Another First

Posted on by Jordan

We got our first Amazon order that came with its own shipping pallet

 

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Side note, you can see that our garage isn’t really organized yet… not even close

 

Back on topic, we now have a treadmill! It ended up being the heaviest thing I have had to lift in the entire moving process, but last night Heather and I managed to get it down into the basement and setup.

It would be difficult to overstate how happy Heather was to have a treadmill… walking is a big part of her stress management process, and being able to do that while staying close to Hannah is a big deal.

-Jordan

Workouts 2014 Edition, Or Perhaps A Retrospective

Posted on by Jordan

It has been roughly a year now that I have been doing the “You Are Your Own Gym” workouts, as mentioned in a prior post. I can’t say that I have really been doing the workouts as much as borrowing the lift ideas and doing parts of the workouts. His full program is intense! I find that I cannot push myself that hard and keep doing the workout, sadly.

On the bright side, doing a somewhat relaxed version has allowed me to consistently get three to four workouts in a week. This has been enough to at least let me maintain my weight, and stay in something that resembles “in shape.” I sometimes worried about my joints using this approach, but excepting some muscle soreness, it has been surprisingly easy on my body over the past year.

We had one of those random mid-winter nice days a week or so back, and I thought it would be a great idea to go for a run. It turns out my knees still don’t really like that. I guess it was almost two years ago that I was running regularly, and I wasn’t having too much in the way of knee pain most of the time then. Maybe I would need to work back up to that, because just doing an out of the blue run caused several days worth of pain.

All of that is to say that I am really glad to have found something that is: low impact, practical within the confines of parenting a one-year-old, and something I can keep doing day in and day out.

A year in, and I don’t even slightly resemble the guy on the cover though, so perhaps there is still room for improvement 🙂

 

-Jordan

Workouts

Posted on by Jordan

Subtitle: Yes we still do them!

The addition of Hannah into our lives has…. complicated getting work outs in, but Heather and I have managed to sneak in at least a little exercise despite the rather demanding schedule imposed by an infant.

Heather continues to take advantage of the treadmill in our building. I won’t say much beyond that it’s what she has been doing for a long time and covers all the bases of being enjoyable, effective stress control, and producing results.

Last winter I tried using the elliptical trainer as a way to be nicer to my knees. I never felt like I was able to challenge myself enough, and I really don’t like staring into a TV during my workout. I decided to try a more strength training oriented approach this winter. Pre-Hannah I was just doing kind of a random collection of body-weight lifts, and the occasional free-weight session. It worked ok, but I would not consider it a great success.

After the initial craziness of Hannah’s arrival I wanted to take a more structured, and hopefully efficient approach, primarily using the book “You Are Your Own Gym.” I am now a couple of months into the “basic” program, and fairly happy with it. I can’t say that I have really lost weight, but I have gotten stronger, and considering how tricky it is to sneak in workouts some days I will have to be happy with that for now.

Someday it will warm up (not today, May second and it’s been snowing for 14 solid hours!)  and I will incorporate running again, but I do think it’s noteworthy that I am over two months into a challenging workout program and haven’t had to skip a single day for knee problems or other injuries. I haven’t ever had that kind of consistency with running.

I have been really impressed that using minimal equipment, just a big dowel to place across a doorway or span over two stools and lots of different body weight lifts (think push-ups) even two months in I am still finding the workouts challenging! The downside is I probably need a pull-up bar at some point, and I have needed to adjust the occasional workout to remove jumping oriented lifts. Someday we won’t live on the 3rd floor and I can re-introduce those 🙂

-Jordan

Spring Cleaning

Posted on by Jordan

It is still spring right?

Because we just got around to the first major cleaning this apartment has ever had.

We weren’t exactly living squalor, but somehow being on the run most of the time had gradually let us get farther and farther behind in general upkeep. Much of the past weekend was spent cleaning, with the additional touch here and there after work, things are starting to look darn good around here!

