Day 1

I've been contemplating structure for this blog. There are lots of things I'd like to share, but many of them are tangential to the primary goal I've laid out for myself: to share my everyday life to try to illustrate fitness isn't as hard as it may seem. For now I'm thinking I'll line the primary initiative out by days. Then I may throw in some asides. So as I sit here, my family near my side and a glass of wine at the ready, I'll tell you what I did today. I really can't believe anyone would have interest in this, but I (egotistically?) hope they do.

It was another night of poor sleep. Poor me. Okay. So I got up with my son at 6:40 and got him started on the day. Diaper changed, milk in his cup, breakfast in his belly, and then my wife woke up. The garden always needs tending, so I headed out to do just that while my wife took over with our son. Watering, bits of weeding--wait, this is too wordy. I'll break it down more simply, but to add confusion I'll use the present tense to describe the past, and the just start switching back and forth at random.

6:40am: Wake up, put water on to boil for coffee, and get my boy's day started.
7:00am: Out to the garden. Spot-check all the plants. Lament my failure to enrich the soil more after the previous years' growth. Water.
7:45-ish: My wife makes waffles from scratch, 'cause we're like that and she's fantastic. (She could have a blog all her own, as she's a fit and amazing woman. I have to limit my scope somewhat, I suppose.)

~~This brings up a good point: cook from scratch. Not only is your food going to tend to be better tasting and more nutritive, you also burn Calories doing it. ~~

So I had two big waffles, smothered in real butter and real maple syrup (no high fructose corn syrup, thank you), along with some French-pressed coffee: a light roast Costa Rican, cafe negro. I'm stuffed. STUFFED. Painfully so, and it lingers. But man, those waffles were good. (Tense change, see?)

After breakfast, I was contemplating getting started painting some of the trim on our house when my wife reminded me we decided to check out the California State Fair today, and I'm glad she did.

{{Poured another glass of wine.}}

So I showered, we made our preparations, and sometime around 9:00am we headed for the fair. It was a great time, honestly. We were pushing our boy in the stroller and sometimes running after him while he strolled. We checked out the livestock and the garden exhibits (which made me truly jealous) and the insects but avoided the midway; we had no need for the midway.

12:05pm: I could put off my love off beer no longer. I set out to find a craft brew. Of course, selection is somewhat limited. On the other hand, it's California. So I got myself a pint of the Racer 5 (instead of the 9 other options of I had). What can I say: I love IPAs. And we headed to the photo booth.

HA! The vibrating foot massagers came after. And so did lunch.

Lunch at the fair, that has to be bad, right? Well, not so much. We headed to the wine pavilion and were surprised to find ourselves sitting down with some cheese tortellini in pesto sauce, slices of French bread, and a plate with two cheeses and some grapes. After choosing my allotted three wines to taste, I settled on a Sauvignon Blanc from...a winery I'm blanking on, but it was darn good. The judges thought so, too, 'cause I'm pretty sure it won best of class. But anyway, we had our lunch and left the fairgrounds soon thereafter. It was nearly 1:30pm, and our son passed out. Oh, and we did buy a big slice of chocolate fudge. Good ol' chocolate fudge. And of course I was eating that. Who wouldn't? We stopped and got dog food on the way home. We have big dogs. We buy big bags of food.

When we got home my dissatisfaction with the garden returned, and I knew what I needed: a good organic fertilizer with a fairly specific NPK ratio in mind. (Why would you NOT grow organic?) So I hopped on my bike for a trip to a nursery I had yet to visit. Here it is, you may be thinking: the exercise. And yeah, it was my "structured" exercise for the day. I rode a little under 10 miles total. That's not a big deal, right? You could probably go bike 10 miles right now. Try it, then come back and read more.

I didn't time myself. I only know the distance because of the good ol' Googler. A little under 5 miles there, browsing, checking out the natives (California native plants, not the people [a later aside, perhaps]), and I found the fertilizer I was looking for. (I really need to get this present/past tense thing in order. For now...deal.) I rode home, it was just about 5pm, and it was my night to cook.

Steak, 'taters, and corn on the grill. I experimented a bit, as I tend to do. Corn on the grill is corn on the grill. That's just good. You can't mess with that much. The potatoes I got at the farmer's market last week, a mix of red and yukon golds with some minced home-grown garlic and green onions thrown in for fun. Salt and pepper, of course. I do love salt. I melted some butter, added a bit of olive oil to that (it can keep the butter from scorching), and threw in some chopped up basil from the garden with a pinch of red pepper flakes. Poured that on the 'taters, wrapped 'em in foil, and onto the grill they went. I did something similar for the steaks (petite cut top sirloin because we're not into chewing on fat): melted butter mixed with olive oil, but in the pan I added a minced up mash of our garlic, basil, oregano, green onions (all from the garden), another pinch of the red pepper flakes for consistency, then smothered the steaks in that and the steaks were grilled. I'm no chef, I just mess around. I had one bottle of Racer 5 left, so I drank that, and I had a splash of a petite syrah left, so that helped me finish my dinner. (I do drink lots of water, too. It's necessary.)

I play with my son at various times throughout all these activities. He eats essentially what we eat. Out of alcohol (!!, especially on a Saturday), I went and bought 6 bottles of wine. After spending some time with the family out in the yard and my son getting ready for bed, I found myself here at the PC, typing away. And my son is now asleep. I'm still on that second glass of wine: an inexpensive Chilean carmenere. It's good. I'll probably have another when I finish this and sit back to read. I'm in a Carl Hiaasen novel right now. It's almost 9:00. I'm hoping sleep treats me well.

~~Time passed. New glass of wine poured. Another note on non-exercise (completely unrelated to anything that just happened, promise): sex burns Calories, too. I read that somewhere.~~

It's about 10:00. So goodnight, moon. I have some wine to drink, and hopefully some winks to catch.