Mood:  chillin'

What a nice chilled out weekend we've had.  Yesterday, combat was cancelled (again!) so we went out on the bikes with the dogs.  Nice to be able to give them a really good run around now the weather is a bit cooler.  Oh yeah and I should also mention that they are never likely to overheat ever again, since Dave gave them a grade 2 all over and they are now practically BALD!!!  I got in from my client on Friday and could barely find them, they were about half the size with all their fluff gone.  Now I've got used to it, it must be said that they are awfully cute like that.  It makes them look like puppies again.  Sigh.  I am very broody for more puppies at the moment (see below).  If I'm not careful I'll end up a crazy old lady with about 15 dogs :-)

Anyway I seem to have digressed somewhat.  Yeah, so we biked the dogs till they were worn out, came home, grabbed some breakfast and then headed out on the bikes again, minus dogs and plus cameras.  Had a really nice mellow couple of hours biking/walking round the common taking photos.  You can see the best ones on my flickr page.  My puppy broodiness went into overdrive when we met this little cutie:

I want one!  I want one!

Today was upper body weights followed by TKD.  My arm dents are definitely getting better.  I seem to have reached a bit of a plateau in my routine though - I can't seem to add more weight to what I've been doing for the last week or so.  It's probably time for a new routine as I've had this one about 6 weeks.  One of our TKD instructors has just started out as a personal trainer, so I'm thinking I might get him to do me one.  Mind you, both of them, Andy and Mike, are nutters.  I'm thinking they would rival Skwigg's Evil Trainer in a one-to-one session.  Last Thursday at TKD Andy had us do 110 press-ups.  Yes that's right, ONE HUNDRED AND TEN.  Then while the rest of us were doing our punching and kicking Andy asked Mike to give him some endurance training and proceeded to do about a million squat thrusts with high jumps in between.  It made me tired just to look at him :-)

Anyway TKD was cool today.  Lots of leg strength work, throwing a kick and then pulling it back but keeping your knee up.  My hips were shouting at me to stop by the end.

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 7:29 PM BST

Updated: Monday, 31 July 2006 9:23 PM BST

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OK, I'm happy again.  Last night just after I blogged we had the most amazing thunderstorm.  Loads of lightening and it went on for ages.  I love storms.  Dave and I were standing on my desk just under the skylight in our loft conversion watching it with all the lights off and the Kill Bill soundtrack still playing.  Very cool.  After a while it occurred to us that perhaps we should turn off the PCs.  And also that maybe the highest point of the house, right in the roof, wasn't the most sensible place to stand in case of the house getting struck by lightening.   LOL.  So I relocated downstairs and attempted to take pictures of the lightening.  Got one reasonably cool one.  Blurry, but not too bad considering I wasn't using a tripod.

As well as being grumpy, I am also dopey.  I am working my way through the dwarves :-)  I am a total idiot.  Someone posted a message on the BFFM group asking about the slide on the Accu-Measure callipers.  That would be the slide that moves when you use them, and then points to the correct measurement.  I had not been using it but just trying to perform strange contortions to take the reading while still pinching my hip fat.  Duh!!!!!    Using the callipers properly makes me 31% instead of 33%.  Woo hoo!!  In other happy news the scales today told me that I had lost 2 pounds, so things are definitely moving in the right direction.

Dave found the coolest website with optical illusions and stuff on there.  The dragon illusion is *wicked*.  Print him off and get yourself a moving desk pet!

Yes, I need to do more work :-)

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 6:51 PM BST

Updated: Thursday, 27 July 2006 7:05 PM BST

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Mood:  on fire

Bleargh - this weather is still WAY too hot.  It's making me all grumpy and lethargic.  The heat just saps all my energy. 

On the plus side it makes me really keen to go to the gym, if only for the lovely air conditioning :-) 

It's been a busy week so far as I was out with a client all day Monday and Tuesday.  It felt like hard work; god knows what I'd be like if I ever had to go back to doing a "proper" job!

I'm trying to assess how I'm doing so far on the BFFM programme and the answer is: up and down.  I was very organised and took all my meals with me to my client.  That was an up.  Monday evening being our wedding anniversary, we went out for a Chinese.  That was more of a down :-)  Let's just call that a cheat meal shall we.  It was worth it though; we had a lovely evening.

I can't believe we've been married 7 years.  It's so weird to think back to what we were like when we got together.  We were both so different.  We both smoked, drank, did no exercise at all, and worked full time.  Now we both do martial arts, go to the gym regularly, gave up smoking, hardly ever drink and are both self-employed.  I definitely wouldn't want to go back to how we were before. 

Exercise also got put on hold on Monday, but I managed to get back in time to do a short body combat workout yesterday, and today it was the gym and weights.  I might contemplate doing combat before TKD again tomorrow, as I haven't done that for a while.

