Author: awmalloyadmin

It’s the little things but this afternoon I’m very happy.

For the first time since we moved in four(!) years ago every nature strip in our little street is neat and tidy. It helps the bank is getting The Ferals’ house ready for sale, they’ve been a hold out for a long time, and today our new neighbour had someone come and remove the forest the previous owner had been growing.

I mowed our lawn, or more to the point sick looking brown ground covering, today so we’re all spick and span. I can only hope it won’t be another four years until this not-quite Christmas miracle repeats.

This is what happens when you start to exercise.

These are all clothes (and there’s still more to go through) that no longer fit me. At the start of the year the shirts were tight around the belly, now I look like I’m wearing a moo moo if I try them on. Almost all of them are, at this minute, being dropped off to the salvos with a few of the business type shirts heading to ebay.

Thankfully most of the items that need replacing seem to be winter gear which will give me time to save a little. My clear out was prompted by Rae clearing out her wardrobe (for the same reason). Our walk in robe now has about half the clothing it once did. Everything is slimming down around here.

Bert lost one yesterday and Moo one today. The Tooth Fairy is going to go broke.

We were watching the news tonight and there was a story about the Eureka climb – 88 flights of stairs in Melbourne’s tallest building. I ‘hmmmmmmmmmmmmd’ and Rae asked if I was contemplating it.

“I’d have to get in shape first.” was my response.

She gave me a bemused look, paused and said “Don’t you realise you are in shape?”.

I can honestly say this was the first time that thought had crossed my mind. I actually am in shape. Then all I could do was laugh that such a ridiculous notion was true. Sure I’d have to train for it but I’ve done some hard yards and got to the point where me doing something like this, even as a ‘walker’ not in the competitive stream, isn’t in the realms of science fiction.

Sometimes you really do have to have the bleeding obvious pointed out to you.

I do love my cat. I couldn’t see her in normal sleeping spot in the front yard and she wasn’t sleeping at the back door so I was a little worried.

Then I looked down the side of my desk.

She was keeping me company and I didn’t even know it.

We’re not a Halloween household here but kinder had a theme day today so my two little spooks ventured forth. One wicked witch and one grumpy ghost.

I started my get fit campaign in April, nice autumnal weather when you just grabbed a pair of jeans and a t-shirt in the morning, perhaps added a jumper later in the day. This may explain the problem I encountered this morning on our first 30 degree day for spring/summer.

I have no shorts.

Well actually I have a lot of shorts but none of them fit me any more – I can pull each of them on, button and fly done up and then they all promptly fall down again. If I needed any more confirmation that I’ve lost a fair stack of weight then that was it.

I managed to find one pair I could keep up and an emergency dash to the shops should see me right for summer. This healthy thing is getting expensive.

My mum said that trouble always comes in threes and so it appears this week.

First off was the dishwasher that decided to turn our kitchen in to an indoor swimming pool. I know it’s a first world problem but with dishes for six people every morning and night it’s something we decided to deal with straight away.

Second was the car. A minor service turned in to a minor raid on the bank. I acknowledge that I know nothing about cars but there’s always that underlying feeling you’re being ripped off when the mechanic tells you the long list of things they have found. Note to self, must explain to clients a lot better when I want them to spend money to make their site better.

And this morning confirmation on the worse trouble of all. It looks like my coffee machine has something wrong with it. I know, I know! How will I get through? Sigh. I love my coffee but after the last two hits to the wallet my caffeine habit is going to have to take a back seat until I find another machine on sale.

Hopefully the money gods have had their fill for now.

Back in August I mentioned that I was going to start C25k – that is, couch to 5 kilometres; a program designed to get you from the couch to running 5 kilometres in 9 weeks.

When I started it was a pie in the sky dream. I could huff and puff my way through half an hour of walking on the treadmill with maybe two minutes of jogging that would then cause me to collapse.

Well this morning I did it. I made it to half an hour of jogging. I can’t believe i achieved my aim, and so quickly. I jogged my thirty minutes straight through and I felt fantastic. When I look back on how far I’ve come in these few months I shake my head. If someone had have told me I’d be getting up at 5.30 in the morning (okay, today it was later but that’s a normal  weekday start now) to happily go and jog for half an hour! I would have laughed, and laughed, and laughed and gone and had quarter pounder for lunch at McDonald’s.

So now I’m consolidating, I’ll stick to the half hour jog for a couple of weeks before I contemplate my next step, maybe 8k or 10k. I’m also now concentrating on food. I’m using My Fitness Pal to keep an eye on what I eat and, oddly enough, I’m realising I have to eat more now as I’m still loosing weight and would prefer to stay where I am.

We’ve cancelled our Foxtel, again.

Last year Rae received a nice bonus at work and we decided to splurge on Foxtel, primarily for the football. We went with the HD Sports package and after a few months of introductory of pricing it reverted to $81 a month. Now the footy has finished we sat back and had a look at what we spent our money on.

The short answer was not much really.

We got to see a few extra games live that we wouldn’t have, mainly the interstate ones, but we didn’t watch many, if any, other games. It was great to have the games in HD (are you listening Channel 7!) but even then some were only upscaled from the 7 feed. Despite paying so much we still couldn’t watch the most important game of the year, no, not the Tigers v Doggies, I meant the Grand Final, in HD.

When it came to watching shows on Foxtel we didn’t. We may have had the music channels on a couple of times in ten months, maybe a flick through some channels on a handful of other occasions but with the options available on free to air television and the series we have on our media PC there was not one show Foxtel offered that we couldn’t source elsewhere. Not that we watch much television any more, it seems to be on in the background more for noise than entertainment.

So it was pretty much a no brainer and Foxtel has now gone. The money will most likelyn be redirected towards extra payments on the mortgage. We don’t regret having had it as we said all along it would be a trial and we will probably miss it for those few games we’d really like to watch next year but it’s simply not worth spending almost $1000 over 12 months just to watch a couple of matches.