Just one more before bed – now this is a weatherman that I could actually get behind!
this kid is going to be a rocket scientist when he grows up…
…or maybe sooner! 😉
Thin Post : A 2Q12 Quarterly Statistical Review
So the last couple of months didn’t really turn out quite like I had hoped … actually, I was doing great up until June, but pretty much bombed out the last couple of weeks and gained back a little bit of the weight that I had lost. Then again, I suppose that’s also the driving force behind looking at the big picture like this because I ended up doing about 25% more cardio than I did last quarter…
Total Weight Lost: 2.3 pounds (5% of total weight loss goal for 2012)
Total Days Exercised: 58 days (64% – 91 days total in April-June)
Average Days/Week Exercised: 4 days/week
Cardio (includes some elliptical, but mostly walking the dog at night)
- Total Days of Cardio: 56 days (97% of total exercise days included cardio)
- Total Cardio Time: 76 hours
- Total Cardio Distance: 240.3 miles
- Average Cardio Distance/Day: 4.3 miles/day
- Max. Cardio Distance/Day: 6.6 miles (4/21/2012)
Strength Training (exclusively push-ups via 100 Push-Up Challenge)
- Total Days of Strength Training: 5 days (9% of total exercise days included strength)
- Total Push-Ups Completed: 320 push-ups
- Average Push-Ups/Day: 64 push-ups/day
- Max. Push-Ups/Day: 67 push-ups (4/10/2012)
Yoga / Balance Games (WiiFit)
- Total Days of Yoga: 2 days (3% of total exercise days included yoga)
- Total Yoga Time: 1.2 hours
Year-to-Date Stats
- Total Weight Lost: 13.1 pounds (29% of total weight loss goal for 2012)
- Total Days Exercised: 114 days (63% – 182 days total in January-June)
- Total Cardio Time: 135 hours
- Total Cardio Distance: 434.2 miles
- Max. Cardio Distance/Day: 6.6 miles (4/21/2012)
- Total Push-Ups Completed: 1,304 push-ups
- Max. Push-Ups/Day: 80 push-ups (3/3/2012)
So where do we go from here???
Ultimately, I think that my progress was botched this quarter for two reasons – 1) lots of stress eating in the last couple of weeks, which isn’t really tracked anywhere here but I know was still a major issue; and 2) I had nowhere near the motivation for strength training that I had at the beginning of the year. The push-ups are kinda tough for me because while I can grab the dog’s leash and not really start to feel it until I’m miles away from my house, my arms start to burn from the push-ups after the first set … which I know is kinda the point, but it’s still harder for me to get motivated to do them in the first place because I’m at this point the negative vibes (a la pain) are still outweighing any positive vibes (a sense of accomplishment for actually doing push-ups, I suppose).
That said, clearly I have a lot of ground to make up if I’m going to lose 45 pounds in 2012, so here are my thoughts for the next three months…
- Get my diet in gear / stop bingeing and screwing up any progress I make through exercise by stress eating afterwards!
- Up my exercise average to 5 days/week, and start pushing myself a little harder either for longer walks or even longer distances in shorter times.
- More emphasis on yoga stuff via WiiFit in addition to cardio days.
- Rededicate myself to including strength training every other day, and actually complete the 100 Push-Up Challenge.
- Also add into the strength mix the 200 Sit-Up Challenge, both in an effort to ramp things up and also in hopes that targeting my belly will help some of that fat disappear quicker!
On one hand, I’ve still got a long ways to go, but half a year should give me time to at least make another sizable dent in this goal of mine. If my math serves me, losing 20 pounds in the next 3 months would put me just over the 50% mark for 2012, so we’ll see what happens… 😐
A lawman appeared…with powers of hawk, wolf, puma, and bear!
Last night I almost actually went to bed “early,” or at least early for me anyways … but then I came across a familiar face during a little random channel surfing that I couldn’t help but watch for a couple of episodes…
Who knew that there was actually a channel out there playing episodes of Bravestarr?!?!?! Apparently it was part of a special “night owl” block of programming on a channel called Qubo … after my beloved space sheriff, they switched over to The Real Ghostbusters, which I also remember watching but wasn’t nearly as into, so I ended up calling it a night at that point. But if they also had Silverhawks or Go-Bots or Captain N: The Game Master … I’d probably still be asleep right now because I would’ve likely stayed up all night watching and reminiscing!
