Hello world!

My name is Champ Cox. Yes, that is my given birth name. No, I am not a porn star.

What I am is overeducated and underemployed. I have a Master’s Degree plus thirty hours, but Master of Divinty degrees don’t pay what they used too (unless your belief system includes a god who can be strong-armed into giving you a private jet if you claim it hard enough – I’m looking at you Joel Creflo Copeland). So awhile back I returned to the life that I knew before seminary – the oil and gas industry. All has been well until recently. The industry is in a bit of a downturn nowadays. This is great for everyone who buys gasoline, but not so much for everyone who makes a living getting it out of the ground.

All of that leads to this: I have a lot of new spare time on my hands. While this may sound good at first, the problem is that I don’t have a real hobby. Years of being gone for days on end dissuades one from participating in homebound fun that others take for granted. Plus, watching loads of TV and catching up on ‘private moments’ with the wife eventually reach a saturation point (The TV for me, the ‘other’ for her). Combining the two only makes it worse. No, really.

Anyway, I need some things to do, specifically cheap things. This list will be a weekly post of things I intend to do during the following week. At the end of the week I will post again to update my efforts. Ready? Ok, here goes.

#5 – Stop playing Candy Crush.

Remember what I said about watching loads of TV (and the ‘other’). Well, both of these pale in comparison next to the amount of time I spend playing Candy Crush. It is the stupidest game in the history of portable electronic devices, right up there with Toilet Time (yes, it’s real and on the app store) and spelling dirty words on a calculator. It should be renamed ‘Soul Crush’ or ‘Crush Your Ability to Get Off the Couch and Live a Productive Life,’ or my new personal motto, ‘Candy for the Crushed and Lifeless Loser.’ Unfortunately, it redeems itself by being a fantastic way to kill time. Although this may seem like a new hobby to embrace, I spend far too much time trying to get three, maybe FOUR, blue candies in a row (GET OUT OF MY WAY YELLOW!). And I really hate Odus. What’s wrong with that idiot? Find a more stable loft to set your lazy, soul-crushing rump on, or expect me to hire Wreck-It Ralph to kick your nocturnal a**! I hate this game. I’m on level 167.

#4 – Meet someone with an Indian name.

Allow me to clarify – I mean Indian as in from India, not American Indian. Taj Mahal, not the Warrior Chief Hotel and Casino.

I live in Louisiana. Do you know how many people from India live here? Me neither. I only know of one man of Indian ancestry in the entire state, and I think he’s trying to move to Washington D.C. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to run for president on a conservative platform.’ Anyway, there may be loads of them, but I don’t know any personally. We don’t have to become best friends, I just want to meet him/her/it and shake his/her/it’s hand. The only problem I foresee with this challenge is that I may have to go to a hospital to accomplish it. I don’t hate hospitals, but I think they frown upon unsolicited people wandering through the halls looking for the chief of medicine without an appointment. This may be harder than I anticipated.

#3 – Plant a garden.

This is one I have wanted to do for some time, but again, lengthy periods of time far away from home (then catching up on the ‘other’ – Yes, sex! I’m talking about sex!), as well as lack of remote gardening technology (remardenology?) have put this one on the back burner for quite a while. I have read that the newest thing in gardening is raised bed gardens. Since gardening is as old as humankind and the last improvement was opposable thumbs, any new advances in gardening technology strike me as a once in a lifetime event, thus worth looking into. The idea is that you can build a box yourself, fill it with dirt and plants, and voila! – a new garden which is closer to your knees than your ankles. As with any new and exciting technology, you can spend as much money as you want, from the customized insert-tab-A-into-slot-B cedar box kits to homemade steal-some-used-lumber-from-the-trash-pile-of-the-new-construction-down-the-street kit. In my current circumstance, cheaper is better, so cedar trees rejoice!

#2 – Teach my kindergarten son how to multiply.

This isn’t a noble ambition, rather an effort to get him to stop asking me the same question over and over ALL THE TIME. He has discovered that one minute equals 60 seconds. So now, half of our day is spent answering, ‘How many seconds is ten minutes?’, or “How many seconds is 60 minutes?’, or my personal favorite ‘How many seconds before I die?’ Wait, what? Is anyone else’s kindergartner fascinated with the time of his death? No? Just me? Ok. I don’t know if multiplication will help that, but he’s not quite ready for seminary-prepared answers, so for now it’s just the multiplication. After that maybe I’ll teach him how to spell bad words on a calculator.

#1 – Start a new blog

So far, so good.

See you on Friday.