Duke
Mood:  sad
Now Playing: Kelly Willis
I've added Donald "Duke" Palmer's blog to the links here. He is an inmate on Death Row in Ohio. Be warned, it will make you cry. If you're reading this blog and you're in favour of the death penalty, please read the entries for April 24 and 28.

Target practice
Mood:  caffeinated
Now Playing: Jack Johnson - In between dreams
I've had too much caffeine today. 3 coffees and a tea and now I have a headache. Bleargh.

The caffeine was needed though...spent the day sorting out a complete mess of a client's accounts. Got there in the end after much banging of heads off desks. I was working with my friend who does their bookkeeping, so that made it a lot more fun, and we managed to squeeze in time to go for lunch :-)

This is the same friend who has the poltergeist. Can't say I noticed any weird cold feelings in her house or anything. She says it has got worse though - last night the bathroom door mysteriously closed - ok, that could have been the wind I suppose - but then the bedroom door mysteriously OPENED and it was properly closed, not just ajar! She is obviously braver than me cos despite being a little freaked she then went to bed. I would probably have run out of the house in a panic and gone to stay in a hotel. Smart TKD wrist snappy moves are no use against ghosts :-)

Speaking of moves Dave is still enjoying the TKD and no ill effects on the knees so that's cool. Yesterday we hung a football in a carrier bag from the washing line and kicked it for target practice. Unsurprisingly, the washing line fell down :-) So I got on ebay and bought some focus pads. Now we can practice our moves in the garden with slightly more professional equipment!

What I would really love is a punch bag or a slam man. But with no room in the house, it would have to live in the garden, and be a freestanding one. So if anyone reads this and knows of a waterproof one you can just leave outside all the time, please let me know. I like the idea of sticking Rupert Lowe's head on there and punching away :-) Especially since they took him off Punch a Celeb. You click on his name and there's no-one there! Seriously, it's very upsetting :-)

Cottage cheese please Gromit
Mood:  cheeky
Now Playing: Annoying laptop squeak
Wow, I actually did quite a lot of work today. The last week or so it's just been too hot and I seem to have spent most of my time flopping around doing bugger all. But today the sun disappeared and I had quite a productive day. Got a few sets of accounts finished off, made some phone calls, and generally acted like I worked for a living. Mind you, I still surfed a lot and went to the gym for an hour in the middle of the day :-) My idea of a productive day probably only works out at about 4 hours of actual work. If you put me back in an office for a 40 hour week I think I would die of shock. And boredom :-)

Today a momentous event happened. I did something I have never done in my entire life. I ate some cottage cheese!!!! It is one of those things I have always avoided cos it looks so totally hideous and it's supposed to be one of those horrid "diet" foods that you eat with nothing but lettuce and hate every mouthful of. But I have been spurred into action by the likes of Skwigg and Krista - if I want muscles, apparently I need to eat the stuff!! So I had the following concoction:

50g cottage cheese
40g strawberries
40g blueberries
1 tsp sugar.

Swirled the whole lot up together and it looked like roadkill. BUT, it tasted remarkably good! At 98 cals, a chunky portion of fruit & veg, and 7g of protein, you can sign me up as a convert. I shall have to try some of the other ideas from Krista's cottage cheese page.

The cottage cheesey goodness definitely helped my "food pie" today: 1426 cals, 82g protein. Not too bad :-)

Twisty wristies
Mood:  a-ok
Now Playing: Eric Clapton - Layla
No lost dogs this morning, just a nice mellow walkie. Dave took his new camera lens and snapped a rather cool pic of a dragonfly which you can see here.

After walkies it was time for TKD. Great class today, we learned how to block a strike, twist the attacker's wrist behind his back and overpower him. Cool! Dave came along again (yay!) so we partnered up and made each other's wrists hurt alot. That's what most married couples do on a Sunday morning, right?

I really hope he keeps coming to the classes. It's cool having him there, plus it would be nice having someone to practice with at home. Especially the self defence moves like we learned today - need to practice them and get them to flow naturally. After all, when someone comes at you with a knife, you don't want to have to say "hey, just hold that pose a minute while I remember which hand to block with and which way to twist your arm". LOL.