Right I'm off to bed now as it's just too hot up here in the office.  Sorry for the short and grumpy blog, I will be more chirpy tomorrow!!

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 10:10 PM BST

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Mood:  chillin'

So, I'm back for more wafflings, this time we're back onto health and fitness.  This week I got myself Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle book.  I read the whole thing over the weekend and I really, really liked it.  No bullshit, everything he says makes complete sense.  I like the fact that he doesn't try and sell you anything or make out like his programme is easy - he emphasises that it take lots of hard work.

So, I've decided to follow it and get into this whole fitness thing properly.  I've been toying with using a "bodybuilding" style programme for a while, have started eating more protein and having more smaller meals through the day, and doing weight training, so I just need to step it up a level.  I took a proper body fat reading this weekend with callipers and was slightly freaked to find it came out at 33%.  Yes, one third of my body is fat.  Eeeeeeeeew.  I mean, I knew I could stand to lose a few pounds but I'm a size 10/12 and my BMI is 23%, so I thought I was at least in reasonably healthy shape.  But that body fat is way too high.

Soooo Tom says I have to write down all my goals.  I gotta say I hate doing this kind of thing but he really emphasises how important it is to have goals and chart your progress.  So I've done all the maths and sat down and thought about it and here are the goals that I came up with.  I'm putting them all down here so I can't back out of them :-)

Long term goals (no deadline!):

Get my body fat down to 23%.  My target weight based on this should be around 119 lbs.  Be able to do 10 full pull ups and 25 full push ups.  Get my black belt in TKD.  Wear a size 10 comfortably.  Be able to wear things that show my midriff.  Wear a slinky dress to our Xmas party.

After you've worked out your long term goals you work out your goals for the next 3 months.

3-month goals:

Lose 1 lb per week (except for the week we're on holiday!) which will take me down to 126 lbs and 27.5% body fat.  Do 5 assisted pull ups and 10 full push ups.  Get my TKD green tag.  Be able to fit back into all my size 10 clothes which are currently too tight!

So there we go, it's all planned out, now all I have to do is stick to the eating and training plan.  I think I'll be fine on the training side, as I'm really enjoying my exercise at the moment.  I think I'll find the eating part hard though.  But I'm actually looking forward to getting going with it.  I've been eating pretty well most days for the last few weeks, so it shouldn't be a huge shock to the system.  I'm trying to convince Dave to read the book and do the plan with me.  That would certainly make the eating side much easier.  He's kind of sceptical, mainly I think because he hears the word "bodybuilder" and thinks his wife is going to end up looking like this.  Hopefully if he reads it he'll realise that's not going to happen!

And speaking of Dave, just to get me off to a flying start with the healthy eating, tomorrow is our seventh wedding anniversary so we'll be going out for dinner :-)

Oh and in other exciting news Michael told us in TKD this morning that we would be doing our green tag grading on August 27th.  Yay!!  I'm fairly confident about this one, I know all the moves and the patterns, so hopefully it will be ok.  I'm looking forward to moving on to the next level.  Today we had a go at breaking boards.  I tried one with a  front kick and couldn't manage it - I was really gutted.  Will try again next week.  Actually maybe I should add board breaking to my 3-month goals as well :-)

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 11:09 PM BST

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Mood:  chillin'

Oh my god.  I don't blog for a couple of days and now I have about a million things to say.  I had better break them into bite sized chunks or I will scare off my tiny band of readers :-)

So, this bit's about cameras.  Feel free to skip if not interested!

The new Canon SLR arrived on Thursday.  So now I am using Dave's old Canon SLR and he is having that one.  So Friday afternoon we skived off work (anyone noticing a theme in this blog?) and wandered around Southampton Common for a few hours taking photos.  I've got myself a Flickr page to put my photos on.  Obviously the camera is still on idiot setting.  I told Dave I needed a "Photography for Dummies" book and he gave me one called "the little book of photography" which apparently would be easy to understand.  HA!!  I read the first two pages and was lost.  It's like something in my brain just hears the word "lens" and starts going "La la la, I can't heaaaaar yoooooooou".

Anyway, I'm enjoying the camera which is the main thing and seem to be managing to get a couple of cool shots even with everything on automatic, so hey, that's ok with me :-)

Anyway here's one.  I had to get so close to take this the bee nearly flew up my nose.

Right, gotta go have some dinner now.  More later!

