Oh, So that's what 7 Yards of mulch looks like.

OOOOOhhhhhhh, so that's what 7 yards of mulch looks like.  Ladies and Gentlemen today's workout consists of taking this pile of mulch and moving it to its new home all over my property.  Ready, Set, GO!

This is the before, after 4 hours of hustle, shoveling, sweating, wheelbarrowing, and raking.  We end up with this:

Since I had the camera out I also decided to take some macro and artsy shots with the cam as well.  Enjoy!

I felt quite productive today, so I am rewarding myself with some quality couch time with a movie or two, then heading back down to the basement to finish poly-ing my next nursery project.  I am in the process of building a closet organizer for the babies room.  Here are the preview pics, the final nursery blog will be posted in the coming weeks!  (Less than 70 days till our son gets here!!

I am feeling incredibly motivated today so make sure you check out my second blog post today as well!  It's a two for one day!

weekly weigh in.

I haven't done a weekly weigh-in for a few weeks.  Well, I have physically weighed-in but I haven't blogged about it because I haven't lost any weight in weeks.  I would be at 209, then 208, then 210, then 209, back to 211, back to 209, then suddenly this week on my Sunday weigh in I was 207.

This was a legit 207 because I weighed myself wed was 207.6.  Weighed myself Friday and was 207.4.  I was very pumped because I was getting to the point where I was going to quit what I was doing and try something else.

This is kind of like fishing, the first time you catch a big fish and land it you are hooked.  Then the next time you go out you catch nothing!  The time after that you catch NOTHING!  Then you go through a period where you try all these new things and you try to get back to the same spot where you caught that lunker before.  Then just when you are about to quit fishing for a while you catch that one big fish that brings you back in to the fold and hooks for for a few more months!

Warrior Dash Recap.

www.warriordash.com
Time: 34:44
Pace: 9:55/mi
Overall (male and female) 2417 out of 9846 (top 24%)
Overall Male 1961 out of 5484 (Top 35%)
Overall age group: 391 out of 1233 (Top 31%)

The race was awesome!! Very well organized and very fluid.  Heats started every 1/2 hour from 8am till 7pm.  Heats could be as large as 550 people.  In the two day event nearly 25,000 people will compete!  We had 14 obstacles and the course was amazingly hilly for rural Ohio!!

My favorite obstacles had to be the cargo net wall (over 30ft high!) and the fire jump at the finish!!  Pictures coming soon!!

Overall I am very happy with my results from the race.  I feel I could have been a little faster had I known about all the hills and prepared accordingly for the race.  But for my first race back I am really excited!! Time to track down another race of similar style again soon.  Maybe even start training for a tough mudder!

Happy Sunday everyone!

What's to come.

We are shaped by many things in our day to day lives...from the place we call home.

To the places we have been along the way.

The beauty that hides in the most obvious places.

The past is remembered because it's what shapes who we are.

In life we wear many hats, hopefully most of them make people smile.

Sometimes its the innocence of a child that makes us realize that our lives are just too busy, just too serious, and much too short.

Many of us want to be famous but most never will.  If only we could be famous for doing all the right things.  But someday all of us will get our 15minutes of fame.

Our lives grow better because we surround ourselves with good friends.

Sometimes its just the fresh air that makes our day complete.

But for me its time spent with my family that matters most.

Especially time with the woman that completes me.

In less than 3 months our family will grow and I can't wait to share this world with him.

Everyone Struggles.

I knew the hardest thing for me in changing my diet forever would be portion control.  Before I started trying to make a difference in the foods I ate both in quality and quantity was my portion.  Sometimes I am like a bottomless pit!  When you put good (read: awfully fattening but delicious) food in front of me like Susan's Buffalo Chicken Dip (scroll down for the recipe) , I could stand over that bowl with chips/crackers/spoon or fork...and just chow down.  Ten minutes later I would be stuffed to the rafters and about 10,000 calories over my daily intake.  I have been in that rut recently and I need to get back to the basics with what I am doing.  I am not very "mental"  about my weight.  I don't look in the mirror daily and tell myself I am a fatty or that I look bad.  I see that on the scale and know that I need to continue to lose if I ever want to get back to feeling healthy.

On the inside I do feel healthy I can run faster and longer than I have been able to in years.  I can rip off pushups, situps, squats, lunges and other bodyweight exercises in my sleep.  I feel very confident that I am going to have a great race next weekend at the Warrior Dash in Logan, OH.  I am starting to get the itch to start signing up for 5k's and 10k's whenever I have free time in the coming future.  One thing I am missing and most likely going to struggle with is mountain biking.  I haven't been out yet this year due to the large volume of rain we have had since March.  (10+ inches, and our normal is more like 2-4).  The trails are just a sloppy and somewhat dangerously slippery mess.  I am looking forward to a dry spell so I can get that fitness aspect of my life back.

I am kind of rambling in this post because I am struggling with weight just not coming off recently.  I have posted before in the past that I struggled and things eventually got back on track.  I can't for the life figure out why I am stalled right now.  I am losing 0.1 to 0.3 lbs a week for the last few and I have been very disciplined with portions, meals, eating out, snacking, and everything else.  I am wondering if maybe I am putting on more muscle mass recently with the additional resistance exercises I am doing.   Maybe in a week or two things will change back and weight loss will start again.  I know that these struggles will pass eventually and that everyone goes through these plateaus but it's still very frustrating.

