Jersey Boys

Happy belated Valentine’s Day; that is if you are into that kind of “hallmark” holiday.  Since I am a good husband, I did pick up a gift for the CFO while we were in Hawaii.  (I bought it while she was busy with the conference and then hid it in one of our bags for the trip home)  We didn’t do much for the holiday, because Bunko night fell on V Day and the neighborhood ladies didn't want to reschedule (or spend the evening with their husbands?), so she went out to play with them.  That was fine with me, it gave me time to catch up on a couple TV shows that she doesn’t like but I really enjoy.

On Friday night, we drove west to Peoria to go see the show Jersey Boys.  She saw the ad for the show back in September and I gave her the tickets as a Christmas present.  She wanted to go out for a nice dinner beforehand, but then we found out that a Chick-fil-a had opened up in Peoria.  Hello combo #1 with lemonade for dinner! Nothing says romantic dinner like Chick-fil-a!  At the show, our age bracket was definitely in the minority, there was way more gray hairs (or should be gray if not for a bad dye job) in the audience.  We enjoyed the show, but it left me wondering how accurately the show portrays the life of the group, the Four Seasons?

We had talked about spending the night in Peoria and then driving another 45 minutes north on Saturday morning to go to the huge furniture store in Kewannee, IL.  However, I couldn’t find a decent room that we were willing to pay for… it was either a crappy $69 motel 6 (she has minimum standards that this doesn’t meet) or over $150 for a nice room downtown (which to me, is way too much to spend on a room 45 minutes from home).  We did the math and decided to just head home and decide on Saturday morning if we were going to drive to the furniture store.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to the question of, “are you ready to go couch shopping?”  That meant that we were turning around and heading back to where we came from the night before.  However, for me, the more important morning question was “what are we doing for breakfast?”  I was thinking getting some donuts on our way out of town, but she sweetened the idea of a return trip to Peoria by offering up a return trip to Chick-fil-a  for breakfast.  How could I pass that up???  Furniture shopping here we come.

Nothing says love like a heart shaped biscuit

We’ve been to this particular furniture store once before, and I might have written about it then.  This is no ordinary furniture store, it is a destination.  It is in a historic downtown area and the store fills several blocks worth of multi-story buildings.  It even has a “skywalk” over Main Street so that you can walk to the buildings on the other side of the street without going outside and it also has a restaurant in the basement.   The place is huge and it is very easy to get turned around and lost in it.

We walked around for over 2.5 hours with a sales person (YES, that long!), took a break for lunch, walked around some more on our own and then paged the sales person to finalize things.  We got there a little after 10am and left just before 4pm.  Crazy. The good news is that we found a couch that we could both agree on.  The bad news is that we wanted it in a different material/color, so we will have to wait 6-12 weeks to get it.   To finish off the trip, we swung back by Chick-fil-a for a chocolate shake… Yes, we visited Chick-fil-a 3 times in less than 24 hours.  Delicious.

The CFO wanted a couch that would "pop" in the room.  How about green with star fish accent pillows?  It is hard to tell how these things will turn out when you are making decisions based on small swatches of fabric...Our fingers are crossed.  You'd think we were decorating a house with a view of the ocean, not a corn field. 

 

Sunday was pretty quiet; we went to church and then out to run some errands.  We were just wrapping up our grocery shopping at Kroger when we heard an announcement on the P.A. system, “Ladies and Gentlemen, there is an odor of gas in the store so we need to evacuate the building immediately.”  Seriously?  We just finished filling our cart and we are ready to check out!  We parked our car near the registers, along with 10-15 other people’s carts, and walked outside.  It didn’t look like the situation would be resolved anytime soon, so we decided not to wait and walked to our car.  Evidently we weren’t the only ones who didn’t think it was worth waiting, there was a mini-traffic jam exiting the parking lot.  I kind of feel bad for whoever had to put away all those carts of un-purchased groceries... at least nothing in our cart was perrishable.

