MOTW - Sept 2 - Sept 8 2012 - KingCam

[Jenste]

Monday, tell us all about you! We know you obviously like amphibians, but we want to know about the rest of your life. Details about you, your life, hobbies, families, past times, favorite colors, poems you have written etc etc....just use this post to brag/boast/bore us how you please.

[KingCam]

Congrats Cam!

Yay! Congrats!

Thanks guys, and thank you Jenste for selecting me. I also wanna give a big thanks to the kind folks who nominated me. I am honored *blushes* haha

Okay, on with the show.

Monday, tell us all about you! We know you obviously like amphibians, but we want to know about the rest of your life. Details about you, your life, hobbies, families, past times, favorite colors, poems you have written etc etc....just use this post to brag/boast/bore us how you please.

Hello, I'm Cameron All my friends & family call me Cam. I am 23 and born on Halloween. I have 2 younger sisters and a younger brother, I'm the oldest of 4.

I was born is Southern Missouri, and lived there until age 9. I spent a lot of time in the woods, at Table Rock Lake, and on family farms during these early years in my life. My dad was always the athletic type, and of course had the same hopes for me. Unfortunately for him I had ideas of my own. He put me in soccer at a young age where he discovered I'd rather stop, mid play, to catch an insect in the grass XD Lucky for me I have very cool parents. My dad encouraged my interest in nature, and my mom was also instrumental in helping me get closer to nature. Both of them helped me put bug collections together, bought me field guides for bugs, reptiles, amphibians, etc. One example of this: I caught a green anole in Florida on vacation when I was very small (it's one of my first memories). My parents let me keep it, I named him George. I had George for 7 years!

At age 9 my dad's work moved us up to the Kansas City, Missouri area. Talk about a strange place for a nature kid to be! I missed the rolling hills of the Ozarks and the clear spring water in all of the rivers. Something about moving and not having any friends in your new town tends to lead to rebellion, at least it did for me. I was a bit of a trouble maker in middle school & high school. Nothing serious, just lots of visits to the principals office for skipping class and things like that :P

In middle school I started dressing a little "dark" and listened to metal & rock music exclusively (these days I listen to everything from folk, to rap, to 70's country, lol). I also played a lot of Diablo II & Starcraft on the PC. PC games had been an interest to me since the first time I can remember seeing a Windows 95 way back when (of course then I was consumed with Commander Keen series, Duke Nukem, Billy The Kid, and others.)

I was in middle school during the early 2000's, which is when xanga.com was getting popular as one of the first social networking sites. Xanga had this "custom html" section where you could add special effects and formatting to your page. This is where I first started experimenting with web design, and later managed to land myself a free homestead hosting account to experiment with. That early experience with code made it much easier for me to take programming classes in high school, and now I am a Web Developer / Systems Admin for a private hunting club here in the Midwest.

I ran track & cross country when I was in 8th grade. I wrestled my freshman year of high school, but quit during my sophomore year after I had to have surgery on my left knee (I had a bone spur, a torn medial meniscus, and cartilage damage under the knee cap).

My junior year of high school (age 17) I started partying and drinking way more beer than I should have :-\ I ate poorly also and put on a lot of weight. I had always been a thicker kid, but I found myself ballooning up at an incredible rate (of course I ignored the problem for some time). I mention this only because I recently lost a lot of weight, more on that later

17 is also when I started hunting deer with my dad. It was his first time hunting deer, too. Our first morning out in the field a small buck stepped out of the woods. Being new to the game, young, and so excited I was shaking, I took the shot. The buck dropped and that was it! Ever since I have been enjoying venison (deer meat) instead of beef. In years past I have always tried to put at least 6 deer in the freezer to last me the year, but this year my goal is 12. I process the meat myself, every step of the way. I gut the animal in the field, age it in my garage for a week, butcher, package, freeze, thaw, and cook :P I am mostly a meat hunter these days. For two reasons really, 1) I'm too lazy to stalk that monster buck 2) doe meat tastes much better than buck, and I don't kill anything I don't intend to eat. I love cooking, and if I do say so myself, I'm pretty good on the grill Some photos of venison (deer) I have grilled on Wednesday

I got hired on at that private hunting club I mentioned earlier during the latter half of my senior year in high school (2007). More than 5.5 years later I am still here, working for the same company. When I started here I was responsible for making maps for each property we leased, but when I was done with that I was kinda out of a job unless I could find something else to do. I told the owner if he'd let me try I could build him a better website than the one he had. He agreed, and I did just that. Now I don't even handle map making, someone else does that. I am responsible for maintaining, updating, and changing the websites. I also manage the online advertising, train new employees on the computers, etc. It is a small company, and I am the only computer literate person here, so I do pretty much anything and everything technology related that needs to get done :P

After high school I went to a community college to work on my Associates of Arts Degree (general education, basically). A year into it I decided to change my degree to Associates in Computer Sciences with an Emphasis on Web Development.

When I was 20 I got a bunch of free-lance side jobs building websites for people. I managed to make a quick $10K, which I immediately put down on a house. I moved out of my parents' house June 2009 at age 20. My parents had always let me keep animals, but there were a lot of limitations. I wasn't allowed to get anything that would get really big or eat too much food. I wasn't allowed to culture crickets or roaches, etc. Owning your own home changes this

After buying a house I didn't really have the time or money to go to school. I have been on "break" from my education since the summer of 2009. Maybe one of these days I will go back.

