Norah and I are Mystery Readers →

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A last minute request, the setup and simple chop editing took longer but we had a lot of fun! Hope you enjoy the story!

Reading for Mrs. Shemanski's First Grade Class at Francis Parker Lower School, Norah chose to share one of her favorite books by Mo Willems titled, "Waiting Is Not Easy!" This was setup and recorded last minute. Sorry for the quick chop.

Tools: Sony Alpha A7Rii + Manfrotto Stand for Universal Cell Phone Edited with iMovie on macOS and recorded via OBS Studio: https://obsproject.com

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SprezzaBox Ambassadorship

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A few weeks ago, I was accepted into the SprezzaBox Ambassador program and I can't wait for you all to signup to the goodness that the SprezzaBox has introduced me to! Click away and check out the amazing collaborations and curations they've created. Subscribe and set yourself up with an awesome surprise every month! It's allowed me to expand my style and even venture out to other styles that I wouldn't have otherwised thought of.

PSA: You can also use the coupon code: ENICOLAS for 10% off your first subscription or store purchase!

My Tour de Cure Page

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If you haven't already clicked on the link leading you to my Tour de Cure Page, I thought that I would also put it here on elijahnicolas.com.  Here it is! Growing up and why I ride

Accompanying my grandmother to multiple eye exams, ultimately an eye transplant and seeing her struggle with the pains in her feet was all part of my growing up.  I would massage her after a long walk around the block, up hill to the local 7-11 then back and just always thought it was normal that she would ache.  I didn't understand until my middle school years that my grandmother was actually suffering from diabetes.  Her kidneys started to fail thus her start on dialysis when I was in middle school.  It always left her too weak to do our walks and I hated seeing her get back from the treatment but it was necessary.

We moved her to the downstairs bedroom so that she wouldn't have to climb stairs anymore and I got use to checking her glucose every morning before leaving for school.  All part of a normal morning of a twelve year old right?  I remember some mornings when she would start acting loopy, which I got use to knowing it meant it she was low on sugar.  So, I would rush to take her glucose reading, which sometimes fell to the 20s, to where I would begin to force feed her mini Snickers and orange juice and sometimes we had to call 911.  It was tough and she passed on strong, quiet and ever so thoughtful in November of '95.

Seeing her struggle with the disease made me more conscious of how detrimental it could be to not only the individual suffering through it but the family surrounding the person.  It is why I chose to support this cause.  I just so happen to also be of Filipino / Asian descent which increases my chances of living the same plight.  So I ask of you...

Please Support Me in Tour de Cure!

I will be cycling in the American Diabetes Association's Tour de Cure fundraising event this year and you can support me with a donation by selecting the "Click Here to Sponsor Me" link. No matter how small or large, your generous gift will help improve the lives of more than 23.6 million Americans who suffer from diabetes, in the hope that future generations can live in a world without this disease. Our efforts will help set the pace in the fight against diabetes. So let's get in gear and ride to beat diabetes!

Thank you for making a generous contribution to this cause that is so important to me!  This ride is for you Grandma Meli! Love, JJ

About Diabetes

Diabetes is a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin. Insulin is a hormone that is needed to convert sugar, starches and other food into energy needed for daily life. The cause of diabetes continues to be a mystery, although both genetics and environmental factors appear to play roles. There are 23.6 million Americans living with diabetes, a disease that is outpacing heart disease, cancer and AIDS. Diabetes is a disease that has deadly serious consequences, and there is no cure.

American Diabetes Association presents Tour de Cure:San Diego

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Did you know that pilots can lose their medical certificates if diagnosed with diabetes?  That's what I'm scared of once I get a little older.  It becomes a personal dilemma. I've haven't done a fundraiser since the elementary school magazine drive or middle school band chocolate candy bar drive for and I thought that it would only do me good to start again with helping the cause. This year, for 2011, I have decided to ride for a Cure.  More specifically, a cure for Diabetes (PubMed / WebMD).  In knowing my family and I, or just Asian Filipinos in general, we are prone to this debilitating disease.  A couple personal notes include; my grandmother on my mother's side passing away when I was in high school due to complications from diabetes, my father-in-law dealing with this disease on a daily basis, and a good friend who lives with it and is able to control it. Some days are good, some are bad, but I see it everyday and I know that you do too.  By riding and getting your sponsorship, I would like to help this Association not only raise money but awareness for the cause. There are so many ones out there, but this time around, I'm all for the ADA.

Please support me in riding a 100 mile century ride on May 7, 2011.   I figured that I could raise around $500 (up from the initial $150) only because of my friends on Facebook.  If you donate at least $1, or even $5, I can easily reach this goal.

I'll be posting from time to time here on elijahnicolas.com and/or http://main.diabetes.org/goto/elijah. By clicking on either the hyperlink, you can easily help contribute to this worthy cause.

If you want to ride with me and form a team, I'm all for it! Let's do this together!