Neither of us felt like repeating the shopping process at another store, so we grabbed some lunch and went back to the house.  We will make due with what ever food is in the pantry and freezer this week.  It was sunny, clear and a balmy 30 degrees outside, so I decided to go out and cut back all of my native grasses with the weed eater.  I was only out there for about an hour, but it was so nice to be outside, even though it was a little cold.  I can’t wait until spring; I am tired of being inside all the time!

Super bowl catch up

I was so focused on finishing the Hawaii update that I forgot to mention the Superbowl party a couple weekends ago.  This was the third time that we have hosted the party and I think this was the largest crowd yet.  The CFO said that the final count was 21 people, which is a lot of people to add to our quiet house.  Included in that count were 7 kids, ranging from under 2 to 15 years old… not good since I wouldn't exactly call our house "kid friendly." If the crowd for future super bowl parties gets any bigger, I'm going to have to get a bigger TV, OR set up a projector and screen in the basement and start building a home theatre down there.  Hmm... I really like the sound of that idea!

I have been trying to do different food “themes” each year and this year it was “taco bar.”  This turned out to be a good, relatively easy self-serve meal; I prepared traditional ground beef and chicken for meats and we had a counter covered with possible toppings.  We seriously overestimated the amount of tacos that people would consume after they finished grazing through a table full of appetizers and finger foods that our guests brought with them. I am sure that no one left the house hungry and those who wanted to take some left overs home were able to.  Even after sending food home with people, we still ate tacos for a few days afterwards, but I guess it is better to have too much than not enough.    Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the event, I guess I was too busy making sure there were warm shells and tortillas for our guests.  That is the one problem with hosting the super bowl party, you don’t get to sit and watch the whole game.

I also decided that this was the year to introduce some low stakes wagering on the game, so we did a cheap game of super bowl squares.  I say "cheap" because we only charging 25 cents per square, for a total pot of $25.  I did a low buy in so that we were certain that we would sell all of the squares... I think I will at least double the buy in for next year. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the football squares game, you set up a 10x10 grid and people write their names in the squares that they purchase.  After the grid is full, you randomly draw the numbers 0-9 for across the top and then again along one side.  One set of numbers is for one team and the other set is for the other team.  At the end of each quarter, you take the last digit of each team's score and whoever has the square at the intersection of those two numbers wins.  Since our pot was small, the payouts were low ($3 for the first quarter, $6 for half time, $4 for the third and $12 for the final score), but it added some interest to the evening.  Of course, the hosts did not win anything… one couple won the first and second quarters, and other people won the third and fourth quarters.  It seems like everyone enjoyed this addition to the party, so I am sure it will return next year.

I took this photo outside our house after a light, early morning rain.  I was taken by how the sun was reflecting off the rain, creating a ring around the sun.

Last weekend was quiet and, after hosting the big party, we enjoyed the quietness.  I hit the gym 6 times last week and the CFO managed to roll out of bed to go 5 times.  I hopped on the scale last Saturday and was happy to finally see a little bit of progress.  I have dropped almost 5 pounds since setting my all-time high weight when we were on our cruise over thanksgiving.  I only have about another 10-15 more pounds to lose to be back down to where I want to be.  The CFO did not get on the scale, so I don’t know how her progress is going… and I’m not sure that she would want me to write about it anyway.  So far, the Mon. spin, Tues. weights (upper body), Weds. spin, Thurs. weights (upper body), Fri. spin, and Sat. weights (legs) schedule seems to be working well for me and I’m not getting bored with the routine yet.  Getting up when the alarm goes off at 4:40am to go to the gym has gotten a lot easier for me too…  Seriously, it isn't that bad.  The only negative side effect of it is that I am now nodding off at 9:45-10pm while watching TV.  No more late night TV for me.

Aloha! Part 2

We also made a trip down to the southeast side of the island to visit the volcano.  Every piece of advertising literature that you see for the island has a picture of molten lava bubbling up out of a volcano or sheets of red lava flowing into the sea. I really wanted to see some lava.

 

You don't typically see road signs with distances to a Volcano on them.  Also note the lava rock wall behind it.  There are a lot of walls like this around the island.

