Category Archives: gym

Weekendness

So, I spent most of Friday driving around Schaumburg, Rolling Meadows, Hoffman Estates, and Arlington Heights collecting information for the Midwest FurFest Restaurant Guide. I’ve got a lot of additions, a couple of deletions, and I need to come up with a bunch more restaurant reviews. Fun! That’s something that will keep me busy this week. It was also the end of the financial year for takaza‘s employer, so he was a crispy critter when I picked him up at the end of the day. We came home and we both collapsed, eventually getting around to making quesadillas for dinner.

On Saturday, Dan had gotten some tickets to see the penultimate Cubs game of the season at Wrigley Field. I wasn’t much interested, so he shared the tickets with perro, darkwolph, and woodychitwn and they had a good time. Linnaeus was off hanging out with the visiting saboutlours and carol_kitty (and I hear mirkowuff was around as well), doing the tourist thing, leaving me at home alone. While that’s not unusual given the current state of my employment, it was nice to have a day when I didn’t have to do anything – I watched college football, relaxed, and even dozed a bit. It was a nice break, actually. Come evening, the two groups converged (less Mirko, who had to take the train back to Da Region), and we went to the always-tasty Tre Kronor for a delightful dinner (and abused their BYOB policy with a bottle of Sarah’s Blend and a wonderful pinot grigio, the latter a gift from camstone and mooivos that was very much appreciated!).

Dan and I relaxed around the house Sunday, eventually wandering out to walk around the neighborhood in search of the makings for dinner. The supermercado a block and a half from us had some good produce, but the butcher’s section was mobbed (and I still need to learn what to do with all of the unusual cuts of meat they offer), so we instead wound up at the halal meat market around the corner and picked up some ground beef. The grind was a bit finer than we were used to but it made for some tasty cheeseburgers! Unfortunately, we ate a bit late and the dyspepsia plus worry about miscellaneous things led to a bit of insomnia for me.

And then there’s yesterday: I took Dan in to work, got some promising calls from various recruiters, and worked out at the gym. For dinner, I made a very tasty pork roast seasoned with Argyle Street Asian Seasoning, as well as fried potatoes in butter and olive oil. Arr num num num! As for today, there’s the trip to the gym (ow, still sore from yesterday…) , the usual shotgun-blasts of resumes across the net, a bit of food shopping around the neighborhood, and working on a nice batch of chicken and dumplings, since Dan has had a taste for it lately. Bored? I don’t have time to be bored!

Note to Woody: I don’t EVEN want to hear you complaining about how many links you have in your posts! 🙂

I hear the voices in my head/I swear to god I think they were snoring

Well, it’s been a real up-and-down week. On Wednesday, I heard from takaza that things weren’t going well at work. I skipped the gym and met him after work and we had a nice walk in a nearby park and talked some of his stress out. After that, we drove around a bit, exploring some of the northern burbs that we hadn’t seen before, and then wound up at Old Orchard Mall where we splurged a bit for some not-bad hot cocoa and some excellent chocolates. I’d like to think that helped Dan a lot and made the rest of his week a little better. We capped off the evening with a nice episode of The Amazing Race, though we’re bummed that the oldsters got bounced. They seemed like genuinely nice people.

Yesterday was relatively unexciting – work, then a cardio workout at the gym. Because of my knees, I’m sort of limited in the cardio I can do, so I vary between the treadmill and the recumbent stationary bike. If I ride the bike, I can definitely get my heart rate up, even though I top out at about twenty minutes and about 130 calories burned. If I use the treadmill I can go twenty-five minutes (and longer – I need to push that a bit) and that theoretically burns 320 calories or so, but my heart rate doesn’t really get into the “cardio” range. I need to figure out how to better balance these. I’m alternating those with one day of shoulder and abdominals exercises and one day of arm and leg exercises; that seems to work pretty well, but I’m having a hard time sticking with the five-times-a-week schedule my doctor has suggested. Well, some is better than none, anyway.

This weekend we’re rewarding Dan a bit for the two weeks from hell that he’s had by spending it at the La Quinta in Hoffman Estates. It isn’t all fun, though – we’re checking out the hotel to make sure they’re ready for Wuffmeet, and on Saturday we’ll be scouting the FRAC course, taking pictures, making notes, and making evil plots 🙂 On Sunday we’ll be hitting Sam’s Club to check prices for food and drinks and play with budgeting a bit more. In between, though, we’ll be doing a lot of relaxing, which I’m looking forward to.

Gotta get some work done, but look out for some links coming up this afternoon!

Stay Home? Not Gonna Happen

Gosh, this seemed like it was going to be a nice calm week when I made my last post. Yeah, right…

Takaza got the word on Tuesday that he was going to be going down to his employer’s St. Louis, Missouri, branch to help out with some training there. Once they got the scheduling worked out, I went to work to figure out how I could get down there economically and we could hang out for the weekend. Flights were out at this late date – the cheapest I could find was over $100. Amtrak, though…they even had a schedule that worked for me. A nice bonus was that I found a great website that posts discount codes for Amtrak (typically these are the ones that are mailed out to their Guest Rewards program); that netted me a quick 25% off.

So, for $60 I’ve got a business-class seat on the Route 305 – State House train from Chicago-Union Station to St. Louis, departing at 5:15 PM on Friday and getting in (theoretically) at 10:43 PM. I say theoretically because, looking at the last week, the train arrives somewhere between five and thirty minutes late. Eh, it’s worth it, I think. We’ll be down there through Sunday afternoon, and Dan will be at the regular Friday night Furry Coffee gathering. On Saturday we’ll be hanging out with ramalion and K and hopefully tygercowboy and company as well. Sunday we’ll do lunch with my sister’s family before driving back to Chicago.

