Justin Germino Ramblings

In an unusual article published on DailyTech titled Running Barefoot Better Than Wearing Running Shoes there was a study done that shows that runners who were barefoot had a completely different running style of front pad touch down first instead of heel first, as a result this put much less stress on the hips, feet and legs and lowered the chances of stress fractures and tears greatly.  I found some of the comments on the article amusing like “You mean bare feet actually are more optimal for the body than running in shoes?” you would think this is common sense as shoes were added to protect the feet from injury and scrapes from walking on ground.

Obviously runners can’t just jog or run in open sidewalks and streets without shoes, but this is something to consider when using a treadmill at home or if you are running on beaches or softer ground.  It is healthier on your feet and body overall to run on your treadmill barefoot than to wear shoes while using one. I myself use a stepper and since my feet never actually leave the ground I don’t think it will provide any specific benefit to my own exercising, but I should walk barefoot more around the house. My wife is always telling me not to walk with my shoes on all the time. (But I do it because we find two to three scorpions per month on the floor and I would rather be safe than sorry).

-Justin Germino

I have had the blessing to be relatively unscathed by the troubling economy in recent years and have not really felt its effects until this week. However our family was recently affected by the economy which has put our family line under some hardship.

Part of the problem is related to the state of health care in this country which provides no insurance for anyone between poverty and retirement age and you are forced to get insurance from a company.  If you have a health condition prior to trying to obtain private insurance you are either rejected or paying far too high premiums.

I feel for all the people who put their lives and careers into a company to be shown the door or cut just a handful of years prior to retirement and no matter what you say about the health insurance coverage issues going around, there is a huge gap in health care and something needs to be done to take care of the people who are caught between the system. Unable to buy private insurance and unable to qualify for medicare, there must be something in between.

-Justin Germino

So the other day my wife decides that its time to play Scrabble with our six year old. I was busy trying to get my three year old to use the toilet (he is still potty training) and meanwhile my wife is busy teaching my son the basic rules of scrabble. We decide to forget the points and just have him practice creating words and building them onto the existing letters on the board and my six year old starts off pretty well with two and three letter words. My wife meanwhile plays the game like she normally would and decides to capitalize on an S already on the board and spells the word “S E X” while playing with my son.

Our son quickly asks mom, what is “Sex?” what does the word mean? Meanwhile, I am asking my wife why she would choose such a word when playing Scrabble with a six year old and couldn’t she have chosen a different word. If you saw the word above it it was “WET”, and I was thinking (while laughing to myself) that it looked like an X-Rated game of Scrabble for a second. Fortunately we dodged the bullet and weren’t ready to explain that word to my six year old, but the time will come soon enough.

Word of advice, when teaching your kids to play Scrabble be careful which words you use!

-Justin Germino

It was a very busy weekend knocking off some long overdue chores and many of which were a result of the recent rainstorm in Arizona that devastated my landscaping in the front and back yards.  I had to cleanup damaged lawn furniture, broken pieces of wind chime and pull hundreds of weeds which seem to crop up overnight.  There were so many weeds in fact that I had to go to Lowes and purchase a weed sprayer with a self pumping spray and hose them down with chemicals.  I pulled maybe 300 manually, but there were thousands more.

Then I had to help my in-laws with a few errands, they had purchased a new couch to replace their old damaged one and this couch had a 36″ clearance on its shortest side, whereas their front door only had 34″ of clearance.  By squishing the cushions we were able to squeeze the couch through their door, but it wasn’t easy and took almost forty minutes of straining, pushing and adjusting to get it to fit through the door.

Last but not least, my in-laws had to put in a new ceiling fan in the master bedroom.  This ceiling is vaulted and they wanted a fan with overhead lights instead of just a fan.  My Father in-law is in very poor health and unable to climb a ladder anymore, this left the chore up to me.  I have a case of acrophobia (fear of heights) and I also get very shaky and uneasy on ladders if I go up more than a few steps.  Overcoming my phobia for at least the two hours it took, I dismantled the old ceiling fan (picture above) and installed the new one (forgot to take picture).