Before I delve further into the volcano trip, let me talk about the beaches, or lack thereof.  This was yet another of my pre-visit images that didn’t quite pan out. Because of the young volcanic nature of the big island, a lot of the shoreline isn't the soft white/yellow sand beaches that I am used to from growing up on the east coast.  Instead, a lot of the shore line is just volcanic rock right up to the ocean.  However, dispersed around the island were small pockets of beaches that were closer to what I am used to. We found a pebble beach covered with small, smooth pebbles and we also spent a few hours sitting on a more typical plain sand beach. When I was reviewing our route to the volcano, and I saw locations for black sand and green sand beaches along the way, so I decided that we would stop at each of those along the way.

The pebble beach

The map showed that the green sand beach was near the southern most point in the USA, so we decided to check that out too. I was expecting some sort of bronze marker or monument, but there wasn’t any that we could see.  We improvised and just made a SWAG (Scientific Wild A$$ Guess) about where it looked like it was the most southern point. Not very precise, but neat to say that we were there. We then drove over to the nearby parking lot for the green sand beach, only to find out that it was an additional 3 miles of hiking or 4x4 driving to get to the beach. The econo-can chevy sonic that we rented wasn’t going to handle the off road driving and I, of course, had scheduled a lot of stuff to see into that day's itinerary, so we decided that there wasn't time for a 6 mile round trip hike. We passed on the hike and got back into the car to continue on towards our other points of interest, the black sand beach and the volcano. You’d think that they would tell you in the travel books that it wasn’t that easy to get to the green sand beach, but I digress…

The southern most point in the USofA

After passing the “southern most” bar and the “southern most” post office in the USA, we decided to stop at the “southern most” bakery in the USA for lunch. After lunch we continued on towards the black sand beach.

 

We found the black sand beach and went for a quick stroll… the CFO proclaimed that it looked “dirty” and I could tell that she wasn’t impressed.  I thought it was pretty cool, but raised another question for me:  I don’t quite understand how the regular sand all ends up on one beach, all the pebbles on another, the black on another and the green on yet another location?You’d think they would all just get mixed up together, into a mish-mash of baby poop colored sand, but somehow nature has managed to segregate them all. I find that very fascinating, but maybe that’s just me. I didn’t realize there was such racism in beaches… can’t the sands all just get along?

 

The black sand beach

 

We loaded back into the car and continued on towards the volcano… I was starting to get excited, I could almost smell the lava.  Then, as we started climbing up in elevation from sea level, the skies started to darken.  Then it started to mist and, by the time we had climbed up to about 3,500 feet above sea level, it was raining, foggy and cold. According to the car's display, the outside temperature had dropped from 76 degrees to 55 degrees. This was not looking good for our volcano visit…

We went ahead and paid the $10 to get into the national park and drove up to the visitor’s center. We ran through the rain into the building and talked with one of the rangers. She confirmed that it didn’t look like the weather was going to lift, so hiking the lava fields was out. Bummer. She suggested that we at least go up to the museum that was perched on the rim of the crater, so we got back into the car and drove up to that building.

That is when the disappointment really started to set in, as the clouds and fog pretty much fully obscured the entire view into the crater. I was totally bummed because we had travelled all this way (about 2.5 hour drive), and forgone the hike to the green sand beach so that we could get there, and all we could see was clouds, fog and rain. The CFO opted to stay inside the building while I ventured out into the rain and onto the overlook, just to see if I could see anything of interest. I caught a couple of short, 2-3 second breaks in the passing clouds where I could see some steam rising up, but not much else.    I walked back into the building and was greeted by the CFO giggling.  Yes, she was laughing at the situation and my visible disappointment.  This kind crap (freak weather, bad timing, etc.) always to happens to me when I really want to see or do something and she seems to find that amusing. Isn't she sweet?

Who ordered up the rain and clouds?!?!   Where is the crater?

