Eric is a Flyer!

No, not a Philadelphia Flyer (he’s a big Blackhawks’ fan and has me watching more hockey this year than anytime in my life), but a Dayton Flyer!

He will be attending the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio starting in the fall and will be majoring in Engineering. 

As you may remember, Dayton won the NIT basketball tournament this past spring.

I’m Losing Weight!

In an effort to continue with the truly mundane postings, I’d thought I’d let everyone know of my recent weight loss. It’ll also help to keep me motivated in continuing to lose weight.

Every year from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, I just pig out way too much. I just go nuts at all the big meals and with the holiday cookies. So I was at home New Year’s day, having just had steak and lobster tail (actually two and a half lobster tails) the night before, feeling uncomfortable because my pants were too tight. The kids were watching “The Biggest Loser” on some cable channel where these people were losing 40% or more of their body weight over many months. So I felt a little guilty and figured, “If these people can lose over a hundred pounds, I could show a little will power and knock off twenty pounds or so.”

So Eric challenged me to lose twenty pounds by the Ides of March. (He just read “Julius Ceasar” at school.) So I decided too take him up on the challange!

I got on the scale and I’m was 190 pounds. I’m not really sure how accurate our scale is, so I’ll re-phrase that and say it indicated 190 pounds. I thought it was going to be more than that! When I graduated college 25 years ago, I was 155, just to give you an idea.

So I pretty much just stopped pigging out. Didn’t really starve myself, just ate more sensibly. Veronica has limited me to only one box of Peanut Butter Tandy Takes a week (six packs of two in each box). Mary Ann got me a case of 24 for Christmas, so I still have a lot of those I can eat. Veronica has hidden the case somewhere in the house, I’m not sure where!

So after one week, I lost 6 pounds. Sunday morning is my official weigh-in time.

Yesterday, another 3 pounds. 9 out of 20 pounds in two weeks is making me feel pretty good about things with another 2 months until the Ides of March!

I haven’t even begun exercising yet. I hope to throw that into the mix this week.

I’ll update the blog on a weekly basis to let you know how it’s going. I hope everyone finds this mundane enough.

Eric and Cross Country

As some of you know, Eric is running on his school’s cross country team. This is his second year on the team. Last year he went out for the team just so that he would be in better shape for his soccer club team, but he really ended up loving it.

This year has been a lot of fun again. Their first meet was at Fox River Grove, who were the state champions last year. Eric surprised everyone and won that race. He told us one of his goals for the year was to win a race, so he made it the first one. After that, he took several third places. At a big invitational meet, he took 15th out of over a hundred runners. The first 20 runners receive ribbons. No one at his school had ever qualified for a ribbon until Eric did it last year.

For a few weeks, Eric wasn’t feeling well, so he didn’t do as well as normal at a few meets. Once he started feeling better, the coach told him to take it easy for one more race, just to be sure.

Another one of Eric’s goals is to qualify for the state tournament. Yesterday was the conference meet and he finished in 8th place with a 2 mile time of 12:33. That qualified him for sectionals which are Saturday morning. We figure he’ll have to finish somewhere in the top 25 or so to make it to state. The top 3 teams get to send 7 runners, and the next top 10 or so runners also qualify.

So we’ll see how he does and look for another posting on Saturday.