Justin Germino Ramblings

Image Credit: Rebecca Dominguez

I saw someone posting a picture about the Coconut Crab on twitter and decided to do a little research into the critters and share with my readers.

According to Wikipedia, the Giant Coconut crab is the largest land-living arthropod in the world and it inhabits the coastal forest regions of several Indo-Pacific islands. The crab is a type of hermit crab and is famous for its ability to crack coconuts with its strong pincers to eat the contents.

It is the only species in the Birgus genus and is also known as the robber crab or palm thief due to rumors about it stealing shiny objects like pots and pans.

The coconut crab starts off being born in a water environment and loses its ability to breathe water, and they have to find a suitable shell to inhabit and migrate into larger shells as they migrate to land. It is said that coconut crabs can even use broken coconut pieces as temporary shells until they develop a hardened abdomen.

Coconut crabs primary eat coconut, but are omnivorous and will eat tortoise hatchlings and dead animals. They will also steal food from each other and drag their food into burrows where they can eat safely.

Coconut crabs reportedly commony reach body lengths of 16 inches with 3 foot leg spans and weight around nine pounds, in some literature specimens were reported measuring 6 feet across and weighing 30 pounds. Coconut crabs are believed to be able to live more than thirty years.

This makes Coconut crabs one of the most interesting crabs in my opinion? What do you think?

-Justin Germino

A friend and I were discussing one side effect to losing weight which is the sagging of skin around the mid section, some of it tightens with exercise and time, but unfortunately once skin stretches from gaining weight and you lose the weight, whether it be from diet pills or exercise, you will be left with excess skin that hangs like a flap around the areas where your fat was stored.

As my friend and I discussed about potential solutions, the only solution I could see is some sort of plastic surgery to remove the excess skin, there just isn’t any other way to completely firm up when you have lost enough weight to have a flap of skin left over. Who could afford the thousands of dollars for such surgery or want to take the risks?

Really though if this happens to you, you should be happy with your weight loss and be thankful you are getting healthier. If it is excessive, like 100+ pounds of weight loss and there is so much excessive skin then I feel it is perfectly justified to get the surgery if you can afford it and save up for it.

-Justin Germino

Finding another 3 scorpions in the last week in my house has me confirming with what was reported in the Arizona local news. Scorpions are multiplying and this is one of the worst years for scorpions around the valley. The reason is simple, foreclosed homes become breeding grounds for crickets which are food for scorpions. They setup nests and spread out across communities where there are lots of abandoned homes.

There were three abandoned homes on my street alone, one right across from the street where the weeds and yard ran amuck with 5 foot grass and various grotesque weeds. I mowed them when I could but it was barely enough to do much damage against the “sore thumb” appearance of the property.

Bark scorpions the most common kind found in Casa Grande, are very small some as little as 5cm in size and they hide under chairs, table legs, kids toys, weave in and out of the carpet and are small enough to fit in your light sockets and get in an out of there. They crawl up from drains, they are excellent swimmers and can swim up and climb out of your toilets and sinks.

Fortunately nobody in the family has been stung by one yet, but we continue to find at least 2-3 a week in the house. If we are finding that many, there must be dozens of others lurking in the walls and in places we can’t see. At least there isn’t a single cockroach to be found anywhere in my place.

-Justin Germino

I find myself suffering problems again with my stomach where I start off the morning with a stomach ache that gradually gets worse throughout the day until I find myself vomiting around 2-3pm every other day, or sometimes two days in a row. These are the same type of stomach issues I was having last year and the year before and come and go in my life. It seems that my mind creates unnecessary stress that causes anxiety which causes me to have severe stomach problems and acidity issues which leads to throwing up.

The stupid thing is I can’t pinpoint what is causing the stress that would be making me feel this miserable last week?
Is it going to the fair last weekend?
Is it that I may be a speaker/presenter at CA World again in April 2010?
Is it that I have to put together a presentation for upper management in a few weeks?
Is it home stress?
Is it worry about my wife’s Halloween Show and hope that it succeeds and does well for her company?

I tend to have no reason for suffering the physical stomach ailments, yet I know they are anxiety and stress related. Sometimes food triggers them, but in other cases they are just because I don’t have a good way to just relax emotionally and just “Hakuna Matata”. Yet I tell myself there is no need to fret on anything and I believe it, but my internal mind just tightens up like a knotted ball.

