The Gray Race and some other stuff

For the past few months I’ve been bemoaning the fact that my library, or none of the libraries it trades with, has Bad Religion’s album The Gray Race. I even told Joe today, “that’s it, I’m just going to order it from Amazon.com” and then a little later it occurred to me that I made a copy of it before I moved out when my ex and I broke up eight years ago. Can you say duh? I got home from work, ripped the copy, and added it to my iPod. Now I can enjoy the best Bad Religion album ever at work tomorrow.

I’ve been using the Wii Fit almost daily for two weeks now and I like it. I only get about 15 minutes of exercise during each use, but I’m also using the elliptical machine for 20 minutes while watching an episode of How I Met Your Mother, so for now that’s enough. I enjoy teasing Joe because when it measures him, this cute voice says, “that’s overweight”. It’s funny because he’s really not overweight as far as I’m concerned. But I guess he’s just over the normal BMI for his weight and height. I’m in the normal range but I definitely have some excess pudge to tone. We had the kids weigh themselves too and let’s just say the Wii was not kind. Unfortunately that’s typical for kids today and it’s rather sad.

We’re trying to be better role models when the kids are here with us, as small of a percentage of their time that may be. Saturday after we went garage sale hunting, we went to the park and the boys played catch while I helped the girl practice tennis. She wants to try out at school but I don’t think they are going to take her unless she takes real lessons. Most of the time she just stood there expecting the ball to come to her. Granted, I was aiming for her to allow her to practice returning the ball, but I explained to her she needs to run for the ball and move back if it’s too high or forward if it’s coming short. She was doing better by the time we were done but she has a long way to go. I do give Joe’s kids credit – they are way more into extra-curricular activities than I ever was at their age. The only problem is they are bit over-confident in their abilities and don’t necessarily want to put in the work it requires to follow through with whatever activity they are interested in. So that’s something they need to work on.

Tonight I tried a new recipe – Chicken Parm Meatball Subs. They came out much better than I was expecting! I was too hungry to photograph the evidence so you’ll just have to trust me. I burned the first two rolls under the broiler so I’ll need to pick up more so we can finish the leftovers tomorrow.

Speaking of leftovers, yesterday we took the kids to Boston Market for lunch to celebrate Joe’s birthday before taking the kids home. Can you believe it cost $28 for the four of us to eat, and that was with a $5 coupon? At least the food is pretty healthy, even more so since the kids had to get one veggie from their two sides. The boy wanted mac & cheese and mashed potatoes so he wasn’t too happy about that but he got over it. The plan was for us to go to Pepe’s for dinner after dropping them off since it’s right by their house, but their mom called about an hour before we were going to leave to say she was in the area and could pick them up. So we ended up at Red Lobster instead. It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten there and I only ate half my dinner and took the other half for lunch today. Plus I had grilled chicken instead of deep fried shrimp.

I started writing this post earlier but a big storm rolled in so we shut down our computers and played on our DS for awhile. We’ve gotten two new games recently – Left Brain, Right Brain and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? The Left Brian Right Brain one is more like Left Hand Right Hand since that’s all it seems to be testing. My left arm actually hurts from using that hand way more often than I normally do.

Going to go weigh myself on the Wii Fit and then read before bed. I’ve been good getting to sleep by 10 pm every night and getting a solid seven hours of sleep. That with my daily dose of Vitamin D, more exercise, and eating better has made my stress levels quite low. Nothing seems to get me really fired up lately which is nice.