We had seen a lot of photos of lava flowing into the ocean, so we looked at some maps and informational signage at the visitors center to see where we needed to go to see that.  We knew that it wasn't raining at the lower elevations, so there was still a chance to salvage the day and see some lava.  OR NOT.  It turns out that the closest that you can get to that spectacle is about 1 mile away, so all you really see is a red glow over the horizon. SERIOUSLY??? I see all of these advertising photos of molten rock oozing into the sea and the closest that I can actually get to it about 1 mile away??? If I didn't know that the National Parks System was so dramatically underfunded, I would have asked for freakin money back!   I'll just consider it a charitable donation, because I definitely didn't get my moneys worth out of it.  They seriously need to revamp their advertising, because it is totally false.  I really do understand the safety issues in letting people get too close to 2000 degree liquid earth, but 1 mile seems a little excessive. We made one last stop at a nearby “steam vent” where you could stand in the warm steam that was coming out of an opening in the rock. That was neat to experience, but it sure wasn’t the molten lava flow that I was hoping for. At this point, she was cold and I was disappointed, so we headed back to our hotel.

Steam venting out of the earth (they built an ugly railing around it)

We bought a few souvenirs along the way, including our traditional Christmas ornament souvenir. At the rate that we are going, our tree will eventually be decorated entirely with souvenir ornaments from all of our trips.  I will admit that it is fun to reminisce about our travels every time we decorate the tree.  We also purchased a glass piece that was made by a local artist. She makes molds of interesting lava flows and then casts colorful glass into the molds. The face of the end product takes on the texture of the lava and looks/feels interesting. 

Even though the volcano excursion was a bust, and even though the island didn’t match up with some of my preconceived ideas, we had a really nice trip. I would like to go back to the big island again, just to try to see the volcano on a clear day and to go star gazing at the observatory on top of the mountain.  Unfortunately for me, our next planned vacation isn't until November... I'm not sure I can go that long without another trip!

Aloha! Part 1

Aloha, we just spent a few days in Hawaii on a “business” trip for the CFO.  She was going there to present at a conference and I figured that I might as well tag along.  It isn’t every day that a trip to Hawaii presents itself.  We visited the “big island” on this trip and now I really want to go visit some of the other islands so that I can compare them to each other.  I have heard that they are all a little bit different.  Having never been there before, I had visions of lush tropical rain forests, sandy beaches, big surfable waves and golden skinned locals hanging floral leis around your neck as you exited the plane.

When our plane landed on the runway, we were immediately greeted by something unexpected… a barren landscape of black lava rock.  Come to find out, the big island is the youngest of the Hawaiian islands and it is still growing.  Active lava flows add to the island every year and there are a lot of areas where the rock has not weathered and broken down enough for plants to be able to take hold.  It definitely wasn’t the green scene that I was expecting.  Nor were there  beautiful locals handing out leis outside the plane.  If you wanted a lei, there was a vending machine inside the "airport" from which you could purchase one.  By "airport" I mean a cluster of shelters without walls, not a real building.  This definitely wasn’t the beginning that I was anticipating.

 The "airport"

This big island is big, larger than the state of Connecticut (which isn’t really saying much, but you get the idea). There is a highway that circles around the outside of the island and if you drove the entire loop, you would cover over 300 miles.   (I put almost 600 miles on our rental car while we where there) There are numerous mountains that fill the center of the island and they limit the number of roads that cut across the island.  Two of the peaks on the island are over 13,000 ft. above sea level! (for reference, Mt. St. Helens is only 8,365 ft. tall)  I expected those two peaks to loom over the island, but unfortunately it was hazy every day and we never got a clear day where we could really see them.  There is an observatory with telescopes on top of one of them, but the CFO didn’t seem too excited about visiting there, so we didn’t go.  Maybe next time.  We stayed on the southwest side of the island, outside of the town Kona (home of the Ironman Triathalon).

Our "partial" ocean view room...  that tiny blue sliver between the building and the trees counts as a partial view!

I was able to keep myself occupied while the CFO was conferencing and we still had time to do some exploring together after the conference.  One afternoon we were able to squeezed in 9 holes of golf at the Kona Country Club that encircled our hotel’s property.  It was a little pricey, but it was cool to play golf 30 feet away from the ocean.  (I’m 99% sure that she had more fun driving the cart than actually playing golf)  I had some nice shots on the short par 3 holes and we managed to play all nine without losing a ball.  Finishing a round of golf with the same number of balls that you started with is a win in my book.

