Day 2 - goal

So, exercise goal #2/90 was already set before I even made this post. I happened to sign up for a 5K run to be held on the Saturday morning of 4/30/2011 - and when I say morning, I don't mean at the crack 'o dawn type - this one was at midnight! Yeah, I participated in the Kansas Special Olympics' Midnight 5K run: http://www.ksso.org/events. It was a rough run - on a normal day, no biggie, but I was exhausted from the whole week catching up with me! I took it easy at the beginning and then upped the pace until my shins told me to take a rest - then just coasted on a jog the remainder of the way in. I think I ended up somewhere around 27:30, not too bad.

Anyway, that gave me quite a bit of exercise, so I'm going to add to it by doing some Ab Ripper and rip those obliques. Fun fun!

Day 1 results

Catching up on my posts regarding my exercise plan.

For my first day back into the program, I said I'd at least kick it off with some serious stretching. Mission accomplished!

Uno down, octacontakaiennagon to go!

Day 1 plan - Stretch

Since I'm keeping this simple, my focus will be to blog about what I'm going to do that day, then live up to it. Once it's done, I'll post about my success, and maybe even add a bit about my day and thoughts. Keeping an exercise journal for people to read never seemed very exciting for me, but perhaps I can add to what I'm doing during my days to spice up the content!

So, day 1 of 90 - my goal is to stretch to P90X stretch for one hour - I've got a 5K run early on Saturday, so this'll be to limber me up for that. P90X stretch, while relaxing, does take some time to do right, and sometimes I'll feel the need to rush through things so I can move on to the next on the to-do list! However, as Tony Horton says, I'll need to "clear my mind" and focus on the job at hand.

Off to work I go! TGIF!

Ha, errrr....

Well, this is embarassing. Hello, blog! I haven't written in ya for a bit. It's about time I get back in the typing saddle!

I'm gonna get some writing exercises going. First up, I've been neglecting my workout routine. I had been pretty hardcore about the gym and P90X, but work responsibilities have had me spending my hours elsewhere. So, it's Plan90Extreme (Not to be confused with P90X ;-) ) where I'm gonna do some regular short, varied workout goals to get back into my "gotta work out today" mentality. So by the end of July, I should be reaching my fitness goals!

I'll be numbering my days and stating what workout I'm planning for the day in the morning, then executing that goal by the end of the day. It might be as simple as just stretching, or doing complicated gym routines or yoga. Either way, short and to the point, and then documenting it here will be the way to go!

Tomorrow will be day one. That's always the hardest day. But, heck, Friday's never supposed to be a hard day!

Japan - Part 2

Continuing the chronicles of my adventure from the US to Japan Part 1:

With the flight plan set, I was ready to make the trek across the largest ocean on the planet to visit the land of the Samurai! My itinerary was rather simple - the day after Christmas, I was to br

ave the weather and crowds to park at formerly named Mid-Cont

inental International airport (MCI, or better known as Kansas City International Airport) to head to St. Louis (STL) then onward to Los Angeles (LAX) to crash for the night. On the morning of the 27th, Dad and I would embark on a Boeing 777 to Narita, Japan (NRT), spend a few days in town, then hike back to Narita to enter

the US via Dallas (DFW). Once there, we would part ways - I would head back to KC, while Dad made an extra mileage run from DFW to STL and ending up in LAX. Whew!

A couple of days before taking off, I had the chance to exchange Christmas gifts with Kelly. Being a silly and sly guy, I was able to get some cool UCLA gymnastics swag for her. They're the best college gymnastics team in the nation - and heck, it gives me an excuse to get her to wear UCLA stuff. ;-) She, on the other hand, gave

this the excellent Moleskine journal to use in Tokyo - it's seriously awesome, served as my notes and maps and guide the whole time I was there. I'm definitely using it as my reference writing this blog! Thanks Kel!

The flights linking me to L.A. were uneventful. Waking up in L.A., I was greeted with some excellent views of the airport:

See the light brownish part of the sky above the mount

ains, beneath the blue sky at the top? That's smog. If you had asked me what that was before I left L.A. some almost 10 years ago, I would've told you that's everywhere. Little did I know that it was simply everywhere just in L.A.

We pop into the airport, get past security, and settle in to get on the plane. It's a little delayed, so I watch planes land. It's quiet in the nice lounge we're hanging in:

Right about at noon Pacific time, our plane was ready for takeoff! Stay tuned for the long flight there!

Japan - Part 1

Konichiwa! Err, hello! As long promised since my return to the states, I'm posting my Japan trip in 3 parts to accommodate all the pictures and things that happened on the trip. I'm still grinning from the terrific experience, in no small part for my Dad making this happen pretty much on a whim. Big thanks, Dad!

I've always been fascinated with Japanese culture, language, mannerisms, geography, and history. I think it stems from a couple of things - in my lifetime, the Japanese have been considered leaders in technology and innovation - things that interest me greatly both professionally and personally - their history is pretty well documented yet heavily influenced by Western culture lately - especially notable was the arrival of the US "Great White Fleet" in 1908 where the Japanese went to great lengths to welcome Americans - and my Dad has made annual trips there for work, but tended to take my older brother to other locations, such as Hawaii or Europe. So Japan was kind of a special place that I really wanted to visit and make my own.