As for Bravestarr, I had a lot of the toys that went along with this show – the action figures, the play-set of the town that folded up in lock-down mode, even one of the laser guns that they put out to try and cash in on the whole Laser Tag trend, but I’m pretty sure that I had to sell most of them in a garage sale one year in one of those “you’ve got plenty of toys – pick one to sell”-type moves. Admittedly they were kind of clunky compared to my Gobots and I still think that I made the right decision, but it was kind of neat that in one of the episodes of the cartoon that I watched, they folded the town up in preparation for Tex-Hex just like the play-set that I had used to. 🙂
I’ll have to root around in my old box of toys the next time I’m back home in a few months to see if anything got left behind that didn’t sell or something…
Sometimes you just need a day of puzzles, cleaning, and Mario…
I guess you could say that today was kind of a randomly productive day…
We couldn’t really go watch fireworks anywhere because puppy is absolutely terrified of them this year, so instead we just hung around the house for the most part.
A fair amount of overdue cleaning got done in preparation for my in-laws coming to visit next week. 😯
Between cleaning bouts, we squeezed in a good couple of hours revisiting Super Mario Bros. Wii, the game that’s been systematically designed to test the strength of your marriage by seeing how many times your spouse can accidentally toss you off the screen without invoking physical violence! 😯 😯
Near the end of the night, we even spent a little more time than intended putting together some of Sara’s old puzzles … more than intended mainly because while moving them around in preparation for gluing them permanently, yours truly on several occasions somehow managed to drop significant portions of each puzzle on the floor! 😯 😯 😯
So in short – I managed to make it through another 4th of July without getting divorced, and there was much rejoicing!!!
“I used to play guitar…”
So I came across these earlier today while we were doing some cleaning around the house…
I always feel guilty when I dig these up because they’ve followed me as I’ve moved from house to house (or apartment to condo to house to house!) for the past nine years, although I don’t think I’ve actually picked one up other than to move it once since I first moved to Florida. It’s a little weird sometimes to look back at how completely music used to dominate my life in high school, and now that’s sort of fallen to the wayside to make room for writing and computers and all of that stuff.
I always tell myself that I’d like to get back into it and start to play a little here and there, though my motives of being in a rock ‘n roll band would nowadays likely have to settle for picking around on an acoustic in the living room. I think part of it is that it’s really been sooooo looooong since I’ve done anything that I’m exceedingly self conscious about it – my wife has occasionally mentioned that she’d like to hear me play sometime, but thankfully doesn’t really push the issue because I don’t think I’d even know where to start anymore.
I tried leaving my acoustic out on a stand in my office for a couple of years, thinking that maybe I’d pick it up at random for a little break here or there, but instead all that got me was a really painful looking crack in the finish of that beautiful, red body of its! It doesn’t really show up in the picture, but it runs square in the middle from the bottom of the strings to the edge nearest where the strap connects.
I also found in a similar cleaning sweep a handful of my old books, including a bunch of the classical guitar guides that I used to love to practice – I think if I were to ever do anything, I might like to start dabbling around with those again because finger-picking always seems so much fancier than simply playing chords behind popular music, plus there aren’t any actual words so nobody expects you to try and limp your way through singing along. Plus a lot of those songs were always really pretty, too – there was a time when I used to play my acoustic way more than the electric just because I could make those acoustic songs sound nice all by myself without needing another guitar player, a bassist, and a drummer who never shows up half the time because he’s got a little bit of a drug problem…
*ahem*
I guess I really need to stop saying “maybe some day” and just pick one of the things up and noodle around for 5 minutes if it’s ever going to happen – after 9 years of celibacy, it’s not like my fingers have calluses on them enough to play any longer right off the bat anyways! I think I’m to the point where I don’t really expect any career changes out of it anymore, but it still was fun as far as I do recall. 😕
Where do fireworks get their colors?
I thought this was a particularly interesting little post blogged over at Boing Boing showing the various chemicals that are ignited to create the different colors that will fill the skies tonight via fireworks.
P.S. Try not to be stupid tonight, America… 😉
blog. finally. done!