Someone please tell her that having a number painted on the side doesn't make it a race car.

Lava, fairways and the ocean... can it get better than that?

We also went horseback riding down in the Waipi’o Valley, which was on the northwest side of the island, about 2 hours away from our hotel.  The valley is surrounded by 1,000’-2,000’ tall cliffs and there is only one way down to the valley floor, a 0.6 mile long road that drops down 1000 feet, sometimes at a 45 degree angle.  Due to the limited access, there are only about 50 residents that called the valley floor home.

The valley below.

 

Our tour guide loaded us all into a van with four wheel drive and said, “no seat belts and leave the sliding door open.”  We all were a bit confused by that, until he followed up with “if the brakes go out on the way down, you’ll have to jump out of the van.”  Oh, great.  The van crept down the slope in first gear and shortly thereafter we pulled up to the stables for a short horse “control” 101 class.  This is what makes me a bit nervous about horses; they are big and smart, which isn't a good combination when I’m supposed to exert control over them. 

They started assigning us our horses and, wouldn’t you know, I get the horse named “Wacko.”  Not an encouraging name for someone who has almost no experience on a horse… Why couldn’t I get one named Sweetie Pie or Sugar? The CFO’s horse was “Jesse,” not nearly as threatening as Wacko.  (the more I thought about it after the trip, I think that if I ever ran a company that did horseback riding tours, I would probably give all the horses crazy names, just to freak out the tourists…  with that in mind, Wacko wasn’t so bad) 

Wacko and Jesse

The horseback ride was about 1.5 hours and we weaved through the valley gazing up at the cliffs towering above us.  Unfortunately, it hadn’t rained much recently, so there weren’t many waterfalls to see.  We were told that after a good rain, hundreds of waterfalls cascade off the cliffs and down into the valley.  There were several streams in the valley and we didn't just ride across them, we actually rode up several of them, one of which was so deep that it came up to my horse’s chest.  This deep water excursion soaked my shoes, but it was entertaining none the less.  After finishing the tour, we all piled back into the van and prayed that it would make it back up the road.  We passed several people walking up the road and I wasn’t really interested in joining them. 

Wacko went a wading...

Views from the valley

 

 

To be continued...

The Lance effect

A lot of you already know that I dabble in cycling.  I enjoy riding, but I am not what I would consider a diehard cyclist.  Yes, I wear the tight padded cycling shorts and yes, I wear cycling specific shoes that clip into the pedals and yes, I own more than one bike (and would love to add a couple more to my stable). HOWEVER, in my mind, you aren’t a diehard (male) cyclist until you shave your legs.  I assure you that a razor has never come close to my legs… Hell, I don’t even like shaving my face, I can’t imagine what a pain in the ass it is to shave two legs.  That being said, as a guy, I thank all you ladies for shaving yours… nothing seems more off putting than a woman with hairy legs.  If that makes me come off as a bit sexist, so be it.

For years, throughout the month of July, I spend at least an hour (or more) every night getting caught up on what happened in that day’s stage of the Tour de France (TDF).  I have attended (as a spectator) many bike races and I once drug the CFO up to north Georgia so we could watch the Tour de Georgia cover a mountain stage.  We drove for a couple hours, stood around in the cold for another hour or two, all to see the pack of riders pass by in a few seconds.  That was the only time that I ever saw Lance ride in person.  I was an early adopter of the yellow Livestrong bracelet, I own numerous Livestrong shirts and hats, and we even have a painting by an artist who followed Lance during the 2005 TDF and painted images from her trip.  I’m not a big “reader of books,” yet Lance’s book “Its not about the bike” is one of the 4 or 5 books that I have read since graduating from college in 1999.  (I prefer magazines… short stories and lots of pictures!)  So yes, I am a fan.

Since his admission to breaking the rules with Oprah last week, several people have asked what I think about Lance Armstrong.  It has been hard for me to come up with a decision on this, and I’m not sure that I can give a clear answer yet. 