A couple of months ago, I jokingly asked my Dad if he was planning another "mileage run" to Japan. You see, even though he travels somewhat often to international locations, he has been cutting back on work travel during the year, to the point where he ends up close to but not quite having the required number of qualifying miles for "Elite" status on American Airlines, which has been his preferred airline for many many years. The point of keeping that prestigious frequent flyer level are the numerous benefits: free class upgrades; mileage bonuses; priority upgrades to business or first class when available (with platinum or gold, you have to wait for the elites to get their upgrades first, then whatever is leftover becomes available); waived charges for changing travel plans; even an expanded seating selection at no extra charge. All you have to do is keep flying 100,000 miles a year on the airline.

Isn't that an easy thing to do? well, to give you some perspective - flying from Los Angeles to New York City is 2,462 miles as the crow flies, and takes about 5-6 hours. 100,000 miles means you need 40 flights or 20 round trips - each flight is 5-6 hours long, so that'd be some 200-240 hours in the air. That's a LOT. I can barely take the 13 hours from L.A. to Tokyo, and I LIKE flying!

So, back to the story. Mileage runs - since my Dad needs 100,000 miles a year to stay "Elite," he needed to take one more big trip to put him over the mark. It takes about 4 international trips to make it easy to get Elite, and for the past couple of years he's had to take one flight at the end of the year as far as possible as fast as possible to reach 100K. Tokyo's easy - go from LAX to DFW (Dallas, TX) to NRT (Tokyo/Narita Airport, Japan) and back is a cool 1,230 + 5,500 + 5,500 + 1,230 = 13,500 miles. So, if you're 10-15K miles away from Elite status, there's how you get over the hump - take a day to fly to Tokyo, spend a night there, and then fly back. My Dad sleeps on planes - in fact, it's a game to him to try to be asleep before the flight takes off. He'll wake for the first meal, watch a movie, then be back under for the rest of the way.

I bugged him this year to join him - it'd be an adventure for me and maybe make the trip less boring for him. So we planned to fly out on the 27th from LAX and be back in KC in time for the new year.

I'll stop here for the night and resume tomorrow!

Back in Kansas

Whoo-hoo! Am typing up my posts as we speak!

Short post

Just making a short post before I leave the country - looking to see a bit of Japan before the new year hits! If you want to read some excellent deaf news about Japan, check out the Deaf Japan News blog here: http://deafjapan.blogspot.com

Catch you all when I return!

Seafood = ew?

Food is good. Heck, when I'm not stuffing myself full of gobble gobble turkey, I tend to rummage around my fridge looking for the next great meal to cook. Tonight, for instance, I threw together the following interesting ingredients just like I would on Iron Chef:

1) Shrimp, tail-off, pre-cooked

2) Gluten free angel hair pasta

3) Cucumber, sliced

4) Red roasted pepper tomato soup

5) Balsamic dressing, gluten-free

I ended up with:

Angel-hair pasta with shrimp and sliced cucumbers, drizzled with balsamic dressing, and tomato soup to keep warm

DELISH! Would eat again+++++++!!!

Now, the silly thing is, earlier this week, I got a universal consensus from my dining partners who all said "Seafood? Ewwww" when I ordered fish for dinner one night. I grew up eating just about any kind of food under the sun and people here are going "ickpth?" What's up with that?

"Super-logoff" of the 'net

Relevant article here: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/super-log-off-teens-bring-street-smarts-facebook/story?id=12131071

I've been pondering about privacy and things we do in our personal lives that may directly reflect upon our professional and community interactions. Let's face it - stuff happens and we're unable to control what happens if we're not aware of it, such as rumors or bad mouthing or even stuff that's just mis-interpreted. To my knowledge, I haven't been a victim of such things (lately!) so nothing of the sort is prompting this blogpost, but what is piquing my curiosity about this phenomenon of "super log-off" is the fact that maybe it's not such a bad thing to gain more control over one's life, especially when your life could be full of drama otherwise!

Since I've had so little time to be on Facebook lately, sometimes it feels like my life is passing by without me being involved. Sure, stuff happens anyway with or without Facebook, but since now our lives are being put online for just about everyone to see, it should hypothetically only take a moment or two to see how everyone is doing, and taking even that brief moment to do so is very difficult at the moment. I'm concerned about losing touch with the people that make my life so very rich and pleasant while I'm buckling down and working longer hours.

Mind you, it's not the end of the world, and this extra workload is only temporary, but again, life is short and our days are numbered. Just trying to grab what time I do have and enjoy the marbles I have in my fishbowl, so to speak.

Challenging myself

Everybody experiences a period of insanity at least once in their lifetime. Usually, this happens right around finals week when you're cramming all night for those 2-4 hour tests the next morning. I've come to learn it's never a good idea to try to jam stuff you're supposed to REMEMBER into your brain at the last minute. Heck, I think our brains are supposed to be sponges, but it's not exactly via osmosis that we're learning here.