The Last Month

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The month of September ended in a whirlwind of vacationing, moving and surviving the slew of mosquito bites that I suffered both from Nicaragua and Atlanta. The last week in September was dedicated to moving, but after a great night of splurging at Taco Mac with some good pilot buddies, my roommate and I still hadn't made a final decision on where we would end up. Eventually being forced to move out of our apartment because the management ended up renting it out to a couple of college girls, we were lucky to be able to negotiate for a "non-upgraded" 2 bedroom, two bath for even cheaper than what we were paying in the same complex! The non-upgraded tag once specifies that it has black appliances rather than white ones, but you can't tell the difference at all anyways. We now have a pool view, and a 1-year lease for $818/mo (that's actually $750 + their fees for water / sewer / garbage, etc). I think we definitely scored as we're also closer to the front of the property making it so much easier to access the huge trashbin, Starbucks across the street, my favorite Cuban restaurant Coco-Loco, as well as Best Buy and the MARTA. I'm happy with the place and I'm just happy that my roommate, Mark Russell and I have a place that we both like a lot. Dealing with Comcast in trying to get the cable line activated was a little bit of a cluster, but apparently, it was disconnected within our apartment!? I guess it would have made sense for them to send out a mechanic guy to our apartment rather than just assuming turning it on from the outside was all they would need to do.

I finally made it back to San Diego by way of ATL-PHX-SAN and the last leg was great. Southwest is always just really friendly, but I have to admit that the two Delta pilots were great company for the 3.8 hrs in the jumpseat. Thanks for the ride guys!

For now, I'm just excited to be back home but there is so much to do when it comes to cleaning up my desk space, taking my bike out for a ride and hanging out with my favorite girl!

In the meantime, check out my new favorite drink at http://elijahnicolas.posterous.com/favorite-new-drink-and-turtwig-on-a-couch-at and the relaunch of the "peak interest" podcast at www.peakinterest.net or via iTunes.

Web 2.0 and the Posterous New Blog

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Intro:

I recently signed up for a posterous site, http://adellelijah.posterous.com, to host both Adelle and I together in one cloud space and in doing so, I actually ended up creating two more different posterous sites, http://adellelisa.posterous.com and http://elijahnicolas.posterous.com so that we can post on an individual basis.  Adelle actually didn't like me posting my stuff to "our" site so I decided that we each needed a separate one for self preservation.  I'll just admit it already: I am a posting whore.

Over the last few months, I've been using the Thesis Wordpress Theme in order to help with Search Engine Optimization on elijahnicolas.com.  I love the simplistic layout of the Thesis Theme so much that I even ended up buying the commercial license to use on Peak Interest (www.whatspyi.com) as well as my fiance's blog (www.adellelisa.com) which she is very hesitant to update but at least it's there.  Over the years, I have graduated from the Blogger platform hosting a multitude of different sites, to trying out joomla for a hot second to finally settling down on wordpress as my choice for a content management system.  Of course, twitter came around along with friendfeed and now posterous all within the last year or so and I indulged.  All the while, I was only looking for that singular reasonable mean to have all my personalities talk to each other and reflect each other's status'.  With posterous, I think I may have found the perfect solution!

Body 1:

The basic idea of Web 2.0 was to forge a design template that allowed for an easy GUI interface for those that weren't code savvy.  It was to provide a simpler means to update ones' online mediums / personality sites and in doing so, collaborate with others in the virtual arena.  That's my personal spin in layman's terms.  If you want the "real deal," here's Wikipedia's here.

Posterous has done just that.  They simplified the entire process.  They have taken out the horrific means of uploading to an FTP site or Content Management System and instead substituted it with the easy medium we use everyday: e-mailing.  You can "attach photos, videos, MP3s and files" to your e-mails, send it off to space and boom...it's that simple!  You could always do that on Blogger.com with text and photos and use a not so great plug-in with WordPress, but with one touch, I can upload a picture with a small post to my posterous account directly from my email address, it detects where I want it to go and publishes instantly without a hitch not only to posterous, but to anywhere else that I'm connected to be it my facebook, blogger, wordpress or even twitter account.

I was thinking of having it update my actual wordpress blog, but that's when things started to come together in my head.  I finally drew somewhat distinct lines.  I have come to the definite conclusion that my posterous and mobile blog are one in the same.  That's almost a no brainer, with a slight difference that the blogger site has a black background and posterous has a white one.  Posterous and my trelijah mobile blog are just quick snippets of my life.  Twitpic and twitter are just even quicker moments that I deem "3rd class" per say.  Of course the hierarchy of it all would be a long post, such as this one, on elijahnicolas.com, a picture accompanied by a posterous moment then a tweet.

Conclusion:

It is however convenient to have one place to update every personality, but duplication starts to become rampant and I don't want that to happen.  For now, I guess I'll keep trelijah going along with elijahnicolas.posterous.com and maybe with time, just end trelijah.  But as I always keep on saying, you can always count on me for some type of update.  That's enough.

p.s.  I had to edit the template of trelijah to fit the new format of pictures.  I like them in the full form.  Nice stuff!

