Turkey day meltdown

I think I turned into the biggest turkey on Thanksgiving. I ate a sensible dinner, followed by 2 more servings I think. It was bad. Then my sister left town and we had a TON of leftovers. That translated into a big leftover turkey dinner on Friday and another on Saturday. The good news is that I am back on track starting today, mostly because there isn't much left to eat! I fear my goal to lose my 100th pound by new years day is out of reach though, but I am not giving up on it I just need to get to work on it. I'll keep you posted. I have delayed my weigh in by a day to give me a little time to work off some of those feasts. We'll see tomorrow if the goal is still within reach. Anyway, I found this good article about the holiday eating stuff and getting back into the swing of exercising. I like this line the best "This shouldn't come as a surprise: Thanksgiving is not the green light to a six-week indulgence that precedes the waddle back to the gym Jan. 2."

Cold Turkey 6K run

My nephew, Ryan, and I ran in the Cold Turkey 6K run this morning. 6 kilometers is about 3.72 miles. The race started at 10 AM, despite the late start is was still FREEZING! It was about 25 degrees at the start. Ryan is on the cross country team at his high school, and is a very speedy runner. He finished with a time of 25:12, which comes out to 6 minutes 46 seconds per mile! He is supper fast! He finished in 34th place overall out of 792 racers, 29th male, and 6th in his age group. Pretty studly if you ask me. As for me I finished in 33:35 (9 minutes 1 second per mile) which was good for 224th overall, 152nd male, and 27th in my age group.

Unfortunately our turkey wasn't so lucky as to be holding a sign, so we are going to eat him! I did learn a valuable lesson in turkey buying, get one frozen ahead of time. We had to buy a thawed one yesterday and they were 3 times the price! My sister Liz is doing the cooking and later today we are going to stuff our bellies with the typical Thanksgiving feast. Although I'll have this wonderful thought in mind: Between Thanksgiving and New Years day the AVERAGE American gains 7 pounds!

Go Broncos

Hey hey hey, how about them Broncos? That was one of their best games last night. My favorite part was the fact that they didn't even try to get into the red zone so that they could sputter and kick FG's all night. Nope they bypassed all of that with 4 touchdowns of 40+ yards! Their defense appears to be playing better, especially against the run. The Titans have some decent running backs, and to limit them and contain Young to 72 yards is a pretty big improvement. Now, every team left on the schedule is less than .500 which doesn't mean much, but at least we can say the toughest part of the schedule is behind us.

New Thermostat

Yesterday I installed a new digital thermostat in our house. I am excited as it is a nice upgrade over the 40+ year old one that was on the wall. So I figured I would play it safe and kill the power to the furnace, I guess I didn't want to get zapped. Then I went downstairs to get some tools and noticed the smell of natural gas. Of course with the kids in the house I started to panic that I was going to blow up the house. But I figured out that when I shut off the fuse to the furnace the pilot light went out, and when I was reading about how to relight the pilot it said some gas left in the lines might escape and to give it 5 minutes before trying to relight it. So I went back upstairs and installed the thermostat, it was really simple on our house since we don't have air conditioning...heat only was 2 wires to connect. Then I re-lit the pilot light, turned power back on to the furnace and it was up and running. It is pretty cool that you can program the furnace to come on at certain times and then shut off at certain times to cool off the house. The thermostat was programed from the factory with a set up that save an average of 33% on heating bills in a typical house. It drops the temperature down to 60 at night, but warms it back up to 68 at 8 AM when the kids and I usually get up. We'll see how it goes, at least it should give us a little bit of flexibility in our house and hopefully it saves us some energy and money too!