Q: How Did Day One Go? A: It Was A Success!

Hey folks, I have a quick little update.

First, I don’t need more reasons to get back on track – a 15-pound weight gain is enough, thankyouverymuch – but another one presented itself midway through my Friday when I popped a button on my pants. Ugh.

I’m handy enough with a needle and thread to reattach this, but it does not feel good to literally break an article of clothing. I’m thankful those pants also had a decorative drawstring that lasted me throughout the rest of my day!

As I mentioned in my last post (read it here if you missed it), I set two healthy living goals for Friday, and

Hami Melon & Recipe

My most recent produce haul post featured a quick mention of my purchase of a hami melon, a variety of melon that I hadn’t heard of before. It’s a good lookin’ melon, don’t you think?

Hami melons are named after the Chinese region where they were cultivated, in the northwest part of the country, near the Mongolia border.

Back to Work!

Today’s my first day at my exciting new job! I was never a boy scout, but I am prepared. It’s been a while since I’ve worked, and I wanted to set some habits back into place right from the get-go. So I packed a gym bag and woke up early to exercise before work (that’s the plan, at least… I confess that I’m writing this Sunday evening).

I also packed a healthy lunch. In fact, I spent hours yesterday prepping food for the work week. And I’m not joking around. I literally spent hours. You must be wearing your lucky pants… because I took pictures!

It all started at Sprouts, which is quickly becoming my favorite supermarket, thanks to its prices and its proximity to my gym (two blocks away).

There’s no gentle way to put this:

Shark’s Tooth Salad AND 2-Headed Soup

The other day, I shared my recipe for watermelon gazpacho, which I renamed “chum” because I made a big vat of it for an event themed around a wonderfully terrible shark movie called “2-Headed Shark Attack.” Click here for that recipe. I made two other dishes for the same event, and I thought I’d share them in this post.

Dish #1: Shark’s Tooth Salad. I never ever thought I’d be saying this, but this recipe is actually based on a recipe by Paula Deen! And it doesn’t even start with two sticks of butter! Paula Deen doesn’t get a free pass, though – like every recipe I use, I modified it. I kept the core ingredients: spinach, sliced strawberries, a few walnuts that I toasted in a pan before adding. Instead of simply draining and chopping the hearts of palm, I sorted out the bigger pieces, and carefully cut them into triangles, creating the shark’s teeth in the recipe’s title:

One big round piece yielded two shark teeth, and the bits and pieces that were cut away I saved for another occasion – only the teeth went in the salad. Is it lame to cut hearts of palm into shapes? Probably. But I don’t care.

I also upped the tropical nature of the salad by adding a couple of mangoes that I chopped up.

Paula’s dressing was made on the stove, and I didn’t have time for such nonsense, so I used the same basic ingredients and completely made up everything else.

I started with the juice of three lemons, and added a few tablespoons of basil-infused olive oil, a few tablespoons of honey to balance out the sour, and pinches of poppy seeds, dry mustard, and paprika.

The dressing wasn’t great. Too much lemon. It wasn’t inedible, but I suggest you do what I didn’t do, and actually follow a recipe or just use dressing from a bottle. But the salad, as a whole, was fantastic. And beautiful – check this out!

Dish #2: 2-Headed Soup. I suppose the full title of this recipe would be called “2-Headed Roasted Broccoli and Orange Cauliflower Soup” but that seems a little unwieldy, so the shortened version will have to do.

My original intention was to make this recipe in the crockpot, but I didn’t get moving that day until a little later than expected, and the crockpot wouldn’t have had all the time it needed to work its magic. Plus, I thought that roasting the vegetables would create a bigger depth of flavor, and you know what? I was right.

Even though I didn’t use a crockpot, I did base my recipe off this crockpot recipe, which I liked because it was pretty healthy for a cream-based soup. I ended up doubling the recipe. The first thing I did was roast the veggies. On a big sheet pan, I laid out 2 (small) heads of broccoli and one big orange cauliflower, cut into florets:

If you haven’t put two and two together, I did 2 small heads of broccoli in honor of “2-Headed Shark Attack.” Not familiar with orange cauliflower? It’s beautiful (read more about it here):

And, since I was in a roasting mood, I also roasted two whole heads of garlic – this soup seemed like something that would taste better with garlic. I cut the tops of the garlic heads, and put them in a small dish:

After about a half hour at 425 degrees, they look like this:

Once they cool a little bit, you can just sorta squeeze the cooked cloves out of the paper skins. The broccoli and cauliflower don’t take nearly as long – only 10-12 minutes until they were tender and starting to turn brown, at the same time as the garlic. I forgot to take a picture when they came out.

