A midday well spent!

I told you I was going to do better, two posts in two days, WIN!

I've been meaning to do deep cleaning in my apartment for a while now. I become a slacker over the winter and keep my place picked up but I don't get the heavy duty stuff done the way I do when it's nicer out. I started last weekend and finished the bulk of my apartment on Saturday. However, when I went to start on my bedroom I promptly changed my mind because there was no way I had the drive to do the kind of work that needed to be done in there. Of all the rooms in my apartment, my bedroom suffered this winter the worst. It was awful. I can't believe that I'm actually going to show you this (please, judge me if you need) but I want you to understand why I had to spend pretty much an entire day cleaning one room.

I didn't cut any corners while cleaning in there today. I washed all of the bedding, moved all of the furniture, dusted, vacuumed, tossed a bunch of crap, wiped down the baseboards and I even pulled the crevice tool out and sucked up what was probably years worth of dust, hair and only God knows what around the edge of the floor (eeww)!  I really love my mom but she could have kept her poor housekeeping skills to herself; that sort of thing doesn't need to be passed onto the next generation. Oh yeah, I also tightened up all of the screws in my mirror as it's gotten quite wobbly over the years.

Anyway, after a few hours of cleaning, I have a butt load of laundry to sort through but I'm pretty pleased with my final product:

p.s. I just love the panoramic function on my iPhone. Everybody said it was hard to use but I think it's user friendly and I get to take nifty pictures!

I have no excuse...

except that I'm a slacker. I could try and come up with some fancy-schmancy reason that I haven't blogged in OVER TWO MONTHS but that would just be a lie. Sure, I've been busy but you're all busy and manage to blog. Therefore I offer my sincerest apologies and promise to try to do better.

Although it's been a while, you haven't really missed out on much. I've been doing a great job with my workouts. Between spin class, boot camp and going to the gym I've been managing to get four to six good workouts in each week. Thank God too because my eating has been so abysmal it's the only reason I'm maintaining and not gaining. I go through spurts where I do really well for about 10 to 15 days and then I'm really crappy for the next week. Then I realize that I just lost all of the ground I gained, get disgusted with myself and hop back on board. When I don't see the progress that I think I should I say fuck it (yeah, I gave up on that not swearing thing a few weeks after the new year) and start eating poorly again. It's a vicious cycle that is leading me to believe I should just throw my scale away. Anyway, I'm working on the eating thing. I've decided to become a part-time vegetarian which amounts to me maintaining a vegetarian diet every other week. I'm not one of those people who feels that a meal isn't a meal without meat and I eat a fairly plant based diet when I cook for the most part so it's not such a big leap for me. I have a lot of really tasty vegetarian recipes and I so love to cook. I know that if I just get a little discipline I'll be doing much better.

I'm really loving my exercise classes right now. Sadly I'm over half done with my boot camp. On the bright side, they just released the catalog for the next Mhealthy session which starts at the beginning of May. I'll have to take a look at what's being offered and see if there is anything I'd like to sign up for. I also just purchased my next 20-session card for spinning. I think once the summer rolls around I'll only spin once each week instead of twice. I want to try and take advantage of free, outdoor activities if at all possible. The one thing that I really want to do is get back into running. I honestly haven't been running consistently in months and will probably just need to start over. However, now that I've made the shift to working out at night, I want to focus on outdoor running as opposed to treadmill. There are a lot of really nice trails, paved and otherwise around Ann Arbor and I've never taken full advantage of that. I hope to rectify the situation this coming outdoor season.

Outside of fitness things are going well. I'm happy to announce that we survived our Joint Commission visit at work this week without me going homicidal so that's good! I'm looking forward to my back-to-back visits this spring from Jessica and Jenny!!  I cannot wait to have some quality bonding time with two of my best girls! I'm also counting down the weeks (it's still a bit early to start counting days) until my trip home this summer. As of today it's 18 weeks!  I know that might seem like a lot but it's been a long time and  I'm chomping at the bit to get back.

