From Buddha to Adonis (body type) – the 60 Day Challenge

It’s scary to look at some pictures from just a few years ago. It’s so easy to just let life happen and all of a sudden you have sleep apnea. I’ve been telling myself, I need to get back down to 170lbs for the past… since 7 years maybe? Well this post is more of a motivation for myself than anything.

Life Time Fitness has this 60-day-challenge where you get some access to other classes, and “virtual coaches” and diet recipes that help you get to either a goal weight or overall “whole body transformation”. You can actually win some loot. Now there is an associated cost, but it helps drive incentive to perpetual physical activity. 

I feel like I want to join and be on my way to a healthy BMI, but then I start to make excuses… I already don’t have the time to dedicate 100% to working out, going to the fitness classes (which is true, the times are not compatible with current life), I will not have any use for the recipe’s that they offer, and why should I use a virtual coach, how would that help?

Well… as I tell my patients, you have to make the time. There is always time to do something. You may not want to do it, but there is always a way to find it or make it. For instance, instead of working out now, I am sitting here writing this blog (which by the way, I commend anyone who does this regularly because it is hard to do well). As I made the excuses in my head, I realized, how can I expect my patients to take anything I say seriously if I can’t do it myself. 

My current BMI is 26.4 (near my all time high). I do have a family history of vascular dementia, stroke, heart attack and diabetes. So why the heck would I not take my health seriously, and take my own advice. Now As I write this, I have already started to implement some Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC). On my professional Facebook Page, I have been trying to track my physical activity via PolarBeat. I like tracking my heart rate during exercise as it give me a better idea of the calorie use. I also sport a FitBit (mainly due to the benefit we get from our health insurance). You do NOT need these tech gadgets to be healthy, but I like gadgets.

I frequently ask my patient to use myFitnessPal to track calories and activity to help them stay focused on their goal weight loss. They have Apps you can use for both Android and iOS. I think you can actually watch my MyFitnessPal Diary here. http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/alphapenguin

So back to this 60-day challenge. I’ve tried sticking with P90x in the past but can’t get beyond day 30. Working out about 90 minutes a day takes a helluva time away from the day. Personal trainers are expensive. You know what though, not good excuses. Even if it’s just 40, or even 30, or even 20 minutes a day, it’s better than nothing. Finding ways to multitask works best. Unless you are superhuman and get up at 4 am to workout like some people I know, great ways to get physical activity in is to be active when you choose to be sedentary. Sounds obvious, but I mean instead of sitting down for 1-2 hrs watching NetFlix or a basketball game, get on a stationary bike or a treadmill (if you have one) and watch the Netflix. If you don’t have one, there are ways to get creative to do something. Now YouTube has a lot of great workout channels/videos with exercises. If you want to spend the money, there is the BeachBody On Demand, which gives you access to most of the BeachBody Material via the Android/iOS apps or via the website.

To keep myself motivated and accountable, and maybe to help motivate others that know me (or even the ones that don’t), I decided to publicly journal my strive for fitness. I’d love to have that six pack, but I think I would love even more is to not die of a heart attack prematurely or succumb to diabetes. As far as I know, I have been lucky so far with my biometric screens. Also, it would be nice not to have sleep apnea.

My current Plan to stay accountable:

GOAL: Weight loss down to 170lbs

Commitment:

  • must work out at least 20-40 min in a day, 5-6 days a week, and will provide proof. Will likely update blog weekly. maybe daily? To be seen.
  • must log food/calorie intake daily (will be using myFitnessPal), as above, may update only weekly.
  • will post weekly weigh-in weight.
  • no Fast foods.

how long am I going to last…

[dare i post a before picture here?]

 

Feel free to comment with any thoughts.

 

Introducing Penguin Friends: Vivi’s New Youtube channel

Vivi and Juliette love watching youtube, specifically this channel where this lady plays with toys or reveals what toy is hidden in random cups of goo.

I asked Vivi if she wanted to make videos of this as well. Well she said yes. She has always been a ham for the lime light:-) I also figure it’s a way to catalog her antics.

Here’s the intro:

Indoor Koi Pond: good idea? maybe not so much.

I was very excited when I initially started my indoor koi pond project. I figured my basement was a perfect place, as it was not yet finished, and the space was available.