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 2:17 PM BST

Updated: Sunday, 23 July 2006 7:59 PM BST

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Mood:  smelly

Today is apparently the hottest July day in Britain since records began.  It's 36 degrees.  Fortunately for me, I've spent most of the day in the car.  Oh, how I love my Honda air conditioning :-)

The road trip was to Hertfordshire, first of all to see my friend Emma.  It was supposed to be a get-together for the gang of four - me and my 3 uni friends - but the other two couldn't come cos of car problems.  I missed seeing them, but it was kind of nice having time just with Em, I felt like we really got to catch up properly.  With the four of us, and four kiddies to watch, we don't always manage to cover everything!

I managed to demonstrate again my complete lack of maternal instincts - Emma asked me to bring dessert and thinking, oh, it's just the two of us, I picked out 2 chocolate éclairs, completely forgetting that kiddies need to eat too!  How bad is that.  I am the ultimate anti-mother.  On the plus side it was good for the diet, as I only got to eat half my éclair and Callum got the other half :-)

After Em I went to see my granny who handily is only down the road.  She is in an elderly care unit having had a fall in the garden 6 weeks ago and broken her knee.  The hottest day of the year and she has a plaster cast from her foot to her hip.  Poor granny.  Still she was pretty chirpy, all things considered.  I'm really proud of her.  Her husband died a couple of years ago and no-one thought she would manage on her own; she's wasn't very mobile even before this.  But she has arranged helpers, and meals on wheels, and is determined to stay in her home.  She's equally determined to go back there once the plaster is off.  No giving up and deciding that's it, she's old.  I think it's great.  Not sure how my dad feels about her spending all his inheritance on carers! but hey I say go for it. 

I've been very lucky with grannies - my other granny who died last year was a feisty old bird too.  We bought Rupert the punch bag with some of the money she left me - it seemed appropriate.  She also left me a set of brass knuckle dusters which look absolutely lethal.  When she was in her eighties she used to carry them with her when she went shopping until someone pointed out to her that was probably illegal :-)

Oh and here's my rant of the day: the care unit where my granny is staying is really, really hot.  I mean I was sweating like I was doing a workout while I was sitting talking to her.  It can't be good for the patients.  There were a few fans but not enough to really help.  The grandson of the old lady in the next bed brought in a fan for her, only to be told that wasn't allowed because all electrical equipment had to be vetted by an NHS engineer.  Only, there wasn't an engineer there so it couldn't be vetted.  So no extra fans allowed, basically.  Blooming bureaucracy.  That just sums up everything wrong with this country. 

No exercise today, but my lunch tomorrow has been cancelled so I will hopefully manage a good eating day and I have TKD in the evening.

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 8:10 PM BST

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Mood:  mischievious

What is it with "Dubbya" and world conferences?  If it wasn't funny enough last September when he got caught asking Condi for a toilet break, now he and our Tony have been caught having a private chat by a mike that was left on.  Apparently Tony is concerned about "this trade thingy" while George thinks we need "to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit".  How funny :-D

If I manage to lose any weight this week it will be a minor miracle.  Yesterday I went out for dinner with a friend - managed to make sensible food choices for once.  But the rest of the week looks like this:

Tonight: out for dinner with in-laws.   Wednesday: lunch at my friend Emma's - usually involves quiche or something equally evil.  Thursday: out for lunch with my ex-boss.  Friday: out for drinks and dinner. 

Eeeeeek!!  Just as well I am doing lots of exercise.  Body combat yesterday, weights today.  Tried some more pull up attempts.  They are not going well!  Of course, right at the end of my weights workout when my arms are already aching might not be the best time to practice them.  I'm trying the assisted ones but I just can't pull myself all the way up.  I'm not giving up on the quest!  But I think it might take a while :-)

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 3:37 PM BST

Updated: Tuesday, 18 July 2006 4:12 PM BST

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Mood:  accident prone

Today in TKD we did some sparring.  First I paired up with Dave and we did light contact kicking.  Really good fun, we were a bit better this time at making contact without actually kicking the shit out of each other.  Then Glen (it's always poor old Glen) put on body armour and we all took a turn at "sparring" with him for 90 seconds.  He was just moving around a lot to get out of the way and blocking, while we had to try and kick him.  Wow, that was so much fun!!!  And surprisingly exhausting.  I felt like a bit of a spaz (and managed to fall over too at one point) but hey, it was the first time I've ever done that so I was quite pleased with myself.  I did at least manage to get a few good kicks in.

As usual I managed to come away with enormous bruises, another one in almost exactly the same spot as last time, where I caught Glen's elbow with the bottom of my shin.  Ouch.  In a weird way though, I kind of like coming home with all these war wounds.  It makes me feel like a proper fighter!  I mean, I never thought I would be able to do a class like that, take a painful knock, fall over, and then get up and carry on.  I used to be a total wimp and I love the fact that I'm not any more.  It’s not that I was totally wrapped up in cotton wool, as a kid, but...well yeah, actually I guess I really was.  I broke both my arms (not at the same time!) when I was young so I think after that I was always really cautious about getting injured.  Add to that the fact that in my teens and onwards I was quite a serious pianist and my parents were forever trying to make sure I didn't injure my arms or hands.  For example, when I wanted to go ice skating they gave me horror stories about getting fingers chopped off with skate blades :-)  I never rode a bike anywhere, and I never did any kind of sports.  All in all I just wasn't very adventurous.  So now, to feel like I can take a knock, get a painful bruise, but not let it bother me and keep training, is something of a revelation.  Way hay, I am no longer a wuss!

