Merry Christmas!

You should be able to click on that to open it in a larger format. We're very busy this holiday season, and will be out celebrating Christmas and then our 6 year anniversary this week! Apparently, the traditional gift for the 6th anniversary is candy! How great is that?!?

I haven't been posting as much recently, and probably won't until after New Year's, but I hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a new year full of hope.

Music & Recent Happenings

I guess I haven't posted what I've been up to recently, so here goes...

November 1st we finished the 12 Week Challenge! Though neither of us saw much of a difference in pounds, we both lost some inches, so that's great.

The weekend of November 3rd we went to Houston to celebrate Joe's Dad's birthday (which was Halloween). It was also exciting because he was starting a new job the Monday after we left! We got to spend some good time with Joe's parents and sister.

The next week we started our new schedule - since the Challenge was over, we needed a workout routine, and decided to add in some time for a few other things (like music and reading) we want to set aside time for. We now are doing our own Book Club. Just the two of us, even though that's a little funny. I got to pick the first book, so we both read a book that was my favorite in high school - Michael Crichton's Sphere. It was a good, quick read. I don't think Joe's picked the next book yet.

Last Friday night we went to a Ross King concert in Bryan. He's a gifted songwriter, and though he leads worship at our church, we rarely get to see him perform. It was great! We had also planned to see Clairmont that night (they were playing later nearby), but Joe started feeling sick to his stomach, so we went home. The next day he still felt nauseous, and had congestion and a fever. I was also all stopped up. We took it pretty easy all weekend, enjoying lots of chicken and dumplings. Joe missed some work the beginning of the week, but I think he's now mostly better.

This Friday is my little sister's 23rd birthday (weird - I feel about 24), so we'll get to celebrate with her. It's also the going away party for some friends of ours, which will be sad.

MOST EXCITING... a week or so ago, Joe finished recording a song he's been working on a while! It's an a cappella version of Ross King's "In Need". Yours truly also makes a cameo in this one. He also started a MySpace page with this song and two others. Check it out: http://myspace.com/joepeebles and add him as a friend if you do MySpace. If you'd like to have an mp3, let us know. And next time you see Joe, be sure to tell him how awesome he is!

Random Pictures

Joe seems to think I take interest in (and therefore, pictures of) some random things. I guess he's right, but they really seem interesting to me at the time! And, with a digital camera, my taking random pictures habit has only grown. Here's a few examples from the last couple of weeks:

I have a basil (which I keep accidentally pronouncing "basal") plant that I bought from A&M. When I planted it in the pot, I found a brown caterpillar on it. After chastising the little bug, I put him outside. Later that week, many more leaves had died on the plant. After some inspection, I found a green caterpillar with a guilty expression on his face (he also got moved to the front yard). A week later, the plant looked horrible and I ended up finding 5 more little green caterpillars! My stern talking-to had apparently not worked. Each time I had pulled off all the partially eaten leaves (because I was afraid it was a disease killing it), so I was surprised with even more leaves looked bad the week before now. I pulled off the bad leaves, and in the pile found a chubby green caterpillar. Here goes:


Next, an injury. For the 12 Week Challenge we had an obstacle course to compete in. It involved running, stooping under something while running, going up and down a LOT of bleachers, mini-hurtles, throwing a weighted ball, doing dips, and more running. We had to do three laps. Now my middle name, Anne, means graceful. People who know me well have pointed out that it must mean full-of-grace (in the forgiving sense) and not mean be actually being graceful (in the ballerina sense). They are right, and it gets much, much worse when I'm tired. To cut the story short, on the second lap I ended up tripping on a hurtle and slamming into the ground. I landed mostly on my right knee and left hip, so that's where the worst of the bruising happened, though scrapes could be found in many more places. Thanks almost entirely to the encouragement of others, I finished all three laps! (Life-lesson: dips on very cold bleachers when your hands have been scraped raw are VERY painful!) I walked funny for a couple of days, but recovered. I thought about taking a picture of the wind pants I had on (with a huge hole in them), but abstained. They were my favorite pair, you'll probably still see me wearing them. Here's part of the bruise on my hip almost a week after the incident (sadly, the biggest part is cut off, but you can see it start on the bottom left):
Finally, another caterpillar-like thing. This is from just tonight (yes, this is how I spend some of my Saturday nights). Joe ran in (after I had spent 15 minutes photographing the creature both inside and outside) and said he got dibs on blogging rights. So I guess I will just show the pictures: (Yes, he had red stripes. No, I did not touch him.)

edit: If you have trouble finding the green caterpillar, he's on the middle leaf on the right half of the picture.