I've been doing a lot of reading and a lot of watching between my bouts of physical activity. I finally managed to finish the second, painful season of The Walking Dead. I have been reassured by several people that season three is so good it makes season two worth the effort. If they've lied to me, I will hunt them down and do unpleasant things to them. I also started watching the first season of Breaking Bad. I don't remember who recommended it to me but it's been pretty good so far. I'll let you know what I think when I've watched more than a handful of episodes.

As for reading it's been mostly of the supernatural persuasion. The latest book in the Kim Harrison series was really good and I'm just finishing up her collection of short stories. For the most part it's a pretty solid read. I'm also trying to work through Max Brooks' books. I listened to the abridged version of World War Z (the movie comes out this summer) and it was fantastic. It's told in a series of vignettes from various people affected by the zombie war. It intrigued me enough that I'm now waiting for the full length book from the library. While I'm waiting, I'm reading The  Zombie Survival Guide. For something that reads like a how-to manual, it's actually quite fun.

Holy crap, time really does fly when you're having fun. I have to get ready for spin class so I should go. Have a great weekend and I look forward to catching up with you as I read through the many unread posts I see before me.

Maiden voyage at Planet Fitness

As my title suggests I made first trip to Planet Fitness this morning. As far as I can tell, I think I'm really going to enjoy having a membership there. I arrived around 7:20 (after wandering around Meijer for 20 minutes looking for a lock for the locker room) and there were about a dozen or so other patrons in the gym. I was able to easily get on a treadmill and get my week 3, day 1 of C25k finished. I took a look at both of the circuits they have set up, a 12-minute ab routine and 30-minute whole body resistance circuit but I didn't get a chance to try either of them. Mostly because I'm not really sure how you're supposed to go about it. I mean, I know what a circuit is but everything is driven by this light system which my early AM brain was not capable of figuring out. There is a class on Tuesday and Thursday nights that focuses specifically on using the circuits so I figure I'll swing in on one of those to figure out what I'm doing. I might as well get the most out of my membership, right??

Even though I skipped the circuits I did manage to get a pretty good lift in. I focused mainly on machines this morning because, while I know how to use equipment, every brand is just a little different and sometimes it's hard to figure out how certain pieces of equipment work. If I'm going to get stumped by the machines I'd much rather do it without 70 people watching or a line forming behind me. I have to admit, I'm really glad I did it this way because I could not figure out the leg press for the life of me which is sad because the leg press is, or at least should be, one of the most intuitive pieces of equipment in a gym. Oh well, I managed in the end so I guess it all worked out :-)

After lifting I was going to head out but I just felt really good so I thought I'd give the elliptical a try. I have a love/hate relationship with ellipticals. I loved the ones at Luther. They were perfect for my stride. I was able to use them, find a good rhythm and not feel awkward at higher speeds. Every other elliptical I've tried has been a let down. I just can't seem to make them work. I don't know if it's the stride length or the angle but something just doesn't fit. I didn't have high expectations when I got on the elliptical this morning but was promptly surprised. The machines at PF fit me exceptionally well. I only planned on doing 10 minutes but ended up going 25.

All in all, I was very pleased. Very pleased indeed!

Boot camp baby!

OK, I did it. Even though it scares the holy bagpipes out of me (see, no swears) I signed up for my first ever boot camp. I'm going to be honest, when I woke up this morning I had no intentions of joining a boot camp. However, after a brief chat with another supervisor in my department, I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to sign up and see what I could get this old body of mine to do.

My original intention was to sign up for the same class that four other women in my department are doing. It meets on Thursday nights for one hour starting at 5:15. It would have been perfect because I could just walk over with the gals, get my sweat on and then catch the bus home for a shower. However, when I went to sign up, the class was already full...boo. I was just going to give up on the idea but then I decided that I was really looking forward to the prospect of getting my butt handed to me on a platter for 15 weeks. So, I did a bit of investigating (read Google-mapping) and found that on Wednesday nights I could easily take the class at the NIB building. It's no more than a half-mile walk to the building on an outdoor route and if it's cold, I can cover most of the distance (a little less efficiently mind you) by cutting through the other hospitals. Again, it meets at 5:15 and will get me out just in time to catch a bus back to my car!

