My new web site is up!

It seems a long time since I blogged. I have been very busy getting ready for the first weekend of Samurai Camp with Klemmer in Phoenix. One major task was to get my new web site prepared.

Things were going well until I hit an unexpected hitch. The site that I had developed was unusable with my hosting service due to a software incompatibility -- one of the problems with trying to do something new in a limited time. So I was now slipping behind on my goals before I even got started.

I had already contacted the Small Business Development Center at Sam Houston State University here in Huntsville, so Monday I called them with an urgent message that I needed help in developing my web site. After playing telephone tag for a while, we finally got together, and last night they put the site together for me, using my provisional text. So today, one day before the deadline, the site is up!

It needs work still, but at least the hard work is done, and it looks a lot better than it would have done if it had been left to me. The person who put it together has worked for fourteen years on web site development. I had only about fourteen days' of experience, so the difference showed!

Go look at it -- I'm looking for suggstions for improvement. And, if you're one of the first fifty people to sign up, you'll get a lifetime free membership. (Unfortunately, the membership form is not working yet, but you have a link on the site you can use. Getting that form working and setting up the e-mail responses are my first two tasks when I return at the end of this month.)

Today, Billie and I are leaving for Phoenix. We shall be there for the weekend, then go to San Diego next Monday. That week we are staffing Heart of the Samurai, where about two hundred people, including Trent, will be taking part. What an incredible two weeks lie before us!

From San Diego, we shall leave for Ventura to have a quick visit with Paul, Alisa and Kai before returning via LAX.

We try not to let the grass grow under our rocking chairs.

To your good health and may you always have as much fun and excitement as we do!

Alan and Billie

The Good News ... and the Bad!

(No, of course that's not me in the picture! It's Trent, taken about a year ago in El Campo at Muldoon's.

I was younger then ...)


First, let's get the bad news out of the way. No less than FIVE of my friends have died in the last month (I just heard about one today). To put it in perspective, only two of them were older than me. I remember my father saying that that one of the sad things about growing older is that all your friends keep dying ...

Now for the good news.

A couple of years ago I had a diagnosis of "possible" non-Hodgkins lymphoma. (A more complete story of that is on one of our web sites -- see My Story.) This week, after another visit to my oncologist, I had another CT scan, and today I got the results.

Guess what?

No sign of lymphoma!

In fact, after a full CT scan, his only recommendation is that I follow up with my urogolist because my bladder wall is slightly to moderately thickened (which it was a year or two ago). I knew I felt healthier than I have for several years, but it's great to have the confirmation.

In other good news, Billie's son, Trent Willmon, has started working in the Texas Hill Country on the movie Palo Pinto Gold. They are shooting early every morning for a couple of weeks and we hope to go out there to watch a shoot sometime soon. Trent's playing the lead, and has also written the music for the movie. Other members of the cast include Mel Tillis, Roy Clark and Kinkie Friedman as the Governor of Texas! Check it out on Trent's web site.

Maybe we'll have a film star in the family!

New Year's Resolutions

The picture shows Alan and Billie with their New Year's Day coffee at dawn on Galveston Island.

We are having such wonderful weather here! I just came back from a run and sat outside for a while in the shade wearing tee shirt and shorts. It's in the 70s!

One of my goals is to run my first marathon in the spring of 2013, so I've started training for it. Today was my long run -- 90 minutes -- and I managed to increase my pace from staggering to shuffling! Instead of an 18-minute mile I cut it to 17 1/2 minutes.

(I try not to remember the day I saw Roger Bannister run the world's first four-minute mile -- it just reminds me how slow I am! I wonder if he's still running? I do know that last year they had a special celebration for him at the Iffley Road track in Oxford where he set the record, and he was in attendance -- but not running.)

My short term goal is to run the Capitol 10K in Austin this March. Before then, I hope to speed up a bit and increase my pace from shuffling to plodding. My intent is to finish within my age (i.e. no more minutes than my age in years), as I did in my first 10K when I was 55. One benefit of growing older is that I can extend my times and still reach that target!

Another New Year's Resolution for me is to lose weight. Apart from anything else, I don't need to be dragging all that fat around with me when I'm running. Two years ago I used the USANA RESET program to lose thirty pounds, but over the years between I gained back twenty. So my goal now is to lose between twenty and thirty pounds before the summer. So far, after five days, I'm ahead of schedule after losing seven pounds.

In case you're wondering about all this activity, I plan to live to 120, with an option to 130! My children will all retire long before they get their inheritance (if I don't spend it all). Like somebody said, age doesn't matter unless you're a cheese.

One thing I have discovered is that the reason New Year's Resolutions generally fail is that I start from the wrong end. By this, I mean that I need to start from my dream, then work that into goals. My dream is to live a long, healthy life: to achieve that I need to take action now. So I set goals to reach that dream, rather than setting them just for their own sake.

Feel free to comment on this blog -- it's starting to look more like a journal now!