Well, check another one off the list, folks – what you see around you is as good as it’s gonna get! 😉
It’s kinda crazy that it’s been 8 months already since I first undertook the task of migrating my blog from LiveJournal over to WordPress … and for what it’s worth, it’s not like I’ve been working on it solid all of this time! Truth be told, aside from a few days here and there to get the kinks worked out of the header and the homepage, I haven’t really touched this thing to finish it up in quite a while. And yet it’s forever been another pair of checkboxes on my 2012 timeline, taunting me as I yearn for newer projects that actually have a chance of making me some money…
*ahem*
Anyways, what’s done is done, and I’m happy to say that this site – ScottSevener.com – is officially as done as it’s going to get until a year from now I feel like it’s grown horribly outdated once again and I’m faced with the task of gutting it and starting anew once more.
For what it’s worth, though, in this particular point in time here on July 3, 2012, I’m actually really happy with the way that it all turned out. I got the self-hosted home for my blog that I’ve been wanting, and I also got a pretty slick interface on the homepage to highlight all of my writing that’s taking place on other sites that I run! Plus, I can do some other cool stuff that a regular blog makes difficult, like these random lists of stuff that I like and my favorite things, and this favorite tag page that promotes some of my best along with a slightly different display of all the rest than most people are used to seeing.
Technically the one other thing that I still need to do is swap out a couple of images in the header menu for abandoned and replacement projects, but I can’t really do much about that until said other projects are actually further along…
I guess it’s sort of a funky mesh between personal and professional, plus it’s nice to be able to share some of these kinds of things a little more publicly than just throwing them up on Facebook where the same 122 friends are my entire audience. Here I’ve got the potential for, well, more, and hopefully over time other folks will grow to enjoy how I’ve brought everything me here together under one roof, too!
Now what was I supposed to be working on next??? 😯
Thin Post : Finding My Way Again…
It’s kind of scary to think that it’s been almost a month since I last blogged about this, and yet in a way I don’t really feel like I’ve made much positive change just yet.
I weighed in today and found that ultimately I ended up gaining 5 pounds in the month of June – not exactly the direction that I’ve been shooting for! Pretty disappointing when my goal was to have lost nearly double that after having worked at it for six months now. I’m hoping that because a lot of it was realistically put on in the last week, that maybe it’ll fall back off just as easily if I can turn things around this week, but even if it takes longer the truth is I just need to start trying a lot harder…
I’ve been trying to figure out some ways to reintroduce motivation for weight loss back into my daily routine – shooting for my rewards again, including more games, and even challenging myself a bit more with strength-type exercises … I only ever ended up getting about halfway through the 100 Push-Up Challenge before it fizzled out and I lost interest, so I want to figure out how to get myself back to being excited about beating those goals and pushing myself to new heights because that’s when I really found myself making headway and resisting the snacking because I had so much positive progress on my side!
I’ve also been reading back through some of my older blog entries as I worked to finish tagging stuff for the site and this one in particular really stood out to me. It’s something that I wrote over two years ago to describe exactly why I want to lose weight, and it’s extremely honest and personal, and a little embarrassing, and admittedly it made me a little sad to read it because though everything still certainly applies, in two years I don’t really feel as if I’ve done nearly enough to take care of this because I’m still struggling and only maybe one of the five things on that list has really been addressed.
I’m trying not to say this in a depressed way, but more in the vein of the fact that I need to do better. Now! It’s been two years since I first made that proclamation, but realistically I’ve been trying to slim up even a lot longer than that. Unless I want weight loss to just be one of these things that always plagues me throughout my entire life, I need to rededicate myself to making some hardcore changes so that another two years from now, I can look back on this post and think about it as the turning point to when I actually got my shit together instead of simply yet another rambling along my perpetual attempts at getting skinny.
I need to change, and even if I don’t exactly have all of the answers right now, I need to start trying a lot harder than I have been.
my latest distraction – Kingdom Rush
I’ve always been a fan of tower defense-type games because they’re typically fairly easy to learn and quick to play, so when I came across Kingdom Rush the other day, it was an easy sell … and not just because it only cost $0.99!
Basically, you have four different types of towers you can build – barracks, archers, artillery, and mage towers – and each has different pros and cons depending on what’s being thrown at you for a given level. I myself am a fan of archers, however as I get into the later levels I’m definitely finding that you really have to make use of everything if you want to be successful because even though my archers can take down most enemies fast, if I get hit with a hoard of armored knights who are resistant to all but magic, suddenly I’m kicking myself because I tend to neglect the mage towers more than anything else… 😯
It’s fun, though, and in the last couple of days I’ve managed to sink a ridiculous amount of time into strategizing against trolls and ogres and pregnant, giant spiders who drop baby giant spiders until you slay them! Good fun!!! 