While the veggies were roasting away, I diced two white onions, and started them sweating in my Dutch oven, with two tablespoons of butter (Earth Balance, actually).

After about 8 or 10 minutes, I added 10 tablespoons of flour and 1/2 a cup of half and half, and shortly thereafter, 6 cups of skim milk. I got that up to a simmer, and, once they came out of the oven, I added all the broccoli, cauliflower, and garlic. I let it sit for about 30 minutes, letting all the flavors marry, as they say, and then went to town with an immersion blender until it was all pureed and creamy. I ended up adding one more cup of skim milk to thin it out a little bit (the recipe calls for adding water, but that seems so boring).

The soup was served with garlic toasts (store-bought, not home-made), and It. Was. Delicious!

Keep it up, David!

Salad and Sumo Tangerine

Are you eating well this weekend? Staying away from junk food? My eating has been pretty good, and I wanted to share a couple of the things that have ended up on my plate.

I made a kick-ass salad the other day. I used my new salad spinning bags to prep some red leaf lettuce, and I added some sauteed vegetables: yellow cherry tomatoes, zucchini, and baby bell peppers. I love sauteing (or roasting) cherry tomatoes – they pop in your mouth with you eat them… absolutely delicious. The salad was huge and filling.

A couple of ingredients I forgot to mention above: I added, to the sauteed veggies, a serving of lemon pepper tempeh. Tempeh is a vegetarian meat alternative made from fermented soy. It’s my least favorite meat alternative (I prefer seitan and tofurky), but I had never seen the lemon pepper variety before, and thought I’d give it a shot.

After I combined the tempeh and veggies with the lettuce, I added a tablespoon of fake (soy) bacon bits, and then a few tablespoons of a new feta and red pepper dressing (fat-free, 15 calories a serving) that I tried for the first time.

The salad was delicious, mostly. I wasn’t nuts about the lemon pepper tempeh, even though I usually like lemon pepper anything. And the lemon pepper didn’t go well with the dressing. But I really liked the combo of warm veggies and cool lettuce, and even a few minor flavor problems didn’t prevent me from eating the whole thing. And it was big.

Yesterday morning, I dug into the new type of produce I picked up the other day. A sumo tangerine!

It’s the biggest tangerine I’ve ever seen (the size of a small grapefruit), although there’s nothing in that photo that suggests scale (my bad). I was digging around online, looking for information about the sumo tangerine, and I came across an Los Angeles Times article written about them last year. The article was fascinating – turns out the sumo tangerine has had a short but very colorful past!

The sumo tangerine, also called a dekopon, is a hybrid fruit created in a Japanese government lab in the early ’70s. It grew to become the most prized citrus in that country, selling for $10 apiece. Import laws prevented them from being brought over to the US, but branches of the sumo tangerine tree were smuggled into California, and the LA Times writer spent over a decade trying to track down sumo tangerines in the US. His journey included learning about an illegal orchard near Fresno that was burned to the ground, a visit to a “farming cult” in Ventura County, and contacting lots of farmers, some of whom wouldn’t take his calls for three years, and others who had signed confidentiality agreements preventing them from talking about the rare fruit. The article is a great read, and if you have a few minutes, you should click here and check it out. You don’t think of fruit growing as an industry with tons of criminal activity, but the history of the sumo tangerine proves you wrong!

The sumo tangerine is well worth all the trouble. It’s large and peels easily, and it’s delicious. The segments pull apart easily, and it’s a great mix of sweet and a little tart. I took some pictures during its consumption:

It sounds like the U.S. sumo tangerine harvest is still pretty small, and I don’t know if you’ll be about to find them if you don’t live in California, but luckily for me, that’s not a problem! I’m definitely picking up a few more if I see them again.

Keep it up, David!

A New Spin on Salad

I don’t own a salad spinner, and I don’t want one. It’s not because I don’t like them. In fact, the opposite it true – I think they’re nifty, fantastic gadgets. Who doesn’t love a hand-powered gizmo that uses centrifugal force (yep, I remember something from my high school physics class) to separate water from lettuce? It’s a great little party trick: just put soaking wet salad greens in this ordinary-looking device, put this ordinary-looking lid on it, turn a ordinary-looking crank, and SHAZAM! Your greens are dry and ready for any salad you could possibly dream up!