P.P.S. Turns out, Joe was kidding when he said he had dibs on the caterpillar story (because it was obvious that I cared about it and he didn't). Oh well, I'll leave room for a little mystery. kp

In Our Free Time

I haven't written in a week and a half! Sorry - I've been really busy. At the end of the blog, I'll make up for it, I promise.

Here's what we've been up to...

The weekend of the 14-16 we went to a family reunion (my maternal grandmother's side) at Lake Conroe. It turned out that everyone (other than my grandmother, parents, and my sister and her husband) was just coming for Saturday afternoon, but we were there the whole weekend. We ate barbeque, played putt-putt, swam, and even tried archery. I met a lot of extended family for the first time, which was neat.

Last week marked the half-way point for our 12 week challenge. We took measurements and weight. Neither Joe nor I were very happy with the results, which is disappointing. We didn't gain weight (even though we can tell we've added muscle), so we must have lost some fat... but it'd be nice to be able to tell it more.

We had the first meeting with our new small group from church (called ComGroup for Community Group) on Wednesday, minus three people. I'm excited about the group this year.

Joe spend this past Saturday in Nacogdoches at a Conflab (I'll let you ask him what that means) with some men from the type of church he grew up in. So I had a project day! I pretty much cleaned all day, but I did get started on the embroidery for a bedcover (half quilt half comforter) I'm making for us. I also experimented with drying our clothes outside. It was a hot, sunny day and our dryer doesn't work well, so they actually dried faster than if I had used the machine. I still fluffed the clothes with a dryer sheet (but no heat) for a little bit after they were dry. Wow, that sentence makes my life sound really boring. On Sunday we were given the first fruits of a friend's chicken (the first eggs they have laid since my friends got the hens), which was very neat. (See, that's not so boring!)

Okay, now for the reward I promised...

Sunday night Joe and I set aside some time to record music together. After a while, we decided we needed to take a break from the song we were working on and get back to our roots. Please enjoy this work of art.

A NEW RECORD and 12 Week Challenge

I'd like to be the first to congratulate Joe on complaining about McDonald's in all three of his last three posts. Well done.

By the end of the second week of the challenge, I wasn't quite as sore as I had been. So Monday night I decided to do the extra workout (we had the option to get extra nutritional advice or workouts, I chose workouts) Brad had written for me. I also walked (not too fast, but enough to make my legs sore) for about an hour with Sesalee. Then Tuesday I had my workout. It's now Thursday, and I have my workout this evening, and I'm STILL sore. Pretty much all over.

Oh yeah, and this morning I drove behind the FIZZIX / John Galt car again. No new developments there. They also have an ATM metal decal and a Aggie Band window sticker on their car.

12 Week Challenge: beginning of week 3

Well, I made it through the first two weeks! I've been sore, but usually it's concentrated in one part of my body, so it's not too bad. My legs have hardly been sore at all, but every single day I work out get so tight I think they'll explode. In the cardio room I just have to keep telling myself, "Don't slow down, you think you're going to die, but you didn't last time - you weren't even sore the next day." (I don't say that aloud, but only because I don't have the breath.) Hopefully this week will get better like they say it does after two weeks... though I know they don't stop pushing you!

I also have some pictorial inspiration to go along with my song, specifically the "swimmin' in jelly" line. I'll share it with you:

12 Week Challenge: Day 2

I made it! My arms actually felt better while I was working out (mostly because they were warm and I could extend them all the way), and I got a better stretch in this time (since I wasn't passing out). I ate lunch of salad and chicken around noon, an apple at 3:30, a piece of whole wheat bread at 4:50, and a banana at 5:00 before the 5:30 workout, so I much better fueled.

