We celebrated Giovanni’s 10th birthday this past weekend. Four of his friends closed in on our home on Saturday night for a sleepover. It’s amazing what these kids are talking about. They spent hours with nerf guns and plastic swords, cutting each other’s heads off and blowing each other away. They were non-stop action-heroes out to either save or destroy the world. This is stark contrast to what you might find at a pajama party for girls of a similar age.
This week has been busy at work. Through some basic back of the napkin calculations, I find that between regular hours and late-night VPN sessions, I work approximately 65 hours a week. If you add 10 hours for my commute, we get 75 hours. I’m pretty sure that sucks by anyone’s standards.
Work-life balance has been a tough thing. When I have an opportunity to get home early, say by 6:30 or 7:00 (I know!), I am faced with whether to go to Tae Kwon Do or to see my kids. This fall, more often than not, I chose to hang out with my kids. This means I only go to Tae Kwon Do once a week, on Saturday morning. This is not a good exercise program, folks. As a result, I gained a lot of weight in the past 6-9 months and started to feel pretty crappy. I even tipped over 200 pounds for my company’s annual weight-loss competition. Shit.
So, for the new year I made a resolution. First, I would not stress out about going to Tae Kwon Do once a week. Family comes first and in these hard economic times, work comes second. But, and here’s the good news, I decided to design my own at-home workout and I was committed to doing it every single day of 2009 (I wind up doing it 5 times, bleh)
The workout is pretty simple. I do things in this order:
- 200 jumping jacks
- 40 wide push-ups
- 50 crunches
- 200 reps of the jump rope
- 30 narrow push-ups
- 50 more opposite-knee crunches
- 30 right-side crunch thingies and 30 left
- 200 more jump-ropes, backwards
- 10 diamond push-ups
- 25 real sit-ups
- 10 kicks on each leg: snap kick, roundhouse, drop, back, and back-hook (100 in all)
- Then I do my 11 Tae Guk forms
The whole thing takes almost exactly 45 minutes. Things are really looking up. I should have done this a long, long time ago. After doing this workout about 20 times so far in January, I’ve seen marked improvement in all of my technique.
Once it gets warmer, I need to start training for the NYC Triathlon in July. Lots of people are doing it at work and my brother and I are going to start our swim training in 2 weeks.
Stay tuned for more pictures on flickr as I’m way behind in updating my feed. I also picked up a copy of iLife ’09 and will probably be talking a lot about my projects in iMovie. Right now, iPhoto is running through my collection of 27,000 photos and identifying people’s faces ;-)