Weekend Roundup

Here's a brief summary of my weekend for those who are interested...I'm going to post about my obsession with the Wii Fit a bit later :)

• Succeeded at returning a dress to Banana Republic without buying anything else. Yay for willpower (and Blake whining like a 5 year old to go home).
• Although I've heard from several people that Costco is a good source for bike buying, the one nearest to us had a horrible selection. They had one woman bike, one man bike, and a child's bike. Not sufficient. I'm going to have to go elsewhere before my bike dreams can come true. Sad.
• Got that Kettlebell at Target on Friday afternoon...and good lord. I wound up with the 10 pound version (I'm a sissy...but I tried a few things with the 15 pounder and I think I need some practice before I graduate to that). The circuit workout in Fitness says to do it 4-5 times...I was able to do it twice without feeling like I would die. It was awesome. I was a sweaty mess and sore in a lot of good places for two days after. I'm going to try to get myself up to 5 times through within a few weeks...but this workout is a keeper. AND the kettlebell came with a DVD workout I haven't even tried yet.
• I got to spend Sunday with my dad who rented a house on the lake for the week. We did lots of boating activities and had a mini-birthday party for me. It was really fun. I wish he lived closer so I could see him more than a few times a year.

Really, the complete highlight of my weekend was the black market Wii Fit that Blake procured...you can read about that later. Happy Monday!

God, I love my boyfriend

Today when Blake got home from work, he insisted on giving me my birthday gifts. I won't be home on my actual birthday, and he didn't know how he was going to hide them from me in the house all weekend. And I love presents. So I allowed it.

I received the Dance Dance Revolution game that I made him buy in front of me, the KitchenAid food processor that I have been wanting, and...a Wii Fit.

I have been looking for a Wii Fit for a month and had no luck finding it anywhere. Blake called around and tried everything to find it and eventually wound up paying more than the retail price for it because he knew how much I wanted it. I made him promise that he paid less than $200 (retail price is $90) so I wouldn't feel bad. But I was impressed.

We played it for about an hour and it is pretty awesome. I'm excited! I haven't even touched the other presents yet. What a fabulous pre-birthday! :)

Weekend Plans

I bet you all can tell how much I'm procrastinating at work today based on the fact that I have posted three times and it's only 4:00. Anyway, here are my weekend plans.

After work today, instead of going to the gym, I'm going to go for a walk. I may go down to Best Buy and get Blake a little Fathers' Day gift from the cats. I may also go to target and get myself a 15 pound kettlebell. I saw an awesome looking workout using it in one of my many fitness related mags this month, and I want to try it. But I don't know if I'd like walking home a mile and a half with a 15 pound weight...so maybe I'll just go to Dick's tomorrow. Later, Blake has DVR'ed The Jerk with Steve Martin and I think we'll watch it. He got mad at me last night for playing Wii for 3 hours, so I should probably be more social tonight.

I have a lot of plans for tomorrow. Most are shopping related. Besides the weekly farmers' market and grocery store trip, I'm going to head to Costco to check out bikes and also to the mall to return a dress I ordered from Banana Republic online and hate in person. While there, I need to replenish some makeup at Sephora, potentially make the trip to Dick's mentioned above, and try to avoid Aldo at all costs. If I have some extra time, I'll probably go to the gym or lift at home. Maybe do a Yoga DVD. Or play Wii. I should at least force myself to play Wii Boxing, since it's a decent workout.

Sunday my Dad is in town! He and my stepmom and one of my stepbrothers and a family that they're friends with have rented a house on Lake Norman for the week. So we're going to head up there for Fathers' Day. Depending on Blake's ability to get his boat out of the marina after the incident there on Monday, we may take the boat there for some skiing. It should be good times. Hopefully I'll get my lazy butt to the gym before hand. Weekends are hard sometimes. But next week, Blake will finally give me my Dance Dance Revolution, and I will burn hundreds of calories in my own den. Yay!

