Weekend Warrior

Andrew and I have had a busy couple of days this weekend. Saturday, we checked out some of the local used car lots - mostly the somewhat lower end lots, as opposed to those affiliated with a big brand or "family of dealerships". The frontrunner thus far is a 2003 Hyundai Elantra with well under 100K miles at a good price... but we haven't yet driven the car, seen a car history report, etc. Tomorrow morning we plan to visit a few more lots and find out a bit more about the Elantra, see what happens. I leave town on Wednesday for a convention in San Antonio, so in our perfect world we'd get something squared away before then. We'll see.

Saturday was another good day for me in terms of my eating, fitness, etc. I used a different treadmill at the fitness center than usual, and it seemed very different to me. I'm not sure which treadmill is more accurate, but on Saturday morning I set the speed at 4.0 and it seemed much slower than what 4.0 had been on the other machine. So, I went for 4.2 which was a fairly comfortable jogging pace. I started out at 4.2 with the goal of jogging for 5 continuous minutes, but at the end of that time I wasn't all that tired, so I decided to press on to the end of the song. The song ended and I felt pretty good, so I kept going... and so on and so forth until I had jogged for 20 full minutes! WHAT?!?!? Yes! 20 entire minutes of jogging without stopping! At 4.2 mph, that's nearly a mile and a half! After that, I did a couple of minutes of walking, then a "sprint" at 5.0 mph for 90 seconds or so. At that point I realized I was simultaneously getting close to the 30 minute mark and the 2 mile mark, so I adjusted my speed to hit 2 miles in 30 minutes, which I did.

So, there is a third treadmill in the fitness center - if possible, I'll use that one for my next workout to try to determine which of the other two it's the most like, and hopefully which one is more accurate. I'm hoping the second one, because 2 miles in 30 minutes makes me feel pretty good, so I hope it's true!

Today was a busy day with church activities: early service this morning, where I have been serving as the interim youth choir director as we've been between Music Ministers. Next Sunday will be my last Sunday as interim, which will be kind of sad because I've enjoyed the gig - but Andrew and I are definitely looking forward to driving to and from church together again soon. Speaking of which, we both completely forgot about our one-car-family status this morning until it was time for me to go warm up the youth choir, and Andrew had just woken up. So, poor Andrew missed worship this morning, and I had to go pick him up right after the service so that we could go to Sunday School. We both felt like idiots for not remembering the whole one car thing until it was too late, but oh well.

After church was a fun lunch with our Sunday School class, which has gone through a mini-rebirth in the last few weeks. It was good to hang out with the other couples/families and get to know everyone a little bit better.

We capped off the evening with the Texas Rangers game, which was a lot of fun. If you're not a Rangers fan, this is a good season to start, because they're playing really well. This outing was particularly fun because we went with the whole Hamilton clan: Andrew's parents, sister and grandpa. For Grandpa, this was his first Major League game, which no one realized until he casually mentioned earlier today that he had never been to a MLB game. Added bonus - former Texas Governor, former partial owner of the team, and former president of the USA, George W. Bush was at the game. Kind of cool in a way. He's definitely my favorite 43rd President.