We celebrated by all eating at Chili’s for dinner.

-Justin Germino

A few days ago while Dish Network was out repairing the damaged lines from the rain storms the television in my family room went haywire. Permanent garbled letters and numbers were spewed across the screen and the TV no longer responded to the power button, channel buttons or remote. You unplug the TV and it goes off, you plug it back in and it immediately powers on in its stuck haywire mode. This was a 27″ Duramax cheap TV that was bought from Walmart several years ago and I had known it was now at the end of its life.

We went to Walmart and I can’t tell you how amazed at how much LCD TV prices have come down over the years, we were able to replace our 27″ Duramax CRT TV with a Sony Bravia 32″ LCD TV and it cost less than $400 for a 32″ LCD TV. It is 720P not 1080p, but this was a secondary TV for the family room where the kids watch and I only use it to play the Wii which doesn’t support 1080p anyway. It was a great deal and I had earned enough blogging money in January to pay the TV off in full come end of February when all my blogging money pays out (Most blogging programs pay you 30 days after you do the post, so have to wait a month to actually be paid).

Still nice to know I was able to get an entire 32″ LCD Sony Bravia and pay for the whole thing with blog earnings. Feels pretty sweet!

The kids enjoy their new TV as well.

-Justin Germino

Often most people choose a WordPress theme based on the cosmetic appearance of the theme during free demo, at least this is how I search and choose WordPress themes. This theme I am using for JustinGermino.com had the feel I was looking for at the time, but it is a beast of a theme to use as some annoying problems with the CSS prevent me from getting formatting the way I want. I had done several CSS tweaks to get the sidebars to look at least halfway decent, but my posts still have problems with images.

The theme wants to left align all images, and even when you center them it forces text to wrap around the images. I tried every WordPress CSS trick I can think of and am not able to fix it other than wrapping the image inside a table just to get it to separate from the text and center. This slows down post writing a bit and makes it more cumbersome to insert images and work on other things.

I really want to purchase the Thesis wordpress theme, which so many professional bloggers do. I plan on saving up some of my blog earnings to purchase the Thesis theme and use it for JustinGermino.com, with the possibility of changing DragonBlogger.com over to it later. For now though I have done so much work on the DragonBlogger.com theme it holds up fairly well and I like the look and feel of it.

How about my readers, how did you choose your blog theme? Do you like it? Do you want to change and just haven’t gotten around to it?

-Justin Germino

My three year old has perfected the three minute nap and I am totally jealous.  The other night we were driving home from Olive Garden at about six in the evening, and he hadn’t had a nap all day.  He starts nodding off in the car and I keep abruptly waking him to say wait until we get home to fall asleep.  I forget to challenge him and he manages to nod off for about three minutes, so we get home and he is still tired and groggy.  I change him for bed, brush his teeth but by the time I insert his feet into the bed he has popped back up like it was morning and he had a full nights rest.

Three hours go by and he has no signs of being tired or fatigued, in fact he is more hyper than he was at ten in the morning.  A three minute nap and he mine as well be the worlds fastest rechargeable human battery.  It took six attempts to get him to go to bed with constantly walking him back into his room.  Meanwhile I myself need to learn this little trick, imagine if all we had to do was take a 3 minute nap three or four times a day and have that much energy.  I swear I used to drink four red bulls a day and never saw that kind of rush.

I have been trying to perfect napping for a while, on rare occasions I can plop down on the sofa on the weekend and fall asleep for 10-15 minutes (that is about as much alone time I can get without the kids waking me for something that they need) and I feel fairly refreshed.  Most of the time I nap and feel worse and more tired when waking up and regretting that I tried to nap in the first place.   I want a sleeping chamber that can amplify the benefits of napping, like beam recharging waves into your brain and body.  You sleep in the chamber for 5 minutes and gain the benefit of 5 hours of sleep.  That is what science should be focusing on.

