The Deal

Cherub texted me awhile back and mentioned a contest of sorts he found on the internet.  It’s 100 pushups in 100 days.  Since I was feeling a little bad about my recent weight gain and hadn’t been making the progress I thought I was going to make I figured this might be the trick.

The pledge is just a personal honesty deal, but me a Cherub keep notes as to our progress.  So we figured you could do 100 a day with no problem just as long as we broke them up. 

I’m at 20 days now and noticed that 50 is my break even point.  Some days I can’t even get to 30, but it totally feels like exhaustion so I know not enough rest has occurred.  I had dreamed that one day I’d get to 100, but I’m not so sure at this point. 

I’ll keep up some commentary about this in later blog entries.

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The first guests of the season have left and we have a two week gap before the next ones show up.  Weight loss with guests in the house has turned out to be a joke.  Exercise is so sporadic as to be not effective and the diet is pretty shabby overall.  Just too much of everything.

With them out of the house and my wife gone on a short trip I might be able to shed a few pounds.  But I’m not feeling to confident about it.

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Back to class tonight and it was just the four of us.  I came a bit late and that turned out nice because I was huffing and puffing.  I just feel so bloated and creaky.  Hopefully that’ll go away in awhile.

The New Travel Rules

Now that I'm settling back into life into the far North I have meditated on two factors.  The first is that if I move to America I'll have to watch what I eat very carefully.  Two weeks in the Pacific Northwest had me put on 10 pounds! The second is that the pleasure of travel seems to have disappeared altogether and has been replaced with barely suppressed rage.  

I came back at 205 lbs.  My average weight is around 195 if I'm lucky and keep exercising.  I basically ate 10K calorie meals everyday with zero exercise.  I knew I was in trouble when my pants were extremely tight and my belt had to be let out to the next notch.  Not good.

So it was back to regular (or less) calories and exercise again.  After four days I'm happy to report I'm down to 202.5 lbs.  It also meant going back to beatings last night with an actual pot belly and little or no flexibility.  I huffed and puffed the whole time, but it was a lot of fun.  Four of us plus Teacher makes for a good two hours.  No breaks!

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Traveling by air has always meant a pleasurable time relaxing and enjoying the relatively luxurious experience of being pampered and napping for long stretches.  That's kind of gone by the wayside as the years have passed.  I'm now waiting in long lines, suffering indignities at the hands of uncaring strangers and my once previous relaxation has turned into enduring endless uncomfortable hours squeezed into a seat designed for someone way smaller than me.  

What really tops that off is the change in baggage regulations and how people have responded to it.  First the charge per bag - not that it's bothering me too much, but I can see a lot of people doing a lot to avoid it at all costs.  So they drag their bags on board the plane with the blithe hope that it'll fit into the overhead baggage compartment.  

What this does is create an environment in which every person in the isle gets elbow, shoulder and knees clipped as our fellow passengers stumble through the plane.  The next bit drives me nearly insane.  People go through this to avoid a fee and then find out that they cannot lift their bag over their head!  When I see the little test basket by the counter (which no one apparently uses to see if the bag is going to fit) I think they should have a fitness proof as well.  

"I'm sorry Ma'am  but since you can't lift the bag over your head twice, you'll have to pay the fee".  That'd go over really well.

I'm not sure what crack head designed the seat spacing, but he or she will have a special place in hell.  I take long flights and a lot of flights to get off the island.  I'd like to see the designers come along with me as I scream incoherently at them for hours.  And then ask if they'd like some cranberry juice with that.  Assholes.

Rose City Digest

I was in the Rose City the last week driving slowly through neighborhoods, trying very unscientifically to figure out where it would be nice to live.  

I'd been given the rule of three circles (really just a Venn diagram) in which you take a map and identify three things that are crucial to where you live, make three circles and the intersection is where you should choose your neighborhood.  This is an excellent idea, but I ran into a difficultly - I have the option of working in two places and I'm unsure where I'm going to end up.  The other issue is that I'm not sure of those critical "other things" I'd need to select to fix my circles, but  I'd been keeping a new school in mind as one of them  

So I used the unscientific method and off I went driving and looking.  Before I left I had stumbled upon a few dojo search engines (dojolocater.com for instance) and was troubled to find that there were no Tang Soo Do schools. I presumed this was an over site or that no one bothered to put up a site for their schools, but as I toured I have to say via drive by, they only seem to have Tae Kwon Do and Jujitsu.

If/When the wife and I move down there next year I'll have to figure out something, but I'm guessing word of mouth will probably turn up something or it's on to another art for sure.