"His Story"

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Over the last two months, both Adelle and I have been making our rounds on the phone or meeting our friends and family in person, telling them the good news! If you haven't found out already, YES...WE ARE ENGAGED!!! The actual date was June 26th, 2009. We have yet to update our facebook profile statuses due to our own stubbornness to announce it there so in the meantime, we're just in a relationship!!! I'm going to start this off by telling you MY story.

Back in Spring 2000, at a Memorial Day BBQ that a mutual friend had invited me to, we crossed paths at the potluck table.  I asked her what her name was, we exchanged brief hellos, and when I mean brief, it's the shortest of conversations. It went something like this:

Elijah: Hello! I'm Elijah. I go to Revelle. How about you? Strange girl across the table picking up chips: I'm Adelle. I go to Marshall. Bye!

-- and she walks off because she has to go sit down next to her friend on the grass on her little towel.  Granted, I weigh about a 140 at 5'11", am wearing khaki short and a Structure Polo with some Dr. Marten Sandals.  I guess you could have just imagined a tool or a dork, or both combined, but she basically gave me the straight hate!

The night continued without any further contact which then transitioned into what ended up being a bonfire.  As the ocean air began to chill, another mutual friend from Atlantis Hall, which happened to also be my dormitory, wanted to head home.  She said that she needed a ride, and being my awesome nice self, I obliged.  Little did I know that her "friend" wanted a ride too.  I thought, "What the heck?"  (I actually didn't think that because I am a nice guy.)  Good thing though, because it just so happened that her friend was Adelle.  We got into my 1985 Turbo Diesel 300D Mercedes, cranked up some surfer-punk music and drove up the hill back to campus.  I was into the punk music contrary to popular belief that I would have been all into hip-hop / rap, etc I too also liked alternative, punk, and metal.  I dropped off Adelle first at her place and then Alice and I walked back to our hall.  That was that...

let’s go fly! Palomar Airport (KCRQ) @ Pinnacle Academy DA40

let’s go fly! Palomar Airport (KCRQ) @ Pinnacle Academy DA40

Fast forward 3 years later, July of 2003, I turn 21.  I'm living it up the leftover high that was my birthday party, heading out every weekend, hitting up all the bars between Downtown San Diego and LA -- it was just crazy fun and definitely costly, but I always refer the 6 months that ensued to as "dirty 21 fun!"  Turning 21 helped me grow a pair and I started to ask a few people out.  To my surprise, some said yes and I thought to myself why didn't I ever talk to girls earlier?  You see, I didn't really "talk" to girls.  I mean, I talked every now and then, perhaps a peep would leave my mouth, but I was always too shy to take it any further than a simple, "Hello.  How are ya?"  I promise when I have a son, he is going to grow some balls and not miss out on his high school dances like I did the first year or so.

Well, it just so happened that I had a friend who convinced me to take "Human Sexuality" with her during the 2002 Fall Quarter.  I signed up, got into the class but was confronted with a slight disappointment that she didn't make it in.  Do I just drop it or stick it out even though she isn't here?  She was a junior and I had a lot of credits already, so it wasn't like I needed to crash the course.  I didn't even need it as I was Management Science major.  I also happened to run into a bunch of old friends from freshman year and while I got distracted with them, my other friend never made it into the class.  Good thing I guess because we probably might have continued our random get-togethers.  It's not like that at all either...really.  Shopping, the occaisional dinner.  Just keeping it kosher at all times.  But onto the climax!

A few weeks pass and I finally had my chance to talk her.  I definitely recognized her and thought that she was cute for sure, but at the time, I wasn't looking for anything more than a study buddy.  Seriously!  So, with that, I finally was able to reintroduce myself, but I made a big error.  I went like this:

Friend: Adelle, this is Elijah, Elijah, Adelle. Adelle: I think we've met before at a picnic. Nice to meet you again. Elijah: Oh yeah, we met your freshman year?! Adelle with a confused look: What year are you? Elijah: I'm a 4th Adelle: so am I!? (weirdo)

Well, I follow her onto the UCSD shuttle bus that takes us to our respective automobile location, sit near her and just start chatting it up.  We have a final coming up, so I pull out the study card!  I got the digits easily without a hitch and filed it away in my pocket.

a cowgirl and an “astronaut”

a cowgirl and an “astronaut”

I didn't call her either till about 2 weeks later the night of Halloween in Downtown San Diego. I had to really convince her over the phone to that she should be coming out being that it was our first year as 21 year olds celebrating what usually becomes a night of drunken celebration. She met up with us and that was that. We continued hanging out and one day, we realized that we were dating. The rest is history.

I proposed in Atlanta after she had rode the aircraft that I was flying back from Toronto. I landed and did the announcements.  It was just all put well together.  I even had the flight attendants have her wait behind and then told the captain that I wanted to get a shot of us in the cockpit.  While he was taking the 2nd photo, that's when I popped the question.  Happy engagement babe!

truly surprised her since she just woke up from a 2 hour flight

truly surprised her since she just woke up from a 2 hour flight

she says yes & my Captain can barely click the camera fast enough

she says yes & my Captain can barely click the camera fast enough