I may be needing to seek out some meditation techniques soon if I can’t seem to figure out how to solve my stress issues, or at least find the causes.

-Justin Germino

Now I know why I hadn’t attended the State fair the last few years, it is extremely costly and we went through about $200 in ride tickets in 3 hours.  Though it was 3 hours of pure family fun and the memories are priceless, the Arizona State Fair has dozens of rides, game booths, activities, animal exhibits and a petting zoo for the kids.  Plus all the junk food you can eat, this year feature were some pretty grotesque items including:

Deep fried Scorpions
Deep Fried alligator
Deep fried Moonpies
& Deep fried snickers

I am proud of myself for not eating any horribly unhealthy fair food, but we just enjoyed the rides and games.

Here are some pics:

-Justin Germino

I actually have had this conversation several times before in the past few weeks about whether or not I have enough life insurance. I do have one policy which covers about 4x my annual Salary, but they say you should have 10x your annual salary in policies optimally to protect your family in case of an accident.

What I probably will do is fish around and collect some term life quotes early next year to pick up a 2nd policy. According to the Total Money Makeover which I am trying to follow, Term Life Insurance is by far better than Whole life since if you put the difference in monthly payment between whole life and term life into even a modest Mutual Fund or Money Market, you will yield far more savings and more money from the invested funds than you would from your Whole life policy.

Either way, I need to purchase another policy next year just to keep my family covered in case something should happen to me.

-Justin Germino

I recently started a new lunch routine to eat healthier and have to give a plug to Green Giant for their Healthy Weight frozen vegetable medleys. These individual frozen veggies come in several variety packs that have only 90 calories per serving or 180 for the whole box (trust me you want to eat the whole box) in one sitting.

So what I do is just fix myself some frozen vegetable medley, and three slices of a lean turkey or chicken breast and I have a lunch that is delicious and has less than 300 calories with two entire servings of vegetables that taste great and some lean protein. You can vary the vegetable selection and meat selection and you intake far less sodium than most frozen microwave lunches, and more vegetables than any sandwiches or most other types of prepacked lunches.

Just one of my lunch recommendations.

-Justin Germino

I know a many coworkers and friends crazy about Choppers, Hogs and the like. They ride around in groups and attend events en masse bragging about the freedom and adventure you get while riding a motorcycle. This just never has appealed to me so much, I don’t enjoy “riding” and speeds combined with the fact that you are likely to suffer far worse injury on a motorcycle vs being in a car really reduces a motorcycle rides appeal to me.

I also know several people who were in motorcycle crashes, some that took months to recover from and left permanent physical and psychological scars. But at least they have their lives, as some people are not so fortunate. It makes me wonder if you got into a motorcycle accident would it be worth calling a Pleasanton motorcycle accident attorney? If you were in an accident and were not at fault, you would need to make sure your expenses, repairs and medical bills were covered.

I don’t know anybody who has actually used an accident attorney, but I can imagine they can help if the other driver does not have insurance, or the insurance is giving you a hard time. Either way, I won’t take chances with a motorcycle anytime soon, just too risky for my blood.

-Justin Germino

So my wife is the owner of Rock Along Productions which is a company that promotes and helps put together music events in Arizona and last month her company launched a new service called AZ Music Connect, this is a classifieds AD site based on a wordpress theme that allows anyone in the Arizona Music Community to promote their bands, music, shows, gigs, sell equipment, look for band members and more.  She started the service after realizing there was a ton of frustration in the music community over Craigslist not serving the community well, too many bands and people in the community were just leveraging Craigslist to just bash other band members and spam over the place.  With a dedicated market this site has a lot of potential in the AZ Music community and she continues to have great ideas to further and promote the arts and music in Arizona.

So if you live in AZ check out AZ Music Connect and see what its all about.

-Justin Germino

Tomorrow Windows 7 is released and I will be picking it up from Best Buy on my lunch break.  I will spend the evening re-imaging my home computer and testing out the brand new Operating System from Microsoft in the hopes that I will achieve greater overall system performance, especially with Internet speeds.  Vista is known for having bottlenecks in the registry that prevent your computer from multitasking on the Internet, Windows 7 removes those limitations.

-Justin Germino

The xenophobia ironed a pancake