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From the shadows creeps a horror...

It's me again. Oh, sweet, sweet Internet. I can go on and on about my life (remaining anonymous, of course) and no one will ever read this. Despite that, however, it is somewhat therapeutic... unlike that P90x program from hell.

It's been over a year since my last post, dear reader(s). I include the plural in parentheses because I know I'm the only one who ever reads this blog. I felt obligated to optionally pluralize the word "reader" just in case there is another unfortunate soul out there who reads this drivel.

What's new in my life, you ask? Well, thank you for asking! Indeed many things have changed since July of Twenty-double-aught-seven. It'd be telling if I were to go into the details but suffice to say that I am once again a member of the bachelor crowd. Single women rejoice! No, seriously. Start rejoicing. It's great for my fragile male ego.

On to less embarrassing topics. I'm working out again, and eating right. Eating right is hard. I think I bitched about this before in the P90x trials. Let me check... mmm yep. Yes it is expensive and time consuming. I agree with myself. That's comforting on some bizarre level. I need someone to cook and clean for me while I'm at work. Any takers?

Alright, it's about time for me to slink back into the shadows. Fare thee well, faithful reader(s). Maybe I'll return before a year's passed, but I seriously doubt it. Oh, and a note for my future self: you better damn well get into that program. You know the one I'm talking about!

Peace!

Day 3

Note: This series of posts starts below at the post titled "Resurrection"

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Day 3 - Plyometrics

plyometrics (n.) - a type of exercise using explosive movements to develop muscular power, esp. bounding, hopping, and jumping

Very, very difficult. I was able to do about 50% of every set that was shown on the DVD. All that extra time was used up for resting. I don't think my legs have ever felt so exhausted after a workout, and I've done heavy weight training before.

Chelsea skipped this routine because of rowing in the early morning.

Diet was pretty much normal. I kept a close eye on total calories eaten for the day, making sure that we eat 5-6 times a day, drink plenty of water, and get some protein in at every meal. Overall percentage of calories from fat was kept near to 20% as well.

Day 2

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 Day 2 - Chest and Back

Today was the first official exercise day of the program. We woke up and stumbled downstairs, sleep still in our eyes, "ready" to tackle the first exercise DVD of the program. Today would be the chest and back routine, which consisted primarily of different types of push-ups and pull-ups. In lieu of the pull ups Chelsea and I were using resistance bands wrapped round the spindles of our stair case. It worked fairly well.

The routine was hard. No joke. I think I managed to complete about 50% of what the fit freaks were doing on the DVD. We hadn't taken into account the fact that the DVD doesn't allow for any breaks whatsoever. When the book says that the routine is 54 minutes, that means 54 minutes of no breaks, rests, or stops. Naturally, Chelsea and I had to rest in between sets since we're no where near the fitness level of the beautiful people on the teevee. That's why we finished in about 1h20min, and didn't have time to do the ab program afterwards.

I may have pushed myself too hard during the routine, as I'm wont to do. I felt nauseous by the end of it, and we still had their ab/core routine to do. It's called "Ab Ripper X" and I feel idiotic just writing it. In any case, we decided to wait until after work to do the abs routine. Now it was time for breakfast, and I was looking forward to it. Tuesday's morning meal consisted of a protein shake, with fruit, protein powder, skim milk and ice. Nice, sounds pretty good. I was sure I could keep it down despite feeling sick to my stomach.

Nothing could prepare me for the amount of shake I had to drink. I stared, wide eyed, at the brimming blender. I had about 1.5L (3 pints for you old schoolers) worth of fruit, protein and milk to drink. Oh well, sit down and work through it. 25 minutes later I finished off my last glass of the stuff. I might have been able to chug it all down in 5 minutes had I not been feeling ill. Apparently the early morning routine didn't agree with me at all. I hauled ass to get cleaned up and dressed, and rushed out to work.

Snacks this day were the same as Monday: recovery drink + bar in the morning, and string cheese in the afternoon.

I decided that day, after finishing my pound and a half of veggies and shrimp, that this meal plan was ridiculous, and had to go. I had subscribed to another fat-loss plan by Tom Venuto called "Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle" that included a rather sensible diet regime. I adopted that into our P90X program since the end goals were the same. The diet is essentially calorie reduced, but the calorie breakdown is much more similar to a standard diet. The majority of calories come from carbohydrates (the higher quality ones preferrably, but not required), with a moderate amount of protein and a low amount of fat. We've stuck to this diet ever since, and it seems to be working well.

Dinner that evening was much better: roasted, marinated chicken breast, with salsa rice and salad. Dinner took about 20 minutes to prepare, and only 10-15 minutes to eat. Woot!

