3days!

I did it! 3 days in a row!

Dang I'm tired... really short blog!

I had so much I thought about writing today, but now that I'm back from my run, I don't know what to write about!!

Today Emma got another round of shots. Apparently it was really bad and she didn't stop crying for a long time! Poor baby!!

This is how we have a high protein + veggie lunch at 7-11, it has spinach and bacon, an egg,, some veggies, shrimp, cheese, beef and squid -- 6 different proteins! Awesome!

almost... like a grenade

I almost didn't post or exercise today.. but I broke under 103kg today so I did it anyway! Go me!! ... so tiring! Today I emptied my tank on the 20 min HIIT -- number 5 and 6 were especially painful. BPM was 187 on my max... that's a beating heart! My usual resting HR is 50-60 and when I just wake up, around 40 something ... so pretty fast!

Anything exciting to report about? Well, we're happy that North Korea shot off their rocket finally... maybe they'll stop now and never shoot another one again! I think the biggest concern with their damned rockets is not if they are shooting at someone or not, but if it will actually launch and fly like they want it... I'm afraid it might fall out of the sky and crush my house! Their last few tries have been almost comically bad!

I have pictures by the way... here are some shots of Emma at the photo studio:

Skip Day

*gasp*

I missed a day... both blogging and exercising. But it was for a good cause!
More cute pictures of Emma!!

Oooooo video! This is her 100th day photo, usually celebrated as her first day to eat.

Yesterday I did my upper-body routine, as usual... it's brutal! I think I'm getting used to it though.  But the sleep deprivation is taking its toll sometimes I'm just flat out exhausted during the day... 4am to 10:30 pm with Emma waking up randomly  during the night... it's a little tough to get enough sleep.

well... almost time for bed! See you space cowboys!

Day 5 - End of Week 1 and Pomegranates

I'll have to add some pictures to this, but for now we will be picture free!
So, this week has just ended, 2 more weeks of Bizzy and I'll be done! -- Not sure if I'll lose the next 3kg I want or not, but I'll definitely get in some better shape. Leg day, I'm lucky to walk home from the park after all of leg exercises! Yesterday, we went to COSTCO so I broke the diet a little with some cheesecake samples. I made up for it with more veggies and protein today! Just because it's now rice/refined carbs, doesn't mean it has to be boring. Tonight I'm stuffing some mushrooms with some steamed veggies for dinner.

We got 6 king sized pomegranates from COSTCO and had one yesterday night. They are SUPER huge, and so tasty. It's been so long since I've had one, Rieko and I ate it like popcorn!

Anyone watching Green Arrow? I'm a little disappointed they're using the Huntress with him, She's part of the Batman family! I mean, her "origins" are similar, but without Batman and Bruce Wayne it's just weird !!!
Looking forward to this weekend with no exercise! Wednesday night's new person party really tired me out!
Earthquake!!!! we're okay though...
See you space cowboys!

Day 4

Day 4! I'm sleepy today -- but maybe that's due to the new employees welcome party last night that kept me out until 11:30! After showering and brushing my teeth I was in bed by midnight, just in time for Emma to wake up.. she hasn't been able to sleep much at night lately :( Then woke up at 4:30 to start work! YaY! T.T

Today is my first day off from the Bizzy routine. I'm kinda happy :) It's such a challenging work out routine, but the exercises are all body-weight so it's as hard as I make it..

Today is another busy day personally... going here, there everywhere!

Gotta save some energy for tomorrow's workout! last one of the first week! 8 more to go after that! Right now I'm holding at 103kg... doing pretty good so far, just 3 more kg!

Day 3

"Greetings Earthlings, we are now taking over your radio"

--- 5 points for that reference...
Anyway... Here we are, Day 3, of za Bizzy... no delirium, no fatigue, just sore muscles and a lighter me... This morning I was 102.6 and 22.7% body fat... that's 3.4 kg from Monday morning (granted I had GORGED on risotto and ice-cream Sunday night) The weight loss should slow from here.

