What’s been happening all these months

This past few months have both been very tough and very rewarding. It took us a while just getting used to little Vincent, but now he is sleeping through the night.  Overall we hit the jack pot with him, he is the calmest baby ever. seriously, all he does is people watch all day. His little head moving from side to side as he sees my wife, the girls and myself go walk around the living room. No crying, no nothing except when he is hungry, then he wails like a banshee.

As far as my workout regiment is concerned: well I hate to say it, but it is non-existant at this time. My work, the baby and out new on-line business really did a number on taking me off my routine. Don’t get me wrong, I still workout but not to the extent that I used to.  As a matter of fact, I’m going to design a whole new workout regiment that only takes half-an-hour to do, which is all I have time for. 

      Well really I have an hour, but once you put the kids on the car, unload the kids and the driving back and forth I only really have around 30 minutes to workout. It’s really not that hard to design something like this, you just have to find exercises that will pull double duty. Essentially what I mean by this is to do less isolation (only work one muscle) type exercises and do more general exercises( millitary press as an example) that will exercise multiple muscles at once.

On another front, our online book selling business has really flourished this past few months.  We’ve learned a lot on how to best manage it and are doing well enough to keep Reb as a stay-at-home mom. Reb staying home is very important to us because we both had moms that stayed at home with us, and we wanted to do the same things for our kids. On another thing, we had set a goal on making an extra $6,000 on top of our normal earnings by next May. Well, thanks to this business, we will probably meet that goal and then some. Now if we can just learn to budget and save money.  Oh well, gotta go. 

updates

Well its been a tough week and half or so. Reb’s labor went well and little Vince was born on May 25th at 3:24 PM. He is a beautiful and perfectly normal baby boy.
While the labor process was relatively easy, Reb’s recuperation is going to take a while. The doctor said that she is going to be out of commission for at least six weeks.
The only good thing is that we found a source of income on the week leading to her labor. That is selling used books on line. It all started three weeks ago when Reb went garage sale shopping with my parents. At a particular yard sale there were two fantasy books(my favorite genre) so Reb called me to see if I wanted them. I wasn’t to exited about this particular author, but Reb reminded me that we could always turn them in at our local hastings for store credit if it turns out I didn’t want them, and at fifty cents a piece we wouldn’t be out much money anyway.
Well, as it turned out I had already read these particular books so of to hastings we went. The bookstore gave us a total of $5.50 store credit, and a great idea to make money. The following weekend we all got up early to go to some garage sales. We spent $4.50 on nine books and got $28 bucks on store credit. Thats when we decided to really make a go at it as a business.
Reb claims that this was her idea, which overall I have to admit is true, But selling the books online was mine. We got an account with half.com and quickly loaded the two books that hastings didn’t want along with a couple dozen of my own collection. This was on the 20th of May. that same week we sold ten books for about fifty dollars. I then went to my chuch’s thrift shop and hit the mother load when I discovered that they were selling books at 8 for a dollar. So far I’ve bought about 150 books from them and managed to sell nine for 60 bucks in revenue. This past Saturday I found 15 college textbooks that I will be able to sell to buyusedtextooks.com for 122 dollars.
In all I think we’ve made a little over 200 this past week selling used books. Not a huge amount, but enough to really see the potential of this endevour.
The problems with all this is that this business can be very time consuming. I was on vacation this whole week, but I spent probaly around 40-50 hours setting this whole new business up. Our problems were keeping track of our inventory, finding room to put all this books in and doing all the data entry. A lot of the time we spent was just trial and error seeing what method worked. We ended up buying under the bed storage containers and making a list stating which book goes where. It’s a pretty good method, but by the time we figured things out we already had around three hundred+ books scattered all over our bedroom.
I still foresee a fair amount of problems with this business, mainly the storage since I calculate that we need to be around 5000 books to consistently make around 2-300 a week, which is our goal. The problems wil be: acquiring the books, storage(we probably have room for only a thousand books in our room) and shipping. Were pretty exited about though, at the very least it will help us meet our goal of 6000 extra by next May.

Reb’s in labor right now

We got here at the hospital at five AM. The nurses hooked Reb up to all kind of monitor machines. Really at this time it’s all waiting game until we get down to business. Or rather Reb get’s down to business and I break out the pom poms and cheer her on like a mad man.
I’m writing this on my PDA which has internet access. We can’t afford it really, and if ever finds out that I still have internet access she is going to get pissed since we took satellite TV away. She thinks I’m currently texting my brother. he he.

Oh well gotta go, wish us luck whoever is reading this.

My pulled Calf Muscle (21 days later)

Well things are pretty much back to normal, yet I can’t say that I’m 100% healed.  There is still some tightness in my calf, but in general that’s all it is.   A general feeling that let’s me know that I shouldn’t do anything to strenuous just yet.  As such I’ve only tried running once so far and that for only around a hundred feet or so.  Over all that small run felt pretty normal, but the tightness was still there, and more than likely it will be there for another week or so.

