fifty minutes of weights and seventeen flights of stairs.

shockingly, i managed to force myself to be active after work today. i’m not good at that. i’m much more likely to be active during lunch since it’s a break from work. yesterday i had the same goal and failed. today, i climbed 89 flights of stairs (2×24, 2×10, 3×5, 3×2) in seventy minutes. i then came back, got changed, and gathered my hubby. we walked thirty minutes on the beach and swam six lengths of the pool before finishing off in the hot tub. the way i see it, that’s practically a triathalon. over two hours of activity. so then, time for some fresh, warm cookies, eh?

this weekend we had my dad and his wife come to visit. we had a great time and i think they did too.

they missed the really impressive storm surge that we had thursday but the waves were still plenty big on friday
dad and rhena
hubby getting pulled around by his kite
ready for liftoff!
hubby and his kite
wii rocked!
wii rolled!
wii even golfed a bit
poor dad got beat by everyone

it seemed like my dad really enjoyed the wii. especially golf and bowling. other activities included walking around the marina, driving through our favorite shopping plaza (rhena’s got a bad foot and can’t walk much), looking for shells on the beach, swimming, hot tubbing, pokering, and conversing. it was a fun visit but having morning persons as houseguests can be tiring. i guess it was fair though because i kept them up way past their bedtime and they woke me up way before my weekend wake time. i was happy to get a three hour nap after they headed out yesterday though.

which is the mexican restaurant that we frequented with the office group in ga. when i say we frequented it, i’m talking pretty much every-other-friday lunch for four years. we miss it very much so we decided to start looking around here for a good mexican restaurant. in that pursuit, we stopped at a place in town last night to give it a try. it had all of the indicators of good mexican – silly name, hole-in-the-wall looks, lots of cars in the parking lot. it was such a let down, folks. the chips were too thick and chewy. the salsa had no flavor (seriously, it might as well have been water with chunks). the meat seemed to be cooked in the same taco season mix that i buy at the grocery store and make at home because i don’t know any better. i ordered nachos and, instead of a thick, soupy plate of chips drowning in melty cheese sauce and meat, i got a plate of burnt chips with meat and shredded cheese sprinkled and burnt over them. needless to say, we will continue our search for another la parrilla but we WILL NOT be going back to los rancheros.

i plurked yesterday about the surge that we are getting from ike. i’m a little surprised because it’s a slightly bigger surge than we saw from gustav and gustav was much, much closer to us than ike. i didn’t expect to get very much from him. anyhow, these are some pix that do not at all portray how impressive it truly is.

that’s our dunes and walkway, i couldn’t catch the bigger surges that were coming up into the dunes and well under the walkway
this is between our property and the one next door, you can see in the sand how much higher it was getting
and just for reference, this is what our backyard usually looks like (i didn’t have any looking straight down at the walkway and dunes but this shows the area from the above pic)

forty-five minutes on the treadmill and walking the seventeen flights of stairs back home. i’m guessing that tomorrow will be a gymless day since my dad will be here. so far my five-day-a-week workout schedule is 0-2. i guess four days is better than none though. as a bonus, here is hubby kayaking tuesday when i was too tired from stair-climbing to join him:

even though i’m tremendously tired from a long night of eluding sleep, i managed to drag my sorry (non-shrinking) butt to the gym. not only did i do forty minutes of weights but i then took the stairs back home. granted, it was only seventeen flights – nowhere near yesterday’s sixty-nine – but it still kicked my butt. that’s far too much talk about my butt (though there’s more than enough of it to talk about).

it’s funny because i was so exhausted all evening from my stair climbing yesterday but if i slept an hour the whole night, i’d be shocked. i finally fell asleep well after 04:00. i was wide awake again at 05:00. i dozed a couple of times before the alarm started hounding me at 06:30. i LOVE nights like that. i was so tired but i was just… restless. and to top it off, there was a noise. see, hubby has been doing some a/c work around here. he’s been adding vents into our bedroom to get me more of the cold at night, which is wonderful! unfortunately, the stronger air is apparently affecting the fan so when the air starts blowing, the fan makes this horrible clicking noise sporadically until the air stops. granted, the sound is not incredibly loud. i’ve actually noticed it for days but hadn’t paid enough attention to it to figure out exactly when/how it’s happening. but i’m one of those people that when i can’t sleep, ANY noise is enough to drive me batty. this is how hubby gets in trouble for snoring. it’s not that he really snores loudly, really just heavy breathing, but when i can’t sleep it rubs my nerves and furthers my non-sleeping. i strongly considered putting in ear plugs last night (since they are right there next to the bed from all that concrete drilling last week) but i’m the keeper of the alarm clock. hubby doesn’t even hear it in the morning. by this morning, the clicking of the fan had me wanting to drill a hole through my brain with a rusty spoon. here’s hoping that ya’ll had a more restful night than me.

today was stairs again. it looked something like this:

– 22
+ 24
– 24
+ 24
– 5
+ 5
– 6
+ 6
– 6
+ 6
– 2
+ 2
– 2
+ 2
– 2

that brings today’s total to 69 flights of stairs up and down or approximately 2484 steps in 55 minutes. the two full climbs weren’t any easier but the shorter pieces after that seemed much easier today. my legs never really gave out on me so maybe i won’t be unable to walk tomorrow. i did a much better job of stretching before and after today, which may have been part of my too-tight-calves last week.

fifty minutes of weights

the weekend was sort of a bust because of my non-cooperative head. i had planned on doing some nice paddling on the kayaks but it just wasn’t meant to be. for the most part, we just rested and hot-tubbed. yesterday afternoon, we did manage to get the snorkel equipment out and enjoyed some underwater voyeurism. we found several pretty shells and i even nearly caught a few fish. one shell, which i just HAD TO HAVE, was occupied. hubby and i spent about an hour trying to find another shell with the right shape and size for tenant relocation. (no, the tenant was not happy to be carried around that whole time and kept pinching my fingers in protest.) hubby finally found another shell just like the one i covetted but with less pretty coloring. i held the two shells together and it only took a minute or two for the tenant to relocate. everyone was happy (well, one of us might have been a bit angry and kept waving claws at the two crazy giants that had held him hostage). we released him and then continued to follow him as he made his underwater getaway. i’m certain he was happy after we left. i wish we had a reef here. that would make this the absolutely perfect home. in the meantime, all of this practice snorkeling is getting me very excited about the snorkeling we’ll be doing on our cruise in fourteen days. assuming, of course, that the cruise doesn’t get cancelled due to a parade of hurricanes!

i don’t know what i’ve done wrong but my head has been so very angry at me this week. much more so than it has been in quite a while. last night was pure hell. usually, even with my worse migraines, i can take some motrin, lay down in the cold, wrap a blanket around my head, and it’s gone in just a few hours. last night, i took four doses of motrin and still ended the night in agony and sick to my stomach. fortunately, i am able to move again this morning but my head is still hurting. i am very much hoping to keep it at a dull ache today and not let it spiral into that hellish torture again.

it was a wonderful evening of wine and hot-tubbing. we had a very nice conversation with a nola evacuee. she was a pleasant woman with a jovial kid. she’s going through a divorce and, for some reason, i get very sad when i hear about someone becoming a divorcée.