We have a second bedroom. As much as we tried to avoid it, that room became the “everything room” catching odds and ends from the first day we moved in. It has a bed in it, and I think in prior post I may have implied that it was just minutes from being ready to host a guest. Well, it may have taken a little more than just minutes, and it might not be 100% ready yet….

One of the things we discovered while attacking the remaining tasks in said room: Not only were things un-dealt with since the move in there, the prickly disagreement that contributed to them being dropped in there instead of being dealt with properly somehow was still attached! That isn’t to say we had a horrible weekend full of not getting along, it just means we discovered that many of the tasks were far more complicated than we could have ever imagined. Heather and I can both be rather… insistent when we know how something should be done. Sad to think we can discover that much when just cleaning a room, I am sure we will get to put everything we learn now to use a few times throughout the coming years.

In a less personal note, I cleaned out the freezer and found some frozen shrimp. The first half of the bag I had used to make this salad: Asparagus and Shrimp Salad. I forgot to take any pictures, but mine ended up looking about the same. Sadly neither Heather nor I were particularly taken with it, so I wanted to try something else with the remaining shrimp. We also had a number or cups of Greek Yogurt pushing their expiration date, so I pulled together a remarkably convincing Shrimp Alfredo that was at least close to healthy enough to be eating on our last week of this workout challenge! 🙂

Check back soon for my chance to work through the backlog of recipes that weren’t healthy enough for the challenge 😉

Also, I have no idea how this is turning into a 40/60 split between things we do and things I cook… but I guess it gives me something to talk about.

-Jordan

Three Weeks Down!

Posted on by Jordan

Today marks the end of three weeks in the Goals In Motion ‘Challenge’.

That leaves six to go, and I am counting 🙂

The interesting thing is that I rather enjoy the workouts, I just don’t like getting up that early, or what getting up that early does to my evenings. In case I haven’t mentioned it, we get up at 4:20 in order to make the 5:15 workout.

Beyond the changes to our sleep schedule, our eating changes have been more significant than expected. Heather and I did another challenge a while back that included an eating program, although it was self moderated. With the current program we have an assigned coach / mentor. She has been incredibly helpful! We already had the basic principals from before, but she has really helped us fine-tune it. One of the tools we have been using is a website called “The Daily Plate,” that provides a nice nutritional tracking tool.  To be honest, the site is clunky and less than user friendly, but it’s free and gives us and our coaches access to the information we want.

Because of our nutritional goals, I have been really looking for new things to cook. I tried a few noteworthy things over the past few weeks.

First up was “Stickless Shish-Kabab“only I cut back the oil in the marinade, and made it with chicken.

I discovered a number of things that were somewhat exciting in the process. First up is the fact that our oven, although lacking the traditional gas oven broiler pan, has broiler settings to ether turn the top or bottom heating element on constantly. This gave me a lot more control when broiling than I have ever had with an oven before. The option to just turn on the bottom element will come in to play once pizza is back on the menu. The second thing I discovered is that the stores have yellow squash in stock, and that Heather and I both rather like them grilled. We have grilled them a few times already, after ‘discovering’ them in this recipe.

The second thing I tried was “Whole Wheat Pasta with Asparagus.” I don’t really think I set out to modify this recipe, I just didn’t quite have the right stuff on hand. I don’t know if the kind of sausage called for was what I used, but it was really hard to skin, so I just chopped it up and did slices instead. Beyond that change I think it was basically what the recipe called for. The results were really good, and I think I may have converted Heather to liking Asparagus.

The final new item we tried was a notable strikeout. After our success with grilled squash, we were eager to try to expand our arsenal of grilling options, so we thought eggplant might be a good thing to try. Normally I would have avoided eggplant, but i figured we were on such a role with new things that it might be really good. (pictured here, hot off the grill)

It wasn’t terrible… but it wasn’t great ether. I know there are recipes that dress eggplant up a lot more, and I think we may need to look into those. Heather mentioned having really liked eggplant in Spain, but that it was breaded, fried, and drizzled with honey. Hopefully we won’t have to go to those lengths, but as it stands now eggplant isn’t on our veggie good-list.

-Jordan