travis' brain dump

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.