Fitness Goals.

As I have said in multiple posts, it has been a long time since I've been really fit. Part of that is due to knee surgery, part of that is due to our leisurely summer in Europe, part of that is due to having a job that lasts till evening rather than soccer practice every evening. But I am in that stage of rehab where I am all amped up to be crazy fit and alongside my husband have vowed to get strong again. I made a long list of both short-term and long-term reasons why I want to get back into shape, and here are a few of them:

1) I played on the same club soccer team for the same coach for nine years. After I graduated high school, my coach took a coaching hiatus for a couple years until his daughter was old enough to play on a club team. So for the last few years, I've been going to the Valkyrie practices to say hi and watch the new "us" play, and I've been wanting to set up an alumni game, where my old team could get back together some weekend and play the girls. Well, the Valkyrie just won A-Cup and most of them are heading to high school in the fall, so I would say they're old enough to play us now. It's going to happen sometime at the end of this summer. And I need to get back in shape and shake all the dust off my soccer skills so I can show these girls who's boss. ;)

2) When we were still in college, Steve and I lived one year in a four bedroom house with a bunch of our friends. This house was down the street from a supermarket that had one of those blood-pressure test cuffs near their pharmacy, and every time we went, our friend Marc and I would basically compete to see who had the lowest resting heart rate, aka who was in better cardiovascular shape. The lower your heart rate is, the stronger your heart. Generally, when you are in good cardiovascular shape, your resting heart rate is low because your heart is strong enough to pump out enough blood for your body in fewer beats. (Unless you have a rabbit metabolism like my husband, whose heart rate is much higher than mine no matter what.) Anyhow, whenever Marc and I tested ourselves, I always won (except once, which I still think is because Marc had a long-sleeved shirt on, which interfered with the cuff's ability to measure his bpm. But no matter.). But Marc has been playing soccer without a huge break like I had to take, and I have no doubt that his bpm is much, much, MUCH lower than mine. And that just isn't right!

3) Right around when Steve and I got married, I was in a big get-fit craze. It was gorgeous outside all the time, I was only working part-time while doing last-minute wedding planning, and there were sweet horse trails all throughout our neighborhood that I would go running on. And at some point, all of us girls (which, in our group of friends, is a small minority) decided that we were going to have a race to see who could get a six-pack first. And no one ever won. SO I CAN STILL WIN IT!!! :D

4) Because my kids are going to be awesome athletes and I want to be their inspiration. Oh, and I also want to be that hot soccer mom, so I can measure up to my babe of a husband.

5) The simplest reason: it has been far too long, and I miss it. I miss the ache in my muscles after a hard workout, I miss the instinctual movement of my body on the soccer field, I miss the sound of my feet on the pavement as I run. I miss just being able to kick a soccer ball around with my husband. I miss how good it always made me feel. I miss the laughter and the friendship and the camaraderie that just isn't the same when you're on the sidelines. And when I start playing soccer again, I don't want to begin by just starting to get in shape THEN learning how to play soccer again. I need to be fit before I start, so I can focus on the ball and the strategy and the team and not get distracted by how *%^#*$)%! tired I am. And that begins today. (Or really, it began a few days ago. ;)

So Much For That.

Well, I didn't get very far with my resolution to blog more. :-/

In my defense, a lot has been going on: we moved all our stuff in, I started my new job, soccer has started up for Steve, etc. And it has been fun. And I really wish I had some pictures to show you of our place, but it is still not set up as nicely (ie, not clean) as I would like for pictures. BUT I promise I will take some of at least the clean rooms and put them up.... Tomorrow.

I've been at my new job for two weeks now, and obviously I have survived! Things have been really busy from the get-go, and with tax season looming, things will only get busier. But so far I am learning a lot and enjoying the work I've been doing. It's fulfilling, actually, to have so many things to work on, to get projects done, and to have the day fly by quickly. I've been going home for lunch since my work is literally only one mile away from our place, and it feels like a long break in the middle of the day, so I kind of forget that I am basically at work all day long. Steve is still working from home doing his food safety research/manual writing/whatever it is that he actually does, but his schedule is very flexible so he usually has lunch waiting for me when I get home. AWESOME! I love having a useful (and handsome!) husband to come home to.

