What I'm Up To These Days

Been a while!

This week's menu:

Monday – Kale-Radicchio Salad with Farro, Run Fast, Eat Slow

Tuesday – Slow-Cooker Chicken Pho, Eating Well

Wednesday - Skillet Chicken Parmesan, Eating Well

Thursday - Chicken Enchilada Soup, Eating Well

Friday – pasta night (I'll share my sauce recipe one of these days, but I can tell you that I haven't bought a jar of sauce in years.)

What have I been up to lately?

Playing guitar and wrote a song

Playing hockey

Coaching hockey

Cooking

Working Out & Swimming

Cleaning

School Walkathon fundraiser

Pancreatic Cancer fundraiser

Game of Thrones

Listening to podcasts and audiobooks

Travel

My Aunt passed away at the age of 92. A good, long life. It inspired me to write a song. Perhaps someday I'll be willing to do a YouTube recording that I'm willing to share publicly, but not at this time. What I can say is that it came from an emotion that manifested itself as a thought that felt like a paradox: my heart was breaking but it felt as if there was a rainbow. So, I wrote a song about it. 

In the meantime, daughter has taken up the guitar. That has inspired me to pick it back up. (I've been playing on-and-off for around 20 years.) Some songs I've been rocking:

Fools Rush In, Elvis

It Ain't Me, Babe, Bob Dylan

I Love You Will Still Sound the Same, Oh Honey

Paradise City, Guns N Roses

Just as often, I'll rock some made-up instrumentals. Perhaps someday I'll have the courage to post and share.

I'm currently on 2 1/2 hockey teams. I've become the manager of a team on which I play for the first time, so I get to pay the league fee, collect from players, order jerseys, do the scheduling, make sure we have enough players for each game, and - most importantly - ensure that there is beer for after the game. Why be on so many teams? Our games are not on the same night every week, and may fall as long as 9 days apart. With busy life schedules, this generally ensures that I am playing at least one game per week. Sometimes it's four, sometimes zero.

Coaching hockey has been awesome. My brother and I love to talk hockey coaching and we have had love-fests over how much we enjoy it. I heard that Pat Riley said that coaching is a distant second to playing. I believe that he meant playing at a high level competitively. While I still LOVE to play, I would never blow off coaching to play. Unless I was due for my assistants to cover for me and the team was short of guys to play, then I'd consider it :)

I have created a YouTube channel for coaching. While not complete, it will have my favorite drills diagrammed, as well as links to drills that others have filmed. I'll post that when it's ready.

As you saw at the beginning, I have a menu for the week. Wife and I have a system that we've had in place for years. I just went to my email and found that the first one was done in October 2013. It makes scheduling my week infinitely better - I know what to buy and when (keep it fresh) as well as when during the day I should prep and create. It also provides a map of leftovers for which we prepare (Wife now prefers taking leftovers to work over buying local quick-serve fare.) I'll post more about lunches in the future. Maybe.

As part of my quest for self-improvement and wellness, I have adopted some concepts. My co-coach from this fall/winter hockey season turned me on to some longevity concepts. Part of that is intermittent fasting. And, of course, physical fitness. He provided several resources, but I'll just mention 4 Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss. You can read up on Ferriss (NYT Bestseller, etc.) I have adopted an eating schedule in which, for 6 days of the week, I eat between the hours of 12:00pm (noon) and 8:00pm. Between 8:00pm and noon the next day, I don't consume calories. Since adopting this schedule in mid-February, I have lost around 7 pounds without really changing what I eat or how much I eat. I generally eat pretty healthy, but chocolate and chips do transition from hand to mouth on a regular basis. 

Also, I do cheat. If I don't enjoy my life, the program won't be sustainable. So, most days I'm right on, but some days I'm not. After my nighttime hockey games, I'll have a beer or two with the guys. Vacation? Throw out the rules. Oh, did I mention that part of intermittent fasting is having a binge day? According to Ferriss, it is important that one day per week you eat whatever you want and as much as you want, as this prevents your body from going into a hibernation state of metabolism. Please do read / listen up on how to incorporate this into your life and consider consulting a nutritionist / dietician as well as your physician.

4 Hour Body talks about more than fasting. For building muscle, it provides guidelines on two workout routines to follow. Long story short, the strength-training workouts take about thirty minutes and REQUIRE two days of rest in between. So, you're working out two times every six days. I am only two workouts in, but I can tell you that they have made me quite sore (in a good way.) 

Swimming was also incorporated into 4 Hour Body. I have never been a good swimmer, but really would like to build up that skill. The book recommended Total Immersion: Freestyle Made Easy. Since the writing of Ferriss's book, Total Immersion has expanded their course offerings (I have no idea if it had anything to do with Ferriss's reference.) It is a step-by-step manual to learning how to swim. As a coach, I love how it breaks down the physical movements and body positioning. So far, I've gone from barely being able to swim 1.5 lengths before having to put my feet down and rest to being able to swim 500 yards. It takes me about 30 minutes, but it feels good to be able to swim continuously. And I definitely have not perfected the system, but incorporate elements in every swim workout I do for long-term incremental improvement.

The last thing that I'll mention from 4 Hour Body is heart rate based exercise. It turns out that our aerobic goals are best met by training within certain heart rate zones. While I'm not going to go through those right now, I can tell you that if your goal is to burn fat and you are training intensely and sweating profusely and getting out of breath, you are probably not losing fat as quickly as you had hoped and are becoming discouraged. It turns out that burning fat takes place at a relatively low heart rate - not resting, but not pounding. Look it up.

