New Place, Old Place, Some Place

Having two homes is kind of a pain. My lease on my apartment runs out at the end of this month and I couldn't be happier. I'm in the process of cleaning the old place, continuing to purge stuff, decorate and organize the new place and sell some furniture and stuff from the old place. It would be awesome if my two houses, jokingly referred to as my "summer" and "winter" homes were closer together, but they're a 20 minute drive, one way. I left all the furniture that I wasn't going to keep at the old place because I didn't see the need to haul it down two flights of steps and back up another. I also thought it'd be better to have strangers come to my old house instead of my new one. I'm down to just needing to sell off the stupid couch from hell and then life will be good. I've also resolved that if it hasn't sold by tomorrow (Monday) I'm calling a donation place down the street from my apartment and having them come and take it. Then it's gone, I can finish cleaning, get the carpets cleaned and get my massive deposit back.

One Week...

So it's been one week since I started the 30 Day. Thanks to Velo's fantastic tip - I modified my push ups, and am now using the steps. This is helping my knee immensly. As far as weight loss, I'm only down half a pound which I'm okay with. And you might be thinking, why am I not disappointed but only losing half a pound? Two reasons. A) I lost 45 pounds 4 years ago. I'm still down 40 pounds, so it's not like when I've started a new habit in the past and the first week, I lose a ton of water weight, there's no water weight to dump. And B) I've lost a combined 3.5 inches across the different areas of my body. Not too shabby. I'm eating better, have more energy and feeling better. This is definitely helping out with my stress a bit too. I've been pretty stressed lately.

30 Day Shred - Day 3 check in

I've completed three days of the 30 day shred and I'm finally starting to feel like I might actually be able to survive. The hardest part for me now is the push ups. I don't do the "real" push ups. I do what you would consider to be the "girl" push ups, which are hard on my knees. Minus the part where I'm sore as all get out - especially my thighs, I feel that I have more energy. I'm not sure that makes any sense. I wake up in the more in pain, but once I get moving I'm fine, I'm just attributing this to age. :) We'll see how I'm doing after a week of this stuff.

30 Day Shred - Day 1

I had a pretty productive weekend - worked on reorganizing my home office, which is my work space. Tossed a lot of stuff. A LOT. Also got rid of my table and chairs, which was pure profit, since they were given to me by my friend Kristin, a little over six years ago.

Now, I didn't state this as a New Year's Resolution, but I'm trying to lose 10 pounds and also basically get in better shape. I'd like to lose more inches than anything. If I lose 3 pounds, I'm actually in a "healthy" BMI for my weight, but a lot of it is not muscle. As much as I'd love to join a gym and get coached/yelled at by a personal trainer, that's just not feasible right now. Plus my schedule isn't condusive to a trainer since I travel a lot. What to do, what to do? I'd heard from various people about Jillian Michael 30 Day Shred. So I headed to Amazon, and read some additional reviews, which were mostly favorable.

First of all, the last time I worked out was, um....this summer I walked a couple miles one Saturday. I do a lot of stairs, but I think my body has adapted to my previous third floor apartment and the fact that I now have a three story townhouse. Needless to say, I'm an out of shape person, who isn't that overweight. The only problem that I foresee is that my medication has decreased my sweating. You might think that's awesome, it makes you overheated.

So I sat down to watch the DVD first. There are three levels, and it's recommended that you start with level 1, which is 20 minutes. After a warm up, Jillian and her two pals, go back and forth between strength training, cardio, abs and repeat twice. It looked easy enough when I was watching it. Those of you that work out would probably zip right through level one with no problems. The strength part was no problem. I looked forward to those segments. It's almost like a break, since there are no breaks. Cardio started off easy, but again, I'm out of shape. I wanted to die. But I did it, I did the whole 20 minutes. I'm hoping that by this time next week, I won't want to die by the time the 20 minutes is up.

2010 Resolutions

All right, so 2009 is over, goals for this year....