I'm feeling good so far, and Rieko has been very helpful, not teasing me by making pasta dishes or buying Tim Tams from the store. I'm not much into carbs, but dessert ... mmm mmmm mmm... I think my diet has been good so far, here's my breakfast: 2 eggs scrambled with zucchini and a chicken sausage. Last night's dinner was a great cold shabu-shabu salad with avocado, mizuna and celery (I added a little extra tuna to mine while Rieko ate some giant shu-mai) -- lunch was just a shredded pork and veggie sautee... I've been meaning to eat some fruit, but I've just been so full I don't think about it.

This diet also has me taking 2 protein shakes a day at snack time. For the first time ever, I ordered some protein from Body Building.com and it is SO good... I got chocolate peanut butter, I mix it with some hot water and it's like a hot-chocolate! Tomorrow is finally a rest day! I hope I can make it through today's routine... it's just super brutal!

So... that was boring right? How about I post some photos from Thanksgiving... please avert your eyes if my ginormous stomach makes an appearance.

Bizzy Day 2 -- Biohazard Cafe

Red and Green Herb mix! Full health restored!

Who's afraid of the Tyrant?

We got guns ... Emma is scary!

Saying good bye to her gun

No wonder the virus spread so easily!  They just leave it on the counter tops.

Herb potions! .. they don't stop the outbreak though.

Ok... I went to Biohazard cafe in Shibuya, it was really fun! They have a really neat themed menu, and they bring your meat to your table like a Brazilian BBQ.

So, I'm on Bizzy day 2. Man I'm sore! I've done the exercise before, but still... it's brutal! Today I do it again, and tomorrow I do it one more time... then I get my first day off! YaY! Too bad Wednesday night is a manager meeting thing.

Here's my goal: I started Monday morning at 106kg... *gasp* I want to be under 100kg by the end of this... I was kinda bloated yesterday so I'm already down to 104kg :) 1.xx kg per week shouldn't be very hard :)

see you space cowboys!

Day 1

Up at 4:00am because this little angel woke up! I went back to sleep for a little bit, then got up at 4:30. I went to bed around 10 last night only to be woken up by Rieko's friend's great timing on line -- just as I was drifting off, she got two quick messages!  It's not a big deal, just that it was perfect timing, a few seconds earlier or later and it wouldn't have been so jarring -- it just seemed to happen right when I was on descent into dreamland... it's like airplanes; they can take a lot of turbulence during flight, but if you shake them up on the final descent it's game over! -- I'll get back to that later.

It's 5:30 now, I've taken my morning supplements and multi-vitamins, filled up my little tupperware container with my protein and packed up my supplements I'll need while at work -- it's 8 pills! Breakfast was just a couple eggs, bell pepper and dessert of yogurt with a little scoop of protein to taste the flavor -- it's my first taste and I liked it. Monday mornings are tough since I have to get up and get moving to get out the door by 6am -- I'm feeling super wired, I don't know if it's the supplement or that I'm excited to start the diet or what... but I hope I keep feeling this good! I'll try to keep posting everyday with how I feel on it.

Going back to talking about sleep... Does anyone else have audio hallucinations before sleeping? It's like the sound part of my brain goes into a dream before the rest of my body... I hear random things before I sleep. Not noises going on in the room, but just suddenly I'll hear a song I know, or some dialogue from a movie I've heard or just some random noises -- this usually happens in that limbic state between awake and sleep.. it's really weird.

Well let me know space cowboys! Be seeing you!

The Bizzy!

Well.. Thanksgiving is over and Crystal and LeeAnn are back in Texas.. Starting tomorrow I begin the 21 day Bizzy Diet... Actually it's only 19 days since the last 2 days are rest days.. I have a slew of supplements to take, and I'm essentially cutting out all processed/refined carbohydrates for this diet! I'll be operating on leafy green veggies and fruits with lean meats. I'll work out 4 days a week, for a total of 12 times.. Let's see how much I can change my body during this time! Really I'm trying to lose fat, so this should work very nicely... then I have to get through Christmas with my parents without going up a pants size... if that works out maybe I can finally get back under 100kg, or 20% body fat, whichever comes first! I want to have a surprising check-up next spring :)

(No more Turkey Risotto!)

