fun?

So I finally get a day to sit down and take a look at emails, computer stuff, etc around my house and I realized it’s been over a month since my last post… time for the July update.

Nothing really new to post unfortunately. I think that’s mostly due to the fact I’ve been working myself half to death the last month. I can’t say it’s been horrible, but there have been days. I think mostly the worst days have been when I’ve spent the whole day working on progressing the new domain structure forward then something critical breaks towards the end of the day which keeps me working. Those days went from an acceptable 10-11 hour day to 16+ in an instant. All in all though it’s been kinda fun I guess. It’s not all the time that you get to recreate an entire environment from the ground up. The best part will be once we’re all moved over and sitting in the new environment. Seriously, the existing one is a wreck. It’s a lot better than it was when I started a few years ago but still – it’s hard for two different IT teams from basically two different companies to share one domain forest without some serious problems presenting themselves. Oh well… not an issue so much anymore.

Sadly, that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing the last month. At least I’ve been forcing myself to get out of work at a decent time this last week so I’ve been able to spend some time with my family again. I hope I can keep the trend up but since I worked so much in June it’s hard not to feel guilty like you’re not doing enough work when you’re used to pouring in a ton of hours and cut the throttle back to normal. It’s like some sort of withdrawal, how lame is that?

Well, with that said there is much to be done around the house today…

ahhh the latest and greatest… ok, maybe not the greatest… lol

Nothing too crazy to report. I finally got off my rear and posted up more pictures and such. I think the only thing I’m lacking at this point is the finished photos from doing this last round of remodel action. I’ll get to it. Just need to take them. I think we were so thrilled to be back into all our rooms and have the house back after that week long nightmare I haven’t cared much to take the time to take more photos.

I finally ran the Bolder Boulder again. For being 9 years later and about 20 lbs heavier I think I can be pleased with my time. In 2001 I ran a 1:20:57. Not too bad, but not the best time for someone who was 22 year old and weighed 210 lbs. LOL This year I’m pleased to say I came in at 1:14:50 pulling a total time drop of 6 minutes and 7 seconds. If only we didn’t get stuck in the walk/jog heat I might have pulled an even better time. We ended up adding just over a half a mile in extra steps dodging folks which made it a little difficult to keep a good pace. However, that being said, next year it’s ON! I’ll be going in for the qualification run or hopefully run another race before hand to log as a qualifying time and get into a jogger heat or something. My goal is to bust the hour mark next 10k I run. I was sad that Amanda couldn’t run with me this year but she was having some problems with her leg while training which kept her out. I ended up running with my neighbor Cristal who did an awesome job as well.

Aside from that, the last three weeks have been uber crap for me working out. I really need to get some workout time in before I end up plumping up again. I looked at some pics of me from 2 yrs ago when I started working to drop the weight and the me at 270 compared to the me at 232 is nothing if not motivating to never let myself get back there. I’ll get back to it but it’s been hard with work lately. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that I’ll be having much time the next month or two. Work is going to kill me, I’m convinced. We’re incredibly busy right now trying to bust out a pretty large project in a pretty tight schedule. It’s an improbable schedule which of course we’ll knock out. We’ll see how positive my next monthly update post is now won’t we?

All in all everything else is going well. Finally getting the Camaro restored. It only sat for about 5 years with no work on it… At the rate I’m going I think I *MIGHT* be able to drive it in a couple years. The only thing slowing me down now is money and I’m about 10k from finishing it, lol.

Anyway… that about does it. If something else comes to mind i’ll certainly drop another update (if i can find the time, lol)

That’s me. I am the professional blog slacker.

Well, to be honest I think I have a decent excuse or ten… It’s been pretty hectic. I think where I last posted was a good sign things were ramping up to drive me completely nuts. To be honest, I don’t recall everything that has occurred over the last couple months but it’s been somewhere in the lines of tons of career work and lots of home related work (remodel, kiddos, car stuff, workout, etc) so needless to say blogging has been the last thing on my list.