Unfortunately, I have a kitchen with very limited space, and I wouldn’t use a salad spinner nearly enough to justify the storage space it would take up (waffle irons and immersion blenders fall in the same category). I’ve lived on my own for over a decade now, and have never even considered buying a salad spinner. Granted, for most of those years, I wasn’t making many salads at home. But salads have been a dietary staple during the past two years, and even now, I don’t ever walk by a salad spinner display at the store and get tempted, with lust in my eyes, to pick one out for purchase.

I can thank the supermarket for squashing any desire I might have for salad spinner possession, because pre-washed, pre-chopped greens are so readily available, and in so many varieties. Even my favorite greens vendor at the farmers market pre-washes their merchandise – according to their signage, they triple-wash it (which I think is excessive, but I still buy it). Any type of lettuce or lettuce mix I could want is available ready-to-eat.

Even though a salad spinner just doesn’t fit into my life, I still enjoy a gadget, and I had a little ‘drop-everything’ moment when I came across this product a few weeks ago:

What’s this? A bag that spins salad? I was instantly hooked. I bought a package. Here’s what a Spin’n Stor bag looks like:

Yesterday, I tried out one of the bags for the first time. On Tuesday, I bought some lettuce as part of my produce haul from Whole Foods. What I learned, as I perused the lettuce section at Whole Foods, is that I know jackshit about lettuce. The problem with eating pre-washed “mixed baby greens” or “spring mix” is that I never bothered to learn what the individual greens were. I know a few varieties, like iceberg, romaine, and spinach, but there’s a whole world of lettuces out there, with names like escarole, Boston, mache, and frisee, that I know I’ve eaten hundreds of times but couldn’t pick out of a line-up if my life depended on it. Further complicating matters was that the lettuce section at Whole Foods was terribly confusing. I wasn’t certain if the signs were referring to the lettuces on the shelf above or below, and some piles of lettuce had two signs. I’m not exactly sure what I came home with, but here it is – I picked it out because it was pretty, and if you can identify it, please do so in the comments section:

I cut out the core, gave it a rough chop and washed it in my sink:

Then I loaded the lettuce into the bag:

And then I spun it. I spun it like a crazy person, in big loops with my arm fully extended, like a softball pitcher. The bag worked! The water drained into a reservoir at the bottom. Look how much water it collected!

(Yep, I’m watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire while making lunch)

The cool thing about the bag is that there’s another panel, called the turbo drain, that allows you to drain the water out of the reservoir without it touching the lettuce. Then, you can twist-tie the bag, and store the lettuce until you’re ready to use it, or, if you’re like me and have no patience, you can make a salad immediately:

I added tomato, scallion, zucchini, green pepper, cucumber, and some fake bacon bits. I also used a nonfat vinaigrette, but I didn’t add that until after I photographed it.

Oh, and the bags are reusable. The package contained 4 of them, and each can be used 8-10 times. I foresee a lot of salad in my future!

Keep it up, David!

Power Through the Weekend

I have a goal for this weekend. It’s the same goal I have most every single day, but because last weekend didn’t go very well, I’m really focusing on it this weekend, so crappy weekends become the exception, not the norm. My goal is to exercise and make good food choices. I will work out both Saturday and Sunday, and I will not consume any gas station junk food.

I’m well-equipped to hit this goal out of the park, but as recently as 24 hours ago, I felt the opposite. Yesterday, I went to the gym to do my first weightlifting workout in a week. I didn’t intend to go a week without hitting the weights, but it just happened: I had the aforementioned craptacular weekend, followed by a Monday workout on an exercise bike, followed by a Tuesday night aerobics class at Slimmons, followed by an unexpected run on Wednesday (more on this in my next post). That’s a lot of wonderful cardio, but by Thursday all I really wanted to do was head to the bench press and blast my pecs <insert musclehead flexing and growling here>.

So I went to the gym, did my typical five-minute warm-up on the treadmill, and then headed over to the bench press I had been thinking about all day. What commenced was a terrible workout, soured mainly by my own attitude, which went from gung-ho to the toilet bowl in about 90 seconds.

