Tag Archive for 'jogging'

Where Did The Weekend Go?

Published on November 16, 2009 in Family and weekend. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Seems like we just slept the whole thing away this weekend…

Today was a bit of a lazy day, waking up at 10:30 when Layla finally got tired of waiting for us to get her and started yelling for us. I guess we should be grateful for her letting us sleep so long… but we both still wanted the other to get up and get her. Seeing as I was feeling a bit guilty about sleeping the whole day away yesterday, I made the first move. I got Layla… and threw her on the bed with Tamie. =)

After getting both girls up, I made breakfast. A little creation I like to call… ham and cheese on toast. It’s even more delicious than it sounds. Tamie skipped it to go jogging, but Layla and I chowed down on the good food. While Tamie was out, we watched some Crocodile Hunter DVD’s. Layla’s choice – I swear! So much for Sesame Street, eh?

After Tamie came back, I thought we could go down to the ritziest part of Tokyo where all the rich people converge to buy overpriced handbags and jewelry. Layla was excited to take the train, Tamie was excited to get some jewelry, but I wanted to go because aside from all the glitz and glamour, there’s an awesome toy store there. In the end, however, we postponed our trip until next week because it was already getting late, but mostly because of laziness.

So instead, we went for lunch down at Vina Walk, as is becoming our usual Sunday routine. As such, we had to stop at the pet store so Layla could almost play with dogs, stop at the baby floor so she could almost play with babies, stop at the shoe store so Tamie could almost buy some boots, and then starbucks so we could all drink some overpriced coffee/fraps. Unfortunately, Tamie was hit with a bit of a bug and wasn’t feeling too well, so we came home a bit early. Our timing was good, though, because Layla crashed as we came in the door.

An hour later, we were off to the grocery store to buy some food for dinner. Frozen pizza – another delicacy I whip up when the mood strikes me. Tamie, not feeling well and really not feeling like pizza, whipped up a batch of her world-famous potato and pumpkin chips. While the food was cooking, Layla complained about being hungry. So I gave her an apple. A big apple. An apple almost the size of her head. And she loved it. She was either really hungry, or it was really good. That, in conjunction with the pizza and chips, made for a great Sunday meal. In other words, we feasted like royalty.

Thursday Pics
Pictures from Thursday, after I picked up Layla from daycare
Todays Pictures
Pictures from Today

Hospitals, Rabid Babies, and Rollerblading. Just Another Typical Saturday.

Published on September 6, 2009 in Family, rollerblading and weekend. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

After a night of barbecuing, Canadian style, with coworkers on the company balcony (Canadian style meaning with a propane barbecue big enough to cook more than one hamburger at a time =), I was a little worried about getting up the next morning. Tamie was more concerned with my coming home on Friday night. Luckily (or not?) it was a fairly early night, so I got home with little trouble and fairly sober.

Today started out early, but not as early as we planned. A 10:30am appointment at the hospital (Layla’s bi-weekly checkup) meant we needed to get up around 9 to give us plenty of time to get ready and go. Setting our alarm for 8:30 should have been enough of a head start but, as always happens, a few presses of the snooze button and we were already behind the eight ball. Scrambling to get ready, we were out the door with seconds to spare. Making it to the hospital by 10:40 could be considered on time for a Saturday morning.

With Layla semi-feverish, coughing and sniffling, I was a little concerned she might get the lung and nostril treatment again. Luckily for her the doctor gave her the green light, only prescribing another bag full of medicine and forgoing the nose torture. After ten minutes of sucking vapour and twenty minutes of waiting for our prescription(s) to be filled, we were out of the hospital. The whole day ahead of us, we were ready to do… something. Planning is for the unspontaneous!

Back at home, Tamie fried up some of her world-famous potato chips while I readied my rollerblades for the next time I went – apparently not rotating the wheels is not a good thing, and I discovered my front wheels were worn down to the metal. I figured now was probably a good time to switch them up. Layla ended up lying down on the floor and falling asleep before we sat down to have a light lunch of beer and chips (on an unrelated note, I’m still not sure why I’m putting on weight). No amount of poking, prodding or holding chips under Layla’s nose would wake her up.