I have to be at the office at 6am Monday for a 4 hour drive to West Virginia. Boo. At least I'm not driving. And we're stopping at Bojangles on the way (oh, how I love you, bacon egg and cheese biscuit with a side of bo'-rounds and OJ).

Have an excellent weekend all!

Wii

Last night, because I had procured a wireless network from work (that I'll need for traveling next week), I set it up in my house and downloaded some games for Wii.

You can get several Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 games. Blake and I already have a Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Genesis console in our house (don't judge us, only the Nintendo is actually set up), but we don't have all of the awesome games that we'd like. So last night, I downloaded Dr. Mario, Mario 1, Bubble Bobble, and Kirby's Adventure. I've only played Dr. Mario and Bubble Bobble so far...but they are awesome.

Blake wants Mario Kart from Super Nintendo, but we need to get different controllers for that, which is kind of annoying. But this weekend is Fathers Day, and the cats haven't gotten him anything yet, so I may head to Best Buy later and get two controllers and download the game for him. At least until we're able to get Mario Kart for Wii. It is backordered EVERYWHERE right now.

Yay!

Money money money money! (money!)

I just paid off my student loan in full. Yay! I've been accelerating the payments big time since I started working (like making payments between 2 and 4 times what I'm required to each month), and now that I've been working for 3 years, and my savings account balance well exceeded the balance in my loan, I got rid of that bitch.

Now I can take the HUNDREDS of dollars a month I was paying those people and add it to my monthly savings contribution. At least for a while, because my savings account is a bit low due to this little payoff situation. My goal is, in addition to the 401K money coming out of my paychecks, put at least $500 from each paycheck in my savings account. This would approximate how much I already put in, plus the monthly amount I had been putting toward the loan. And I get my annual raise next month (glorious day), so I'd like to up that to $600-$650, depending on the amount of said raise.

I complain about my job a lot, but as I've always said, I am thankful that I have the skills to have a job that pays me really well. Sometimes I think I'd be perfectly happy living off of a dog walker's salary, but most of those times I'm delirious and angry at how shitty my actual job is.

I should have the approximately $10k I've budgeted to spend a month in Italy next year in no time. And I'm working on contributing to my high-interest "condo fund," which is me attempting to even out the investment Blake and I have in our house. Obviously, when we bought it, I had approximately $2,500 (borrowed from my dad) and he had what is a completely ridiculous amount of cash for a 23 year old that he put toward the down payment. So technically, his ownership percentage in our house is higher than mine (yes, we have a legal agreement. Yes, we are cautious, because we are accountants). But within 2-3 years, which is about the time we'll probably look at moving, I should have evened us out completely.

Some days I'm really good at money. Please God, don't smite me by making my car die right now. I do NOT have acceptable funds to buy a new car at this very moment (although that is on my radar...because my car could cease to run at any time really. She turns 10 in October!) Though honestly, I might be able to get by on just a bicycle if I could learn to drive stick shift...right now I can't drive Blake's car because of my inability to master the manual transmission. (Things that aren't helping me learn: feeling completely nervous that I'm going to tear the gears out of the car that Blake treats like a child every time I get behind the wheel. Also, the fact that I'm a pretty terrible driver in general.)

This post is bordering on rambling incoherence right now, so I'm gong to end it with this. I noticed yesterday that my Marriott points balance is teetering on 300,000. It will cost me between 250,000 and 300,000 for my Italy trip (this will cover 12 nights at ridiculously nice hotels. There are no other Marriotts over there that interest me, so for the other half of the trip I'm going to have to actually pay for rooms. Boo.) I've basically earned 150,000 points in the last 6 months (since I got their credit card...and since I travel constantly and stay only at Marriotts). I don't plan to go to Italy until October 2009-ish. By then I should have probably another 300,000 points. What should I use them on?

Things that are a bad idea:

1) White, dry clean only capri pants and a salad with balsamic vinegarette dressing. Damn it.