So to bring my little online community up to speed for things they may or may not already know. I successfully made it into the 220′s (albeit high 220′s) on the weight loss and I’m hovering around 19% on the body fat count. I can’t complain really, that’s pretty good considering I was out around 270 when I started this whole thing two years ago. So, almost 42 lbs down and more than 6″ off my waist is nothing to be disappointed over. We’ll see how this next round goes. I’m doing quite a bit more cardio as Amanda and I are training up to run the Bolder Boulder at the end of this month. Projections say I should see around 215 again. That would be nice… lol

In other news, we finished cleaning up the three bedrooms and the hallway to the upstairs in the house with a little remodel. Nothing like pulling out all the insulation in the exterior walls and replacing it with 2 levels higher of an R factor to make things a little cooler/warmer in the bedrooms. It pretty much wraps up most of the work in the house in the odd areas. All that’s left is the kitchen/livingroom combo remodel and the two bathrooms and this house is done. I kinda wonder what we’ll do after that… Hopefully start building the house in the mountains if all goes well. Some pictures will be posted up shortly if they’re not already there when this is read.

I also passed another birthday… 31, wooo… I dunno. I remember thinking as a kid that I would be lucky to see 21 and here I am with 10 more years on top of that, two kids, a wife, a career, debt and everything else that goes in between. Wow.

Tons of stuff in between but hey, I’m still alive and all is well so that’s pretty much where we’re at. Hopefully I can get at least one or two posts a month as things go forward eh? *rolls eyes* riiiight.

Shortly before we left for GA there was a mouse we had busted digging into some things in the garage. This little isolated incident turned into a huge mess in our absence adding to the phrase “while the cat’s away, the mice will play”. Seriously, it was like an army had moved into our garage while our house sat quiet for that week and a half.

My solution?

<evil streak>

… the most painful looking, horrific feeling device I could find for a mouse trap. It’s got teeth and all. PETA eat your f`n heart out!! So, I’m not completely without a heart though… I did buy one of those ultrasonic devices to ward off the little buggers. But in the mean time it’s open season on those rodents! So far the score is 1-9. Only one trap has been robbed of the bait but I do believe that crafty mouse bit the big one when he hit the next trap for some more peanut butter. We even got a two for one special with one…

So until they stop coming in, I’ll get excited every time I hear a “snap” or walk out to find another one bit the dust. >=D

</evil streak>

Well, it’s definitely been a crazy few weeks. Perhaps that’s even an understatement.

Kicking it all off, the family and I packed up and went down to Georgia for the holidays. Talk about a crazy jam packed trip. I think the entire family had a blast down there though. Arwen got to meet her cousin Chloe for the first time and those two hit it off. It pretty much kept her occupied a good chunk of the trip when she wasn’t riding around with the rest of us while I played tour guide for Amanda. Travis had a blast being the new baby in the group. Between my parents and my sister that kiddo was not lacking for attention. Amanda however I think had the most fun. Between seeing some sights and the food, I think she was a little sad to leave. To quote Amanda concerning the food she had down there, ‘I would weigh a ton if I lived here… literally a ton.’  She did however raid a few really good recipies from my mom so she’ll be sure to cook up some of those favorites here. Let’s hope she doesn’t go too nuts and I end up weighing a ton afterwards.

While I didn’t get to see everyone I had intended to see while down there it was definitely great to hang out with at least some of my friends again for a bit. We also did get a chance to catch a couple movies while down there as well. Yay for grandparents that will keep an eye on the kids while the parents escape for a couple hours here and there. So, I suffered through New Moon with Amanda. Ok, it wasn’t *that* bad. Although the commentary Randy and I carried on with during the movie made it all the better. We also went to see Avatar in IMAX 3D. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it, but my advice? Spend the extra few bucks on the IMAX version. It’s well worth it.