Action Heroes
Mood:  cool
Now Playing: Shawn Colvin
Dave and I just took the Action Hero Quiz.

Turns out he is Batman and I am James Bond.

Coooool!

Doggie adventures
Mood:  happy
Now Playing: Mansun - Attack of the grey lantern
Had a lovely Friday yesterday. Took the afternoon off, cycled into town and bought some martial arts shoes for TKD. Dave invested in a pair too, which I'm taking as a hopeful sign that he will be coming back with me again this week - yay!

Afterwards we took the boys to Paddles doggies swimming pool. Vic who owns it lets you go in with your doggies if you want, which we don't usually indulge in, but it was such a hot day we took the plunge and it was lovely. The pool is colder than most human pools and has salt in instead of chlorine. Eddie and Neo thoroughly enjoyed themselves as did I. Quite good exercise too - I was trying to race them up and down the pool and considering they're only doing doggie paddle they were pretty damn quick!

Here's a piccie of them enjoying the water:

More doggie fun this morning on our walk: we met a greyhound cross who appeared to be lost. He followed us round for a while until we realised there was no owner in sight and he didn't have a collar on. Neo started getting a bit sniffy with him - he doesn't really like other dogs being around us for any length of time - so we had to put him and Eddie on leads and wander round the common looking for the owner. Eventually after about half an hour we came across him looking for his dog. Turned out the dog was called Jake, is 16, and is starting to go a bit senile - hence the running off. Poor Jake. Just as well we found the owner as we were starting to think we would have to bring him home with us. And that would have ended in tears and dog fights :-)

Anyway with all the excitement we didn't get back till gone 10, so no time for weights today before combat. Probably just as well, as I was feeling kind of wiped. Still dragged myself to combat though - new routine this week, I'm not too convinced by it to be honest, have to see what I think next week.

Rant of the day: Saw this article in the Independent today. The guards at Buckingham Palace, you know the ones who wear those stupid black furry hats, have abandoned their trial of synthetic fur. Apparently it got too waterlogged on rainy days, and lacked "bounce". So they're going to carry on buying Canadian black bear pelts. Well, never mind about the senseless killing of bears then, just as long as we have sufficient bounce in our hats for our archaic and completely pointless ceremony. Gosh, it just makes me proud to be British. Grrrrr.

Punches, Pianos and Poltergeists
Mood:  lyrical
Now Playing: Nickleback
Excellent TKD class tonight. The sore foot held up ok, I took it a bit easy in the warm up and did less mad jumping around than usual. We did some nice punching/kicking combos today. Spinning back fists are cool!! Mags (my usual partner) reckons I'm getting stronger and my kicks and punches are much harder than they used to be. That's what I like to hear :-))

Played the piano today for the first time in months. Had so much fun I ended up playing for about an hour instead of going to the gym to do my weights before TKD. Ah well, my fingers got a good workout :-) I worked out the chords to a couple of Lily Allen songs and sang along at a shocking volume. Just as well our next door neighbour is in his ninety's and nearly deaf :-)

In other news, one of my friends has a poltergeist. Now I don't believe in any of this stuff, but she's someone I consider a really good friend, and she is neither mad nor prone to making stuff up. Things in her house have disappeared from their usual places and then reappeared weeks later. Plus she hears noises like people moving furniture around. She seemed remarkably calm about the whole thing....if I was living in a house with just me and a ghost, I think I would be a tad more freaked. Anyway, this happened before and she had a priest come round and do his exorcism or whatever and the poltergeist went away. Apparently it has now come back though. Maybe the holy water passed its expiry date or something.

No mates
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: KT Tunstall
Gaaaaaaaaah....the whole perfect nutrition day didn't really work out. There's a shock hey :-) I did fine until about 5 pm when I got the munchies and ate...ahem...a mars bar. Followed by ditching the planned dinner of fish cakes and salad in favour of curry :-)))

Oh well. At least I'm doing loads of exercise. I'm not going to beat myself up over it...just try and gradually improve my food choices. That's the plan anyway.

