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Monday, February 08, 2010

Resolve Your Resolution

The gym that Carrie and I belong to, Pure Austin is one of the coolest gyms I have ever seen, that's for sure. We love being members. We noticed that they were having a contest, called Resolve Your Resolution, where they would pick 10 people and over 4 months these people would compete to meet their respective fitness goals. I threw my name in the hat, and amazingly I got picked.

They have paired me up with one of their fitness trainers who is also a Cat. 2 bike racer in town. We met last Thursday and I feel that we understood each other well. For the next 4 months I will be logging all of my food and beverage intake as well as my workouts. My coach at the gym will provide me with workout plans as the weeks go along.

My main goal out of this is to finally cross the line on the bike so that I can actually finish races. Since here in Austin we have the world's best weekly bike race series, I have a great way to measure my progress. I am also going to be doing LT threshold testing at the beginning and end of the 4 months. The starting one will probably occur last week. I am expecting pain.

I am so excited and feel very lucky to have this opportunity. Today was my first official Resolve Your Resolution workout. Went out on the bike for an easy 1.5 hours. It was chilly, but it was nice to get out on the bike as always.

I plan on meeting and exceeding my goals. The main point is to get myself in decent shape finally, but there is a competition involved between me and the other nine people, so I would love to win. A little extra motivation never hurt anyone, right?

Oh, one last thing: GO SAINTS!!!!

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6:02 PM |

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Wonderful Christmas Eve and Day

I will probably not be able to complete Holidailies, unfortunately. The 12 hour delay between posts will keep me from getting up to 31 posts. The last few days I have not posted, but I have had a wonderful time, so I'll gladly take that trade any day of the week.

Carrie and I had a lovely Christmas Eve and Day with our family and some of our friends. From lunch and presents with Carrie's family on Christmas Eve during the day to fireworks with Katie and Steve that night to presents and lunch with my family during the day on Christmas and then finishing it all up with some beer with Diego and Anna last night. We had a great two days, and I feel blessed that we are so lucky to be surrouned by so many awesome people.

I just wanted to catch up quickly with my small readership and let people know that I am going to try and keep the posts coming, but I am going to make sure I enjoy my time home first. Merry Christmas!

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8:33 AM |

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Reveillon

We spent Saturday night in New Orleans, and Sunday morning after mass we headed to Avenue Pub for some lunch. I had a duck sandwich that was fantastic. We spent in the afternoon walking around the French Quarter ducking in and out of some of the art galleries. It was an absolutely beautiful day.

On the way back to the car we swung by the Aquarium of the Americas to look for the brick there with my name on it. I was sort of discouraged at first as there were many, many bricks. However, Maureen was able to find my brick. It was pretty cool; I had not seen it in a long, long time.

We headed over to the Dickey's around 6:30 and hung out while all of our dinner companions collected. It was great, as always, to see everybody. After while we headed towards downtown to go eat Muriel's.

They seemed to be a little behind on reservation seating, so we spent some time in the bar. They made a tasty dirty gin martini. Yay, savory cocktails. When we sat down the Reveillon menu looked good to me. I had duck confit with a pumpkin risotto for an appetizer, a fresh Louisiana citrus salad, a bone-in veal chop with crabmeat and oyster dressing for an entree, and then pain perdu bread pudding for dessert. Overall a fantastic meal, and I think we all enjoyed it.

We decided to stay in New Orleans that night as it was late and were both tired. We had a great time and look forward to continuing the tradition as the years go by.

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7:39 PM |

Travel and Blogging

As the astute observer may have noticed, I have not posted the last several days. We have been travelling around, and I have fallen behind. I have several things to discuss, so I am going to try and get several potss in a day to catch up (there is a 12 hour delay between posts enforced by the Holidailies site).

We had an interesting time getting ourselves to Louisiana on Saturday. We were going to stop in Port Arthur to attend a family Christmas party, but we realized when we were in Bastrop that Carrie had forgotten her driver's license. Had she not been flying back to Austin next week, it would have been not as big of a concern, but since she is flying, we had to go back and get it.

Luckily, we weren't that far away, so we headed back towards Austin. When we were almost home I realized that I had actually forgotten all of my dress shirts in the closet, so it turned out we both forgot something. We picked up the forgotten items, said bye to Pierre one more time, and got back on the road.

We made it to the Christmas party right as it was ending. We got back on the road ourselves and headed towards New Orleans. We were able to listen to the first quarter of the game on the radio and got to Greg and Maureen's in the second half. The game did not end like I had hoped, but hopefully the Saints will use this to refocus and burn through the playoffs.

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11:48 AM |

Saturday, December 19, 2009

The Beard is Done

So after thinking yesterday afternoon that the beard was staying, the itching started last night. I couldn't take it anymore, and I shaved before I went to sleep. I could see how irritated my skin was underneath my beard. I apparently have sensitive skin, and it had just had enough of being poked by my beard.

While I was curious to see what I looked like with a full beard, my face feels so much better this morning now that I've shaved. And the itching has stopped. Ugh, the itching.

Well, I need to run and do some final things so we can be on our way. The next post will be from Louisiana.

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8:36 AM |

Friday, December 18, 2009

Getting ready to head out

Tomorrow morning we head to Baton Rouge for Christmas. I will actually be staying in Louisiana for two weeks with Carrie coming back to Austin for some time between Christmas and New Years. It will be fun to be home. South Louisiana is a special place.

We should be able to knock out the remainder of our book on "tape" tomorrow. We have the last few hours of the Bourne Identity left. I actually have the second one as well on my iPhone, so maybe we'll start it too.

Leaving for an extended time always makes me miss Pierre. He's a very social cat, and it always makes me sad to leave him by himself. If he wasn't a fugitive from the law we would have gotten another cat by now, but oh well. A few days of extra rubs and he seems to be back to normal.

Tonight we are heading to Jasper's for supper. I am excited, it looks good!

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4:23 PM |

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Brine

Last night I roasted a chicken for supper. I decided to do something different and try and soak the chicken in a brine before the roast.

While I definitely think it had some effect, it was not huge. Now, I do not blame the concept of brining for this, I just didn't do it right. In the future I plan on making two changes:

  1. Increase the soak time dramatically. It was just in there for about 6 hours, it probably needs more like 12-24 to really take.
  2. Increase the salt content of the solution.

I think these two changes will go a long way to really making the brine fulfill all of its promises. I of course cooked the chicken using the probe thermometer, and it came out nice and juicy. Cooking meat by temperature alone is really the biggest thing anybody can do when it comes to producing tender and juicy meats. Especially for longer methods like roasting or braising. Time is worthless; you should only be using a thermometer.

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8:35 AM |

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Beard

So today I shaved, but just a little. Inspired by several people over the weekend I'm going to let my holiday beard come to be. The itchiness is always what makes me shave it all off. But I shaved a little bit higher up my neck than I had in the past, and there is really no itchiness to speak of right now. I am hoping I may have turned a corner on the beard front. I'm thinking I'll leave it going through the epiphany, a true Christmas beard. We'll see. It may start to drive me absolutely nuts and it may all come off. Who knows?

If it actually stays around long enough to look legit I'll post a picture.

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1:21 AM |




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