Eventually Layla woke up and we dropped by a bookstore to get a guide book about Naruto, our upcoming island excursion to see giant whirlpools. While Tamie checked up books on Naruto, I looked at the guide books for Canada – it’s interesting to see what is interesting to others about Ottawa. Funny thing, they listed four or five restaurants in the market… one of which was a Japanese restaurant and one being Colonnade Pizza. Yep, that’s Ottawa cuisine in a nutshell.

After our adventures researching and planning our next adventures (spontaneity be damned), we headed over to get some coffee at Starbucks. Frappuccinos all around! Again, no idea about that whole weight thing… I had my camera with me, as always, so snapped a couple pics of the girls as Tamie read about Naruto and Layla chugged her green tea concoction.

Eventually bored of the whole coffee thing, Layla lead us downstairs to play. I know she likes to play on stairs so it was win-win for her. Downstairs we did, in fact, play. Running in circles is a great game to a two-year old. At one point, I picked her up, threw her in the air and caught her. Tamie’s always asking me to do that while she was the camera so I did. Layla laughed, Tamie snapped a picture, and I caught the baby. Lather, rinse, repeat. The fourth or fifth time I did it, Layla ended up banging her tooth on my chin, or more precisely biting a big chunk of flesh out of my face. Reeling from the pain, but too manly to admit it, I inspected her mouth to see if she was hurt. The toothy grin told me enough. She was fine. Blood pouring out of my chin, I took a kleenex from Tamie to try to stem the bleeding. Light headed, I sat down while trying not to cry.

As we sat there holding kleenex on my chin, a group of high school kids appeared in front of us out of nowhere. They had a small speaker that they hooked up to their cell phones and blasted (by blasted I mean barely audibly played) tinny dance music for all to enjoy. They took turns dancing – each having his own shtick. One guy did backflips, one did the robot. One seemed to only be able to bounce on one hand – he bounced well, but after seeing it for the third time it got old. Before we left, one guy put on a helmet and spun on his head, break-dance style. The future of boybands was there in front of us and we had to leave to go grocery shopping!

By the time we made it back home, it was getting dark but I was eager to get out and try my newly rotated wheels. Tamie, too, was eager to go jogging. Since I was on wheels, she figured I’d be quicker so I left while she stayed back to watch the kid and prepare dinner. Boy was she wrong. I should have been faster but it was dark. There are no street lights in rice fields. Seeing is definitely not overrated.

I wanted to find a good route so went exploring, letting the colour of the traffic lights dictate my direction. When there were no traffic lights I’d just pick whichever street had the biggest sidewalk. Luckily I had a GPS enabled phone with me — but even after I got lost I was too stubborn to look at it. It’s not a big neighbourhood so I figured I could make my way back. I’m here typing now, so obviously I did, but not without doubling back a few times. Check this out for an idea of how lost I was. =)

By the time I made it back, nearly an hour had passed. Tamie tried to use the dark as an excuse not to go jogging but I would have none of it. Actually, it took very little to convince my little marathon runner to get out there and sweat. So while she didn’t get lost, I watched Sesame Street with Layla. She fell asleep, and I almost did. Luckily Tamie came back just in time. We had a nice steak dinner before putting Layla down to bed. Looking at the time now, it’s about time we head off ourselves.

Lazy Days of Summer

Published on August 30, 2009 in rollerblading and weekend. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

It was with great effort that I got up this morning, not quite wanting to face the day yet. Tamie, good sweet wife o’ mine, was gracious enough to get up with Layla and let me sleep in. I eventually felt guilty enough to pull myself out of my slumber and zombie-walk into the living room to greet my girls with a friendly “uuuuugh, is it still early enough to say ‘good morning?’”. Man do I love weekends =)

With nothing but the obvious bit of R&R planned for the day, Tamie, always eager to go jogging, figured it was the perfect opportunity to head out for a bit of a run. I, not so eager to even think about jogging, figured it was a good chance to give the parents back in Ottawa a call. So while Tamie sweated under 40 degrees of mid day sun, I stayed air conditioned with the kid to call her Nonni and Chinni online. A good chat and an hour later, Tamie came in the door exhausted, explaining just how blistering the sun was before going take a long, cold shower.

