It is official: I have become an enormous dork. No, you say, not Talley… Well, lets add it up and see: I haven’t biked or lifted or run for shit this year and I have gained ten+ pounds of lard. I have not scaled one single peak or boarded one run. On the upside, I read 37 books – mostly non-fiction, am a board game winning machine, have been writing a Linux script to make my job easier on my off time, have become the master of the spreadsheet at work, and I spent a good deal of my Christmas break playing Guitar Hero: Legends on an X-Box 360. I have even been surfing the web for cool nerd tattoos. I have to admit that it has gone so far that I asked my wife to buy me a calculator watch for Christmas… I am so ashamed… All I need to do is start going to D&D gatherings and become a cyberthug on some obscure web forum and the damage will be irreconcilable…

How did this happen? Can I stop its progression? As I see it, I am a just a bit over the cusp, but if I can pull back a touch I may be able to return to the land of a flat belly, big arms, and cycling while maintaining just enough geekiness to excel as an engineer.