Well, this year we decided to finish the basement, and I had to take the pond apart. I intended on rebuilding a new pond, and purchased a fish tank to hold them temporarily. After further thought, multiple discussions with MommyMD, we realized that a pond in a house with children may be bad idea. First off, to have a proper koi pond, you want to be able to look down and enjoy seeing the fish swim around. You dont really see koi in a fish tank (at leat I don’t). If you have young kids, you know they climb on EVERYTHING. They will get INTO everything. Even if your child is awesome and obedient, your neighbor or friend’s kid may be an idiot. Regarding liability, we kept thinking about what if… what if ViviBear or JulietteBear fell in, or any child fell in and drowned?  Yah, that would be bad.

The other problem that I almost did not catch was black mold. I figured the pond would produce a lot of moisture, but I thought my basement was sufficiently dry enough that this would not be an issue ever. Well I never looked behind the insulation until a month ago. Around the first week of Jan 2014, as the basement is being insulated, we had a really bad freeze. Temps around -5 to 0 deg F. The basement was very warm but I could feel a draft, so I pulled the insulation back and saw some ice formation. You can see more about that here.

Black Mold
Black Mold and Bowing of Particle Board 

 

So we got the mold treated

Mold Treated

Initially I was torn about how to place a Koi Pond in my new basement. I was even going to install security glass paneling around it like at a zoo, but that would have been ridiculously costly I would think. Sad to say that child endangering is not what sealed my decision [Vivi and Jette Bear, I really do love you and don’t want you to drown, but I really wanted a Koi Pond], but the excessive moisture and mold issue is.

Though I still think Koi should be looked at from above, I will settle for an inwall fish tank

Future inwall Aquarium

 

More pictures to come of the happy fishies once the project is done.

To see more projects by the contractor finishing my basement, check out Werenercontracting.com

UFS and Debian: Migrating from FreeNAS to OpenMediaVault

I have been trying to migrate away from freeNAS for the past 2 years now since the advent of Open Media Vault. I’ve come across the issue of accessing data from my UFS filesystem drives ( freeNAS uses has the option to use UFS being based on BSD platform). Suffice it to say it was difficult to access the drive since I did not have any computers loaded with BSD. I had windows/mac and Linux (ubuntu). Scouring the web, there were many options, but I did not have the free time or spare computers to fully explore how to do this. I remember last year I found some info how to do this but did not have the time to follow through. Today I was determined to do it.

Basically, I needed to access and transfer files from an UFS drive and back it up  to either an NTFS or EXT-4 drive, then I could re-purpose the old UFS drive.

Simplest way for me was to mount the UFS drive on my Ubuntu computer, and then move the files. Ubuntu does not support UFS out of box, but with the help of this post, I was able to get things working in a Jiffy.

Mounting UFS file systems in Ubuntu should be straight forward. Follow these simple steps to make sure that your are mounting your FreeNAS disks properly in Ubuntu:

Load the UFS module (or make sure its loaded)

sudo modprobe ufs

Make a directory where to mount the files on

mkdir ~/ufs_mount

To find out which device holds your UFS file system use the command fdisk -l, note which device you intend to mount.

Mount the file system to the directory your previously created

sudo mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sdb1 /home/<your_username>/ufs_mount

(where: sdb1 is the UFS partition you want to mount and <your_username> is the your current username where the intended mounting point was created previously.

(Credits to Bruno Pereira user on AskUbuntu.com)

The “fdisk -l” did not seem to output what I was looking for, but I just used Gparted to figure out the partition name in question.

Just wanted to share this tid bit.

Hot to grow a mango from seed PART 2

IMAG1404
sprouting in the containers

 

check out the initial steps to growing a mango from seed or wonderful methods of eating the mango prior to getting the seed

Here is a follow up on my mango growing activities. I figure they are easy enough to sprout, might as well do as many as I can. They do make great gifts, but unfortunately they do require some care.

After about 3-4 weeks

IMAG1405
Sprouting Roots

 

After 6 weeks

IMAG1439
seeing leaves

 

About 7-8 Weeks

Growing
7-8 Weeks of growth

They need to be transplanted into a pot now. I have been putting this off, really not sure why.

 

more to come…