This last year I lost and regained about 10 more lbs, dropping down to a low of 208.9 in August just before running another San Jose Rock and Roll Half Marathon (2:11:44 slightly faster than last year). Post Marathon I put all the weight back on and I’m back up to 220ish. This year I’m planning to run the San Francisco Rock and Roll Half Marathon in April and I need to get back on track with my training. I injured myself in December and had to take a month off running, so I only have a couple of months to get myself back up to 13.1 miles.

Probably the biggest factor in my slip was that rather than doing long runs or bike rides on the weekend I’ve been looking to buy a house here in the Bay Area. To that end I’ve spent several hours each weekend looking at houses in my price range trying to find one I like. So far I haven’t had any luck, and the prices are just going up, up, up here. Coming from the midwest it’s so painful to find out that if I want a home with a reasonable commute I’m looking at spending $600-800k for a 1,300 sq ft house.

Besides looking at housing I started “hoarding” beer this last year and have quite a collection of craft beers. I probably should start reviewing them here so I have an excuse for the collection. I sadly need to start actually drinking some of these beers before they get bad, which sort of goes against my goal to lose weight.

My goal for the next couple of months is to get on track with my health again and should start sharing my weight log/graph on this site and logging what I’ve been up to to keep myself honest. I just have to figure out how to link this from Google Docs.

In addition to all the extra curricular activities I’ve been a lot busier at work this last year. I got a “promotion” to a lead position which basically means I’m now doing everything I used to do plus another person worth of work. This plus the house hunting has left me with no time to play any games or see many movies this last year.

So what has happened with me over the last year? So much I’m not even sure where to start. Probably the biggest news is that in late February of last year I met a wonderful girl who’s company I enjoy greatly. This turn of events has taken up quite of bit of my time over the last year so I haven’t done too many long bike rides over the last year. Just not enough time on the weekends to spend 2-4 hours pedaling around the bay. I think this year I need to try and make some more time for biking since I still want to try to bike to San Francisco from San Jose. Though I also have to balance this with finding time to hang out with my Girlfriend, since she’s not the biggest fan of two wheeled vehicles (though she does like that whole running thing).

I did continue with my plan to go running and have managed to go from not being able to run for more than 10 seconds in Nov of 2010 to finishing all 13.1 miles of the San Jose Rock and Roll Half Marathon with a time of 2:12:58 in October 2011. That’s a about a 10 min/mile pace. The 10k I mentioned in my last post was my first run (and was really the Bay to Breakers 12k), and there I managed 7.46 miles in 01:23:25 (11:12 per mile).

In addition to running I did a couple other outdoor activities this year. I went skiing a couple of times last winter. I also took a couple lessons and actually learned how to “parallel” ski instead of just do a wedge down the hill. With a couple lessons I went from being afraid of the “blue” hills in Tahoe to managing a trip down a Black Diamond rated hill.

Once it warmed up a bit I went backpacking with my Girlfriend and a few friends and we did the Skyline to the Sea Trail through Big Basin State park. This was a lot of fun and I’d love to do another backpacking trip this year. I just need to go find myself a pack.

I bought a Motorcycle which has been fun to drive for those occasions where my bike is a bit far/slow for where I want to go and I don’t need the extra space of my car.

I did manage to lose another 10-20lbs but I’ve been stuck around 225 for the last year. Hopefully next year I’ll make some more forward progress.

Despite all that it turns out losing weight is hard and one year later I didn’t hit my original goal, though I do feel a lot better than I have in years. In the last year I went from 289lbs down to 234lbs, a net loss of 55lbs over the course of a year. I’ve also shaved 6-8 inches off my waistline since I started last January.

Not my original goal, but still within the “healthy” weight loss rate of 1-2lbs a week. Looks like I have another year or so to go to hit my final goal, though perhaps I can do a bit better in this new year.

But it should be fun in any case, I’m excited to see more of the Temples in Kyoto, actually make it to Nara, and see the National World Heritage site in Nikko. I’m also looking forward to some shopping in Akihabara, seeing the Tokyo National Museum, and the Studio Ghibli Museum.

Everything is booked/lined up for us except train tickets, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to get a ticket to Nikko from Narita with little hassle. My biggest concern is that the Hotel I’m staying at says the front desk closes at 10pm and the earliest I’ll be able to make it to Nikko is 9:42pm.  Hopefully everything goes well and I can catch the right train connections.

Anyways I plan to take a few notes of my adventures and take lots of pictures. Maybe I’ll post a summary of the trip here when I get done.

So far I don’t really have a favorite race as I’ve been playing all my matches as random. Of course this means I never really learn any one strat very well so I think it’s hurting my overall ability to play. But it’s fun to learn all the races. They also automatically record replays of all your matches so you can go watch what other players did to slaughter you .

I’ve been doing 2v2 matches over the last couple of days with my brother, and in one memorable match the other team accused us of using “hacks” claiming we had more resources than they did. Which was really funny since they had totally wiped my brother out, and he had like 5 units left.

Also the recently sent out a wave of invite a friend Beta keys and I have an extra key. Anyone think they’ll play the beta a bunch and need a key?