I figure that two nights a week of spinning and one night of boot camp will offer some nice variety to my workout routine. I got a chance to check out Planet Fitness tonight and I was really impressed. They have a good number of what appear to be really nice cardio machines but they also have this 30 minute cardio/resistance circuit set up. I still haven't had a chance to get to Anytime Fitness but I think I'm strongly leaning towards Planet. The price is right and I really liked the facility.

Anyway, I think that's it. I'll let you know how my first boot camp goes next week. I just hope my instructor doesn't resemble this guy...

Year end and looking forward

Happy 2013! I have to admit, I'm really glad that the Mayans were wrong and that the world didn't end last month. I have so many things left to accomplish in life and I'm hoping to get a good start on that to-do list in 2013.

The end of 2012 ended without much flourish or bang. I had a fairly nice Christmas and new year. I spent Christmas with a friend and her family. It was very nice to have a place to go as opposed to staying home alone. I did that one year and it was awful. However, I think this year it wouldn't have been so bad. After being away from home for so long I think I've gotten used to spending major days on my own. I think that's part of growing up. I've come to realize that any days spent with the people I love most in the world are special, regardless of where they fall on the calendar. Anyway, Santa was good to me this year. I got a new Blu-Ray player, a few movies, an insulated water bottle that I've been looking at FOREVER and refused to pay for, a lovely care package and socks, socks and more socks!  I also got a really nice bottle of sparkling wine from one of our doctors. Oh yeah, did I mention the chocolate? I LOVE chocolate!

My new years eve was very quiet. I had plans with friends and they had to bail at the last minute. I was bummed because I didn't really have time to make new plans (3:00 on NYE is too late for plan making) but I had a decent night. I ended up cooking a nice dinner and drinking the aforementioned bottle of wine. I didn't set out to drink the whole bottle but before I noticed it was gone, it was gone.  The only downside to drinking the whole bottle is that it made me overly sleepy a lot sooner than I was hoping. I tried to make it to midnight but at some point I must have passed out because I was awake and watching a movie and the next thing I know my phone is vibrating on the sofa arm next to my head. I'd have to ask Jessica to be sure but I don't think the 'I wasn't just drooling on my couch pillows' tone that I was attempting to pull off was very convincing. At least she had the good grace to not call me out on it. I really hope I wasn't on speaker phone...

Now it's back to business as usual. Work has been really slow through the holiday week. It's nice to have a day to catch up on things but by the end of the fourth slow day in a row it starts to get old. I did find a website online where I could read the Hunger Games books for free so that was at least a nice way to spend some of  my time, even if I should have been working. Although, in my defense, there was literally nothing to do. We got all of the stocking, cleaning and paperwork done on slow day one. Basically we had no busy-work left and no patients to fill our time. It was bad. I could have used PTO but I hate wasting PTO when I could save it for fun times with my friends from home. Oh well, if a few slow days is my worst complaint at work I'm pretty lucky.

As 2013 was approaching, I was thinking a lot about my resolutions for the year. Last year I set two real goals, one fitness and one life resolution.  I didn't do well on either. I'm not saying last year was completely wasted, I did run my first 5K, however, I followed it up with my second 5K which was a disaster (excepting the fabulous company I had). It's really frustrating to me that I'm in worse shape right now than I was at this time last year. I have nothing and nobody to blame but myself and my lack of dedication. So, my fitness resolution is very simple: do better in 2013 than I did in 2012. I figure this can't be that hard to accomplish but it's open enough to grow into what I want.

I think that my other resolution, my life goal, is going to be the harder of the two. I've recently decided that there is simply too much profanity in my life. I feel like the well placed swears that are meant to really show impact no longer do because I curse too freely otherwise. Because of this, I have decided that I am going to omit profanity from my life. I don't know that I will be entirely successful, this could be a very arduous task but I want to really cut down on my sailor talk. I'm 36 hours into the new year; so far, so good!

Lastly, I'm currently searching for a new gym. They still haven't fixed the equipment in the exercise room at my apartment (I would really like to use a few vulgar words at them) and I'm tired of waiting for them to get around to it. I've put my feelers out and I'm going to be touring the Anytime Fitness and Planet Fitness gyms closest to me. As far as I can tell the only really difference is the price but I'll hold off on judging until I see the actual facilities and talk about the options I'd have available at each.