Managed to hurt my foot at the gym yesterday. Dave & I had done our workouts (upper body weights for me) and went into the studio on our way out to mess about with the punch bag. I managed to throw a back kick at it and catch it all wrong, hurting the top of my foot. D'oh!! It hurt for a while, then felt ok, then woke me up at 3 am hurting like a bastard. Lovely Dave got me ibuprofen and ice spray which calmed it down. Then this morning it felt ok again. Very odd. Anyway, thought I had better rest it today and get back to the gym tomorrow.

I tried going for the double cardio madness again tomorrow but left it too late - Combat was fully booked! D'oh again. Not too bright this week am I. So I think I will have another weights session tomorrow, before TKD. Gotta do something to combat the mars-bar-curry-fest.

Dave has had loads of "friend" requests on his MySpace site. I haven't had any. Sob! Nobody loves me :-( So I tried clicking on some of my interests to see who else shared them. I came to the conclusion that people are weird. I'm just gobsmacked by their tastes. I mean, how is it possible to list Michael Moore films as one of your favourites and then put Ronald Reagan in your heroes section? And who the hell likes Green Day, AND Michael Jackson??

Still, after browsing through some odd people, I happened upon a cool looking Taoism group which I signed up for. Nice to see some UK people on that one, all the other Taoist sites I've found are US-based.

Bad Blood
Mood:  energetic
Grrrrrr! Went to give blood this morning and was turned away because I had acupuncture. Grrrrrr! Wasted an hour of my morning going down there. I can go back next month cos it's 6 months after the acupuncture.

On the plus side this means I can now go to the gym today - was planning a day off but will now go and do my upper body weights and some running.

My running is getting slightly better, but I still find it sooooo hard!! Yesterday I had a whole plan going - I was going to try and do a full 5k on the treadmill. Now at my snail-like pace that would be taking me around 40 minutes so I timed my visit to coincide with Countdown :-) I figured I could run all through that which would keep me entertained for half an hour, then I wouldn't have much more to do at the end. But disaster struck!! The gym changed the channel and we had bloody Miss Marple instead. Far too boring to run to. Especially as I already knew whodunnit. So I abandoned my run after 20 mins and went and did my lower body weights workout.

I'm trying to work on getting my food right this week. I'm doing pretty well on the exercise front - but have ZERO willpower with my food. Yesterday I did OK calorie wise, but not enough protein and too much fat. Today I've planned all my meals out and they give me 50% carbs, 25% protein, 25% fat and 1300 cals. Spot on. I'll let you know tomorrow if I stick to it!

Dog walks are really nice at the moment. Having to take them early to avoid the heat means the common is much quieter and we see more of the regular dog walkers. Everyone we meet has a name according to their dogs. We see Poodle-Lady, Jack-Russel-Guy and Grumpy-Lead-Throwing-Man (we once saw him throw his extending lead handle at his dog in a fit of anger. Nice.) Dave once met one of the regulars in the gym and totally didn't recognise him without his dog :-)

It's also still duckling season. Here are some dead cute ones we saw:

Kickin'
Mood:  spacey
Now Playing: Beatles White Album
Dave came to TKD with me today! I've been trying to get him to give it a go for ever but he always said he didn't fancy it. I think he quite enjoyed himself, despite falling on his arse in mid kick :-) Everyone does that at least once ....

We had a fun class today. Poor old insane Glen volunteered to put on a padded body armour type thing and let us all kick him for about half an hour. He looked a bit battered at the end :-) It was really great though. Good practice for getting power and accuracy into your kicks. When we started doing side kicks I was barely touching him and by the end my kicks were actually making him stagger back a bit. How cool!

Walked the dogs early again today. We have to at the moment or the poor little guys would just melt in the sun. Even early-ish it was still hot so they got a shower under the garden hose when we got back. Here's a picture of my babies in the garden:

That's Neo on the left and Eddie on the right.