Aside from seeing family and friends for that first week, Christmas went really well, especially for the kids. They both made out like bandits. LOL Trying to pack everything to go home was a little bit of a challenge although the hardest challenge was rolling home with a head cold. It never fails to happen. I get a sinus flair up before I head down and coming back I’ve got one heck of a headcold. *shrug* Whaddya do? At least we did stop on the way back to rest before tackling the evil that is Kansas. To those that live there, I’m sure there are some very nice places there, but the I-70 corridor is forsaken by all that is good.

So home and sick… I pretty much slept for Thursday, barely made it through New Years, slept more and then subjected myself to snowboarding on Saturday. Powder=Good, Head cold and 23 degrees = BAD. I seriously thought my head was going to explode on the drive back home. It felt and sounded like my head was in a plastic bag squeezing in on my head. No fun but it was worth it. I so needed to get up there if only for a short time.

All in all though it’s been a pretty good few weeks. I am looking forward to returning to work tomorrow though. It should be an interesting week of catching up.

More to come…

Wow, so Andy brought something incredible to my attention… I have gone almost two months without a post.

I guess to some degree I have some decent excuses, but not really. I can’t really blame non-blog activity on being thrown on your butt by H1N1 for a few weeks… If anything my blogging activity should have gone up but instead it was only my gamer score did on Xbox Live, LOL. Alas, I was sick for a few weeks, hammered with some projects at work that destroyed my evenings and when that stuff wasn’t going on I just plain didn’t care. *shrug* I know, it’s bad.

So let’s see here… I added some new pictures of the kiddos and some misc stuff out there. Feel free to check them out. Some pics from Halloween, Travis Jr’s 1st birthday and some pics in between. Nothing too major, but the pictures are pretty much up to date at least.

Events of the last month and a half…. Halloween, Travis, Amanda and Andy’s birthdays, a couple four day weekends and reconnecting with a much missed friend that I lost touch with for almost 15 years. All in all, pretty productive on the personal front and most definitely some definite positives in there. The only real negative in there was getting sick… As I said I’m pretty sure I ended up with H1N1 literally kicking in the day after Halloween and leaving some lasting effects which pretty much destroyed most of November for me. In between days when I was so tired and hurt so bad that I didn’t want to move I found a way to work so I didn’t blow up too much of my PTO. I also managed to squeeze in a few hours a night about twice to three times a week to catch up on projects and work that was lingering so I didn’t get behind. Let’s just say by the time I made it to Thanksgiving weekend I was happy to see a 4 days weekend and repeat the process a week later and alas, here I am.

Only one more week for the most part and I get to journey home for Christmas. I can’t believe I haven’t been there since 2005. The time has flown… somehow in the last 4 years I’ve pretty much managed to completely change my life from the person I was then. Kinda strange. In no particular order I’ve re-married, had another kid, quit drinking, got really physically motivated and started up a cyclical workout plan that has increased my muscle mass quite a bit and dropped 10 points of body fat.

Speaking of the fitness related stuff… That front hasn’t stopped. It’s been lingering there all along despite having dropped blogging about it all the time. I think perhaps when Andy and I start up again in January I might get slightly more religious about putting up some results on a regular basis. Andy, wow… He started up with me 3 months ago and we have brought him leaps and bounds from where he was. He’s even quit smoking! I can’t wait to see him hit round 2 of this in January and see how well he does. As I stated, I’ve made some major progress.. I’ve gained a few inches on my chest, biceps and forearms while dropping ~5-6″ off my waist. Currently I seem to be stuck at about 240… it’s soo hard to drop the weight when you’re at a point you’re just packing on muscle as you’re burning off fat but at least I’m seeing measurement results that keep me motivated while the scale struggles. Regardless, it’s still nice to see that despite gaining some weight back in mass, I’m still down 25+ lbs from where I started so there’s a win.  

Well, I think that sums it up for the most part… I’m going to try to get back to my mischievous posts and updates over the next few weeks. Wish me luck… LOL

Yes aimless ramblings… pretty much how I feel this morning. I can’t believe I’m blogging at 6:30 in the morning…

Do you ever hate the fact that whenever you have to get up for work or school your alarm clock could go off at 5:30 in the morning and it’s the end of the world, however you get woke up at that time on a day you have off and you’re wide awake? I don’t get it. I wish I could be this awake in the morning when I *had* to get up. It would make life so much easier. I guess it makes for good harassment of my daughter this morning. She definitely doesn’t like me right now since I’m the one that woke her up and won’t leave her alone, lol. She’s not my biggest fan right now since I’m the alarm clock that won’t snooze and I threaten cold water torture.