So, right now I'm trying to juggle my work obligations, community obligations, health obligations (volleyball!) and even trying to add to the workload something that involves actual studying - preparing for the GMAT, which I haven't even scheduled yet. The Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT for short, is a 4-hour adaptive test that's supposed to test your aptitude for solving difficult questions and be some kind of indicator as to what level of success you can expect in MBA graduate school. Frankly, I've forgotten more since I graduated with my BA than I think I'm gonna learn over the next month which is when the applications are due for Spring 2011. There's no excuse but to try and make the time to brain up whenever I can.

What's the lesson to be learned here? There's only so much I can do - and I'm definitely somewhere at my limit right now. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be making some tough decisions on what to cut back on - all the things I've committed myself to are good things, but I can't do it all - so time to figure out where to drop the axe. That's never a fun thing but I think overall everyone will benefit from having a fuller me present at the things I can commit to.

Cccccccold and HLAA young adults

I just went from:

to

Okay, so Kansas City's not THAT cold right now, but brrrrr! I did have the foresight on Wednesday to bring a jacket with me on the flight, but man oh man the weather in Orlando was faboo! Light breezes, low humidity and the perfect temperature for shirts n' jeans - yay!

It looks like HLAA has posted their sponsorship opportunities for the 2011 convention online. In there, it shows on page 6 that the planned young adult event will be a scavenger hunt - from talking with Nancy Macklin from HLAA, it would be throughout the Capitol Mall in DC, which is huge and an awesome place to explore. See the Young Adult Off-site event summary on the right side of the page here:

http://www.hearingloss.org/convention/2011Convention/2011Prospectus_6of20.asp

Thinking about DC - I really do enjoy visiting DC. Not so sure how much I'd like living there, even though I am a city boy and am used to traffic/smog/people. I love love love the Smithsonian Museums - especially the Air & Space (which happens to be the national favorite too - drat! Always busy, always packed. I wanna scope it all out by myself!)

Speaking of the Smithsonian museums - the month at the museum in Chicago is still going on! Check out the five finalists and vote before October 5th! I wish I was going to be in there... a month of science!

http://www.msichicago.org/matm

Scatterbrained

I think I left my brain at home. Well, of course I did!

It seems a bit more often lately I'm forgetting I'm supposed to do something important or follow up on something I promised. I write stuff down, I catalog it, I post reminders, but I keep missing something like a delivery date at work or even a simple emailing of a list of emails to my HLAA folks before heading off on a work trip. Heck sometimes I even go to bed and wake up remembering I forgot to feed my boys!

Boys with tails do not let you forget lightly. Sharp claws pawing the covers in the middle of the night are no laughing matter. Ow!

I'm wondering if I'm just too busy. I've got the largest stack of books sitting on my dresser ready to be read. I can tear through one of them in minutes, yet by the time I'm home from the office after spending an hour reading emails from the west coast, then working out, then cooking some tasty gluten-free yumminess, I'm done for the night. And weekends! At least some weekends I can do fun stuff when I'm not trapsing all over Orlando or Los Angeles.

I'm on my way back home from the AARP conference where I ran into quite an assortment of characters - Mickey, Donald, Goofy -- oh, oh, oh, you mean about the people at the conference -- elderly special-forces men who shouted that they heard on the phone fine while their wives were all "gimmie that CapTel phone!", magazine writers and bloggers who were all agape over the newest technology from Sprint, and even catching up with folks from the Deafness Research Foundation and HLAA National.

It sounds like HLAA will have some fantastic stuff lined up for the 2011 convention. I can't wait for them to publish it!

Psych!

Ah, hah, I'm laughing my tail off catching this show. So it's pretty witty and hits all my geek points, but the really sad thing is that this show also makes me think of the Gilmore Girls. Back when I was in college, I had a few unfortunate nights where I was forced to watch the aforemented show and the whole thing reeked of ADHD-infused talking heads that just couldn't stop delivering their lines as fast as they could or else their heads would explode and the world would come to an end and so on and so forth and nobody could ever stop to take a breath and would keep on talking until they keeled over fainting...... *wheeeeeze gasp!*

But, in this case, Psych just has me rolling in the aisles..... well, until they call an MBA a Monkey Basketball Association. :-p

I need a maid

"Life's too short to do housework." I see that slogan on a bunch of ads around here - touting maid services and every other week cleaning. The only thing I'd have to do is make sure my place is picked up on the day the maid service comes.

I do keep a somewhat orderly house - at least, I'd like to think so. Thing is, I could also spend all day every day doing chores and I feel like I'd never get anything done. Dusting, vacuuming, sweeping, laundry, bathrooms, kitchen counters, filing, landscaping, mowing, whatever, just so much to do!

Ever since I moved to KC, I've hired a neighborhood kid to do my lawn. That has been an excellent timesaver. I think it's now time for me to focus on just that little extra oomph on keeping the house clean with some help - and so I think starting tomorrow I'll get that maid service scheduled and give it test drive.

Anyone else ever tried a maid service?