-Justin Germino

So we were at Walmart on the weekend where I saw the book Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger and my kids noticed the book as well. My wife and I decided to pick up the book and I will start reading a chapter each night to my kids as their bedtime routine. My kids love sword and sorcery genre things and the book appears to have just the right mix of fantasy, silliness and we look forward to it as an activity together.

I will let you know what I think of the book after we finish reading it together. It is a pretty meaty book, too much for my six year old to read by himself but probably ideal for eight and older. I will be reading it aloud to my six and three year old boys. (Hopefully the three year old will sit still long enough to listen to a chapter, he gets to be pretty wild at bed time).

-Justin Germino

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of HealthyTuna.com. All opinions are 100% mine.

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Fish oils which contain Omega 3 Fatty Acids are among the most beneficial nutrients you can take in for your body, numerous studies show how healthy fish oils can help boost brain function (critical for the developing brain of newborns and infants) and can help slow down aging, fight heart disease and even improve and combat depression.

Though you may read about Tuna and some other fish containing high levels of mercury and being relatively unsafe for pregnant women, you can find many varieties of healthy tuna that provide so many benefits it greatly outweighs the minor risks.

Salman and Tuna are vital sources of healthy fish oils and should be consumed on a regular basis and a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in October 2006 by Dariush Mozaffarian and Eric Rimm showed the the benefits of increasing your dietary intake with fish, even fish with slightly higher levels of mercury far outweighed the risks. This included the benefits for pregnant women and fetuses, and in a later study by Emily Oken from Harvard Medical School of 25,000 Danish women showed that babies whose mothers consumed the highest amount of fish had a 30% increase in development milestone scores in comparison to moms who had the lowest fish intake.

CNN has news stories all the time and you read about it in the news and medical journals constantly. Fish is not only healthy and tastes good, but is beneficial for life and aging well.

I loved anything grilled, and the recipe for Grilled Albacore Tuna Steak on the website looks fantastic and is quite healthy for you, here is a reprint of the recipe:

Ingredients & Instructions
1 1/3 pounds skinless Pacific albacore, cut into 3/4 inch thick loin cuts
2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons olive oil
6 tablespoons lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon oregano, crushed
dash of cayenne
Sautéed Red Peppers (see below)
2 French rolls, split lengthwise
1/4 cup chopped basil
Sautéed Red Peppers
1 red pepper, roasted, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch strips
2 teaspoons olive oil
2 teaspoons minced garlic
1 medium onion, sliced into thin half-rings

Instructions
Rinse albacore with cold water; pat dry with paper towels. Set aside. Make vinaigrette by combining oil, lemon juice, pepper, salt, oregano and cayenne; mix well. Divide in half. Marinate albacore in one-half of the vinaigrette for 30 minutes, turning once. While fish is marinating make Sautéed Red Peppers (see recipe below). Drain albacore reserving marinade. Place on greased grate, 4-5 inches from hot coals. Cook 5-6 minutes, turning once and basting frequently. Do not overcook! Albacore should be pink in center when removed from the heat. Toast rolls lightly on grill. Brush toasted sides with remaining vinaigrette. Make four open-faced sandwiches by topping with albacore, Sautéed Red Peppers and fresh basil. Serve immediately.

Sautéed Red Peppers

In non-stick pan, sauté garlic and onion in oil until onion is translucent. Stir in red peppers and remove from heat. Set aside.

Source: Oregon Albacore Commission

• Bottom Line:

You should be adding more fish to your diet and Tuna is a very inexpensive, delicious and versatile fish that provides many health benefits.

One of the worst storms in decades to hit California and Arizona has caused so much rainfall that Casa Grande which is around fifty miles south of Phoenix has common area’s flooded and my own backyard overlooks a temporary stream that is nearly 4′ deep. For one week until the water dries I have a flowing stream of water in my yard and it gives the appearance that I live on a Riverfront property.

Some parts of Northern Arizona received over 4′ of snow in a single day and there will be massive runoff when the snow melts soon. Sedona itself has had its river reach twenty seven feet which is the highest water level on record in history.

Meanwhile, the state could use the rain to help replenish our reservoirs as the state is constantly in a drought.

-Justin Germino