Today I participated in our gyms annual CrossFit competition.
It was really hard. Yeah, really hard. But it was fun too.
We were on teams of four, two guys and two girls. And I agreed to be on a RX team, which is basically signing up for pain 😜
Here were the four events.
Event 1 – B17: Flying Fortress
This is a Bombers CrossFit special. I’ve done the workout twice in a scaled fashion, never the RX.
The workout was five rounds of 17 back squats at 135 lbs and a 400 meter run.
The tricky part was that we had to all squat in formation at the same time. The first few rows were okay, but rounds 3, 4, and 5 destroyed my legs.
Event 2 – Skills Competition
In this round there were four max effort events that each team mate had to do one of the following moves:
- Max rep muscle ups
- Max deadlift
- Max standing high jump
- Max L Sit hold
I was drafted to do the standing high jump. And even though it was 30+ minutes after the first event, my legs hadn’t recovered.
I ended up getting 21 inches which was just short of 10 feet in the air. If I could have a step to approach, I’m sure I could have gotten 25+ inches.
Event 3 – Three Legged Race
This was a partner workout of back-to-back-to-back girl workouts:
- Karen (150 wall balls)
- Annie (50-40-30-20-10 double unders and sit ups)
- Fran (21-15-9 thrusters and pull ups)
We had a pretty good strategy and I had a super human partner.
I did 30 wall balls, then Travis did 90, then I finished it off with 30 more and Karen was finished.
I moved straight to Annie and did 50 double unders and 50 sit ups. Travis did the next two rounds of 40 and 30 and I completed the last rounds of 20 and 10.
Finally Travis did the hard pars of Fran, 21 thrusters, 21 pull ups and 15 thrusters. Then I did the rest of 15 pull ups and 9 thrusters and 9 pull ups.
We got second in this workout and we were all exhausted by the end of it.
Event 4 – The Obstacle Course
This was a goofy short event where we had to pull a sled with 180 lbs on it and maneuver around obstacles and twice pick the sled up and carry it over an obstacle.
The twist on this one was we had to all for be touching the whole time.
Since we had super strong Travis, he picked the sled up himself and we got first on this one.
Overall it was a fun, yet exhausting day. I am not looking forward to seeing how my legs feel the next few days!
Today we celebrated our ten year anniversary.
Usually we would have liked to celebrate with a trip to somewhere with a beach, but with little man only being 4 months old, figured we’d postpone a trip until next year.
So our every-five-year-picture-in-a-picture was a boring shot in our backyard.
And as a tradition, I didn’t buy any gifts or a card (as cards are an expensive waste of someone else’s words) but wrote a poem in Melody’s book of cards.
Happy 10 Year Anniversary!
Did you know that we’ve been married for 521 weeks / 315 million seconds?
Time for a poem to celebrate 🙂
Ten years ago it was a day
straight from heaven
We got to celebrate with our
friends in 2007
Nine years ago we
adjusted to married life,
we lived on a college campus
as husband and wife
Eight years ago we
bought something new
a new car for us
that definitely wasn’t blue
Seven years ago we
moved to the city
that place in Galena
sure was pretty
Six years ago we
moved out ‘west’
so far I can say
I like this house best
Five years ago we
took a trip to paradise
the hiking and the beaches
certainly were nice
Four years ago we
went to Spain and more
lugged suitcases around
and wished to stay on the first floor
Three years ago we
got ready for baby one
before kids, remember
how much we could get done?
Two years ago we
had fun with our first baby
oh that time was a delight,
but she was such a crybaby
One year ago we
were in Spain on a fun trip
we explored a lot on planes,
trains, busses but not a ship
Now it’s time to
celebrate year number ten
I can believe how much
has happened since then
Junk stores, blogs, and
speaking gigs oh my
I’m excited to see the other
things that will make the years pass by
Thank you for being
on this journey with me
maybe on our 20th
we can spend it in Hawaii
Transmit is my favorite utility for FTP and connecting to other cloud accounts and today Transmit 5 make things so much nicer!
Panic at have released a great update to my favorite file transfer app: Seven years after the first release of Transmit 4, our well-loved and widely-used macOS file transfer app, we sat down with an incredibly exhaustive list of ideas, and — this’ll sound like I’m exaggerating but I’m mostly sure I’m not — we […]
It’s one of my favorite CrossFit workouts and today I was the fastest 😃
In the first minute, you run one shuttle run length. The next minute you do two, then three and so on.
