About The Niño

So what the heck is this blog about? You got me. Seriously, if I knew what I was doing here, I’d be getting paid for it, BELIEVE ME!

I guess I would have to say that I just like posting random stuff here I find interesting, enraging, intriguing, etc. I created this page as I was coming out of a nasty video game addiction, so I guess you could say this is my therapy

~The Nino
Blog created: October 20th, 2008

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From inception date of October 20th, 2008

94 days to the 1000th reader – January 22, 2009
43 days from that to the 2000th reader – March 6th, 2009
21 days from that to the 3000th reader – March 27th, 2009
07 days from that to the 4000th reader – April 3rd, 2009
07 days from that to the 5000th reader – April 10th, 2009
07 days from that to the 6000th reader – April 17th, 2009
06 days from that to the 7000th reader – April 23rd, 2009
06 days from that to the 8000th reader – April 29th, 2009
05 days from that to the 9000th reader – May 4th, 2009
07 days from that to the 10,000th reader – May 11th, 2009
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32 days from that to the 15,000th reader – June 12th, 2009

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Biography

[Link to - Initial Entry]
[Link to - Update 4/11/2009]

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First entered 10/20/2008 -

Born in Glouchester, MA in 1980, my mother told me that I made it known at a very early age that I aspired to become a writer and deeply-read individual. I graduated from a small, country H.S. and moved to New York to begin attending a private, Christian 4-year college studying English and Secondary Education. My adviser told me that if I loved reading and writing, the only real thing I would be able to make a living at doing this would be teaching, so I threw myself into the educational system.

During this time, I met my wife Jennifer at this same college. We were married in the Summer of our Senior year of college and began to prepare for our careers upon exiting our further educations.

Upon graduation, contrary to the expansive words given to the “wide-open” field of teaching, I struggled to find a job as a High School English teacher. Much of the setbacks I dealt with in the job related to three main problems:

1. I was not politically connected to anyone in the system.
2. I was already a preferred substitute teacher
3. I was overweight

None of the people I had as recommendations were from the area, so I am sure boards were hesitant to hire someone untested from out of the area. The second reason for problems was that I was listed on the preferred substitute teacher list, and because of the substitute teacher shortage in the area, they were hesitant to remove me from the list to a permanent position. As far as the overweight aspect of this story, I have only myself to blame for being overweight at that time, but teaching is very much a performance art in its own right, so being overweight didn’t help.

As such, my wife left her job as a Headstart teacher to have our first daughter, Zoe. Upon her leaving, we forfeit our health insurance and I was forced to give up substitute teaching for a more fixed position with benefits. I was hired at a local bank and have worked in their Online Banking/Customer Service department ever since.

Until recently, this is how my life played out. It is obviously pretty depressing to not work in the field you were trained in, and so I stayed overweight and became more and more inwardly focused. I began playing video games as a form of escapism and became addicted to World of Warcraft.

It started innocently enough… my friend knew I like this type of genre and introduced me. I began playing in March, 2007 and quickly began leveling. I began playing incessantly, and my wife grew to hate the game. Eventually, (I think), she began to play the game too in an attempt to connect with me again. I became uncaring of the things of Real-Life… my Master’s thesis lay unfinished and I quit looking for teaching jobs.

About 2 months ago, everything broke. My marriage and relationships with my family and friends were in shambles because of the amount of time I had invested into the game. My weight had ballooned, (I’ll mention numbers… 347), and my health was beginning to deteriorate. You can do the math, I was born in 1980… I was 28-years-old. Due to an occurrence I won’t mention here, I was forced to look at myself in the looking glass of desperation and see what I had been doing not only to my own life, but to the lives of those closest to me.

I am happy to report, however, that over the course of the past 2 months, I have begun to turn my life around. I have lost nearly 50lbs by going to the gym religiously and eating healthily. I am reconnected back into my Chrisitan faith and have begun to make changes to both my attitudes and outlooks on life. I have quit playing World of Warcraft and now have begun to devote myself back to my wife and daughter to reforge the relationship I allowed to be destroyed.

As I stated in another page of this blog, I write here to “write”… plain and simple. I write because I love to do it and I write because I was to sharpen my skills at it once again. This is a therapy for me, and as I begin to become “myself” again, I hope to begin applying these writing skills to my career and to my aspirations that I have always had.

So, I hope you enjoy my blog as much as I enjoy writing it. Please be patient with me as this blog, and myself, are both a work in progress

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Updated 4/11/2009

Well, the blog has been up now for almost 6 months and many great things to report!

1. I have continued to lose weight rapidly!  I have been sick the last 2 weeks, so that has been a bit of a damper on my progress, but I have lost 84lbs since I started this program.  (Click here for a summary of my program).   I currently weight 265lbs and still going strong!
2. My relationship with my family, (especially my wife), continues to improve drastically over where it was previously!
3. I am still WoW-free… 6 months baby and feeling great!
4. The blog is growing in leaps and bounds… just hit 5000 readers yesterday and posted my 100th post a few days prior to that!  Man I love writing for this thing, I hope you continue to enjoy reading!

I am El Nino!

All tropical storms must bow before El Nino!

Yo soy El Nino!

For those of you who don’t “habla espanol”, El Nino is Spanish for…

The Nino!