That night we decided to move our exercise time to the evening, right after work and right before dinner. Chelsea still had early morning rowing to contend with (5am instead of 5:30, yikes!) so she would skip the afternoon routine.

Day 1

Monday, July 9th, 2007 Day 1 - Fitness test

Alright! Up early (not necessarily bright), and ready to go. Today is the fitness test that P90X requires potential users to complete. The program is quite advanced, and someone in very poor physical condition wouldn't have a hope in hell of completing even the test.

We measured our resting heart rate, weighed ourselves, took measurements of various limbs and torso points, and snapped a few "before" pics. Up next was the fitness test, which included basic strength and cardio fitness levels. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't overly difficult either. My guess is that a person of average fitness and health would be able to pass.

With the fitness test done and passed by both of us, we pressed on with the P90X program and have the first, predetermined meal of the program. There are various levels of calorie intake that users are grouped into. I fell into the 2400 calorie/day group, and Chelsea was in a lower calorie group. We still ate the same things, I just had more of it. Any recipes or amounts I report here are for me only.

Today's breakfast consisted of:

• an eight egg white mushroom omelette with various veggies in it,
• 1 cup of 1% cottage cheese
• 1 cup of sliced strawberries

I'll just tell you right now that I was stuffing my face for at least half an hour to get all that food down. Oh, and I'll be perfectly happy if, for the rest of my life, I never eat another mushroom omelette again. Bleh.

The morning snack consisted of a recovery drink and a protein bar. Not bad. Certainly a nice break from the monstrosity of a breakfast I had a couple hours earlier. I thought I'd be stuffed after that massive breakfast, but it turns out that a diet that relies on half of its calories coming from protein isn't all that filling. That's probably because the body can't digest more than 32g, or 128 calories, worth of protein in one sitting.

Lunch was a chef salad that Chelsea was kind enough to prepare for us the evening before. Did I mention how long meal preparation takes with these pre-planned meals? You'll get a true appreciation for it when I describe what Monday evening consisted of. Anyways, despite this being a reduced calorie diet, we were eating a truck load of food for the normal meals of the day (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). I suppose that works when I'm eating a salad that consists of 4 cups of salad and veggies and there's nary a calorie to be seen from all that food.

I can't recall the afternoon snack. It must have been something semi-normal.

Ah, and now my (least) favourite part of the first day: dinner. Heh. Here was the rest of my day after coming home from work: make dinner, eat, make lunch, sleep. I'm not kidding.

Dinner was a vast cornucopia of delicious foods:

• 8oz grilled lemon dill salmon with a lemon-shallot sauce
• 1 cup of blanched asparagus
• 1 cup of long grain, brown rice
• 2 cups of roasted red pepper soup

Oh joy! What a feast! I couldn't finish it. Maybe I'm a terrible cook, I don't know. All told, I used nearly every pot we had, and dirtied almost every kitchen utensil too. I even whipped out this hand blender that I had never used before.

The roasted red pepper soup took more effort than it was worth, in my humble opinion. We still have about 3-4 cups of it sitting in the fridge, we liked it that much. At least it made a half-decent topping for the rice we had. The salmon was delicious, but 8oz is 1) too expensive and 2) too much, even for me. Poor Chelsea, who would be a vegetarian by now if I wasn't the cook in the house, had to eat 6oz of the stuff. I think she managed to eat about half of her food over a period of about half an hour to 45 minutes. We started out at the kitchen table, but as time wore on, our butts started to get sore from sitting there for so long. She moved to the couch to work a bit more on her dinner, while I tried to figure out an alternative to this P90Xtreme meal plan.

Well, after dinner was done with, it was time to make lunch. YAY! Shrimp stirfry with a mound of vegetables, I kid you not, that must have weighed at least a pound, if not 2. All this was 2 SERVINGS. No left overs. It was pretty tasty, to be honest, but not worth a half hour of my time. Especially since we were only getting one meal out of it. Oh, and did I mention it used an entire bag of frozen shrimp? That worked out to be about $7-8 worth of crustacean goodness.

So here we were, Chelsea cleaning round 2 of dishes, and me trying to puzzle out how anyone who doesn't have a personal cook and a million dollars could afford this meal plan. When the kitchen was finally cleaned for the last time that day, we dragged our tired asses to bed, hopefully ready to wake up at 5:30am again tomorrow to tackle this program.

Resurrection

Funny how I pop up once a year, give or take a few months. This time around I'm going to keep track of an exercise program that Chelsea and I are working on. Now, I'm posting after exercising for nearly a week so this first post will be a summary of what's happened so far. After this point, I'll attempt to post at the end of every day, so that the memory of how horribly difficult this exercise regime is is still fresh in my wearied mind.