PT has been going well - although going in the morning BEFORE work is not my ideal time. Ugh. So early. But I have noticed one thing: the first few days after I started working, I was coming home exhausted, both physically and mentally. But once I started going to PT in the mornings, I found that I have more energy throughout the day. You always hear people say that exercise stimulates your body and gives you more energy rather than taking it away, but I never reallllllly realized the truth of that statement until now. And since I (again, because I like to brag ;) ) live only a mile away from my work (ie, a three minute drive), I have time to get up, get some exercise in, eat breakfast, and go to work without really having to get up that much earlier.

Steve has been having fun at home while I'm at the office - like I mentioned already, he's been working from home with a food safety consulting gig, but besides that he's also been playing a lot of guitar, crocheting, cooking, and working out. The new 7v7 season started at the soccer park last Monday, and really since we moved into our place he's been itching to get back in shape - it's been too long for both of us, really. He has his bike up here now and I just brought my old bike from my parents' to our place today, so hopefully tomorrow we can go buy some new tubes for my bike (which I haven't ridden in like eight years....) and then we can start getting some serious cardio in! There are some neighborhoods down the street from us that we can go explore, or we can take our bikes out to the river trail and get some serious mileage in. I'm looking forward to it. I just wish the weather would get nicer! It was nice out (like 60 degrees and sunny) for a few days last week, but it's been drizzle and dreary the last couple days.

So with that not-so-exciting life update out of the way, I will put it on my to-do list to take some pictures of our place and get them up for all the world to see and admire. And hopefully I will get to this sometime before the weekend is over and not like three weeks from now. Here's to hoping! <3

Updates! Part 3. {Last One - Snow Day}

For our last few days in southern California, we celebrated David's birthday a little early with a spiral ham and cheesy potatoes, then loaded up our MOVING TRUCK!!!!!! Ack. We rented a 16ft moving truck and filled it to the brim (well... more like halfway to the top) with all our furniture (including our sweet new couch!) and boxes upon boxes upon boxes. Thank you Blonde Matt for making the packing up process relatively painless.

For our final weekend, we headed up to Lake Arrowhead with our friends for some fun in the snow. For Christmas, my dad gave us a new camera that is waterproof, freezeproof, dustproof, and shockproof - which came in handy because I kept dropping it in the snow. But I did get a sweet sequence of photos using the "Continuous" function on the camera where our friend Jon, who was sledding down a hill on one of our inflatable turtles, wiped out and ended up back on the turtle!

Other funsies included more sledding on giant turtles and snowball fights and building SNOW STEGOSAURUS!!!!!! And a snowman. And a show toilet?? And a little igloo for Billy!

To sum up the weekend (that really ended with two GIANT pizzas, Sardines, and Mafia), I leave you with another photo sequence:

 

 Thanks, friends, for a wonderful weekend. <3

Updates! Part 2. {Christmas(es) through New Year}

After the world didn't end on December 21st, we spent a few more days in town before heading to southern California for the holidays (and to pick up the rest of our stuff for our new place!). For the remainder of December, we basically decided we were going to have 12 Days of Christmas (or so it felt). Our schedule was as follows:

December 22: Christmas dinner with my immediate family, which consisted of prime rib and opening presents.

December 23: A loooooonnnnnnnnnnngggggggg drive down to southern California - this drive normally takes around 9 hours, but this time it took about 12. We (and by "we" I mean "Steve") had to drive really slow for the first half of the trip because it was windy and rainy and stormy. The grassy area between the north-bound and south-bound lanes of I-5 were flooded from all the rain and we passed several cars who had slid off the road and into the water. Then we stopped in Willows for a while so that we could have breakfast with my old friend Adrienne, who I hadn't seen in almost two years. She and her husband had been living in Spain for a year where she had a job teaching English, and she came back to the States right after Steve and I left for Europe for the summer. It was great catching up with her, and hopefully we'll see her again soon when we head out to the coast so she can take us on a brewery tour. :)

December 24: We have another reunion at lunchtime with Steve's friends from high school, who are spread all over the country (some here in California still, some in Colorado, some in Texas, some in New York...). Christmas is really the only time of year when everyone is in town, so it was nice for Steve to catch up with everyone, and it was nice for me to get to know everyone a little better since we don't get to spend a lot of time with some of these guys.

