The 100 Plan

Today's personal training session with Lisa featured two things. One, that she's taking the month of August off, and two, since it'll be about five weeks before I see her next, that I get to do the "100 Plan".

The 100 plan is deviously good. You start small and work your way up. To wit, my new regime is:

• 10 standing bent over rows
• 10 ab crunches on the exercise ball
• 10 chest presses on the bench
• 10 squats on the leg squat machine

Repeat 5 times, or a total of 50 each.

Each week, add 2 repetitions to each individual exercise (i.e. 12, 14, 16, 18, 20). By the last week in August, I'll be doing five rounds of 20 each, or 100 of each per workout.

Scary. Cool. Very cool.

The 2007 Vancouver Folk Music Festival

After a week of being on the Sunshine Coast on a lovely vacation, we returned just in time to spend Saturday and Sunday at the Vancouver International Folk Festival.

The Saturday was amazingly hot and I managed not to get burned, but I sure did get a lot of colour... Sunday was nicely overcast and being right by the water, it was lovely and cool.

I have to freely admit that while I always have a good time at the Folk Fest, pretty much none of the artists at the show are on my normal music radar. The music they play there is the kind that is really enjoyable live, especially when two or three different bands/artists are in a collaboratory set and jam together, but for the most part doesn't really translate well as something you'd listen to at home. In part it's because at a concert venue, you're actively engaged with the artist and the music, but at home music is often relegated to the background.

My wife had a lovely definition for folk music, that goes something like this: folk music is music that is consumed by the people who create it. It's a lovely definition that works on several levels.

I was talking to one of my good friends who has been volunteering at the Folk Fest for over a decade now about how the festival runs and learned some interesting things. For instance, the festival does not pay its performers (one of the few if not only major festivals in North America to do so), and as such, they usually don't know until about May what the final lineup will be. Hence why, unlike say Mission or other festivals, they don't post the schedule/lineup until June. Of course, the few "big name" groups/artists are usually booked as much as a year in advance, but until the whole lineup is known, the schedule can't be published.

Anyways, to cut to the chase, I had a lot of fun at the festival this year, and we bought three CDs:

• The Carolina Chocolate Drops: old time music from North Carolina. Fiddle, banjo, percussion, and very fun.
  
• Tapia eta Leturia: a Basque ensemble encompassing accordion, fiddle, keyboard, and tambourine. The tambourine player is unnatural - I've never heard or seen it played like that before. Has to be seen to be believed.
• Ndidi Onukwulu: This fine Torontonian has an amazing voice and an incredibly fun stage presence. She spans all manner of genres, and has endless energy.

Progress

My personal trainer has been working with me for about four months now - we meet every three weeks or so, which has felt like the right amount of time. She refreshes my workout plan, and then I execute the plan just long enough to feel comfortable with it and ... I do something else.

So what's the prognosis so far?

Pretty good I have to say. When I started, I was doing an indoor cycling class twice a week. Now I'm still doing that but adding two Lisa-designed workouts, and now that the weather is finally nice, I'm cycling once a week - if only to prepare for the 60km Ride for MS in mid-August.

So let's see... in four months I have...

• distinctly improved my overall fitness level.
  
• distinctly improved my posture.
• strengthened my back and abs (those core muscles you always hear about).
• almost doubled the weight I can lift/push/press/pull around the weight room.

One thing that has not been cooperative is the scale. While I've lost a little over twelve pounds so far, it's definitely been a case of three steps forward, two steps back. Averaged out, it's a little over half a pound a week. While I know logically that losing weight and more importantly, keeping it off, is a long and laborious process, emotionally it can get quite frustrating. And as someone whose reaction to stress or feeling blue is reaching for the munchies...

However, onward and upward - all progress is good! It's summer and fresh fruit and veggies about, and I'm getting enough sleep and sunshine to get me to the gym four times a week, and that's all very positive for me indeed.

My current workout, for anyone interested is...

• Three sets of 8 each on the rowing, chest press, and hamstring curl machines.
• Three sets of 12 each lunges with weights (front, back, and side), or 108 in all.
• Between all of those, in sets of three to coincide with above, crunches and obliques working out to about 115 crunches and 120 obliques all told.

In under an hour.

I'm looking forward to what Lisa has planned for me next time.

Red Burrito

I'd heard good things in passing about Red Burrito, on the southwest corner of Commercial and 1st in Vancouver, but finally had the chance to try it out today.

There's a joke about fast food that you can choose any two of fast, good, and cheap. Red Burrito is a place where you get all three.

The place is small, but very functional. Lots of nice small bar height tables as well as eating bars along the windows.

The service is excellent - the two people behind the counter worked harder than the entire line in any fast food place you'd care to name.

The menu is nice and simple too - burrito & burrito fajita (with peppers and onions instead of beans) are the main two items. They also had taco bowl salads and a couple other items.

In order to keep their business model simple, what you pay depends on the meat you choose. You make your choice of item, decide which meat you want (chicken, beef, veggie, etc), and then you get your toppings/fillings.

And how is the food? Excellent. I had a burrito fajita with chicken and guacamole (extra charge for guac - and here a sidebar rhetorical question: why is guacamole always extra? It's not like avocados are that expensive). It was very big and left me quite stuffed.

Ambience: 3/5
Service: 4/5
Food: 7/10
Price: $

Total score: 14/20

Nerd Games

I've been an avid board gamer for over a quarter century. I played the usual games when I was young, my dad introduced me to chess when I was only three or four, and when I was a kid Monopoly and Risk and Clue were the games that ruled my household.

Then in 1980, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons (the old Basic set in red and the added Expert set in blue), and not long after moved to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. That was also the year I was introduced to Ogre and it's been an unrelenting succession of board, war, and role-playing games ever since.

The other day I was in Imperial Hobbies in Richmond buying Chicken Cha Cha Cha for my daughter to try out, and the guy behind the counter made a comment about getting kids hooked on "nerd games". I thought that was a great term.

Over the decades, my interest in games and gaming has waxed and waned to various degrees. At the moment, it's in a waxing state - for the past six weeks I've had a lot of board games hit the table. Hopefully that will continue all summer.