Speaking of Arwen… tooth #2 down. It’s so funny to listen to her talk with this big gap in the front of her mouth. I need to take another pic of the progress. Funny how we look forward to teeth falling out when you’re a kid and as you get older you come to fear it…

All is well otherwise, except Travis is currently sick. Poor fella has the worst nasal congestion and you can tell he’s just suffering through it. At least we’ve got him sleeping pretty good now. I think for the last few days he has missed so much sleep it was making him a little nuts. Last night he was staring off through the tv while watching me play Fable II. That kid and video games… he loves em.

So we finally put the casings around the doors in the downstairs. Only took me what, a year? lol. Speaking of… Travis will be a year old this month. Amazing how the time flies when you have kids. At least it makes winters come a little faster….

oh yes, I have the fever already. Only a few more weeks and snowboarding season starts… YAY! We really didn’t have much of a summer here… I *THINK* we had one day hit 100 but I could be wrong. 98% of the summer was low 90′s or well below. We’ve seen a lot of cold fronts and much moisture this summer which has been wonderful. Hopefully it’s a sign of a colder, snowier winter. *crosses fingers and hopes for the best*

Ok, I have much slacking to do today so I must get to it.

So,  I guess I succesfully went a whole month without a single post. That NEVER happens. (lol)

Not a whole lot to report. Sure I’ve had my ideas of rants, but not time to put them down. They finally assigned some help to me at work so hopefully I’ll see some of the workload balancing out sometime in the near future. I certainly hope so as much more of this and I’m liable to lose my mind and “off myself” as James so delicately puts it when describing his bad days, lol. At least I have 4 more days off work to look forward to. Maybe I can find something constructive to do other than sit around playing video games the whole time.

On that note, working out has been going well. Amanda and I just started actually doing some really good recording at the beginning of August and I’m actually seeing much better results in both of us. It renews the goals and keeps us focused. When we started recording at the beginning of August I was at about 25% bodyfat. EEEK! However, within a matter of a few weeks I’m already down to 22% and steadily dropping. If the trend keeps up I should be somewhere closer to 20% this weekend when we take our measurments. We’re still keeping up with the P90X routine with some other stuff tossed in along with it. I took up running again, except this time I got a bit more serious with it. My long runs are about 3.5 miles and my short runs are 1.8 miles. I typically put in a long run Mon-Wed-Friday and short ones on Tues-Thurs-Sat. Typically Saturdays over the summer were skipped due to push mowing a 1/3 acre slot of grass but with winter approaching I’ll probably start throwing that in as well. All in all it feels really good to run, the only thing keeping me from increasing the distance on my long runs is really time. 40 minutes is about all I want to take out of my day in the evenings for “working out” due to my daily schedule. Up at 430, workout til 530, shower, head to park and ride at 6, work by 645, home at 5, run til 6, dinner, shower, hour to relax/read/whatever, then sleep… rinse repeat. LOL

All in all I can’t complain. Despite being extremely busy this last month has been a pretty decent one. At the beginning of August we piled into the Highlander and headed up to Bear Lake in Utah for a famliy reunion on my mother-in-law’s side. It was definitely a trip with it’s ups and downs, lol. It was however, good to see Amanda’s family and participate in some activities out there like seeing the Minnetonka Caves. Arwen had a blast of course playing with all her bazillion cousins and being spoiled by Amanda’s parents. We also had the chance to go to Chase’s wedding in Logan, Utah. Talk about timing, the guy got married the day after we arrived and only 30 minutes away. Chase of course jokes that he planned it that way… crazy guy. It was definitely good to see him again and meet his new wife, Shelly. Congrats again to you both!  

