Get your spin on

Last week’s experiment of getting up at 5:00am and going to the gym worked out pretty well, I did it successfully Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  I thought I would sleep in on Saturday; however my body thought that it was definitely time to get up by 6:30 am.  Ok, so there might be a down side to getting up early during the week… it will make sleeping in on the weekend even harder to do.

Since the CFO is out of town visiting family, I decided to go to the gym’s “intro to spinning” class on Saturday morning at 9:45.  I’ve always read about spinning being a good winter workout for cyclists and the classes are included with our membership, so why not try it out?  After the instructor spent 15 minutes verifying that everyone’s bikes were adjusted properly for their size/shape, the she ran through the basic “moves” involved in a typical spin class.  Basically you vary the resistance on the machine to simulate hills/flats and then either sit or stand or (harder yet) “jump” back and forth from sitting to standing to sitting to standing.  They instruct you to vary your cadence, from a normal “resting” cadence to high rpm (around 110-120 rpm) sprints.  It all seemed easy enough to understand and I could see the potential for this to be a real a$$ kicker.  In the 30 or so minutes of actual spinning during the orientation, I covered about 6 miles.  The instructor said that she was teaching the 5:15 am class on Monday, so I thought it would be good to try a “real” class with her before going to a class taught by a different instructor.

4:45am on Monday my alarm went off… it felt way too early, but that was probably because I stayed up until 11:30 the night before, because I couldn’t tear myself away from the New England/San Fran football game.  I walked through the door to the spin room at the same time as another guy from the Saturday intro class.  The instructor was happy to see some returning new faces and we adjusted our bikes and started warming up.  After warm up, she commenced to running us through series of sprints and hills and jumps and more hills and more sprints and more jumps… I was very happy when the “cool down” finally came 40 minutes later.  Somewhat surprisingly, I managed to cover over 15 miles during the class.  I was whipped, though.  I attended another class this morning (Wednesday), with a different instructor… her class was a little more intense, with lots of standing climbs and a whole lot of jumps. 

With different instructors teaching spin each morning, the variety of instruction might be enough to keep it interesting and not become too monotonous.  I think that I might make spin class my mon/weds/fri workout routine, with weights mixed in on tues/thurs.  Now that I have my tentative plan set, all I have to do is stick to it.  The big problem is that we are heading out of town for the holiday; will I be able to get back on it after taking a week of for Christmas???  I sure hope so; I know that I will need it after being around dad’s homemade donuts and cookies!  I can’t resist eating those, typically in large quantities!

Keep It Simple Stupid

On Sunday afternoon I made a run to the grocery store to get food for the rest of the week, until we head out of town.  (The CFO is out of town visiting her family, so I’m solo this week)  Since I’m solo and we’re leaving town at the end of the week, I didn’t pick up much.  However, I did stop by the deli to get some meat to use for lunch sandwiches.  Because we won’t be home over the weekend and I won’t be making sandwiches then, I decided to trim my usual half a pound order down to a third of a pound so that we didn’t have to throw out any leftover meat before we left town.  I placed my order for a third of a pound of ham and watched the college aged woman work the slicer.  As the pile of sliced meat grew on the tray, I started to worry that she miss understood the amount that I requested.  She walked over to the scale, placed the meat on it and the scale read 0.66 pounds… twice what I had ordered.  She started to head back towards the slicer to cut some more so I spoke up and said, “I only asked for a third of a pound.”  She then replied, “I know, I need to bring it up to 0.75 on the scale.” 

I paused… told myself “don’t be a jackass,” (which we all know is often difficult [for me] to do when such an opportunity like this presents itself) and then tried not to laugh.  After taking a moment to collect myself, I said “a third of a pound would only read 0.33 on your scale; you are currently at two-thirds of a pound.”   She stood there and thought about it for a few seconds and then I could almost see a cartoon light bulb above her head switch on.  She started to turn red and get a bit embarrassed as there were several other customers standing around watching this unfold.  She then packaged up the quantity that I asked for and sheepishly handed it to me.  Lesson learned for me: just order deli stuff in half pound increments… none of this complicated “thirds” stuff.  Or, maybe, I should push the limits and go to eighths or even sixteenths, “Yes, I would like seven-sixteenths of a pound of smoked ham please.”  I can only imagine the response that request would get.

Blue Dawg Days

It took the better part of a week to forget about the University of Georgia’s heart breaking loss to the Alabama Crimson Tide in the SEC championship.  Yes, UGA went into the game as the under dawg, but I still had hope that they could pull out a victory.  For those of you who didn’t watch the game, it was a series of ulcer causing, emotional ups and downs.  I went from standing up and cheering, to slamming my fist into the couch back to jumping around cheering many times during the game… The CFO just shook her head at me, un able to understand how I can be so “involved” in something that I am not physically involved in.  When the game clock finally hit 0:00, the dawgs were 4 yards and few seconds short of scoring a game winning touchdown.  Oh, the agony… So close, yet so far away.

Now that I have had some time to reflect on it, I am very happy that we (even though I wasn’t technically involved) gave Bama a run for the entire game.  Part of me was worried we that we were taking a knife to a gun fight, but the teams ended up being pretty equally matched.  It all came down to Bama being able to run the ball better than we did and us not capitalizing on turnovers.  We took the ball from them 3 times and only scored off of one of them, a blocked field goal that was run back for a touchdown.  I was a little shocked to see that we plummeted from 3^rd to 7^th in the final BCS poll, but that extra loss in the SEC championship hurt us.  Now I have a month to wait for the Capital One Bowl, where UGA will be facing Nebraska.  It should be another good game, too bad we can’t make the trip down to Orlando to watch it.

