travis' brain dump

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