Alright, enough VENTING!! This blog is becoming too negative recently when it comes to workouts I am going to promise not to vent too much more to you and instead come up with some interesting topics to cover in the very near future!! Anyone have and ideas or primers to improve these posts please feel free to leave them in the comments sections.

Hopefully next week after the warrior dash I will have some awesome pictures to post and some stories to tell!!  

Slowly getting back to normal

My life is always chaotic, always busy, even when I have downtime I feel like I should be doing more.  Part of this comes from my lovely wife nagging encouraging me to do things around the house.  Most of it comes from ideas engrained in me by my parents.  My parents were always on us to find something to do, keep yourself busy, don't just lay around.  I think that is an important lesson to teach my son as he grows as well.  I have worked with all spectrum of people in my life from the uber-worker to the complete slacker/waste of space.  I prefer people who are somewhere above average but below uber worker.  Usually because they have similar beliefs as I do and also because they get things done.

Needless to say the last few weeks have been chaotic to say the least.  We have been busy readying the house for the coming of our son. Only 95 days until the due date!  I was also busy doing some long overdue yard remodeling.

Let's start with the yard, I have a patch of grass between my sidewalk and driveway retaining wall that is slightly sloped, about 25' long, and 5' deep.  It gets an absurd amount of direct sunlight, which leads to me having a brown crunchy section of my yard from about June till September.  No amount of water, fertilizer, or seed can solve this problem.  Time to do some landscaping.

Before:

This was after spending about 3 hours tearing up the old grass, and grading the soil.

After:

I put in a weeping cherry tree, a bottle brush plant, a Ogon (mellow yellow) Spirea, some cottoneaster, a broom bush, and some other filler shrubs, and built a decorative stone wall.  I also need to order some mulch but that is another project for another day.

This past weekend my family was coming over for a late birthday party for yours truly.  My wife put together a nice family get together with the requisite dinner and beer!  What better way to celebrate my birthday by getting rid of the NASTY anodized gold light fixtures and ceiling fans around the house that I just despise.  Who better to help me with this than my handy brother Andy.

I should have taken before and after pictures but these fixtures were so heinous that I am embarrassed to publish them.  So you get the afters:

Two of these lights replaced the two pineapple shaped gold monstrosities in the hallways.

Yes the quality is terrible, but this replaced the malfunctioning fan in the nursery and adds a soft light to the room.  (yet its too bright to leave on to take a picture with my cell camera)

This is now the wall light in our kitchen.  The previous light was dull and anodized gold.  Take my word for it, this is a marked improvement!!

This is the new fan in the dining room.  It weighs ALOT!!  It also has a fancy remote control so when I am exhausted and hot on the couch adjacent to the dining room I can turn the fan on without getting off my @$$.  This puppy can move some air!!

The wife and mother in law were also busy this past weekend putting up the border in the nursery.  I think it turned out very nice!

Aside from that my company has opened up a 4th store in the Pittsburgh area so I have been working a fair amount of overtime.  Money which will be used to furnish the nursery with a nice bedroom set that we ordered this past Friday.  Once the furniture is in, we will only have 1 more project left for the nursery and that is building the custom closet to add some storage to the room.  Then maybe, just maybe I will have some free time available to go Fly Fishing.  Then again I am sure I will find something else to do!

Wife, Nursery, and Weight Updates!

I took some grief this past week from Susan about my lack of wife and nursery update photos and stories on the blog so I made sure to download some pics to my laptop so that I could share them with you!

First things first; today is weigh in day, I started the week at 210.0 with the help of the bodyweight workouts and about 7 miles of running this week as well as a more stringent attitude towards my meal selection I was able to shave off an additional .6lb this week to get me to 209.4.  I am officially the lightest I have been since I met Christine and each lower weigh in will change that!  I feel as though I have broken out of my brief plateau and hopefully as I ramp up the bodyweight workouts things will improve even more.

Now on to the more exciting updates.

The nursery comes first.  The room we have chosen for the nursery is rather large.  It used to be the master bedroom in the house until the previous owners added an addition to the back of the house.  The room also looks as though it hasn't been repainted in about 15 years.  The walls were permanently stained had numerous nail and screw holes from the previous owners.

  You can't really see the damage to the walls in these picture but trust me I spent an hour repairing holes, patching dents, and wiping down the walls before painting. 

Here is the after.

The brown in the picture looks a little more chocolate milky than it really is when you see it in person, but you get the idea!  Additional room improvements include new plugs and outlets, (switching the 2 prong to 3 prong outlets), replacing the dysfunctional ceiling fan.  I am also going to build an organizer for the closet to utilize the space a little better than it is currently.  We will be ordering the furniture in about 2 weeks.  The theme for the room is construction, so there will be lots of trucks and tools decorating the room.  Look for more updates as I continue my work on the nursery!

One more update and that is the first picture of the baby bump.  Christine was about 19 weeks in this picture (she is now starting her 25th week).  So without further adieu I bring you the bump!

I need to get another photo up that is more recent because her belly has REALLY popped in the last 2 weeks and her belly button is slowly becoming an outtie!

Have a great week everyone!