there and it is also and Exxon and accepts Safeway points, but then as summer started to wind down I noticed something. Other gas stations started to lower their prices. Just a couple weeks ago $3.50 in Manassas was a deal but then suddenly gas in Centerville was $3.50 and then $3.50 hit Fairfax. In case you are wondering gas in Manassas is now $3.20, but there this gas station off of 123 sits still charging $3.89.

It is weird to see, because there is always someone there getting gas. I should mention again that this gas station is on 123 and not only that it is on 123 in Oakton. There is a gas station next to a Giant less than 100 feet away charging $3.65 which is still high for the area but it isn't $3.89. In many ways I wish my phone wasn't a piece of crap so I could take a pitcher of this and prove this madness to everyone, but I can't.