Right, I'm off now to lie on the sofa with an ice pack on my leg :-)

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 5:30 PM BST

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Mood:  chatty

Had an old friend round this afternoon.  Well actually he's the younger brother of my best friend from school days.  When we were kids he used to annoy the hell out of us by pestering us when we were trying to have deeply important conversations - you know, about crucial stuff like what we should wear, or hair crises.  Weird to think that we're all grown up now :-)

Anyway, he's starting this cool website called 1000 things to do before you die, so came to have a chat about accounts and tax and stuff.  It was really nice to see him and catch up.  The guy is a total nutter.  Last year he broke his neck diving (he's fully recovered now).  It doesn't seem to have put him off doing insane stuff as last week he did the Pamplona bull run.  All makes good material for the website I guess! 

It did make me think, cos he was asking if there was anything we had done that we thought should go on there.  The most exciting thing we've done recently is a trip to the Isle of Wight, which doesn't really compare!  The thing is, we're really stupid over our dogs and every time we contemplate going abroad on holiday we just don't want to leave them.  We had a chat about it and decided that travelling could wait until the dogs were no longer with us (sob!).  In the meantime, I'm pretty happy with our life; we're very lucky.

This morning my combat class was cancelled so I did my upper and lower body weights workout.  Didn't manage any progress on the pull ups as the gym was quite busy and I get self-conscious doing them in front of other people, seeing as how I can only manage a few and they're totally wussy.  I meant to do push ups on the stairs when we got home, but forgot.  Must do better with the quests!

On the weights front, though, I'm quite pleased with how I'm progressing.  I love the fact that with weight training you can really see yourself improving and getting stronger as you manage to up your weights.  It's much more quantifiable than with cardio workouts.  I'm definitely starting to see more muscle definition on my arms.  If I could just lose a some of the extra fat I think they'd be looking quite cool.  Speaking of which.....

.....food wise I feel like I've gone off the rails a bit this week, with so much eating out.  I'm going to try and eat really well this coming week.  I'm out with a  friend for dinner on Monday, so that probably won't be a perfect day, but I'll try to make sensible choices and avoid the cake :-)

In other news, our house was invaded this evening by ants.  FLYING ones, no less!!   Eeeeeeeeeeuuuuuuwwwwwww.  We went into the lounge and there they were in one corner, all over the floor, windowsill and curtains.  It's at times like this that I appreciate my lovely husband.  He let me shut him in the room with a hoover and large amounts of ant powder, and when I dared to look again there was not an ant to be seen.  What a star :-)

Also in other news (gosh I'm chatty tonight) we have ordered a camera for me!  Well, actually we have ordered the fancy next model up camera for Dave, this one, and I will use his current one.  Should be cool.  I'm looking forward to taking more photos of stuff to put up here.  For today I shall leave you with this one Dave took on our morning walk of Neo having a good soak.  I think that dog was a hippo in a former life.

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 11:03 PM BST

Updated: Saturday, 15 July 2006 11:08 PM BST

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Mood:  chillin'

I love eBay.  I just bought the cutest Welsh dragon t-shirt on there.  As you can tell, I'm having another productive day in the office :-)

Dave just found this cool video of some guys making like a domino run out of various stuff in their house - CDs, videos, even bits of toast.  I'm pretty good at time-wasting when I'm supposed to be working, but I've got nothing on these guys.  They clearly have *way* too much time on their hands.

Today I went to Alresford with my mum.  It was very mellow.  We drove out there in my mx5 with the top down.  I *love* my convertible.  When we first got it I really didn't think I'd enjoy driving with the top down, it would be too noisy and scary.  Now I love it!  Giant sunglasses are of course compulsory for all top-down driving.

Then we met one of mum's friends, went for coffee, wandered around the shops, went for lunch, wandered some more, went for tea and cakes.  I actually really enjoyed myself.  When you start to get on well with your mum's girlfriends and have giggly girlie lunches with them, does that officially mean you are old?

I'm not even logging my food for today.  I'm pretty sure that coffee walnut cake doesn't fit in any sensible nutrition plan.  It was bloody nice though :-)

Posted by fluffie-bunnie at 6:33 PM BST

Updated: Friday, 14 July 2006 6:40 PM BST

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