With this said, On Sunday I plan on doing a fast walk/slow run in my local public park.  At that time it will have been exactly 27 days since I pulled the calf, enough time to let it heal and time to start pushing it little bit. Hopefully with any luck I won’t ruin my calf all over again.

Piece of advice: if you want to do cardio exercises on a pulled calf muscle then don’t hesitate to use the elliptical machine.  Since your foot never leaves the pad, pedal, whatever you call it you hardly use your calve muscles at all.   On day 4 I was able to use the elliptical, albeit slowly,  even-thoughI was still walking crooked.  By day 7 I was able to go full speed on the elliptical even-though the calve still hurt a little.  If you don’t have access to an elliptical machine then I don’t know what to tell you since this was the only cardivascular exercises that I did for the first ten days.

The baby’s coming, the baby’s coming!

Well kind of!  Not till Friday anyway. Again I didn’t workout today since I took Reb to the doctor for which hopefully may be her final OBGYN appointment before the baby is born.  I’ll make it up on Saturday which lately seems to be a regular thing. As matter of fact, I doubt that I will workout on Friday since we have to be at the hospital at 5:00 AM and stay there pretty much until late that same night.  So chances are that I’ll do weight training on Saturday and cardio on Sunday.  As a matter of fact I’ll probably just walk/run at the public park since my gym doesn’t open until 11:00 AM Sunday mornings.

That’s it for right now.  I’m going to do another post regarding my pulled calf muscle.

Fitness Update (5/21/07)

It’s been a while but I’ve had a heck of a time just getting in front of the computer, nevermind updating.  

Anyways, I went back to 245 lbs with 34% body fat.  The body fat is kind of pissing me off, and I’m beginning to think that the scale I’m using is off.  On April 28th I measured in at waist 43 inches, stomach 49 inches and chest 53 inches all while measuring in at 33.6% body fat.  Last night I measured myself and got the following: Waist 42 inches, Stomach 48 inches, Chest 52 inches. Essentially I lost an inch all the way around when compared to April 28th which is the last time I measured myself.  Add all this to the fact that I am stronger than I was a month ago, my workout log book confirms it, and I think that this scale is off. 

The truth of the matter is that I feel somewhat slimmer. My pants don’t fit me the same way anymore,  I notice a certain amount of muscle definition everytime I look myself in the mirror so I refuse to believe that I have more fat than back in April 28th.  It just doesn’t seem possible to me so I will probably switch to fat calipers as soon as I can afford them.  I think I’ve seen them on sale for around fifteen bucks, but we are on a ‘every penny counts’ type situation so it’s just going to have to wait.

 Big problem with me lately is that my time management.  Really the problem is that I’m working during the day.  When I work at night, I can usually do things that I can’t do during the day such as work on this blog, work on my budget, you know things that you can’t do while the boss is around. 

As such I’m seriously thinking on switching to the workout I mentioned here.  This is a very quick workout that will exercise the entire body in less than 20 minutes.  This way I will have thirty minutes for cardio and ten minutes for stretching and water breaks.    It’s not perfect and as a matter of fact I still think that my workout routine mentioned here is better, but nonetheless it will certainly allow me to have decent workouts in an hour or less.   Which is what I need, at least until I can go back to my regular routine.

Well almost worked out today. This story highlights one of our bigger problems. We are a one car family.  Actually a one car and half a truck family.  My truck, a 1990 chevy pick up is currently sitting in my garage without a motor, but that’s a post for another day.

Our problem started with a small dilemma. Reb had a doctor’s appointment today at 4:00 PM which is around the same time that I wanted to do my workout.  So we considered what to do. Reb’s notion was to drop me off with the girls at the gym and then go to the doctor. However I protested because the last couple of times a visit to the doctor has taken over two and a half hours.  I wasn’t in the mood to just twiddle my thumbs for a good hour or so before Reb would finally come to pick me up.  So instead I went to drop Reb off at the doctor and went straight to the gym.  Supremely comfortable with the notion that I had over two hours to burn, I decided to take my time.  First I played with my mp3 player trying to find just the right song to put me in the mood. Then I toyed with the weight machines to warm up a little before finally heading to the elliptical machine.  Anyway on my way to the elliptical the phone rang, it was 4:38 PM and Reb was done with the doctor. ‘Crap!’ I thought as I designated Saturday as my make up day.

After picking Reb up I got the news.  The baby looks perfectly normal and it turns out that Reb has 5 cm of dilation and The doctor said that if she could get to 8 cm(presumably by next Tuesday’s appointment) then labor would be induced regardless if her water is broken or not.  The doctor also told Reb that walking will help increase the dilation.  Exited, Reb insisted that we go to a local park with a walking trail, which is exactly what we did. 

Reb amazed me, for a woman thirty seven and a half weeks pregnant she managed to waddle along the walking trail at three miles an hour.  Pretty good if you ask me.