That evening we attended the Filipino Christmas Eve Extravaganza, better known as my mom's family's Christmas party. There was a lot of food, a lot of laughing, a lot of games (in which I won prizes!), and a lot of picture taking.

The ladies of the family.

December 25: Christmas dinner with Steve's mom, grandpa, and brother in Newport. It was almost surreal to have Christmas at the beach when it had been snowing lightly the week before back home. But I will never complain too much about sunshine. After a delicious Christmas dinner of (yet another) prime rib, potatoes, creamed corn (my favorite!), and salad, we headed down to visit and spend the night with a few of our college friends who lived nearby.

December 26: Christmas dinner + movie with Steve's dad and brother. We ate at a Thai food place (because we have had enough prime rib dinners for the holiday season :P ) then all saw Django: UNCHAINED together. Christoph Waltz, I applaud you for your amazing performance.



After our Four Christmases, we spent a lot of time driving around various parts of southern California, having reunion wine dinners, bowling with Joshua for his 29.2nd birthday, solving riddles, playing Sardines, and engaging in various shenanigans and knitting scarves. Here are some pictures to sum up:

By the time New Year's Eve rolled around, Steve and I were exhausted from all the driving we had been doing, so we opted to stay in and watch The Adventures of Tin-Tin on Netflix with Steve's mom. We celebrated with sparkling cider (of which Billy of course drank too much) and party poppers then promptly went to bed. :)

Updates! Part 1. {Thanksgiving through End of the World}

This past Thanksgiving was the first Thanksgiving I've had with my parents in the last five years. When I was still in college, we only got Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving off, and four days really wasn't enough time for me to go home, since two of those days would be spent mostly driving and I would have had to deal with horrendous Turkey Day traffic in both directions.

This year, it was just my immediate family and a few family friends. We ate only a fraction of the spread in the picture below.

On the menu: Trader Joe's cranberry-stuffed turkey breast, smoked prime rib (my dad's specialty), a spiral ham, mashed potatoes and gravy, artichoke rice salad, stuffing, baby asparagus and green beans, biscuits and butter, pumpkin pie, apple pie, peach pie, a huge platter of Filipino desserts like cassaba and sapin-sapin, and... I don't even remember what else. Water, soda, beer, and wine. Needless to say, we did not finish it all. We didn't even come close.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I began going to physical therapy three times a week. The main focus in the beginning was to get my range of motion back before moving on to some light strength-training. I went in for a preliminary evaluation the Monday after Thanksgiving, and in the two weeks between my surgery and that evaluation, I had lost over an inch of muscle in my right leg. Ugh. But physical therapy went well, and I gained back about 85% of my range of motion in the first couple weeks.

I start my new job in January, but Steve and I were invited to attend the company Christmas party in mid-December. It was nice to meet everyone in an informal, relaxed atmosphere (but don't quiz me on all their names...), and I won a prize in the raffle! Steve and I gorged ourselves on sushi, which was another added bonus.

We also moved into a new place! FINALLY! We are now living in a two-bedroom townhouse on the outskirts of downtown, which means we are within walking distance of lots of restaurants and shops but far enough away that we don't have to deal with lots of traffic (although after living in southern California for the last five years, it's hard to really think of it as traffic). The townhouse is very nice, as the interior had been completely remodeled about a year and a half ago. OUR KITCHEN IS GLORIOUS!!!!!! A gas stove (thank goodness. If I never cooked on an electric range again, it would be too soon.), lots of cabinet space, endless expanses of granite countertops... It is wonderful. It is easily twice as spacious as any of the other kitchens we've been in since we moved in together. All of our cooking gear fits nicely in all the cabinets, and the gadgets on the counters (like our pear-colored KitchenAid mixer!!!) don't take up too much space. Pictures to come of our new home once everything is put away and decorated. :D

For the last day of the world (Dec. 21), Steve and I sat around knitting/crocheting scarves and hats and gloves and boots for our stuffed animals while I read Charlie and The Chocolate Factory out loud. It was a wonderful use of our time on the supposed last day of existence. :) In the evening we had my brother and a few friends over for a silly but relaxing evening in, and all in all, I am very glad that the world didn't end that night because there are still so many things in this world to see and do!

Happy New Year!

New Year's Resolution:

Blog more often.

We get internet set up in our new place tomorrow. Lots and lots of updates (and pictures!) coming soon, I promise.

<3