I finished round 15 as time expired and got 9 of the round of 16.
We’ve been saying for awhile that we need to form relationships with people who live near us and this weekend we got an opportunity to do that.
On Saturday morning, my wife hosted a group of moms who came over, with their kids and let the kids roam free in our backyard.
Then, in the evening, we hosted a block party for our whole street. I’m ashamed to say, we met some of neighbors for the very first time, even though we’ve lived here for nearly seven years.
Of the 21 houses on our cul-de-sac, we had seven families stop in throughout the evening. It was a lot of fun and we will have to do it again.
We are going to be intentional about getting to know more of our neighborhood and spend at least part of a weekend each month hosting neighbors at our house.
I’ve been using Duolingo for about the last two years trying to up my Spanish fluency.
Yesterday I downloaded Memrise (again, as I’ve used it before) to my phone again to give me a new challenge.
This app seems to focus on listening, which is usually the hardest part about learning a language, able to hear was a fast native tongue says.
I haven’t outgrown the free plan yet, so it’s free to try 🙂
I checked my personal email for the first time since Saturday this evening.
My inbox was full with nearly 200 messages, but nothing was urgent and only needed to send a few replies. Plus I was able to process them all in about 30 minutes.
I’m going to start checking my inbox only a few times per week and see how that goes 🙂
How often do you check email?
This boy is a few days shy of 4 months and he’s been actively rolling over the last few days!
Soon we will be baby protecting everything again.
Since returning back to work from paternity leave, I’ve found it hard to concentrate for long periods of time. It seems like there is so much going and my mind goes in a zillion directions.
Today, I started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport in hopes of learning some techniques to exercise my brain muscles so I can concentrate better.
I’ll report back when I’m finished reading 😁
Just got home from Nashville and too tired to write a post about our weekend trip.
Here’s a shot of me and the little guy at brunch.
(He wasn’t this smiley the whole 5+ hours home, but we only had to make one stop!)
A few weeks ago, I mentioned I had completely cut out all forms of sugar and grains/gluten.
I didn’t have a plan to stop or cheat on my plan but when in Nashville this weekend we found a great bakery that had paleo donuts. By definition a paleo donut fits into my criteria for food and I was excited to have a treat.
Their was some miscommunication between me and the donut lady and only one of the donuts we got was paleo (the smallest one in the box).
So I ended up having a cheat day and boy was it a good one. I had a S’more one that had chocolate icing and marshmallow filling.
Back on track tomorrow 🙂
Somehow I missed this massive thing in my garden!
This looks like something we would make 😂
Place 1,013 I do not fit in: CrossFit tournaments. I think even the toddlers had protein in their bottles. We went to the West Coast CrossFit Regionals in Portland on Saturday. Garr loooovvvveeeesssss CrossFit. Like, gets up at 3:30 am every weekday to do CrossFit loves. He’s also insanely good at it and I will be […]
Someone rode her decorated tricycle in the parade in our neighborhood and had a blast!
Another new toy, complements of BidFTA.
Here’s my kiddos with my sister.
It can be summed up with this simple request
We took advantage of our babysitter staying until 4pm today and went for a late lunch without the kids.
We found a new restaurant called Table 33. Their menu was loaded with great gluten free options, like my chicken and waffles with home made sriracha sauce I had, yum!
In today’s workout, it had 30 muscle ups.
I did a combination of ring and bar, but I got all thirty of them.
CrossFit plus gluten/sugar eating is making me stronger 🙂
Looks like if I wanted to quit my day job, I should go into farming zucchinis.
Here’s just a portion of what I’ve harvested this year (we’ve already ate some).
This piece of furniture once was a hutch that went over a desk. We got rid of the broken desk, but it still makes for a nice shelf.
Tonight, I cut the legs off so I could mount it to the wall.
Er, Lake City Captains versus the Dayton Dragons.
Beautiful day for a baseball game, especially when the box seat tickets were free 🙂
Someone likes picking raspberries with Grandpa
Today on our way to Grandma’s house, we made a quick stop in Whole Foods for some yummy snacks and a potty break.
Since it was raining out, I asked her to get in the car and take her rain coat off so I could buckle her while in the car and not get soaked.
And then, this happened:
This little guy had a rough day from some vaccines yesterday, but he’s definitely getting more stable in the sitting department (he’s heavily leaning on sissy’s couch here).
