New year, new fitness

Since I blogged on New Year's, Kim and I have joined a gym. I have been to the gym every day since last monday (the 5th) and, excepting the weekend, have arrived at 5:30 AM. In contrast to Bally's, this gym has quite the facilities.  These facilities include: a lap pool, both a dry heat and steam sauna, a hot tub, an indoor track, a basketball court, racquetball courts, a myriad of machines and weights, and an aerobics room with a large number of aerobics classes each day.

As part of getting into a fitness routine, I am exploring the aerobics classes.  One in particular is called BodyAttack.  I have attended twice and both times have been quite thoroughly exhausted.  I never expected aerobics would be so difficult.

The other activity that is being incorporated into my daily life is a sweat bath.  I have decided there is some sort of voodoo associated with the sweat bath. A quick google search will produce thousands of wild claims of the benefits of the sweat bath.  Well you can add one more. I notice that despite my new 0500 wake-up call, I feel refreshed and energized throughout the day.  I attribute this to my sweat baths as opposed to the exercise because I have been avidly riding my bike over the last 6 months without seeing this effect.  It's complete voodoo, but I'm completely sold.

In other news, my iMac has died. The good news is that we have Apple complete care, the bad news is that we only had backups of our photos and some important documents. I have been running DiskWarrior for 4 days now with discouraging results.  Something spectacular appears to have failed in the harddrive because there are large sections of contiguous blocks that are completely unreadable.  I'm very glad we had the photos backed up because they were really irreplaceable, but it will be a major inconvenience to rebuild the environment I had setup.

Another new addition to our household is an Xbox 360.  I didn't think that we would end up with one, but we had some Christmas money that we used to buy a Christmas gift. We went with the xbox due to it's stream netflix capability.  It is a fun toy that I'm sure we'll get a lot of good use out of, particularly when we don't have cable television anymore.

Finally, there has been no progress towards buying a house as of yet, I have a USAA representative contacting me sometime either next week, or the week following in regards to automobile insurance.  Once that is setup I am going to open a dialog with a loan officer through USAA and shortly thereafter contact Sean's realtor, Tim. Kim and I have discussed some very specific things we are looking for in a house, so this is either going to make Tim's job very easy or very difficult.  My guess would be the latter. Just for fun, here's the qualities we're looking for:

• Minimum of a 2 car garage (shop would be awesome!)


• A yard we have the right to fence in for a dog


• A basement


• Preferably ranch style, but not required


• Easy access to a major bike trail


• We're also thinking something that needs a little TLC (if the price is right) would be nice.  So we can customize it to our needs and wants


• We're also looking further east than we are currently

We'll see what we end up with!