The other outstanding thing out here was the traffic. Traffic was jam packed especially as we were coming into LA around 5PM. It took us a couple of hours to navigate our way around the worst of the LA traffic through Pasadena to Anaheim. Once we got checked into the hotel we walked over the the Anaheim convention center to pick up our Blizzcon registration info and our goody bags. I got a little Raynor marine statue, and a key to get a murloc pet in World of Warcraft. The one item the bag was missing that I really wanted was a Beta key for Diablo III. Sadly there wasn’t one included in the bag. But I did get some official Blizzcon hand sanitizer. Since I left home without my USB camera cable, I’ll post a few pics of the line (long, but it moved fast) and the goodies once I get back to the Bay area.

So right now I’m looking forward to the trip and spending time away from computers and work! (Sorry I doubt I’ll blog while there, but I might bring a notebook!) Even so I’m not going totally tech free on this trip, while the laptop will stay at home, I picked up 32GB of CF cards for my dSLR  and 4GB of cards for my point and shoot camera so I should be taking lots of pictures. I’m also bringing my PSP for some entertainment while on the airplane. Hopefully, I’ll have some fun photos or stories to share about my trip when I get back. I also might actually beat more than 2 mission in Final Fantasy: Tactics.

Also besides this big trip to Italy tomorrow I have a few other exciting trips planned. I’m going to a friend’s wedding back in WI in the middle of July, and in August I’m taking a couple days off to go to Blizzcon!

So what have I been up to? Back in February I finished up the PS 3 game Prince of Persia. Overall I had fun with the game, but it was a bit short. I’m not sure it was worth the $55 I paid, but it would be worth picking up at a bargain basement  price. If you’re into achievements and obsessively collecting stuff then you might get more mileage out of the game.

On February, 21st I attended AMC’s Best Picture Showcase with a friend. There we watched all 5 best picture nominees in one, very long, day. It was a fun experience and I might do it again next year, depending on what gets nominated.

My favorite picture of the day was the best picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire”. Compared to the other movies it did the best job balancing happy moments, sad moments, action, and comedy to tell a truly engaging story. The only thing I found a bit annoying was the heavy use of shakycam during some of the chase sequences, but it’s probably to be expected from the director of “28 Days Later”.

My runner up choice for the day would have to be the Sean Penn film “Milk”. Penn’s performance was great, and I learned a bit about the history of San Francisco. Having only recently moved to the bay I wasn’t even aware of Harvey Milk’s struggle for equal rights in the 60′s and 70′s.

I was also surprised that the movie “Frost Nixon” was enjoyable, I expected it to be pretty slow and dry but it they did a good job keeping the movie interesting throughout. Even so I’m not sure why they did a dramatization of the events behind the Frost/Nixon interviews. The overall story really wasn’t that exciting.

The final two pictures, “The Reader” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” were not very entertaining. Overall, “The Reader”  was slow and I’m not really sure what I was supposed to get out of the movie. Plus the movie failed to get me to care about either of the characters. The worst movie of the day was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and that’s because the movie was at least 2 hours too long. At a runtime of 166 minutes this film was the longest film of the day, but had the least actual “plot” of any movie. It felt like they were trying to do a “Forest Gump” like film, but unlike Gump Button’s life was pretty mudane (minus the aging thing). Sadly aging backwards cannot take a boring story and make it exciting.

The orignal source material was a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t believe the short story had enough material to really fill up the 2+ hours of this film, there was a lot of time spent showing off the special effects for the movie which didn’t really help the plot. If they took the whole 166 hour movie and compressed it into a 46 minute film then maybe it would have been a tolerable film.

Well that’s it for the movies. The main reason I haven’t posted in a couple months is that for the entire month of March I’ve been working 10-15 hours a day, every day for most of the month. At least on weekends I was only working 4-12 hours depending on the day! So that sucks but I had stuff to get done and I think I’ll be back to a normal schedule going forward. I also have taken up to playing Dungeons and Dragons every other Saturday with someone from my WoW guild and his friends. So far that’s been fun I’ll maybe talk about D&D and how it’s changed since last time I tried playing it.

P.S. I didn’t spell check or proofread this post. I’ll go read through it later and fix up typos, don’t hold them against me. If I don’t get something posted soon it will sit in my drafts FOREVER!

Today I  cleaned up my kitchen a bit and made some room for the mixer. This thing is huge and takes up a large chunk of my counter. Honestly, I don’t really have enough room for this beast. Especially as I still have a deep fryer from my last cooking “experiment” sitting around.

Anyhow, after rearranging and wiping off my counter I whipped up a batch of pizza dough (recipe courtesy of my graduate advisor’s husband). Making the dough was a cinch with the new mixer. Just add water, yeast, flour, oil, salt, and sugar. Turn on the dough hook and wait 10 minutes. Of course I had to wait an hour for the dough to rise but at least I didn’t make a huge mess kneading it.

So once I got some finished risen dough I put it to use,  sadly I couldn’t make a pizza since I had no cheese. Instead I decided to make a few small balls of dough, and bake it up as a pizza dough twists to go with the pasta I was making.

To top the rolls I made an olive oil, garlic, basil, and oregano pesto like mix to coat the buns. Since I had no recipe I pretty much threw these ingredients in randomly. Sadly I put way too much garlic powder in. In fact I had enough the rolls had a bit of a garlic “bite” to them.

While the rolls were still good this is one case were I’d say I used too much garlic. Despite the overabundance of garlic I think my first mixer experiment was a success. I’m now considering starting to bake my own fresh bread since it was so easy.