Garden Update & Week Plan

Happy Weekend!

Well, Rob is away fishing today so I figured I would take a break from house cleaning and write a quick blog.  I’ve got a long list of things to do today before school orientation tomorrow.  It is going to be a busy week!  I’m so glad school doesn’t officially start until Wednesday.  Its like a “soft opening” for me.  I think I would feel way overwhelmed if the first week was a full week of classes.

Anyway!  A little update on our garden.  We didn’t do much gardening this year due to lack of time and planning early in the season but we did a late planting and our squash plants have taken over the yard.

And they keep going to the right.  We’re not sure what we planted.  We saved seeds from things we ate last year and didn’t label.  We know they are winter squash like acorn, butternut, spaghetti squash, and pumpkin.  We shall see!  So far, we have some butternut-looking squash growing.

We had built a cool fence for the plants to climb but only one of the squash and some of the watermelon actually figured it out.

We have lots of watermelon but some of them rotted from lack of water (while our squash are complaining about too much water – but they are in the same garden!!)

That’s it for garden photos.  Nothing else big this weekend.  It has been pretty low-key.  We did some back-to-school shopping for me.  Sadly, most of my jeans don’t fit and the pairs I do have aren’t very pretty.  I want to look my best at school since it is a professional program so I had to get some new pants.  The most annoying part was that I felt like I was buying things I got rid of years ago.  Just wish I didn’t need them!  Oh well.

With Rob out of the house today, I’m just cleaning and planning.  I attacked the kitchen first so I had no excuse not to eat healthy this week.  I stocked the fridge and made a meal plan.  Most of the meat I bought will be frozen for later (the prices were just very good this week).  I labeled the fridge so Rob knows what is in there too.

Health & Fitness Update

My foot is feeling somewhat better.  It seems to like shoes with heels verses flat shoes.  Too bad I can’t find my heel lifts for my sneakers!  That means boots for school which is good because I want to look nice, remember?

I think I’ve decided that my workout plan that starts tomorrow will be inspired by Body Beast Lean.  I have the DVDs but with the tracker sheets, I can do it all at the gym (but you need to have watched the DVDs before to know some of the moves).  I want to do barbell work but I am not strong enough yet to really benefit.  Our gym has nothing less than the 45lb barbell – a problem for my barbell stats at the moment (see my Week 1 workout below from Strength Standards).

I will not be doing this because I’m a weakling right now.

Body Beast is all dumbbell based and you can use a bench or a stability ball to sit on.  You also don’t need a spotter for the workout (another problem I currently have in regards to barbell workouts).  So I have my modified Body Beast program saved in my JEFit profile and will use their app to do it at the gym.  I like their app because you can do super sets (where you do 1 set of each move of a set and then rest before going on to set 2).

In order to not hurt myself this week, I am going to take it SUPER easy.  When I started BB before, I had 3lb, 8lb, 12lb and 18lb dumbbells to use at home (along with multiples of 5s).  The gym has only multiples of 5s in the weight room and you have to hunt down anything else (and there are no 12s at all).  So instead of trying to go crazy on leg day and being so sore, I have to rest for almost a week (like last time), I will go much easier on myself and figure out my baseline.  No more injuries!

Some other things I want to incorporate are swimming, abs, yoga, and metabolic resistance training (you know this as CrossFit).  I plan on doing double workouts if I have time or doing it on my off days (BB is only 4 days of lifting).  I will hopefully blog tomorrow about my plan for the next 6 weeks!

Shopping for swim goggles