During my paternity leave, usually made breakfast for myself everyday. I’ve really enjoyed having a hearty breakfast, especially if I go to 5am CrossFit.
Here’s what my breakfast has looked like durin the last week (minus the potatoes)
I start by sautéing some eggs, then add some veggies from a salad mix from Trader Joe’s. Next I add some butter and spinach and any other vegetable we have in the fridge.
Then I add either 3 or 4 eggs and topped with some Mozzarella cheese.
The waffle is a grain free waffle made primarily of cashews and are amazing.
I have been avoiding grains, anything that isn’t a whole food, and sugar (and substitutes like honey or maple syrup) for the last 6.5 weeks.
It was tough at first constantly craving sugar, but now I’m trying to see how long I can keep the streak going.
I’m starting to see some great improvements at the gym and I’m down about 8 pounds of fat in that time (says my smart scale).
On my first day back to work today, our baby sitter shows up with a 100+ degree fever.
Not wanting to risk our kids to get sick, I sent her home and we found a friend to come and play Barbies for a few hours with our daughter, while I tried to work with our 3 month old son.
I was able to be about 80% focused while he slept (since I kept glancing at the video monitor) and about 50% focused while he was awake.
Luckily I had gotten up at 4am to start working, so I was able to get five hours of “catch up and see what’s happened since I left on paternity leave”
Still fun to hang out with this smiley boy:
Today is my last day of my 12-week paternity Automattic generously gives new parents.
These last few weeks have been awesome but I’m thrilled to be going back for several reasons.
Adult conversations
On Monday’s, Tuesday’s and Thursday’s I have been watching the kids from 6:45a until about 5:00p. Typically during this time, it was me and the kids. Conversations revolved around Barbies and her play kitchen.
I Miss WordPress
On average over the last three I’ve spent about 60 minutes on the computer. I had to find nuggets of time to record my weekly podcast.
Goals and Projects
I’ve had to postpone my goals and project and few things were checked off my to do list (mainly because of the lack of computer time). I found that instead of doing household projects at the end of the day, I’d try to catch up on my email or other small computer tasks.
By going back to work, my goal is to finish everything computer related before dinner time, then work on home projects after the kids are asleep.
Sure I’m going to miss all the fun mornings walking to the park, playing Candyland at lunch and all the other joys of being a stay at home dad.
Thankfully, I get to work from home and our kids will be here with our nanny, so I can be active in their lives each day.
It’s a joy to be a dad and send time with these kiddos:
Duolingo now has a feature to chat with a bot. I think it’s more fun than just answering quiz questions. Plus it’s more real to have to answer in a dialogue fashion.
Maybe it will help me become fluent in Spanish 😜
Last week we released version 4.8 “Evans” of WordPress, as I write this it has had about 4.8 million downloads already. The release was stable and has been received well, and we were able do the merge and beta a bit faster than we have before. When I originally wrote about the three focuses for…
Great thoughts on what skills and abilities are needed as a Happiness Engineer by one of my colleagues.
Since joining Automattic (and to the annoyance of some people, I’m sure) I tend to go on about how much I enjoy my job and the company itself. I’ve often been asked what it takes and what you need to know to get the job. Especially since I called people to join me in my last post, I thought I would put together my thoughts and some resources which I can point people to or they can hopefully find through searching online as well.
I’m going to go a bit further and not only talk about what you need to do to get the job, but what I think you need to be successful in the Happiness Engineer role at Automattic. Please note that there are a lot of points here and you don’t have to be an expert in all of them to apply, but having a good understanding…
View original post 2,613 more words
‘Tis the time of year for 90%+ humidity days in Ohio.
70 degrees and 95% humidity during my morning workout completely drenched my shirt.
The broccoli is growing great in our tower garden!
I was reading an old version of Men’s Fitness tonight, and I read this article “Ask Men’s Fitness: How Often Should I Wash My Jeans?” and the recommendation was at least three times per year? Really?
Seems like they should be washed more than that 🙂
Looks like summer will be hitting us in full force over the next week.
My zucchini and pumpkins plants are doing quite well this year.
When dad’s in charge of the wardrobe for the day, we all wear WordPress (or WooCommerce).
I’m pretty sure these two are related.
Unloading the car the other day, I broke off an RCA cable for the auxiliary input.
After a bit of searching Google, I found the method to fix it and it worked like a charm.
I love the internet 🙂
Do you love helping people use WordPress?
Here’s a job for you!
We always come home from Grandma and Grandpa’s with more than we bring.