As she showered, I thought about things and came to a conclusion myself. I’ve recently been having an email conversation a friend who has been lamenting about how quickly getting older seems to meaning getting heavier. Having put on my own fair share of weight recently, I couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment. Now, I’m not saying it’s just age that is putting on the pounds – I mean, I’m sure the beer and cookies might have played a small part in their nightly consumption, but age does get its fair share of the blame. The last email I received had the a number, a big 238 lbs of a number in it. Crikey! It was a scant 2 years ago when we were both hovering between 180-190 and worrying about the double century mark… oh, to be so slim again.

So with that in my mind, and inspired by Tamie’s industrious (or maybe insane) jogging today, I thought it was a good time to break the ol’ rollerblades out of retirement. I’d been talking about it for more than a year (I think it was my new years’ resolution… of 2008). Man, time flies. So like an old war veteran suiting up after a long spell of peace, I suited up in blades and wrist guards into the battleground of sun, traffic, and old ladies on bikes. It’s a dangerous world out there.

I got off to a pretty good start – felt like I’d never stopped blading. The wind was blowing just right, the traffic lights were green at every corner I approached and I was flying down the road at a good clip. I was free, and I was loving it. I was inspired to do this every day! Thoughts of waking up early and starting the day with a similar invigorating rollerblading session filled my head as I passed pedestrian and car alike. I couldn’t remember why I stopped.

Not ten minutes had passed before I was drenched in sweat, the sun beating down stronger than anything I’d ever experienced in my life. What little breeze there was only seemed to pick up the heat from the pavement causing even more discomfort. The old ladies on the bicycles I’d passed earlier seemed to pick up their pace and fly by me as easily as I had them only moments prior. Insulted, I tried to use that as motivation to keep my legs moving and not to die. I lowered my cap, focused on the few feet in front of me and rollerbladed like I was chasing women one quarter their age. And to my great surprise, I caught them. They were stopped at a traffic light, which I almost missed, but I caught them.

At twenty minutes, my legs were like rubber. I could barely breathe. I thought I was a goner, for sure. I wasn’t even insulted or embarrassed when those same old ladies walked past me pushing their bikes. The only thing on my mind was survival – I had to make it back to the air conditioned haven we call home. I rolled along at what I’ll call a leisurely pace for what seemed like forever until I finally made it back to the finish line. It was with great agony that I peeled off my rollerbladed and made my way up to the third floor — it’s not easy standing and waiting for an elevator as slow as ours.

After a quick 45 minute shower, I finally felt like I wasn’t going to pass out or pass away. I was anxious to check out the stats I’d collected on my spiffy new google phone. Tamie had used it first when she went jogging and found she ran over 7km in just under an hour at average speed of nearly 7km/h (funny how that math works out, eh — good thing google is smart enough to figure all that out for us). I, too, had carried my gps-enabled toy and found I’d gone just over 6km in 30 minutes. Check out my maps page here, if it works. Yah, she ran farther than me, but let’s face it – I’d like to say she’s in much better shape than I am but, honestly, I think it was because I’d gone out later in the day and the sun was so much hotter.

Exercise out of the way for another year, we went out to pick up a couple things we’ve been meaning to get. Tomorrow is Tamie’s sister’s birthday so we picked up a couple things for her (Tamie didn’t think she’d like some oversized, slightly-used, like-new rollerblades). While we were shopping, Layla wanted to ride on the merry-go-round she’d been on in the past (her memory is getting to be a bit of a pain sometimes). Since she’s spoiled, we gave her the 200 yen and let her go at it. She plunked the first coin into the slot no problem. The second one she tried a couple times. The third time she dropped it I put it into the machine for her at which point she started yelling, got off the merry-go-round, and cried until it stopped. Luckily at the end, it spit out a card which she was more than happy to collect and show off. Phew!

We eventually made our way back home where we had dinner (chicken caesar salad and potato-crust pizza, for those curious). Actually, I just wanted to mention the potato-crusted pizza because I’d never heard of such a creation. I’m pretty sure Tamie made it up due to the fact we had leftover potatoes in the fridge, but it actually turned out pretty well.

So that was our day. I call it a lazy day, but in all honesty it was one of the unlaziest days I’d had in months, if not years. Who knows if I’ll stick to the rollerblading, but I’m certainly going to try. And to Mr. 238, I know you read this — the gauntlet is off, good sir. We’ve talked about self-improvement for a long time, well the time is now. So step up! I look forward to reading about your adventures in rollerblading!