Anyway, going to bed early so I can get rest up for this challenge!

See you space cowboys and cowgirls!

Rockstar Emma

Emma Grace -- ROCKSTAR!!

Happy Birthday LeeAnn.

Movember

Happy Movember!! Can you see that shadow under my nose? Right now it's a raging hairy monster!!
Here look:

Look at that blurry monster! Today is the tenth day of Movember! you gotta grow out your stache so you can be an ambassador of men's health awareness!! In November, growing a 'stache is very similar to the pink ribbons for women's health awareness!

Anyway, see you guys! GROW THE STACHE cowboys!

Bizzy

So... I just pretty much achieved my bench press goal, so for the end of the year I'm starting this "Bizzy" 21 day work out and diet plan with supplements! Something I've never done before... let's hope it works :) I'll start the first week of December so I will finish before Christmas... it's a lot of work, but hopefully I'll get some good results! Here's what the plan is like: 20 minutes of 1min rep HIIT slow/fast followed by a superset of circuit weight training x 2, with 5 minutes jog + 5 minutes run and 2 more circuits! I did legs today and it's pretty awesome! By awesome I mean... painful!

It's almost Thanksgiving so it's time to start planning dinner! I haven't even bought the turkey yet, but we'll take care of that on Thor's Day. We'll just do a simple dinner... stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes, succotash...  and pie!

See you space cowboys!

Top Chef!

Today Top Chef is back! I love cooking shows so much, I suffer through buffering on hulu for some Rachel Ray TV shows!! Anyway.. with no relation to Top Chef, I made Tequila Spanish Mussels and Clams!!  I think it's spanish.. only because I put tomatoes in it and it looks like a paella without the saffron rice!

Anyway, that brings me to my new favorite kitchen tool... and this tool has been around forever! This tool has given me the nickname of "Sauce Master" -- the mortar and pestle:

Here's my favorite recipe for salad dressing: 3 cloves of garlic, 3 pinches of salt, a few pepper berries, a dash of cumin seeds and a pinch of habanero. Mash it up nicely then pour in a tablespoon of vinegar and 1/4 cup of olive oil. pour this over your salad and mix well!

---
Now that today's cooking is out of the way.. let's talk about my mood. I've been really out of energy lately.. and I'm pretty sure why. I've been spending a lot of time in front of the pc and it's kinda wearing me out I think... I've been at a real energy loss, I've been having to push it sometimes to give Emma Grace the energy she deserves.

I had a good day today getting away from the computer and shopping so I can see that that is causing some trouble. I'm losing weight lately so hopefully that will help too!

Finally here is me and my angel!!

See you space cowboys!

Meat

It's been a while since I've posted. I hope everyone had a great Halloween. We sure did!

So..well, Emma is a little small for trick or treating, but we gave out some candy to neighborhood kids and apparently in Japan, it is starting to grow in popularity but the tradition seems to be that you have to give candy when you get candy... it's very interesting!
So.. not really since it was halloween, but it's kinda grotesque, I made oxtail soup! It was really really really good!!

Making chili tonight :) it's a meaty week.

Linux

Here we are having the most amazing ramen at our favorite ramen place Oozakura! Emma's happy even though she can't have ramen.That's her Halloween outfit she has on too. She loves her Mummy! I've been just flat out exhausted this week and not gotten up the energy to blog in a while, but today I'm feeling a little better.


