You gotta know when to hold em...

OK, so I'm in Las Vegas, down about $150 to black jack, and staying at dumpy Circus Circus. But things are looking up...

I played the most excellent golf course yesterday. I definately need to thank my father in law for the suggestion. We teamed up with a pair of sales guys from Richmond. Small world huh? I shot a 107 which really blows because from the 3rd to the 10th hole I was hitting them great. I really fucked up the back 9. =( Sean beat my by 1 in strokes but I beat him by 1 in holes so he owes me $1. We played the mountain course which has a couple of small canyons, lots of desert scenery and hundreds of rabbits. They were everywhere. It also had one par 4 over a small lake that looked like an infinity pool. I'm very pleased to have played this course in my 50 state golf challenge. I can now add Nevada to my list.

Florida (I don't really count this one because it was the first time I played and it was a dog track)
Virginia
North Carolina
Ohio
South Carolina
Georgia (I list this one but I'd rather replace it with a better course. That one kind of sucked)
Nevada

We're moving to The Flamingo today which is down on the strip near the nicer casinos. Now hopefully my luck will just change. Maybe I should just stick to playing the ATMs. I can't seem to lose on those as long as my bets are small.

BTW, my workouts have been shit for the last couple of days. I'm going to have to start over when I get back I guess. I'm very disappointed. There just isn't anywhere to do pullups and it's too <insert blaspheme> hot here to go jog.

I'm leaving on a jet plane...

Just finished packing my trip to Las Vegas. No posts til Monday. I'm leaving the internets behind. I'm probably playing golf at Angel Park tomorrow. I picked up a travel case for my clubs last night. The price to rent clubs was about half of what I paid for a really decent hard shelled travel case. Since I'm planning on playing in every state I figured it would be a worthy investment.

I'm feeling kind of bad about ditching the guys at work but we seem to be in rather good shape at this point so we'll be all right. I know they'll miss me. =)

BTW, I did my jogging last night but I only made it 10 minutes before I got these really weird cramps in my lower back and had to quit. =( Hopefully the hotel has a gym or something, but I doubt it. Maybe I'll just run up and down the stairwells. Hah!

See ya on Monday!!!

Day Seven and Eight

Sunday was rough, I did my 20 minute jog but I'd say the amount of fast walking outnumbered the jogging. I was hurtin. This time I actually got to jog down Azalea Garden rd. rather than doing laps around the pool. I think I enjoy going around the pool more though. There is the additional anticipation of whether this will be the night that I fall in.

Last night I did my rounds of 1 pullup, 3 pushups and 4 squats. I found this great video that has the proper technique for doing squats. I think I'm in love with the girl with the green shirt. =)

I'm faced with a dilemma for the next couple of days. I'm going to be in Vegas so I don't know whether I'll be able to get my workouts done. I'm pretty sure I can do the pushups and squats. I'll have to find some place to do the pullups and jogging. We'll see.

Game day

A good bit of Saturday was spent finishing Lego Star Wars on the 360. What a great game! The kids both loved it. Trystin helped me out quite a bit getting through some of the levels and Tanner was very content just watching the story unfold. There were many humorous things about this game that make it so compelling. Some of my favorites:

• Chewbacca "killing" stormtroopers by pulling their arms out with a distinct popping sound.
• C3P0 and R2-D2 getting plugged into dirt when they get stepped on by the chicken walkers.
• Gamorrean guards rocking out on a disco floor to a heavy version of the Imperial Theme song.

I've heard that there is going to be a Batman version. Now if they'd just do one for Pirates of the Caribbean...

Days Five and Six

Friday night I did the level 2 day 3 workout from simplefit.org. So far it's actually been kind of fun. After reading over the workout again today I realized that I kind of did it wrong so I'm not going to post the time because I don't think it would be valid to compare against next week.

Saturday was a pretty interesting day. We decided to do some yard work and I figured I'd try to clean up the swamp/swimming pool. I was skimming this brown muck from the top that I can only assume to be algae when Trystin informed me that there was a frog stuck in the skimmer. After what was probably a hilarious sight to any onlookers we got it out of the skimmer and onto the other side of the safety fence. As I was skimming the top of the pool I looked down and noticed something that I thought was a forgotten pool toy which actually turned out to be a hibernating baby turtle. I scooped it out and stuck it in a bucket. For a short time I entertained the idea of letting the kids keep it as a pet , I had kept quite a few turtles as a kid. I decided that it would be better to just let it go, the kids barely take care of the fish and hermit crab they have now and I didn't want to have to purchase the tank and all of the other pet paraphenalia. He sure was a cute little guy though.

I did my 23 minutes of jogging last night around the pool once again. It's actually kind of fun so long as I can keep myself from falling in. I found the PodRunner podcast where each roughly 1 hour episode is a different BPM so you can pick a beat that suits your workout.

Day Three and Four

Last night I finished my workout in 21 minutes with between 2 1/2 and 3 minute breaks in between each round. The "pullups" I'm doing do seem to be getting a little easier now. They aren't necessarily true pullups, more of a hop up and then slowly lower myself to hanging but those are definately getting easier.

Tonight, I was considering modifying my off night goals a little however after some gentle prodding from my blogging counterpart I decided to go ahead and jog some laps around the pool since Julie is working. I grabbed some tunes and headed out back. I ended up lasting about 24 minutes, 3 and 1/2 of which were walking. I made it through the first song, walked the second and then picked it back up with Linkin Parks new song Bleed it out which was a great beat to be jogging to. I didn't think I was going to last 10 mins but I just kept resetting that song and made it the whole time. I know there is software that will determine the BPM for songs but I haven't been able to find anything that works on Windows and will analyze the songs directly on an IPod.