2) Tasty Friendship bread. One of the partners made some and brought it in today, and as I have a weakness for baked goods, I ate a very delicious slice for a snack. And then she came over, told me she had some extra starter and asked me if I wanted it. Of course I do. Sometimes it's good to be known around the office as an avid baker, and sometimes it's bad...because if I have two loaves of this bread in my house every 10 days, there is going to be trouble. Good thing tailgate season is coming up...those boys will eat the crap out of this stuff.

3) Going to the mall this weekend. I've successfully stayed away for about a month, but after I received a shipment from Bananarepublic.com yesterday I didn't like one of the items I ordered, so I have to make a return. And then buy more stuff probably.

4) Wasting time at work searching online for a Wii Fit to buy at the retail price. Spoiler Alert: it's not going to happen anytime soon. Maybe 6 months from now.

5) Party boats. This one, which is owned by the same company as the one we've taken our office summer outing on for the past two years, exploded while fueling up at the marina we keep Blake's boat at on Monday. One of the kids that works at the marina was killed. It is truly awful. The water is littered with boat debris and oil. We definitely recognize the kid as someone who has worked there for a while. Needless to say, we probably won't be doing much boating this weekend. Sad. Blake's boat was in dry storage at the time, so it's fine...but apparently a large portion of the dock was destroyed. Not good.

Things that are BS

Normally, I enjoy reading Self magazine, and I think it's a pretty reliable source of health and fitness information. However, a few months ago, I stumbled upon an article called "Find Your Happy Weight!" and it made me raging mad. And then I stumbled upon it on their website today (here) and it reminded me how angry it made me. And here's why.

According to the article, a large percentage of women who are trying to lose weight have an unreasonably low goal weight. No surprises there. So they provide this calculator that you plug your stats into and it tells you what a reasonable weight would be for you. It takes into account how much you exercise, and even if you allow yourself a treat 'every so often,' so in theory, it would gauge your general lifestyle and tell you an estimate of what your goal weight should be.

According to this calculator, my goal weight is 117 pounds.

I'm a pretty reasonable person when it comes to my weight. I'm 100% happy with what I weigh right now (same as when I graduated college, go me), although I wouldn't mind losing 5-10 pounds. When I say I 'wouldn't mind losing' I literally mean just that - I'm not going to drastically change my diet, which I think is already pretty healthy, or increase my workouts, which I already do 5-6 times a week, to make that happen, but if it happens, then great. I think any of you who has known me for a solid amount of time knows that I have what might be considered a high to borderline too high self esteem, and I am truly not bothered about the way that I look in a bikini. I could look better, but I don't really care to make any more changes to my lifestyle to do so.

And here's the problem: I haven't weighed 117 pounds since my junior year of HIGH SCHOOL. I had the metabolism of a marathon runner at that time, and I was in dance class 4 nights a week. I in fact have a video from the school musical that year (Guys & Dolls) in which I essentially played a stripper. I was wearing probably what was the least amount of clothing passable for a high school production. And I looked like a skeleton with gigantic boobs. I looked ridiculous. If my boobs weren't so big (thanks, genetics) I would have looked like I was about 12. And aside from dance, I did no serious weight training at that time, so I estimate that I didn't have much muscle mass.

In essence, I think it would be 100% IMPOSSIBLE for me to ever weigh that much again, unless I decide that anorexia is the way to go (and with my love of chocolate and pizza, that is certainly never going to happen). Going into the article, I figured that the lowest weight that I could reasonably maintain (should I ever get back there) would be about 125 (what I weighed after my freshman year of college). To be fair, when I changed the settings in the calculator to say that I have a large build rather than medium, I got 123 pounds...which is slightly more reasonable, but I definitely don't have what would be considered a large build.

So I just want to say this: SHAME on you, Self magazine. You created this tool to encourage women to stop trying to reach unreasonable goals, yet from my experience, all you are doing is encouraging them.

You guys should all try, and let me know how it turns out in the comments. I'd love to see if any of you get a weight that seems reasonable to you. I'd like to know how reliable this thing really is.