I am a person who tries to judges things based on principal.  If you sell a crappy product and don’t stand behind it, then I’m going to fight you tooth and nail to get my money back based on principal.  I don’t steal because I don’t want others to steal from me.  I believe that if you intentionally take someone else's life, then you should die.  Yet, for some reason, this story has my mind all twisted up.

Yes, he broke the rules and cheated.  But what do you say when a majority of the other riders who raced with him also cheated?  Unfortunately, most of the top contenders from that time period have all been implicated in their own doping scandals.  In some of those years, you would have to go pretty far down the finishers list before you find someone who hasn’t been busted for it.  Does that make it right?  No, but it almost seems to me that doping was the “norm” back then so he might have still been racing against a somewhat "level" field.  However, I can almost hear my mother saying (and waving a finger at me), "just because your friends are jumping off of a bridge, does that mean that you are going to do it?"

Off the bike, he is a cancer survivor and he started an organization that provides support to people suffering from cancer and their families.  Does the good Karma from that offset the bad?  The fact of the matter is that the Livestrong organization exists and it has raised millions of dollars for a good cause.  After all of this has came to light, he stepped down and is no longer officially associated with Livestrong.  Is that enough to save it or will it fall victim and go down with his ship too??? Only time will tell, but, because of all the good it does, I hope not.

As a fan, I was definitely disappointed that this came to light.  I had hope in the fact that he had passed some 300+ tests during his reign and I really thought that he was racing clean.  Do I feel lied to and mislead?  Sure, a little bit.  Unfortunately, this seems to come with the territory when it comes to being a fan of sports.  The human body can only do so much and most athletes are looking for every possible advantage.  No matter what is done, drugs, blood transfusions and other scientific “pump me ups” are always going to be around.  He isn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last big name athlete to get busted.  Baseball, football, and even the Olympics have all had their share of drug issues in the past and probably will again.  Testing can only detect so much, however it sounds like the new “biological passport” system that they are using now might make it harder to get away with it in the future.

So, back to where I stand…  I still think it is amazing that he was able to bounce back from a 50/50 odds of dying from cancer to become competitive on the world wide cycling stage.  A lot of people would have just given up on racing and spent the rest of their second chance trying to live a “normal” life after beating back the disease.  He didn’t.  Would he have been able to do that without the assistance of doping?  Who knows.  He then took the fame that winning the TDF gave him and put it into a building up a charity that does a lot of good for others.  If more celebrities, athletes, etc. used their fame/wealth to support various causes, this world that we live in could be a totally different place.

Am I giving him a free pass?  No, but what does my opinion really mean?  He didn't put anyone else's life in danger, he didn't kill anyone... he made a bad decision to start doping and that snowballed into the chaos that we see now.  I have certainly made bad decisions before but, fortunately for me, no one knows who I am and my mistakes quietly disappear into the past.

I am certainly not going to stop cycling because of this.  Would I ask him for an autograph if I ever passed him on the street?  Yes, I absolutely would.  Will I continue to wear the Livestrong stuff that I have?  Yes, I will (once things cool down a little).  Right now, I don’t feel like getting into long, potentially heated discussions about him with random people on the street and at the gym.  In a few months, after our media and social websites have forgotten about Lance and are focused on the next big celebrity dramatic occurance, I will wear them again.  Will we keep the painting up in our extra bed room?  Yes we will.  Will I go down to the basement and dig out one of the five or six new, unopened Livestrong bracelets that I have packed away in a box?  Yes, I think I will.

Did I answer the question? I’m not sure if I really did... but, as Forrest Gump said, "That's all I have to say about that."  (For now, anyway)

The crazy facial hair tour

On Saturday, we drove an hour west to shop (no trip with the CFO can be without shopping!), go out to eat and then see the Zac Brown Band perform at the Peoria Civic Center.  I've decided that the official name of the concert tour should have been the “crazy facial hair tour.”  The first opening act was really scruffy, like 6” + long beard scruffy.  The CFO, of course, was put off by his facial hair...  but I thought he could sing really well.