Also, in a nice “Power of the Internet” moment, I just spent the last ten minutes or so using Google Maps to talk Dan through a detour off of I-270 around a nasty accidenton the Illinois side of the Mississippi River that had stopped traffic for miles. It was very odd to be talking to him and relating what he was seeing real-time to landmarks I saw in the satellite photos.

Going back a bit earlier in the week, I did have my physical health assessment at the gym on Monday, as I mentioned. The good news is that I’m not quite as bad off as I thought I was – I weigh a little less than I thought I did and my nutrition is “average” where I thought it would be “poor”. The bad news is that apparently, for a 37-year-old I have the body of a 50-year-old, according to their “Body Age” testing thingy. Yeah, that’s something to work on, I reckon. I’ve got another appointment on Monday evening to set up a program for cardio and strength training, and then I’ll be good to go. I’m such a creature of habit – once I can get a good regimen going, it’s pretty easy to stick with.

Oh, and finally, two cool items from today’s paper of interest to roho, genet, and feren: a comparison of stir-fry restaurants in the Chicago area, and a nice review of my favorite tea house, Infini-Tea.

Where Have I Been?

If it’s Monday, it must be another…Weekend Recap! Well, OK – maybe more than just the weekend. Let’s go back to, um, Wednesday, I think. Linnaeus and I went over to his gym and signed me up for a membership. I like their egalitarian approach to “family” memberships: you can sign up two people for a discounted membership. Those people can be spouses, roommates, neighbors, whoever – it doesn’t matter. So the net benefit is that I get a reasonably-proced membership to a very spiffy facility, and Paul gets a discount on his current membership. Yay! Like my last gym, they start you out with three introductory sessions to assess where you are now, what reasonable goals for you might be, and what you need to do to meet those goals. I really like this, as it gives me some good structure within which to work – I thrive on structure. The downside is that because I joined at the beginning of the year just like every other schmuck trying to make good on their resolutions, I have to wait until Monday, January 16th at 8:30 PM for my first session. Grrr. I’m having a bit of trouble getting myself motivated to go to the gym in the interim, but I’m sure that once I establish a routine it’ll get better.

Wednesday night and Thursday we chatted with Uncle_Kage a bit online and talked about Dan and my respective positions with the convention. I’ll be doing Artists Alley again, and Dan will be taking on a newly-created cash handling position to try to streamline the flow of cash through the convention. One thing led to another and now it appears that we’ll be heading out to Pittsburgh the weekend of February 4th to meet with some of the staff and get an early look at some of the facilities. Woo!

On Friday, Takaza was feeling under the weather so he came home from work early. I was all set to go to the gym right after work, but first a little Sly 3 – just to wind down. And then suddenly it was three hours later. Wha? Ah well. I made up for it a little by walking to pick up dinner – sushi for Paul and I, and a tasty cheeseburger for Dan. Afterwards, we relaxed and watched some Tivo.

Saturday, Dan, Paul, and I had lunch with roho and genet at Opa! Estiatorio in Vernon Hills. The Greek food was excellent and very filling. We rambled around Hawthorn Mall for a bit, then we parted ways with Paul since he had some stuff to take care of back home. After a quick stop in Antioch and at Woodman’s in Kenosha, the four of us arrived just in time for fritzie_pup‘s surprise birthday party that colliedoc had secretly arranged. Fritzie was completely floored and extremely surprised. Siriuswolfstar, lisagems, and datahawk were there as well. What followed was an extremely enjoyable evening of yummy appetizers, tasty chili, some very strong (but good!) cosmopolitans, Klaus the adorable but incredibly destructive German shephard puppy and the requisite Drunken Apples to Apples. It was a real pleasure to see more of Straif and Fritzie, and I do hope that we’ll be seeing more of them in the future. We headed back to Roho and Genet’s place after midnight and slept quite soundly.

Sunday morning, Dan wasn’t feeling too well. While the company the night before was excellent, I don’t think either of us dealt with the copious cigarette smoke too well – my throat was sore and still is, and Dan had to hit his inhaler before the day was out. We motivated over to Las Vegas Restaurant and this time I opted for the chocolate chip pancakes, which were delicious. We were joined (an hour later) by the rest of the folks from the previous night’s party, just in time for us to head out to the movie theater. It was a bummer not to be able to hang out with them more, but them’s the hazards of planning stuff after a party, particularly when some of those folks don’t go to bed before 5 AM 😉 Datahawk joined me and Dan and Roho and Genet to see The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe at the Antioch Theater. Hey, for $2 for a matinee, even if the movie was lousy I wasn’t going to complain too much! It wasn’t of course – it was quite lovely, and the effects were just plain astonishing. The plot showed the books’ young-adult fantasy roots, but that’s to be expected. I really enjoyed the movie and I’m glad we saw it. After the movie, Dan and I drove back home. The Midwest FurFest post-mortem meeting took place online and that ate up the majority of the evening, then we watched Family Guy, then it was off to bed.

And so for this week, I have a bit of followup from last night’s meeting to take care of. I need to get to the gym at least three nights this week, even if it’s just using the treadmill and recumbent bicycle. And I need to start organizing some of the Artists Alley paperwork from last year and make some lists for what I need to do this year.

Oh, for those interested: it sounds like we’ll definitely be going to Musher Mania down in Monee this coming Saturday afternoon. If anyone would like to join us you’re quite welcome! There won’t be much, if any, snow on the ground but that’s OK because they have wheeled sleds they can use. Plus…huskies! What more reason do you need? If you’re interested, just let me know.