Arwen is just growing in leaps and bounds. She lost her first tooth (pictures will be uploaded after this post) a couple of weeks ago and she started first grade just a couple days later. It amazes me to actually think about it since it seems like just yesterday she was born. Travis Jr, is growing like crazy too. The lil guy has officially figured out that ‘ ma ma ‘ gets his mother’s attention and has proceeded to use it whenever he wants her. It’s cute and annoying at the same time. Despite the fact he’s been saying ‘ da da ‘ for a couple months this is the first sign of him actually “using a word” so the win goes to Amanda for him saying “mama” first. The lil guy is also crawling around now… not proficiently but none the less he is mobile and dangerous. I also suspect it won’t be long (few months) before he’s trying to take his first steps as he is able to hold pretty steady on those legs. Considering how quickly he went from sitting assisted to sitting up on his own, I think we’re in for it for sure.

Ok, well if I’m going to upload some photos before going for a run, I’d better end here. Perhaps September will hold more time for me to get back to blogging.

Well, I have to say it’s about freakin time. I think this has been one of the driest winters (in terms of snow) I’ve seen since I left Georgia. LOL I really wish that we had more of this recent snowfall all over the winter. It was kind of boring this go around. Still, can’t say I’m bored with Colorado weather and at least we’ve been keeping some decent bases in the mountains to go boarding on.

However despite it being dry, it was good to see the weather finally dropping some much needed precipitation out there. January was horrible, February saw precipitation at .11″ out of the average .33″ and we sat in March all the way until last Thursday at trace levels with an average of .92″. Finally between then and now March is sitting at 1.62″ which is awesome.

Here’s some pics from last Thursday and Friday’s fun.

The best part? More is supposedly on the way as we roll into April! Hopefully we’ll be getting some more tomorrow and again this weekend. YAY!

I really hope this is the case. I’ve enjoyed getting in some late season snowboarding. Even Arwen has joined in on the fun.

Hopefully the poor kiddo can get cleared to come up with me again this next weekend. I feel it will be unlikely though since she broke her wrist last Friday. Crazy kiddo was jumping off the furniture and got herself good. We thought at first she had sprained it, however when she tripped and fell again Saturday it hurt her again just as much so we had it checked out. Still though, she boarded awesome on Saturday so who knows, maybe she’ll get to go up again despite having a cast on!

You know, I have to say I’m extremely glad to be back into a “normal” routine. There is only so much time off someone should take and I think I maxed it. lol I ended that vacation a wreck. The last two days have been nice getting back up at 430 in the morning to workout and being at work during the day. I miss hanging out with my family but my body is so much happier. It seems to be operating in a little smoother, albeit ready to shutdown by 8pm, mode.  Either way, it’s good to be doing some productive work again. I’ve come into the new year with new projects to get my butt in gear right off and so far, so good. Lots of fun things to work on.

So I’ve picked up Russian again. Hopefully this time I’ll get it to stick a little better and be able to use it more regularly since Amanda is interested in learning it. Due to the fact the kids will be raised bilingual in Spanish and English we have to have something to communicate in that they can’t understand right? lol It’s actually been pretty remedial throughout this first part of the course. I’ve blown through the first two units and have remembered most of the vocabulary and for a change I actually have the alphabet down pretty well. The hard part is that stupid grammatical nonsense. So frustrating but what do you do? I’ll get it. At least this time it’s much easier to remember where and when to change the last syllables of words. At the rate I’m going I should be finished up with Level 1 by the end of the week and be able to move on to Level 2. That’s where the big slow down will be, lol. I’m sure I’ll spend a good solid month on that.

In other news, the kiddo is getting huge. Well, both of em… Arwen is just a couple inches shy of 4′ (46″) and Travis is an inch shy of 2′ (23.5″).  It’s hard to believe she’ll be 6 this year and he’s going into his third month. The little guy is already trying to babble his head off sometimes. It’s amusing. I actually forgot how entertaining it can be to have a baby around.

Well, that’s about it for now.