Today's post is going to be a quick tech blog comparing Windows and Linux. I've been playing with Windows 8 for the past couple of months, and while I hated being on Windows, it did work, though not well. I've now switched back to Linux Mint 13 with the cinnamon interface and I have to say, it's nice. So many things I missed out on!!
Let's start with the interface -- the "Metro" interface is a nightmare to use on a desktop. It will work great on tablets, but on a desktop, I don't want to have to hunt down and find the icon I want in pages after pages of tiles:

It looks nice and colorful, but... a little difficult to use. Also I get confused between Windows programs and apps from the Windows app store.. they behave differently, programs open in a window and apps go full screen. The built in PDF reader was especially bad. Let's see what mint looks like:

Looks familiar right? I thought so.
Let's continue.. What do I have out of the box? Full office support, I have Thunderbird (my favorite email), Firefox, VLC media player, Banshee music player (I prefer rhythmbox) and pidgin IM. What does Windows have? All of their windows apps for  these which require you to have a app store account etc etc... and no Office, that's a separate purchase. I mentioned PDF reader above, Mint comes with documentviewer which reads not just PDF but almost every text file I've met.

My notes:
My system is a beast, I have 32gb ram and a good 2.5GB of video cards. On Windows, it wants to set aside 32gb on my hard disk for paging but the hard disk only has 120gb total space!! On Linux, obviously, you can set your own space fairly easily, and it doesn't have to be on the same disk.

I have 3 monitors, and I found that if I was streaming netflix or xbmc on the TV and did something fullscreen on another one, on windows the playback would stop whereas on Linux it continues without a care in the world.

I have a DLNA media server in my living room which I use to stream to my other devices, in Linux, not only can I browse it via DLNA (Windows could do it too) but I can actually mount it like a local drive and load the files into a playlist. (Windows couldn't do that)

Finally, I was also experimenting with Office 365 consumer preview. It was actually nice, and I preferred it to Libre office (it has more "polish") but the ribbon drives me crazy!!

So, in summary, use Linux! It's free, as in beer! And it works really well... at least for me. So many things just .. work, or work better.

See you space cowboys!

Porkchops!

Last night after eating these decently sized succulent pork chops and saw-mill gravy, I weighed 103.3 kg.. This morning I weigh 101.9... where did the 1.4 kg go? I didn't have any b.m. and just guessing, but I think my liquid input was even with liquid output... It's a mystery!

Diet Don'ts

Cake and Sweets all you can eat for 980 yen... seriously? I puked after lunch.. I started to get "high" feeling and my stomach started to hurt and I started craving salty food. Rieko's stomach hurt for a few days. I'm still a whopping 102 kilo! :( Today I just did a quick jog before it started raining, 2k in 10 min... this tubby can still move when he tries!! I'm also getting stronger on my benchpress, last week I dropped a dumbbell on my chest and then a few days later I wasn't able to finish a set, but yesterday I did 3x5 and 1x8 so the day after tomorrow I should be up to 5x5 ... I hope.. so maybe 1 or 2 more weeks and I'll clear the 100kg mark! I'm also starting to incorporate burn-out days and jogging days, so maybe if a miracle happens I'll start trimming down as I finish my goal of clearing the 100kg mark!! So, this year, I'll have done 2 exercise goals, run a marathon and bench my body-weight and/or clear 100kg.

Anyway, I hope y'all are better at resisting temptation than I am!

See you space cowboys.

Drive

There are so many things to post about .. I don't know where to begin.

Why don't I just do something nice and boring about something that came to me today during the course of a meeting.

TPTB at my company were discussing our mid-year interviews and asking if the managers underlings have drive. Not if they are doing their jobs well, not if they need to learn anything or need training or if there are any parts in the chain of command which are breaking down. No, they ask, are they still motivated? Are they looking to the future? Of course they are! They've only been working here for a year, they still have the fresh out of college new degree smell! What worker with half a brain who wants to keep their job would tell their boss they don't have any motivation or any desire to work more? Also, what manager puts so much emphasis on this aspect to ignore any other facets. For me, I'd ask, are they learning? Can they learn? Do they apply themselves to the tasks at hand and learn from them?  It's like Yoda "There is no try, only do" -- I wouldn't want someone to say "Boy, look at Pike, granted he can't do anything, but boy is he motivated!" Yes, having drive, and being motivated is important, but for the most part, you also need to do something with it!!