Illinois State, made it to the quarter finals game, but then lost… it was still a good showing for the Red Birds!

Say hello to our backyard neighbors... what a bunch of animals:

 

I am also starting to try out a new routine.  Today is day 2 of it:  I rolled out of bed at 5 am and went to the gym and exercised from 5:30 to 6:30.  Why am I doing this you might ask?  Because when I stepped onto the scale that was in the workout room on the cruise ship, I was not happy with what it told me…   Not quite "one at a time" but high for me.  I've got to get a handle on this compact spare tire that I'm carrying around before it becomes a full sized one!

Will this new routine stick?  It is way too early to tell, but I still feel pretty good this afternoon.  We’ll see how long I last in the evening, although I guess going to bed earlier wouldn’t be bad for me either. I typically go to be around 11:15-11:30, much of the evening spent plopped down in front of the TV at night.  This is why I need a new project car... to get me on my feet and away from the TV in the evenings.  Makes sense to me, however, I'm not sure the CFO will buy that reasoning...

Cruise conclusion

On Wednesday, we docked in Antigua, where we had already planned and pre paid for a zip line excursion.  I was worried that the harness and the sunburn wouldn’t play well together, but I wasn’t willing to miss out on the trip either.  The CFO, her brother and I headed out on the excursion and had a blast.  Nothing like a series of 9, 200-300+ foot long zip lines strung between big trees to get the adrenaline pumping.  The CFO was pretty nervous about stepping off the first ledge, but I think that she did really well.  The big question is if she would do it again???  I am not sure if she will, but I definitely would.  Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures from this excursion because they didn't allow you to bring your own camera.  They would, however, charge you $20 to take your photo.  Since there was 3 of us, we decided it wasn't worth $60 for our zip lining photos.... I did buy a t-shirt though!

Busy day in St. Maarten, 4 ships in port.  Our ship, the Summit, is the one on the far left.

On Thursday, we docked in St. Maarten, a place where we visited on our honeymoon 6 years prior.  We took the water taxi to town and roamed through the various stores looking for souvenirs and gifts.  The one thing that really stands out at every port is the number of jewelry stores at each stop.  There were at least two dozen at this stop and possibly more.  I have no clue how they all stay in business, nothing that they sold seemed to be a “bargain,” at least not the items that the CFO liked.   Luckily for her, I had already bought her jewelry for an anniversary gift, so I didn’t feel obligated to make a purchase.  In fact, we didn’t buy much over the entire trip, just picking up the zip line t-shirt, a license plate (I collect them when ever I can find them when we travel), and a few Christmas ornaments.  (We try to get an ornament from every new city/country that we visit)

On Friday, our last port of call was in St. Thomas, another island that we visited on our honeymoon.  We did a little shopping, including the purchase of an SPF rated swim shirt for me, and went to the beach.  This beach was in a more picturesque location, but the feel wasn’t as nice as the beach in Barbados.  We spent a few hours in the water and sitting under the shade of some trees that lined the beach.  Then the reality sunk in… this was our last stop and we would have to get off the ship tomorrow.  A 7 day cruise sounds like a long trip, until you actually go on one…. Then you end up wishing you had booked the next week too, so you could do a two week, back to back cruise.

Our ship in port at St. Thomas, taken while riding in the taxi

Several people have asked how we liked Celebrity compared to Royal Caribbean.  Both cruise lines are owned by the same company, so there were a lot of similarities.  The crew and staff were very similar and the way that they wait on you was also the same.  The food was amazing, however I would say it was a notch higher on the fru-fru meter on Celebrity.  There were several items on each night’s menu that required additional explanations from the waiter… but what do you expect when the head chef is a Frenchman?  May be I'm just to simple of an eater, there weren't any chicken fingers on the menu! That being said, every dinner meal was amazing and no one ordered anything that they didn’t like.

Our ship... yes, she is "small" compared to some of the newer vessels.

What did we eat at night?  The dinner menu has two sides, the left side that is the same every night and the right side that changes daily.  At dinner, you would order an appetizer, salad or soup, the meal itself and then dessert.  Every night was like this.  At times people ordered two appetizers, or two entries, or even two desserts.  On the last night, I had this amazing chocolate cake with a chocolate gnocchi on it… after eating it, I flagged down our waiter, Nelson, and said, “There was a problem with my dessert.”  He responded, “Oh no, did I bring you an empty plate?” I responded, “Yes, I think you did.”  He then disappeared and came back a few minutes later with another slice, which I managed to inhale as quickly as the first. 

The part of her SECOND lobster tail that she couldn't finish because she was full.

I am going to start taking pictures of the menus and meals each night because I can’t remember what we ate.  Over the week I know that I had prime rib, grilled chicken, new York strip, turkey with gravy (on thanksgiving), beef wellington, turkey parmesan, ribeye and who knows what else.  The CFO hit the seafood pretty hard, having shrimp pasta, tuna, salmon, and lobster tails to name a few.  I know that other people at our table had veal, duck, pheasant, and many other things…. And that was just the main entries at dinner! 

Overall, it was a great trip, I can't wait for the next one.

 Another cruise ship sailing off into the sunset after leaving port before our ship.