Day Two

OK, so I suck. It was raining and the prospect of jogging around the pool in my backyard for 20 minutes just wasn't doing anything for me. I had a feeling when I said I'd jog on my off nights that it wasn't going to work. My wife just isn't home enough at night for me to be able to really get into doing it. Besides my legs still hurt from Day One but I need to suck it up because there may be a challenge being issued at work. I'd link directly to the post but apparently his blog doesn't support that. Go figure. I do have to thank him for the link tho. Thanks Chris.

We had our first work-related golf outing tonight. I played with Jason, Athens and Jen. I was very happy with my driving and fairway play. I still need to get out to the putting green and practice. I definately need some improvement. I'm hoping we can get enough people to play every Wednesday. It was great fun.

Day One

Results from last nights workout. I had 20 rounds of 1 pullup, 3 pushups and 4 squats in 20 minutes. Not too bad I'd say considering I had never really tried to make it the full 20 minutes. I'd usually stop after about 10 rounds. There is certainly room for improvement in that I took a couple of breaks and towards the end I would do a round and then pause for about 30 secs before I could do the next one. I'll have to compare this to next Monday to see if I can beat it.

Heroes was ok last night. I really want to like this show but it just doesn't engage me the way LOST does. I really like Hiro and Ando though. They provide great comic relief for this series.

It seems that I've pretty much given up on 24 now. I have absolutely no inclination to stay up to date with the events of this show. I think they lost me a season or two ago but I've been holding on , hoping for something exciting to happen. The beginning of this season looked promising, I mean, the terrorists actually killed more than 50 people. That never happens on 24. But then it went shark jumping with Jack's family and now his ex girlfriend.

I nabbed a couple of episodes of Deadwood last night to watch on the flight to Las Vegas next week. I've heard great things about it but never really had a chance to get interested in it.

Late.

Goals

One of the reasons I've decided to try blogging again is to track my workouts and to have some accountability. I figure if I post them here at least the guys I work with will rag on me somewhat if I start falling behind . I started doing the simple fit workout a month or so ago but I've been slacking off lately so I'm going to start doing it again. I'm going to start off with the Level 2 workout. I was doing pretty well with the pushups and squats, however, I've never been able to do a pullup so those I imagine are pretty funny to watch. My overall goal is to get down to 175 lbs. and be a lot fitter. At the very least I want to be able to keep up with this guy. My office mate and I are splitting the cost of a water cooler to ensure that we both drink more water. The convenience of not having to walk back to the break room certainly helps with water consumption but doesn't do anything for getting me up from my desk. I guess that is what Puzzle Bobble is for. =)

My workout schedule is
Monday do max rounds of 1 pullup, 3 pushups, 4 squats in 20 minutes.
Tuesday either jog/run around the neighborhood or the pool for 20 minutes depending on whether Julie is working or not.
Wednesday do 5 rounds of 3 pullups, 8 pushups and 13 squats for time.
Thursday jog/run for 20 minutes.
Friday do 13 pullups, 26 pushups, and 26 squats for time.
Saturday jog/run for 20 minutes.
Sunday jog/run for 20 minutes.

Whenever I get my bike fixed I'm going to alternate jogging with biking.

In addition to the workouts, I'm going to start consistenly working on playing my bass every night. I've been trying to pick out parts of songs that I want to learn to work on my relative pitch ear training. I've never been very good at this and right now I think it would help my playing the most. I also need to work on scales and arpeggios to loosen up my fingers. I want to be ready when Thel comes back in July.

The last reason I'm starting this blog is to work on my writing skills. I haven't really had to document my thoughts for quite a few years and I'm hoping that this will help me get better at doing so.

First Mondays post suck

First post. Mondays suck.

I had to go into work late this morning because I had to go into have an ultrasound on my liver and some labwork done due to some elevated something or other. Hopefully, this is all related to the Lipitor I've been taking for years and not something more serious. Anyhoo, the trip to the hospital was considerably less than pleasant. The ultrasound went very well. I got in a couple of minutes early. I'd already been preregistered so I only had to sit around for a couple of minutes before the technician came and took me back for the procedure. Once that was done, I had to go "donate" blood for the tests. This is where my day started sucking. The hospital I was at requires you to visit the registration desk every time you have a procedure done. This is ordinarily a minimum of 30 minutes for which the only reason I can determine is so they can scan your insurance card. The problem with this is my insurance hasn't changed in over a year but still they insist on this ridiculous process. Both of the women I questioned about told me to talk to Administration and gave me inane reasons like looking up procedure codes and what not, none of which made any sense. To finish up my trip to the hospital I had to go spend another 30 minutes waiting to be seen for the labwork which was then followed by another 10 minutes while the phlebotomist(?) tried to determine exactly how much blood she needed to take. After a uneventful pricking, I was off to work.

Work was fairly normal although I didn't really feel like I got a lot accomplished. Between arriving late and random distractions I would consider it a pretty unproductive day.

Finally, I arrived home to a "discussion" with my wife who then left for work. I grilled up some chicken for the kids (which they didn't like of course) and helped Trystin with her homework. Shortly therafter, she managed to knock a stool over on to her big toe which is generating a fair amount of blood and a brilliantly purple bruise underneath the nail. I told her about how Grandpa lost his big toenail when I was a kid and I think she is sufficiently worried now. =)

I hope Heroes rocks tonight.