The program we're following is called P90X. Yes, it has an infomercial. I wasn't aware of that until after we got it. Despite that, however, it has shown real promise. There are no false promises. They work hard, and expect those following the program to do the same. I have the sore muscles to prove it. They also provide a diet regime, but, we shied away from that immediately due to a couple causes. I'll get into it in the details below.

Sunday, July 8th, 2007 Day 0 - Setup

We had our equipment assembled. This included mats, weights, and resistance bands. All we needed was the food for about a week's worth of food. As I said earlier, the P90X program includes a diet they strongly recommend. The Phase 1 diet (lovingly referred to as "the fat shredder phase" by P90X) is high protein, low carbohydrate (carb), and low fat. The diet plan also includes pre-made meals that we thought looked pretty good, so we decided to buy about 3 days worth of ingredients for all the meals we'd be eating. The list was mostly fresh vegetables, along with a good amount of lean protein like chicken, turkey, ham and fish.

I began to have my doubts about this diet plan when it cost $200 for roughly 3 days of food. That meant we were looking at least $400 a week on groceries alone when our previous monthly budget for groceries was $300. I think the horror I felt must have been written all over my face because Chelsea was attempting to make me feel better about it. Granted, the first phase only lasts 1 month, but paying $1700 for food in a single month, for 2 people, seems obscene to me.

Supplement use such as protein shakes, recovery drinks and protein bars are also suggested by the P90X diet plan. I've used supplements before when I was weight training with my friend Aaron. They can be an affordable source of protein and calories when one finds himself short on either during the day. I decided to buy a month's supply of supplements.

We chose to do the exercises in the morning, at about 5:30 or so. Since each session is approximately one hour in length, that would give us enough time to work out, get cleaned up, and eat some breakfast. We hit the sack early to ensure we had plenty of rest.

Belated anniversary post!

So my blog's been around for more than a year now. Its original intent was to document the building of my new home. The house is still incomplete but suffice to say that the documentation of its progress is, well, lacking.

There are some of you out there who play a game called World of Warcraft. In this game, it is possible for another, anonymous human being to use their online avatar to repeatedly "gank" your own avatar in said game. We, in the know, like to call this "griefing." Last night my house was "griefing" me, and to such an extent that I felt an overwhelming urge much akin to what a pyromaniac must feel when left alone with a book of matches, gasoline, and a warehouse full of the finest sawdust. No need to worry, however, the house still stands.

Aside from all that life marches on. I'm still working as a web developer and I'm enjoying it a lot. Getting a new co-op student to work with every 4-8 months is like a fresh breath of air in the otherwise stale atmosphere of The Cubicle. In reality, however, my job is not nearly as bad as I would make it out to be, even on the worst of days.

The marriage of my younger brother Matt is now looming on the proverbial horizon. I can only hope my duties are limited to copious amounts of drinking and slapping Matt's back occassionally while issuing some nugget of wisdom such as: "how'sh 'bout tha local shportsh team?" Obviously, the former responsibility would only enhance the latter.

More photos to come assuming I can remember to bring that damned digital camera.

A porch by any other name is still a porch

Built the porch last weekend (Nov. 25th) I'm going to build a pillar on the front left side of it. Fun!

The home

Finally I got around to posting the pics of my house! I'll add a little caption where it's necessary.

Without any further ado, here is my home.


The very near beginnings of the house. That's Adam climbling up the plank to help me out with laying out the floor.


Adam the hero come to rescue his brother from another day of drudgery. Oh, to make this perfectly clear, the majority of the labor is being done by me with the generous help of family and friends. Thanks to all of you!


A close up shot of the exterior side of the foundation walls. This is to ensure that Mike Holmes doesn't wander by and shout and yell and get red-faced about the work not being done properly. (j/k)


Laying out the floor...


... and securing it in place. The glue smells good :)


Time for the Halloween break! Didn't get dressed up this year so I made up for it by carving this pumpkin. He's a happy pumpkin (I think he got hold of some of that glue).


sosometimehaspassedandIforgettobringthecameracauseIwastoobusyworkingandImsorry...
Ahem. So some work was done and all of a sudden I have two storeys of walls done. Magic!


The day I did remember to bring the camera was sunny and nice. Here is a nice picture of the entry hall. The ceiling is sloped up to the second floor to give it a really open feeling. It sure looks open to me.


Yeah. So trusses are big, heavy and a real pain to work with. Thankfully we had hard hats on so that if those trusses that weighed several thousand pounds were to drop on our heads... we'd still be killed... I dunno ask the safety inspector.


The future kitchen area. That big opening on the left wall is for the sliding doors to allow access to the back yard. And what a yard!


The roof is partially on. That's Matt up top swinging the sheets up onto that stack there. Wade and Adam (not my brother) are below working hard.

That's it for now. With these pictures off the camera I'll be able to take more. I'll try much harder to keep up with the updates.