Tuesday 5 February 2008; 1800

Greetings!

I once again missed my update over the weekend but here I am with the latest in a not very exciting week.

One of our team members moved to another team last week so we all took off at 12.30 on Friday and attended a tour of the Theo chocolate factory in the Fremont neighborhood. We had a great time and we all got to wear hair nets which always sets the mood for a group of coworkers wouldn't you say? Well, they were very free with the samples and that was the start of a weekend that really didn't include a lot of good eating habits to continue on my health regime...If you haven't had Theo chocolate or don't know about it you can visit the website to learn more about one of only 14 chocolate factories in the US and the only one that is certified fair trade and organic (the 91% chocolate from Venezuela was INCREDIBLE! Not to mention the new milk chocolate with roasted hazelnuts, mmmmm). Here is the link: http://www.theochocolate.com/.

Once we had our fill there we adjourned to a very nice bar across the street that has a beer list the likes of which I have never seen before in all my drinking days! There must have been at least 30 tap handles and the list of bottled beers added at least another 100 labels. It was a fitting place for me to fall off the wagon after my 31 day self imposed dry period. I hopped off with a lovely draught Jamaica Red Ale from the Mad River Brewing Company in Blue Lake, CA and it was yummy: http://www.madriverbrewing.com/pages/brews/jamaica_red.html. So as I said, I made it the entire month of January dry and with a little perseverance I was also able to lose 14 lbs; a full stone! Yippee for me! Now that the weekend is over and I've had a couple days of not really worrying about it, I need to get back on the healthy lifestyle regime. My short term goal is 10 lbs per month so I'm ahead of the game going into month 2. The long term goal is 30 lbs for the year but I would like to take off about 60 lbs overall. I'm still having some trouble with the disc in my neck so lifting is out for the time being but I'm trying to be a bit more disciplined about getting some walking in and I can always go to the gym to use the treadmill on rainy days so I should be able to kick start this again and maybe even lose another stone in February but anything over 6 lbs lost will be gravy. Once Henry and I start training for the summer riding season as the weather gets nicer it should be even better and I won't have so much weight to pedal around either.

Henry was invited at the last minute to a birthday party Friday in downtown Seattle and he suffered from that the next morning during bowling. He has not quite figured out the lack of bumpers and although the first week of league he averaged a 74, he dropped down to about a 45 average for this past weekend. Ah well, it will pump his handicap up for this next week and his team can use that because they are all pretty skilled and thus have relatively low handicaps which doesn't help when it comes to league stats. They lost each of their 3 games this last week by less than 5 pins (handicapped). He still seems to be enjoying it so that's the main thing.

I signed Henry and I up for this year's Tour de Cure to take place May 17th so we have almost 3.5 months for fundraising. Henry has committed to us riding the 45 mile loop this year so this time around we need to do a bit more training and kill those butt nerves. I worked a table at our company mingle this morning and we had a good turnout with almost 40 people signing up for more info and we're hoping we'll get some good participation out of this. Greg LeMond is scheduled to once again lead the ride and I hope we can get Henry up to meet him this year since he had to cancel last year due to a family emergency. I'll update with the personal web page links here next week after I get this year's built.

Not much more going on other than Henry and I both fighting off the flu/colds that seem to be going around. We stayed pretty quiet on Sunday and then stayed home both of us feeling pretty poorly yesterday but we're better now. I'll sign off now and see if I can find some more ultra exciting news again for you all next week to keep you on the edges of your seats...

Hasta