NaBloPoMo Reflections

It’s the last day of NaBloPoMo, and I made it! Being that I just started this blog, this was my first time attempting this challenge, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do it, so I’m pretty proud of myself that I stuck to it. Some things I learned over the course of the past month:

– Coming up with blog topics every single day is hard
– I much prefer to just ramble about my day and my thoughts rather than have a focused subject for each post
– The above is probably something I need to work ou
– Blog hops are the best, and I will continue doing them
– I’d really like to create my own blog template and domain so that I have more control over everything

I probably won’t blog tomorrow, but I know after this past month that I’m dedicated to continuing this little project I’ve started.

Tuesday Ramblings

After feeling drained of energy yesterday, I decided to go to bed a little earlier than usual, take some Nyquil and try to catch up on sleep. It worked and I got a decent amount of sleep, but when I woke up this morning, I was in a thick Nyquil haze. Much like yesterday, I didn’t wan to get up at all. Once the haze wore off though, around lunchtime, I got an unexpected burst of energy and decided to use it.

I went home for an early lunch break around 11:30 and spontaneously decided to vacuum the entire apartment – not a small task as we have 1100 square feet and about 95% of it is carpeted. I also did the dishes and picked up the living room and bedroom and still had a little time to spare before coming back to the office. That’s the kind of lunch break I enjoy: highly productive.

I’m really hoping our new tv gets delivered today. They attempted delivery yesterday, but didn’t leave it because no one was home. That’s the problem with ordering online – both of us work full time so we need UPS to leave our packages outside the door. Lately, this has been a problem for some reason, either because they want signatures (for things from amazon? really?) or because they get left at our apartment building’s office, which means we have to wait until the manager is in there and then pick them up. Last night, we got a notice that we had a package in the office and I had to wait in line for 15 minutes before I could get in there and grab it. Very annoying.

Thankfully Tuesday is almost over and we’re nearly halfway through the week!

Need… more… energy

I followed through on what I posted yesterday and woke up today at 6:30 for Zumba. Man, did I ever not want to get out of bed or do anything this morning. I was tired, but it wasn’t the kind of tired where I wanted to just go back to sleep. I just didn’t WANT to do anything. Maybe it was knowing that the long weekend and the holiday I had been looking forward to were over. Maybe it was the fact that it was Monday morning at 6:30, and I have a full week ahead of me. In any case, I did get up and I did do Zumba, but it did not feel good today. And evey now as the work day is about to finally end, I’m still exhausted and can’t wait to get back into bed tonight.

On the plus side, D found out last night that one of his short stories just got accepted for publication at an online magazine! He was super excited and so was I. He’s a very talented writer and he’s worked long and hard on his stories. Just this past year he’s started having success getting them published and I’ve been encouraging him and helping him out as much as possible. I’m very excited for him.

Also, I’ve been making good progress with my Christmas shopping. I have a list written out of everyone I need to buy for and I’m slowly working my way through it on Amazon. I don’t plan to do a single bit of shopping in an actual store this year, if I can help it. It’s not worth it to have to drive somewhere, spend a half hour looking for parking and get all worked up over all the rude people.

Did anyone find any great cyber monday deals this year? I haven’t been able to find anything I’m looking for on sale for some reason. We did get a decent deal on that TV we ordered over the weekend, but I don’t feel like it was anything extraordinarly special to be qualified as a Black Friday deal. I’ve also been on the hunt for a decently priced Roomba, but haven’t had much luck with that either.

Here’s hoping tomorrow comes with more energy than today!

Why must long weekends go by so quickly?

Here we are… Sunday afternoon and getting ready to get back into the grind. Ugh. The weekend did not last long enough, not even close. I need more days off and time to work on my projcts. Luckily, I did get to start in on some Christmas shopping online today for D. Lots more work to do there, plus I need to get out my Christmas cards this week.

Tomorrow I’ll refocus on eating right and working out 4 times a week. Despite the holiday, I did end up going to the gym 3 times. I haven’t slacked at all on the working out front since I began this project. My only slacking comes from eating badly these days.

So, tomorrow morning I will be up at 6:30 to Zumba and that will hopefully get the week off to a good start.

Only 3 more days left of NaBloPoMo! Are you participating? Or is anyone participating in NaNoWriMo? If so, how are you doing?

Black Friday and the aftermath

Anybody out there score some awesome deals on black friday?

We ended up buying a 42 inch LED HDTV for the living room. We’d been scouting them for quite some time, waiting for the right deal to jump on and we found a pretty good one yesterday. The problem we were having: we have a game room that includes a PS3, which is meant to be played in HD. However, we have a really old TV in there and we’re very much missing out on what we could be experiencing with our games because of it. So, we’re going to move our current HDTV from the living room to the game room and replace the living room TV with this new one.

Today we went to my parent’s house to put up the Christmas tree, which was a ton of fun, but also involved a lot of eating of not so healthy foods. Starting Monday, I’m going to have to get back on the diet train.