Within a couple months of buying my house I found my first room mate, she didn't last long XD She was replaced by a friend from high school, overall he was a great roomie and lived with me for some time. This friend of mine used to be overweight like me, I was astonished to learn that he had lost all of the weight and literally looked like a completely different person! The summer of 2009, when I bought my house, I weighed 245 lbs (I'm 6'0" tall). This was the heaviest I had ever been!

My friend moved in November 2009, and I decided I needed to lose the weight in December of 2009, thanks to inspiration from his story. I had already quit drinking earlier in the year and was down 10 lbs to 235lbs when I started counting calories. Over the course of 3 months I lost 62lbs. In March of 2010 I was down to 173lbs, and feeling MUCH better about myself!

I took on a second room mate, another old friend from high school. It was us 3 guys living in a 3-bedroom 1-bath house. I have an unfinished basement, so you can imagine the parties we had

I stopped counting calories in summer of 2010 and slowly the weight started to come back. On November 1, 2010, I made it official with a gorgeous gal I had been seeing Her name is Kristin, and I love her face off! Fall of 2010 is also when one of my room mates moved out, leaving me with only 1 room mate and an empty room. This empty room became ground-zero for my newly rekindled hobby of keeping cold blooded critters More on that Tuesday!

When Kristin and I got together she was kinda scared of snakes, but our first spring in 2011 I took her into the woods looking for snakes. We found a tiny Western Worm Snake (Carphophis vermis), and after about 10 minutes of convincing her, she agreed to hold it. The rest is history, she likes hiking for snakes now almost as much as I do! My younger brother also really enjoys nature and field herping with us, too!

By the time April 2012 rolled around I had put 27lbs back on, tipping the scales at exactly 200lbs.
I decided then I needed to do something about my diet that I could make more permanent. Counting calories simply wasn't an option. It involves obsessing over numbers, eating tiny portion sizes, you have to weigh your meat, measure out everything. No thanks, not again. It was in April that I discovered the "Paleo Diet" or the "caveman diet." Basically you eat only foods that were available to us in the Paleolithic (caveman) era, foods that our bodies evolved on. So no grains (bread, pasta, corn, rice), no legumes (soy, beans, peanuts, peas), no dairy (except real butter), no processed foods, no preservatives, no sugar. Basically all I can eat is Meat, Vegetables, Fruit, Nuts, and Seeds. If you're interested in this way of eating check out Paleo Diet Lifestyle | paleo diet tips and recipes Let me tell you, this diet is AMAZING! I have lost all the weight I gained back and then some on this diet, plus I feel great. Currently, and for the past 1.5 months, I have weighed less than I ever have, 167lbs and holding steady That means from the summer of 2009, when I weighed 245, to now I have lost a total of 78 lbs! Some recent before and after pictures on Wednesday!

Let's see here. I bet I can come up with some other random facts about myself to tell you. I like to grow things, I just planted my first garden this past spring. It started out really strong, but then we had the hottest & dryest summer Missouri has seen in like 100+ years or something like that. My favorite color is lime green, but I like to decorate my house with browns, black, and burgundy. I drive a big dodge ram 1500, 4x4, silver, long bed, extended cab. I like to burn incense, drink tea or coffee (unsweetened), listen to all kinds of music, and sit in my animal room observing things. I enjoy mushroom hunting and like the idea of hunting & foraging my own food items. I'm an introvert, I'd rather stay at home and hangout with a couple of friends than go out to a bar. I have good reading comprehension skills, but I do not read books very often. I don't watch the news anymore because I believe it's nothing more than a tool to scare society into submission. In fact I don't even subscribe to cable anymore, I watch TV and movies using Netflix & HuluPlus on my extremely awesome roku player & 50" plasma I'm a bit of a clean freak, most people see my house and assume a woman must live there (although it's been a bit of a disaster for the past month, I go through spells of extreme laziness at times XD). I grew up in a Christian household, but totally abandonded those beliefs after high school. I have been reading a bit of Buddhist material lately I think I might be interested in commiting to it one day. My mother has been stuggling with a severe case of multiple sclerosis since the year 2000, every day is a stuggle for her just to get out of bed, it makes me appreciate my health. After watching her stuggles I do not take my ability to walk for granted, and I am focusing on improving my health in any way I can to prevent diseases of all kinds in my future. I think if more people grew up with a very sick parent, if people saw what it was like to lose their health, they would take their health a little more seriously. I believe all people are essentially the same, and we should all make a better effort to get along. People who litter absolutely make me furious, nothing will put me in a bad mood faster than walking a shoreline and having to step over trash every 2 feet. I like rollercoasters, but only if they stay relatively close to the ground. I am deathly afraid of heights, and overall I'm a very cautious person. I won't get on a motorcylce, and the idea of white water rafting makes me uneasy. I'd much prefer to float down a gentle stream in a canoe, looking for snakes & turtles to dive in after :P

Well, that's really all I can think to tell you about myself! I hope you enjoyed my long-winded biography, check back tomorrow for the stuff you actually care about: THE AMPHIBIANS! (and other ectotherms)

[GrifTheGreat]

GREAT!!! to learn more about you Cam!!

Remember to keep it PG Lol!!

[Pluke]

That was quite a read Cam, you sure you didn't miss anything?

Nice to learn more about you, as Grif stated. Honestly, I can't wait until tomorrow to see your WHOLE collection.

[Kristen]

Great to learn more about you!
And I like your girlfriends name

[KingCam]

Thanks guys. I guess that'll teach you to ask me about myself XD Won't be doing that again anytime soon, will you? hahahaha