a post over at brandon’s puppy reminded me of a funny story that i probably never ranted, although i’m sure a few of you have heard it. it has to do with my time as a goat–mommy. in february of 2005, i had my first experience with midwifing. my brother-in-law had several goats that he had to induce labor on and those kids had to be bottle-raised because of some disease that could have been passed on through the milk. 
i batted my big blue eyes at hubby and, next thing you know, i had two precious little kids to take home to ga. i don’t know if you’ve ever had a goatlet, but they are just the cutest and most playful little things! they are also a little noisy when they feel insecure. their bleating sounds just like a crying infant. a loud crying infant. they required several feeds a day at first so i worked from home a couple days and then we were able to ween them down a bit and we just went home for lunch to feed them during the day. while we were home, we’d let them run around the backyard or garage but while we were at work, they stayed in a playpen in the tiled useless area off of our kitchen. hubby was very concerned that someone was going to see us with them in the backyard or complain about the bleating and call the county because we were certainly not zoned for farm animals. he worried over this quite a bit. the rest of the rant… »
i know that i have been neglectful in my ranting the last few days, but i promise there is good reason. i have been working on transferring my old travel log into a travel blog. the mexican cruise that we just got back from is fully recapped there. maybe, just maybe, one day i’ll even post about the west carribean cruise from 2006. anyhow, it took a lot of time to get it put together so go check it out and let me know what you think. and i’ll get back to trying to find more interesting things to rant about here.
back to the routine as normal which means that today was stairs. i did 100 flights even (2×24, 4×10, 2×5, 1×2) in sixty-two minutes. not too bad, if i do say so myself. especially since i had two weeks of sloth. throw in the continued head-spinning land-sickness and i find it downright impressive.
fifty minutes on the treadmill plus nineteen flights of stairs up and two down. i did a lousy job of gymming on the cruise – the only exercise i really got was walking up and down the stairs to get from one meal to the next. however, i am jumping right back into it now that we’re home. that’s something, right?
along with the new and improved rant URL, i’ve undergone a much-needed redesign as well. i hope you enjoy the new look. it is subject to change as i play around more but i think i like it pretty well for now.
i’m starting to post about the cruise. it’ll probably take a few days to get all of it up because, while i did make sure to write up each day, typing it up and organizing pix takes time and my attention span doesn’t last very long. the first five days are up but you’ve got to scroll down for them since posts are newest to oldest. no, i don’t know how to reverse the order for a single category and i didn’t want to mess with the date/time stamps to get them in ascending order.
the weekend has been restful. after work on friday, we went for a four mile walk on the beach (it counts!). saturday i woke up feeling very dizzy and the spinny-sensation persisted all day. i suppose it was probably delayed land sickness but it sure was annoying. still a bit dizzy today but not nearly as bad. we made it down to the pool a bit this morning and watched a speed boat race (pix in another post to come) in our backyard. mostly, we’ve been working on our respective websites. i’ve been organizing pix and trying to figure out the best way to post them in a blog format since i can’t really do my travel logs on this pc.
we’re back in port for a few hours, marking the halfway point in our cruise. It’s been a wonderful week filled with rest, relaxation, snorkeling, and way too much eating. The coolest thing was an
excursion from calica (which isn’t really a town, just a port in the middle of a quarry – the nearest town is playa del carmen ten miles away). We snorkled underground in a cavern called chaak tun. I think we have some good pix of the underwater stalactites, stalagmites, collumns, and even some fishies. We also met some great people, including a girl traveling by herself from Russia (siberia to be exact). She was very interesting and we spent a lot of time hanging out with her. Of course, pix and full recap will have to wait until we’re home at the end of the week and I have my computer.
we are moments away from heading out to catch our cruise ship. since i am very excited about this cruise and getting away, i’m not even going to rant about how terrible i felt last night when i was trying to fit into my old “formal” wear. i’m not going to tell you how devastating it was to my recent exercise mentality. i won’t even tell you that if i had had a half-gallon of ice cream and a bag of cheetos, they would have been gone. what matters is that i’m going on a cruise and that’s something to be happy about!
since we both had good lower body workouts this morning (104 flights of stairs for me, 10 mile run for him), we took the kayaks out this afternoon to give the upper body a chance too. we played around a bit and had a nice two mile paddle. it was tiring but so nice. now how about some packing?
naturally, since we are getting ready to cruise, i have been watching the tropical activity closely. especially with all of the ‘canes that have been going on in the last month or so. so i was very pleased last week when, all week, there was no clyconic activity in the atlantic or gulf (according to the nhc). then, on friday morning, there was a big yellow blob on the map indicating a low potential for tropical formation within 48 hours. that same afternoon, the blob was orange which means medium potential… yesterday was a busy day of having fun so i didn’t look at it at all. but today, the blob is twice as big and red – high potential for tropical formation. fantastic!
A LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM LOCATED OVER THE NORTHEASTERN CARIBBEAN SEAABOUT 100 MILES SOUTH OF PUERTO RICO IS PRODUCING WIDESPREADCLOUDINESS AND THUNDERSTORMS OVER THE LESSER ANTILLES…ANDADJACENT CARIBBEAN AND ATLANTIC WATERS. THIS SYSTEM IS SHOWINGSIGNS OF INCREASED ORGANIZATION…AND UPPER-LEVEL WINDS AREEXPECTED TO GRADUALLY BECOME MORE FAVORABLE FOR DEVELOPMENT TOOCCUR OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS. A TROPICAL DEPRESSION COULDFORM LATER TODAY AS THE SYSTEM MOVES SLOWLY NORTH-NORTHWESTWARD. AN AIR FORCE RESERVE RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT IS SCHEDULED TOINVESTIGATE THE SYSTEM THIS AFTERNOON. LOCALLY HEAVY RAINFALL ANDSTRONG GUSTY WINDS WILL AFFECT PUERTO RICO…THE VIRGIN ISLANDS…AND THE NORTHERN LEEWARD ISLAND THROUGH MONDAY. INTERESTS IN THESEAREAS SHOULD CLOSELY MONITOR PRODUCTS FROM THEIR LOCAL WEATHERFORECAST OFFICE FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THIS SYSTEM.
somehow, i woke up this morning feeling energized (makes no sense since i didn’t sleep well). i got up, saw that hubby was gone, got dressed, and hit the stairs. i took a watch this time so that i could track my time a bit better. i made it down (22 floors) in four minutes flat. i made it up (24 floors) in 05:13. not too bad. i expected by time to dramatically increase on the second “lap” because i tend to be much more winded and my legs tend to protest more the second time but i made it down (all 24 floors this time) in 04:25 and up (all 24 floors) in 05:40. not too shabby, imo. anyhow, i ended up doing 104 flights (2×24, 3×10, 4×5, 3×2) in sixty-seven minutes. though i still feel like i’m dying, i am clearly getting better at this. go me. of course, when i try it again in two weeks, i’m expecting to be right back at square one again. oh well – that’s a worthwhile price for vacation fun.
fifty-five minutes of weights. and i slightly increased weights (i purposely do low weights, high reps because i want to get fit, not bulky) on almost everything today so it was a rigorous workout. i then did the nineteen flights of stairs up to the top and two back down to our floor. it may just be my imagination since i don’t wear a watch but i really felt like i did the stairs quicker and easier today. my breathing didn’t become severely strained until the 21st floor. seems like that usually happens around the 12th. it really just felt like i maintained a better pace all the way up. and, if i had had the time, i felt as though i could have kept going.
so that completes three weeks of a good workout routine (four days a week, half weights, half cardio). now comes the tricky part: can i maintain that routine while on a cruise ship and can i jump right back into it when we come back in two weeks? this is always my weakness. i start a routine and do really good at it but then we go out of town or something interferes and i just don’t get back into it. i’m going to strive to do a better job this time. i’d be happy if i can force myself to do at least three days a week for the next two weeks. i’d be thrilled if i did more. it would be so easy since there’s a running track around the top deck of the ship and state of the art gym. of course, it’s also much too easy for me to say “i’m on vacation” and shirk it. i’ll try to keep in mind the pain that my cousin is putting herself through for a fantastic cause and maybe, just maybe, that will be enough to guilt me into some vacation activity.
last night hubby and i enjoyed some rock band and wii sports, just the two of us. we really don’t play much when we don’t have company but we really should make it more of a habit. it was a good way to spend a crummy tv evening. of course, hubby still kicks my butt at pretty much anything and everything but as long as we’re having fun together, i won’t complain.
forty minutes on the treadmill followed by nineteen flights of stairs (plus two down). is it naptime yet?
yesterday was so beautiful that we decided to go snorkeling after work. the water was comfortable and clear. it was interesting to see how much the gulf-floor was changed by ike. i knew it had since you can see the difference in the sandbars from up here. not to mention that our beach itself is almost two feet higher than it was the beginning of last week (i can tell this because the first two steps of our walkway are under sand now and the showers at the foot of the walkway that used to be hip-high are now below the knee). but it was amazing how different it is under the water now. it used to gradually get semi-deep from the shore and then shallow again for the sandbar and then deep after that. now, it plunges to deep right off shore and the sandbars are pockets of shallow almost perpendicular to shore. it doesn’t gradually build up to the sandbars either, there’s a three or four foot wall of sand that creates each one. we found some great shells. and there were some huge crabs washed in. it was a very relaxing way to spend an hour and a half. we ended up pulling our heads out of the water just in time to see a magnificent technicolor sunset into it. and since the air is starting to get cool at night, we made a mad dash to the hottub to warm up when we got out.