Hope everyone’s having a great weekend!

Magic Music

Well, Thanksgiving has come to a close and now it’s time to work off all those extra calories at the gym. I’m off to a good start… I just got back from a really intense workout!

D and I went to the gym together since we both have the day off today. I had next to no motivation to do anything when we first got there. So, to start I did:

– 5 minute warmup on the elliptical
– vertical chest press machine
– leg press machine
– hip adductors

Then my plan was to get back on the elliptical for a lengthy cardio workout, but I just wasn’t feeling it. At all. Instead, I went over to the treadmill and decided to just walk with some incline, put my ipod on shuffle and see if any motivation hit me.

To start, I was doing my usual: 5 minute walking warmup, 1 minute running, 1-2 minutes walking, etc. Then an amazing song came up:

It’s jpop and it’s the most high energy song you can possibly imagine. It was magic! I started running at the beginning of the song and didn’t stop until it was over. It was 3.5 minutes… the longest running interval I’ve done in a very very very long time. And it felt great! I was shocked, to say the least, that I was able to do it and feel so good about it.

Today was also my first day running with my new sneakers and apparently, based on those results, they were worth the purchase!

And because it’s Friday, I’ve once again joined up with the Restless Blog Hop:

Happy Friday to all!

To all my American readers…

Happy Thanksgiving!

I’m off in about 2 hours to go see my family, but I wanted to check in and say hi. Also, some happy news (for me):
Today I weighed in at 142.2, down 1.4 pounds since this past Saturday! It’s the first time during this whole project that I’ve seen a significant loss, so I’m very happy to have some evidence that I’m doing the right thing.

Whatever you may be doing today, I hope you enjoy yourself and eat lots of good food!

Happy day before Thanksgiving!

I was lucky enough to get to work from home today. I technically could have gone in, but the vast majority of my office worked from home and there was really no reason to be there. The day was pretty slow, so it was extra nice to be at home for it.

I got in a great workout at lunchtime today:

– 45 minutes of Zumba Wii
– 20 minutes on the bike

No weights or abs today, but my past 2 workouts have included lots of weights, so it should be fine. I’d love to be able to get in a quick half hour on the bike tomorrow before the festivities, but I’m not sure I’ll have the time.

My family will be going to my aunt’s house, as we do every year. I haven’t seen this side of the family in many months, so it should be interesting. I’m also looking forward to some awesome food, but I’m going to try not to go too far overboard. I don’t want to lose all my progress after all!

D and I are embarking on a baking project tonight. We’re going to attempt to make Eat, Live, Run’s Pumpkin Cheesecake Bites. They look delicious and I can only hope that we don’t somehow screw up the recipe!

I’m sure I will be checking in briefly tomorrow to fulfill my NaBloPoMo responsibilities, but I do want to wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving!

Short and sweet

Today is the last day in the office before the few days off we have for Thanksgiving, and I can’t wait to get out of here!

D and I have been playing a lot of old school Sega games for the past few days. We have a PS3 game that has something like 100 different Sega games from back in the day, and we’ve been having a ton of fun together playing it. My favorites so far are Sonic (I, II, and III) and Columns, which is like a Tetris game. Of course I played Sonic a long time ago when we had a Sega at home, but I never really played any of the other games on the disc. D is having a lot of fun reminiscing, since most of these games were ones he played as a kid. Sometimes it can be really cool to go back through time via a video game, or a song or tv show for that matter.

That’s my update from now… short and sweet!

Thanksgiving Prep

What are you doing to prepare for Thanksgiving?

For me, I’m just trying to make it through 2 full days of work at the office followed by one work-from-home day on Wednesday. D and I might also be doing some baking so we can take desserts to our respective families, and simultaneously and unrelated to Thanksgiving, I’m trying to finish up a few, very large, personal projects:

1. A few weeks ago, I got the idea that it might be nice to have all of my old pictures scanned into my computer. When I was a kid, roughly from the age of 10 until about 13 or 14, I took pictures ALL THE TIME. I have books and books of them, and in some ways, it feels like those years are forever documented and preserved. I’ve often thought about what would happen if any sort of disaster ever befell those pictures and it’s not a pretty thought.

On top of that, I’d really like to create a photo book on Shuttefly for my parents for Christmas. It will be a mixture of these extremely old school pictures and some newer ones, already at my disposal thanks to the age of digital cameras. It’s turning into a huge project. I already have over 400 pictures scanned and at least 3 or 4 large books left to go.

2. I’m working on an epically long writeup of our Disney World vacation. I’ve been working on this since October, but took a very long break and now I’m at it again. I want to write down all the memories I have from the trip before they leave or fade. I’ve currently covered the first day we were there and the morning of the second day and I’m already over 5000 words. I guess I can’t do anything small, huh?

3. I’m also trying to learn a new coding language for work and possibly for my own projects. I have some ideas to try to start my own website or start building something for D’s future book.

All that on top of the usual holiday craziness and I have plenty to keep me busy!