So.. after such a boring wall of text, let's look at a picture!!

Maybe tomorrow I'll show you what not to do when you want to lose weight!

10 years

10 years ago today I met my wife! Amazing how quickly time flies! I've now known her for 1/3rd of my life! So for dinner today I made a 1 pot meal I saw on 30-min with Rachael Ray -- something called a cassale or something like that.. basically a meat soup with a salad on the side. It was pretty good! We got some sparkling wine by "Carl Jung" that's a de-alcoholized sparkling wine .. not sparkling grape juice... whatever the difference is.

This week.. Emma is just not taking a bath ... she just suddenly cries! Dunno why, but she's just not liking the bath! I wash her with the shower head and soap her and rinse and then .. suddenly it's cry time. I don't even get her in the bath sometimes before she starts crying! I hope she gets over it soon! She used to love the bath.

Manly Quiche

*GASP!* I almost forgot to post today!!

No baby photos... she's been bad! Well she hasn't, but she was a cry baby in the bath tonight. It was a rough day! I mean.. how would you like it if you got bundled up, put in a backpack, carried across town to be forced to drink a vaccine and get two shots and then get dragged back to be thrown into a tub of hot water? Yeah.. you wouldn't be so happy either! Actually she was pretty good when I came home and she cried before getting in the bath not when she got in the water.

So tired today!!  I didn't work out like I thought I would since I had to go to the office today.

Anyway.. about the quiche! They are manly mini quiches... I just chopped up some veggies and a jalapeno and grilled some sausage and mixed it into the egg, poured it into the little silicon cupcake wrappers and baked it at 200 for 20 min. So tasty!! I wanna do some with bacon wrapped around it.

Ok ok... here's some fan service!

Cicadian Rhythms

Lately, I've been feeling like my clock hasn't been right. I've been feeling sleepy in the afternoon and getting an energy boost around 11 or 11:30 pm... which isn't so great since I try to get up around 4:30. So I've been skipping on blogging. Sorry!! I'll try to get back in a good rhythm and not be so sporadic with my posts.

Tonight taking a bath with Emma, I told her my Cinderella story and she cried when I got to the "punch line" ... I know it was purely coincidental but she had good timing.  Here goes:

Once Upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there was a beautiful young lady who lived with her step-mother and three older step sisters (her father passed away under suspicious causes but in this age, they had no forensic science). She must have been a red-head because her step-sisters and step-mother made her do all the household chores and forced her to sleep in a small room just big enough to have a fireplace (she was rather aptly named Cinderella) One day, the king decided to have a ball and invite all of the eligible women in the kingdom to attend so he could find a woman for his hopeless bachelor son to marry in order to continue his lineage. The step-sisters and even the step-mother (having spent all of her late husband's money)  were very excited and kept Cinderella busy all day doing their hair and make-up and squeezing them into their beautiful expensive dresses (this is where all the money went) and left for the ball in hopes of finding a rich husband. When they had all left, Cinderella sat down at the kitchen table and began to eat the leftover soup when suddenly the room was filled with sparkling lights which coalesced into a fairy. "Cinderella, I am your fairy godmother and I am here to give you a beautiful gown and carriage so you can go to the ball," she said. "Kyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," Cinderella screamed and threw a shoe at the fairy. "Leave me alone! I just want one night of peace!" she said, because she was extremely tired and didn't want to go to the ball in the first place. The prince, who just so happened to be skipping the ball (they're tiresome events with lots of brown nosing and waltzing in stuffy suits and tight gowns) heard her scream and rushed to her house to see what happened. Once their eyes met, it was love at first sight and they lived happily ever after! -- Afterword: After Cinderella moved away to the prince's castle, her step-sisters and step-mother had to take up jobs as housekeepers since they didn't find any husbands at the ball and they spent all their money on dresses to attend. 

See you space cowboys.