Encouragement (i.e. punishment)

214.6 (oh yeah.)

MONDAY

I had a GREAT weekend. But it went by WAY too fast. My mom came into town on Thursday last week to help get my house in order, and just make her first visit to my new home. It's so great having her there. My mom and I are totally best friends and I miss her so much when we don't get to see each other. Besides, she's super helpful around the house. I am a HORRIBLE decorator. I mean, really bad. I have no idea how to position things to look good. So she came in and has already put up a bunch of our pictures, and repositioned things so they look really good.

So, Saturday I was going to get up and run a 5K that that guy Josh in my boot camp told me about. I had Erik all convinced to go, and mom ready to come watch. But right before bed, I nixed the idea because I realized I only get 2 days a week to really catch up on sleep. I shouldn't squander them. Even if it is for exercise.

So, Saturday morning I slept wonderfully till 10:00 am. Almost 11 hours of sleep. You can tell I needed it I think. Once we got up, mom and I went up to IKEA, just about the coolest furniture store ever, and bought me some bookcases. Well, turns out I didn't need to go running that morning because we got our workout buying those bookcases. I measured the wall in my soon-to-be library and determined we needed about 7 of these really big bookcases, plus 7 more "height extenders" to make it almost as tall as the ceiling. Boy were they heavy! Ikea gives you these rolling carts like at home depot to carry everything (they are in boxes to be put together by you), and we totally overloaded the first one. to the point it wouldn't roll! We had to separate the stock to two of these big rolley carts, and still got a work out pushing them out to the car. Then loading them was a hoot. We had my mom's Jeep Liberty. We measured the depth and came up with 70 inches. I thought the bookshelves I wanted were about 72, so I knew it'd be tight. Turns out they're 79 1/2 inches. So mom was scrunched all the way up with her knees on the dash, and still we had several of the boxes sticking through the seats between us. Oh and then we had a 35 mile drive. Lol. Good thing my mom's a good sport.

We got them home, and I put on of them together, thinking I'd get Erik to do the rest. Well, when he got home, we ended up putting them all together, together. Kinda a funny project, as I kept having to tell him what he was doing wrong (boy REFUSES to read directions). But we got it done.

Then I started opening the book boxes. I LOVE books by the way. And I had boxes and boxes full of them just sitting in the library. I didn't think I'd have the energy to put them all away Saturday night, but I was just so excited, I totally did. Of course I had to organize them, popular paperback fiction by author, literary paperback fiction by author, hardbound by author, then all the non-fiction by subject matter, plus a whole section for my law books, and then all my text books from colleges (the ones I didn't sell back.) I LOVE it. I have 180 inches wide by 92 inches tall worth of bookshelves with all my books put up. I actually managed to fill about 60-70% of it, though in looking at it I decided I just didn't have enough books yet. Much to Erik's dismay...

So we were up till about 1:00 am doing that on Saturday. Sunday I took mom to the resort I'm having my wedding at to have their Sunday "brunch" and taste some of the options for our rehearsal lunch. She also got to see where everyone will stay and where the ceremony will be. Then we went home and just hung out the rest of the night. Oh and Erik bought a new microwave and installed that - which was actually rather difficult because it's one of those over the stove, under the cabinet kinds... Oh - and we bought a bunch of plants at home depot that mom has graciously put in my back courtyard (love her!) Ah - fun housework...

So this morning was the return to boot camp. Where I got "encouraged" Which is their polite way of saying "punished". Basically they review your food journal and if you weren't perfect, you get encouragement. I wasn't perfect in two ways. 1) besides pushing around bookshelves and putting them together, I didn't exercise like I was supposed to this weekend, and 2) Sunday's food wasn't on track b/c of the tasting. Couldn't get away from that, just have to suck it up.

It wasn't so bad, though. Encouragement consists of an extra 5 minutes after cool down where they push push push you. Today it was ab work and we literally did 5 STRAIGHT minutes of ab crunches, flutter kicks, plank, and many other torturous moves. I will definitely feel that tomorrow.

So I'm loving this boot camp. I will not lie, I am not loving getting up so early. But this morning I determined that if I lay my clothes out the night before I can get up at 5:00 and still be there in plenty of time to get my book checked by the instructor before the 5:30 am start time. Which is still obscenely early, but sounds much more reasonable than any time with a 4 in front of it.

I'm only 3 days in, but I really think I'm going to try to do this all the way to the wedding. After this week, I've got 15 weeks. It works out that if I do the next three sessions of the boot camp I'll go right up till the Friday 9 days before the wedding (which is on a Sunday). So I'll have the week of the wedding "off" which is perfect. I'll have lots of guests in town that week anyway, so don't want to be running off and leaving them too much. It's going to cost another $650 to add 3 more months, but I really think it'd be worth it.

I'm holding off on committing for at least another week or so, but boy my class is full, and I'd hate to be shut out. It's the only one convenient for me to go to. I'm sure I'll cave and commit soon, but I do want to be sure I can hack it. And I'm still really new to it, so I should give it a little more time.

That's about it. Need to get some work done!