…And God(dess) Send you a Happy New Year

I know things have been kind of slow around here.  I still have to rebuild my professional site, which is taking forever, plus this time of year is the busiest for us singers. I have been continuing with my situp/pushup/squat challenge, and if you check out my tweets every other day, you’ll see I’m even logging in my progress.

But I wanted to wish you all a wonderful holiday season, whatever you’re celebrating, and all the best for a happy new year.

In other news, because Christmas also seems to be the season of spammers, and I’ve been getting comment overload from bots wanting to sell me Viagra and/or Cialis, I’ve installed a CAPTCHA application to the comment forms.  Please feel free to continue to comment on my posts (obviously, those of you reading this on Facebook can continue commenting as per usual), but this extra step saves me having to wade through the spam.

Exhaustion Test

So I started the Push-ups/Squats/Situps Challenge today with an exhaustion test, to try to see what level I belong to.  Turns out Cindy Whitmarsh’s abs workouts on Exercise TV have done me a whole bunch of good, because I managed to do 100 situps in one set (N.B. – the “situps” recommended by the 200 Situps site are actually crunches, since full situps are not good for your back).  I got 80 squats in, but only 18 push-ups!  So now I know I need to work on my arms most of all.

It’s been an hour or so since I did the exhaustion test, and already my muscles are complaining.  I think it’s a good idea to do these exercises every other day, as recommended on the site, to give my body a chance to recover.

Another Challenge

So I finished the 12-week Body-for-LIFE Challenge (or my version of it, at least), and I managed to lose 15 pounds! This is just about exactly what my doctor told me I should aim for, so obviously my hard work paid off.

HOWEVER, we are now in the midst of the heavy eating and drinking portion of the year. Between Thanksgiving, various holiday parties, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve, I’m afraid the temptation to be bad has been overwhelming, and I’m not eating with as much discretion as I was while I was in the middle of the challenge.

Also, I have not reached my goal weight of 160 yet, and I think I may need another challenge to motivate me. My friend Ellen has been participating in a weight-loss motivation program called Lose It or Lose It, a website where you make a monetary investment in your weight loss, and if you don’t lose the weight, you lose your money. It’s a pretty clever idea, actually, and I’m considering joining the program (once New Year’s Eve has come and gone and I’ve stopped eating so many darned Christmas cookies).

In the meantime, Ellen and I have been talking about the Two Hundred Situps challenge, which, like the Couch to 5K program, trains you to gradually be able to do 200 situps in one day. Talk about six-pack abs! There are related challenges, like Hundred Push-Ups and Hundred Squats.

So we’re going to go triple-threat and participate in the 100 squats/200 situps/100 push-ups challenge and get our bodies nice and strong! The great thing about these programs is that they have an log book that is connected with Facebook, so Ellen and I can keep track of our progress and stay accountable to each other. Right, Ellen? And I invite any of you to come along for the ride and post comments letting me know what you think and how you’re doing.

Just to Reiterate

Because of my own stupidity, I have managed to wipe TWO WHOLE YEARS of blogging from the face of the earth.  Luckily, nothing I really had to say was all that important, I guess, but I thought some of my observations and reviews might have been helpful to some people.  I suppose I’ll never know.

Luckily, Facebook uploaded all my posts onto its site, so I have at least something to work with.  I might be able to recreate at least the posts that I liked.

In the meantime, onward and upward.  I have to rebuild this blog, my singing website, and my caroling website.  It’ll be slow going, but it’ll get done.

A Message from Management

Yesterday I got a notice from my web host that my account was being deactivated due to suspicious activity.  Apparently someone had hacked into my WordPress account and was doing all sorts of nefarious, spamilicious things with my site.

So I uninstalled WordPress as per the instructions here.  I thought as long as I backed everything up to my hard drive, all will be well.  But I forgot to back up the database.

Why, oh, why did I delete my SQL database for my blog?  I thought I had backed up my entire blog before I wiped it (someone had hacked in here), but apparently I didn’t.  Argh.  Really, double argh.

Anyway, I don’t have time right now to fix up my blog with all its extra stuff, so stay tuned and you’ll see something soon enough.