First of all, I'm going to cook more at home than I did last year. I started working on this about the last couple months of the year. So far this year, the only meal that I've eaten out is Tuesday this week when I took an agent to lunch. That doesn't really count because I recoup that cost. I ate out NYE while watching the football game. I like cooking, it's just finding recipes that are simple and small enough for one person. Eating the same thing for a week gets so old.

Also, I lucked out that my parents bought me a latte/hot drink maker for Christmas. The goal is to knock down the stops at the coffee shop from 5-6 days a week to a max of 1 - 2 days a week.. This should save me some serious cash. You know you have a latte addiction when you wake up on New Year's Day, go home (crashed at Salsa's), and think you're hungover, so you drink some water. It didn't help. So I went back to bed. Which also didn't help. So I went to my local Scooters, which knocked the problem right out. I need to find a rehab program. I went for three years with no caffiene. I can do this. Probably didn't help that I drank double rum and cokes on NYE.

Secondly, I'm going to pay off my credit cards. I'm pretty annoyed that they have a balance since I didn't have a balance on them when 2009 started. The fact that I'm carrying any balance makes me want to vomit. I'm also going to have at least a full three month emergency fund saved up. Another thing that makes me want to vomit.

And finally, in something, I'm not going to get real specific about here... I need to be more aggressive and take charge in certain areas of my life. So I'm going to deal with that, and hopefully quit messing it up.

2009 Recap

Overall, 2009 was a pretty good year. In late January/early February, I made a trip to Chicago for my friend, Amanda's, 30th birthday. I haven't been to Chicago in ages. It was great to catch up with a lot of friends there.  May saw me going to a bunch of concerts, which was a great time - Jason Mraz, the Nadas, Billy Joel and Elton John. I also traveled back to Eastern Iowa for my cousin, Alice's wedding in June. In July, I headed to Vegas for my 30th birthday, it was definitely an experience to remember. August had me heading to Lansing for a week of training for work. I ended up catching up with some friends there too.  And I managed to make a complete idiot out of myself in the process. YES!!! Football season kicks off and I feel like I move to Ames, which is always a good time. This year, I also got to travel to Kansas City to see Kati and Sara and their Justin's along with Stacy. November, hmmm....oh yeah, I bought a house in November. And December seemed to be all about the holidays. So really I can't complain. I managed to not go to the ER last year, so I achieved my biggest New Year's resolution goal since I'd gone twice in 2006, once in 2007 and twice in 2008. My health insurance company probably thinks I'm dead.

Throughout the year, I managed to make a bunch of new friends in Omaha, and reconnect with a few old ones too.

I Can Do It

I've been living in my house for a couple weeks now. I closed about five weeks ago and have been having a random problem. My garage door has been coming open on it's own. You might think that I'm crazy.  That I leave and just forget to close it, and while that might occassionally be true since I'm not used to having a garage door....this is typically not the case. I sometimes sit in the driveway after I shut the door for about five minutes, checking email, sending texts, checking work voicemail. After I'm sure that it's really shut, off I go.

I thought that I'd fixed the problem about two weeks ago, because I was no longer coming home to an open garage door. I pushed some button on my wall opener. Wahoo! And yet, just to be safe, I continued to lock the door between the garage and my house. So today, I'm sitting in my dining room, wrapping presents, when suddenly, up goes the garage door. WTF??? I run downstairs, throw open the door to the garage look out, to watch the door going up. And then 20 seconds later it's going back down again. Clearly someone else is on my frequency.

So, I decided I'm smart enough to figure this out, right? I dig out the manual, read it over a few times and head downstairs, step stool and manual in hand. Move the car out of the garage. I begin my search for the "Learn" button. The picture in the manual only showed and extreme close up of a button. Clearly, no one has ever seen a button before. Hmm...not on this side, not on that side, or that side. Why wouldn't it be inside?  I have to pry the cover off of one end, hold this button in and wait. The button looked nothing like the picture FYI, thank God it was labeled. Then reprogram the remotes. No big deal, been there, done that. And then moved the car back inside. But here's the thing. I still have no clue if this actually worked. I like to think it did. Otherwise, I have to move all the stuff in my garage inside my house before I leave for trip to Iowa.