(side note: right now it's storming REALLY bad with lots of thunder and lightning!)

My arms hurt a lot last night, but I took some pain medicine and poured on some icy-hot (actually, ours is "all natural" and called sore-no-more). So woo hoo! Just this afternoon I was able to stretch my right arm out straight again, and my left arm doesn't hurt unless I move it out of it's comfort-zone. My legs are doing just fine, mostly because I still have decent muscles in my legs and my heart / lungs give out way before they do when I'm doing cardio-training. I'm working on that, though!

My birthday is tomorrow, and Joe's got surprises planned that should take up the whole day. I'm excited!

Some people where I work are preparing for Hurricane Dean to hit next week, thinking it may hit Galveston. Joe's family lives on that side of Houston and had mandatory evacuations a couple of years ago for Hurricane Rita (it was right after Katrina). It took them between 12 and 14 hours to get out of Houston. I know it's supposed to be better now, but I hope Dean doesn't pose a big enough threat for them to require evacuations.

12 Week Challenge: Day1... plus some irony

Joe and I started the 12 Week Challenge (now 12WC) with BCS Fitness yesterday (Tuesday). It's basically personal trainers working with small groups (I think we have 2 trainers and 8 people) on both cardio and weight training. The other 3 people who were there yesterday (3 were out of town) have all completed at least one 12WC directly before this one. We've got tons of friends (well, more than 10, I'm sure) who have done it and loved it. Our friends who didn't stay on for additional 12 weeks are still working out on their own, too!

We were on a wait list to get into a class, so we just found out on Monday that we could start Tuesday. We met with Brad (the owner / a personal trainer / a guy at our church) during the day Tuesday to fill out the paperwork and talk about our goals. He said specifically that we needed to eat a snack about 30 minutes before our workout and gave us a list of things that made good snacks. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to get any snacks before the training (it started at 5:30, so we drove there from work and changed clothes once we got there) and all I had to snack on at work was popcorn. So I ate that during the car ride. (Yes, that is obvious foreshadowing.)

I liked the trainers, and the other people (all women - there may be men who just weren't there yesterday) also doing the 12WC were really, really nice. Everyone was super-encouraging, which was great for me because I REALLY SUCKED. I knew I was in very bad shape (and that was one of my two major goals - to improve cardiovascular-wise), and yesterday proved it to everyone else. I did push myself (and received much pushing from the trainers), so I don't feel bad about the effort I put forth. But at the end I got dizzy and kept shaking and couldn't finish the workout (I missed the leg press and most of the stretching at the end). So, that's why you don't just snack on popcorn when you are about to work out! I think I was trying not to cry for about 40% of the time. Last night, I talked to a friend who did the last challenge and is doing it again (and has gone down 3 sizes in clothes while losing only 3.5 pounds, that's some serious muscle she's got!) and she said that she cries almost every time in the weight room, so that made me feel better.

This is already much longer than I intended, so I'll skip over the details (like how painful it was to reach for the shampoo in the shower). I would like to get to the irony, however... this should reward all of you who are still actually reading this!

As I tried to ignore the screams of my muscles last night, I told Joe I needed to remind myself of all the things I'll be able to do once I start getting in better shape. So I started to sing a (made up) motivational song. The first verse went like this:

Liftin' a mountain,
Swimmin' in jelly,
Runnin' around the block
without gettin' smelly!

Now, Joe did not understand the swimming in jelly line. For the record, I made it up before I thought of smelly to rhyme with it, so that was not my motivation. I like to swim, and if I were really strong I could swim through jelly (at least as much as I could lift a mountain). We continued to make up verses, and I was being silly and kept putting the weakest syllable on the longest note and that sort of thing. I asked Joe why he was laughing so much, and and he said "You have unique syllabic stress," to which I replied, "Mmmm... that makes me hungry for sausage. What is that word, salobic?" (I thought at the time that it sounded like Slovacek, a brand of sausage around here.) Joe said "Sill-LAH-bic." It took me a minute, and then I said, "Oh! SILL-uh-bic stress!" And Joe broke into laughter in which the only intelligible words were "the... irony."