Walking

The rain inspired me to go for a walk tonight. It was a nice walk. There are a lot of frogs out. Big frogs too. They grow quick once the water comes I guess.

I'm at El Camino now. It's dead. There are just three people here talking about sex and dating at Tech. They make it sound easy.

My pedometer has certainly gotten a good baseline of how lazy I am. But today and yesterday were good days, in that they were high points in the graph. The lower heat and the fact that the mountains are open again should be motivating to me.

The fries here are terrible. I suspect they just cleaned out the grease.

My weight has been not so good. Lower than what I think of as my natural weight, but not really falling. My rain gear fits a bit tighter than it should. At my peak exercise, before the crippling surgery, it fit better than it does now. More walking will probably help that.

Short Time No Post!

My eating habits have varied from good to bad. Sometimes I just stuff myself full of fat and carbs because fat and carbs are delicious. Sometimes I eat carefully and choose good for me things that are still delicious.

One problem I've sunk deeply into is monotony. It's not that I'm eating the same single meal each say like I used to, but my adventuresomeness has faded drastically. I'm trying to fix that. As well as trying to fix my poor food choices.

I have, for starters, stopped going to the gelato shop for cookies. It's not really that I don't want the cookies, but that they have successfully waged a war against customers to the point that I'm just not willing to go back. For a while, then the war was just a skirmish, I wore earplugs to go in there. But they just kept upping the volume of the music. The time I tried to eat something there the music was so loud that people were having to raise their voices to be heard talking. The last time I rode my bicycle past the building I could clearly hear the music through the front windows. And the end result is that I don't eat cookies anymore. So I guess their terrible music selection and volume knob that goes to 12 (one more than 11) worked out well for me.

I'm making a concerted effort to keep up on my fruits and vegetables again. I'm making a concerted effort not to eat french fries again. I've been trying to eat fish more.

And I'm trying to remember to cook new things that I haven't cooked before, or haven't cooked in a long time. Two nights ago I made a chicken and mushroom dish. The mushrooms were fried until they started to brown, the chicken was pounded flat, and the sauce was made from garlic, balsamic vinegar, and "dijon mustard". The dijon mustard is in quotes because I made it myself, and it wasn't really quite right in terms of the recipe. But it tasted good.

Tonight I plan to make spaghetti with tomato sauce. I have roma tomatoes from Tom Hyden. He only had a few, but the people ahead of me in line passed them over. I find it baffling, really. I'd be hard pressed to think of any tomato recipe I know that doesn't call for a roma toma as the best possible tomato to use. They are firm, meaty, and low in seeds.

Tonight my spaghetti sauce will be made from them. Though I'"m still unsure if it will be raw or cooked. Either way,. I have a pound of tomatoes to make it from.

Every Friday, for several weeks now, and continueing tomorrow, I've been making Pho. The goal is to get good at it. I use Andrea Ngyuen's recipe as written about my Jada's Steamy Kitchen website. I'm getting better. I think this week should go pretty well. I plan to cook the broth a day ahead of time (tonight) so that I can properly defat it.

Long Time No Post

There had been an anniversary hike to the Turkey Creek Hot Springs scheduled for May 21 of this year. But the Gila was on fire, and the area was closed. Since then, everything has closed. Even the river is closed, so I can't even hike on the sand next to the water.

I am however, make to weightlifting. The thing that led me to all this. My hydrocele made itself known when I started weightlifting in 2009. The hydrocele caused them to find my blood sugars. And those made me try to become healthier. So here I am.

The surgery to remove the hydrocele was crippling. I should have just told them to chop it off rather than fix it. Oh well. Live (in pain) and learn.

Weightlifting has been going on for some time. Day one, we lifted the bar with no weights. It was a bit hard. We started lifting in late May of this year. We started with a pure strength program, StrongLifst 5x5. It is a pure strength-based program that just builds strength. One person hated it the entire time because we were building too much strength at 5 pounds per workout-day, so we recently switched to a more endurance based program, but still following the core exercises of the 5x5. The same person still hates it because he thinks we are doing too much endurance each workout day. I think he would be happier not lifting. I'm not sure which program I like more. I felt I wasn't doing enough work on pure 5x5 to make me feel accomplished, but I liked how quick the sets were and how easily we were progressing in strength. With the endurance sets I like that I feel sore afterwards (something I seldom got from 5x5) but it does take a while to do the workouts.

I bought a pedometer a few weeks ago. So far, I'm not aiming for any goal, though when I bought it I had said my goal was to outdo someone else I know who has a pedometer. I need to start walking for a goal soon. As it is, my steps counts varies wildly per day, depending on what I do.


I should mention that I'm tremendously stronger now than I was this time in May. And I like the feeling of being strong.

I guess that's a good catch up post.