 Then the second act walked on stage while the lights were dim… you could see that all 5 of them had long hair, but some were obviously dudes based on their build.  The CFO and I both thought the lead singer was a lady, until the lights came up and we were proved wrong… really wrong.  The band was all guys, the lead singer was just really skinny with long hair, so when the lights were dim he looked more like a she than a he.  His facial hair, however, took the cake.  He had what I would call “lamb chops,” but not normal lamb chops… no, no, these things were super long…  I found it quite hilarious.  They all looked like they came straight out of the 70’s, but they put on a good show.

Here is a good shot of the lead singer (the band's name is Blackberry Smoke):

 

After the openers, the Zac Brown Band came out and put on a great show, hitting most of my favorites plus they threw in a couple covers of other songs.  While you might think they would do covers of country songs, they actually went rock-n-roll.  They did an acoustic version of a Black Crowe’s song, a rocking Metallica cover (it took me straight back to the high school days!) and every UGA fan’s favorite “The devil went down to Georgia.”  I really enjoyed the show and I think it turned the CFO into a fan of the Zac Brown Band.  She wasn’t too thrilled about the idea when I initially told her that I wanted to go to the show, but she really enjoyed the performance.

Here is a shot from the show, our seats were better than the iPhone photo shows:

We had another consistent week of going to the gym; The CFO and I went every morning Monday through Thursday and again on Saturday morning.  I also went on Friday morning too... yes, I'm the over achiever.  Go me!  On Saturday, I decided to hop on the scale at the gym to see what was going on… much to my surprise; I weighed exactly the same as I did when we first joined, right down to the tenth of a pound.  What the heck?!  I was hoping to have dropped at least a couple of pounds by now… oh well.  After thinking about it some more, I have decided to go with the “muscle weighs more than fat” theory.  We are pretty sure that my stomach has slimmed down some, so I’m hoping that I just swapped some fat with (heavier) muscle.  This is exactly why we don’t have a scale in our house, not seeing any numeric change can be detrimental to motivation.  I’ll probably wait a while before stepping onto a scale again.

Damn good dog

Yes, that saying is typically reserved for UGA bulldogs (and the title of a book about the UGAs), however I thought it was also an appropriate title for this post.  After 17 years as a faithful member of our family, my sister’s dog, Allie, passed last week.  She was part beagle, part terrier of some sort… she had the loud beagle bay/howl and the seemingly never ending energy of a terrier.  She was my sister’s first “child,” keeping my sister company when she first moved out on her own.  Yes, she was a somewhat psycho/crazy dog that loved to lick, and lick, and lick, but she was  also super sweet.  When she was a puppy, she seemed to bounce when she ran, which earned the nickname of Allie-Roo, which then transitioned (at some point) to Allie-Rude. 

Allie, Christmas 2005

17 years is a long time for a dog and part of me thinks she hung on so long just to spite my brother in law.  He is not a fan of dogs, but understood that she came along with my sister.  He and Allie somehow managed to coexist under one roof, sharing my sister while pretty much ignoring each other.  Allie had some ups and downs with her health over the last couple of years and I received several phone calls saying, “Allie is on her way out,” only to find out that she bounced back a few days later and was acting “normal” again.  Each time that happened, I could almost picture her standing in their kitchen looking at my brother in law thinking, "I'm back" or “you thought you were about to get rid of me?  Ha, not so fast!”

There wasn’t much else going on here last week; we just tried to settle into 2013 by hitting the gym most days, only to then offset the workouts by going out to eat and baking sweets for a dinner party.  We went bowling with friends on Saturday night, the first time in over a year since we had bowled.  We bowled three games, divided into the CFO’s favorite teams, Guys vs. Gals.  Unfortunately for her, the Guys dominated the Gals, easily winning all three games.  Personally, my best game was the second game, when I scored a 151… not too bad considering I hadn’t played in so long.  That score ended up being the highest score out of our group for the night, go me. 

The CFO found her groove in the 3rd game and she was beating me all the way up to the last frame, where I finally reacquired my ability to hit the lead pin.  I ended the game with two strikes and a 9, which shot my score way above hers.  She was not happy (she hates to lose), which, of course, made me laugh and rub it as much as possible.

 Chocolate brownies (from scratch) topped with melted caramel and chocolate chips