Keeping my house clean has never been my homemaking strong suit. We have had the good fortune to be able to afford a cleaning service every other week for many years. However, the service that we had been using for over ten years had a lot of turnover and the most recent couple of rounds of employees have not been up to par. I canceled that service and hired another but she was not particularly good and wanted a higher fee than I wanted to pay. Frankly, I was not willing to pay very much. I decided that I either had to hire an expensive service or do it myself, so I'm doing it myself. It's going okay, but I'll talk more about that in another episode. 

This is getting super long, so I'll hopefully keep writing on another day. For now, here are the highlights:

• Walkathon - it exposes my weaknesses but in a good way
• PANCAN fundraiser - another thing that's important but worthy and that I have to schedule time to work on
• Game of Thrones - Wife and I just started watching it and are through S1:E3. So far, a lot of blood, a lot of boobs, some incest, and constant combative dialogue. Fun!
• Podcasts: Currently Listening to Hardcore History, Supernova in the East Part 1; recently listened to Martyr Made God's Socialist Pt 1; consistently listen to: Tim Ferriss Show, Wall Street Breakfast.
• Audiobooks: Currently listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer; recently listened to The 4-Hour Body, Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek, Ferriss, A Column of Fire, Ken Follett.
• Travel: Went to LA and a little bit north to Los Alamos for a wedding and a funeral. 

Thanks as always for reading.

Bags full of memories

Our daughter, 9, had turned her room into a disaster. I wouldn't say dirty, but more of the hoarder element. As she explains it, her possessions contain memories.

As they do for many of us. From her room, there are items that were gifts from friends who have moved away, from family members, from vacations. Wife and I have explained that, unfortunately, we must get rid of old possessions to make way for new ones. You're only 9 and you've accumulated all of this - and we've gotten rid of lots over your life. Imagine what it would be like if Mom and I had kept this many things! We would need a house just to hold our stuff.

That's not to say that I don't have plenty to shed. As I believe I've mentioned in previous posts, I have piles in corners that badly need attention. Still, eventually things get tossed. Out with the old, in with the new.

Now there is a mound of bags in my kitchen waiting to be sorted into garbage and giveaway. as I looked, something caught my eye. There, at the top of the bag of stuffed animals, was Moosey. Moosey is from JD's infancy. He slept with two stuffed animals - Moosey and Puppy. Puppy still remains, but Moosey has long been relegated to a shelf ornament. Seeing Moosey in a bag almost made me cry.

Daughter, however, is quite happy with her new room, relieved of its burdens. There are still plenty of stuffed animals, books, and trinkets. Just as any of us are happy with our unloaded closets and dressers after purging our decade-old clothes that aren't worn out, but are never worn.

In this holiday season, remember that we make memories with each other and have little markers of these times in our lives, times that become hazy or forgotten when we are forced to part with the tangible items that served as bookmarks for the events, stories, and pictures in our mind.

Breakaway Better than 4K

I'm not yet sure why I'm writing this into my blog. Perhaps it's vanity. Maybe it's for posterity. Or for pre-posterity - whatever that means.

On Monday this week, I had a hockey game for my 40+ rec league. We were playing a team that we routinely beat badly (the last meeting a few weeks ago resulted in a 9-1 win.)

Throughout the game, I felt like I was making smart plays - I could see where the play was going and was able to anticipate the play, I had confidence carrying the puck, and confidence defending in my own zone (I am a defenseman.)

During the second period, I ended up with the puck behind my own net and waited for my players to set up and for the opposition's forecheck (attacking the other team who is in possession of the puck while in their own defensive zone.) A forechecker attacked my left, causing me to skate out the right side. As I skated and picked up speed, I looked ahead, left, and right for open teammates. I saw open ice ahead of me as some of their players were changing on the fly on their bench to my left. To my right, one of the opposition was covering my right wing. I cut left to get away from the player on the right but not so far that I got into reach of the fresh players coming off the bench.

Then I was cruising through the neutral zone (the area between the blue lines that doesn't belong to either team) and toward the lone defender between the goal and me. I faked right, then moved the puck left, using a cross-over (brought my right skate over my left to get more power into my change of direction) I cut left and around their defenseman. I was one-on-one with the goalie.

I quickly faked the puck forward (to freeze the goalie,) the to the right to my forehand (moving the goalie slightly), then left to my backhand (against the direction the goalie had moved, giving me a little room) and, in one motion, lifted the puck into the top netting under the crossbar four feet above the ice. It was my first ever coast-to-coast goal.

One thing that I got to experience in high school as a varsity hockey player was hearing the roar of the crowd. We weren't particularly good, so our games were rarely packed, save our adoring parents. However, when we played our cross-town rival, I (playing goalie in those days) made a few pretty good saves. Hearing the crowd chanting my name is something that still rings in my ears.

And while the only people cheering my goal were my teammates (not many fans of those games, especially those that start at 10:30 on a Monday night,) it's moments like those that will eventually be impossible. Maybe I'll hit a long putt once in a while on the golf course. But, to be able to do something physically like that - something that I've never done before - is something that I'll be able to remember for a long time.

So maybe that's why I'm writing this. Maybe I'll never come back and read it, but, for me, the act of writing it down will help burn it into my memory. And that's better than 4K resolution.

Healthy Cream Cheese Substitute

The recipe:

Roughly equal parts Greek yogurt and finely grated or crumbled cheese, such as cotija, feta, or parmesan.

Mix together until you have the consistency of cream cheese. Spread as needed.

I used it today on an egg sandwich and it was fantastic.