Basically, thanks to my seven-day absence from the weight room, I discovered quickly that I felt weak, and I soon grew annoyed that I wasn’t completing the reps that I wanted to complete. No matter what I did – bench press, chin-ups, dips, flies – I wanted to do more reps than I could actually do, and it pissed me off. The actual reps wasn’t the thing that pissed me off – it was how feeble I felt after just one week away. It didn’t like not being able to accomplish something that I accomplished so recently.

It really shouldn’t have been such a big deal. I can’t expect to walk in and pick up right where I left off. But it ate at me, machine after machine, and after a while, I just wanted to throw in the towel and go home.

But I didn’t. I soldiered on for a full 30 minutes, then jumped on an elliptical for another 20 minutes and watched “Wipeout” on TV. Nothing gets my mind off a crappy situation like seeing dudes getting smacked in the nuts over and over and over again. By the time I got home, I felt happy that I carried on and finished a solid workout, and a little depressed by the thought that it only took my body a week to deteriorate as much as it did. What that means is that I can’t go a week without lifting weights. Ever. And that thought brings two sound effects to my brain simulatenously – this one:

And this one:

The only way to get back what I lost during that week is to keep lifting weights, so earlier today, I went back to the gym, and I brought a couple things with me:

1. A better attitude.
2. My friend Kristy.

I haven’t worked out with Kristy in a looong time. All last summer we took the same boot camp class (as did Kristy’s hubby, Mike), but I haven’t been to that class in months. I got her a guest pass to my gym, and we did a killer workout, both individually and together. After a warm-up, we did a 20-minute set with free weights (focusing on a variety of upper body exercises) while pedaling away on exercise bikes. Then we split up, and I did more weights: squats, leg presses, inclined bench press. We met up again at the end, and Kristy finished with lunges and flies, and I did a ton of sit-ups.

That workout was fantastic. It felt awesome to follow up a bad workout with an excellent one! Kristy came over after the gym, and we made a delicious lunch (which I will share in an upcoming post).

Speaking of food, there will be a couple occasions this weekend where I’ll be dining out. What I generally do when a menu is placed in front of me is jump immediately to the salads section, and find one that sounds good. With that salad in my mind as an option, I then peruse the rest of the menu, looking for other healthy options. Sometimes I find and order them, and sometimes I stick with the salad. Twice in the past week, I’ve stuck with the salad, and they were good. Here’s the citrus and berry salad I got at Hugo’s, one of my favorite restaurants:

Strawberries, oranges, mango, jicama, asparagus, green beans, greens, and some crumbled goat cheese, with a berry vinaigrette (that was a little on the tart side).

And here’s the salad I got at Cabbage Patch, a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles that I had never heard of until I walked into it:

Roasted baby beets, avocado, and mixed greens with a little cheese. Balsamic vinaigrette on the side. Fantastic.

I kinda fell in love with Cabbage Patch – it’s quick and reasonable (a perfect lunch spot if you work downtown), it has healthy options, and it’s in a fun two-story space that uses what looks like reclaimed wood. OH! And it has a mysterious skylight! There’s a frosted skylight at the top of the two-story space that brings light all the way down to the counter where you order, but the restaurant is located on the first two floors of a 10-story building. So, either the building has a center atrium/courtyard/light well that the skylight accesses, or… the skylight is completely fake! A sham! A ruse! See? Mysterious!

Here’s to a weekend filled with good choices!

KEEP IT UP, DAVID!

Greetings From Michigan!

I’ve landed in the Great Lakes State – my home state – and I’ll be here through the day after Christmas. Then it’s off to a whole different part of the world… but that’s an announcement for a whole ‘nother day!

My flights today were great. I had a short layover in Phoenix, and, during the Burbank-Phoenix leg, I had a window seat… except that, as you can see in the picture, I got gypped out of a window! From Phoenix-Detroit, I had an aisle seat, which I like because I can stretch a leg into the aisle. Added bonus today: the middle seat next to me was empty, so I could stretch my other leg in that direction!

Tomorrow morning I’m heading to a local gym – the same gym I frequented when I was here in September – and seeing what kind of deal they can cut me for a week. In September, they charged me $25 for 2 weeks, so their 1-week rate must be less than that, right?

I’m hoping the change of fitness-related scenery will provide me a little boost. I’ve been struggling lately to motivate myself to work out. Last week, when I was terribly ill with a cold and/or flu, I ended up missing four days of exercise in a row. I’m not complaining – just an observation. It’s the longest stretch of non-exercise I think I’ve had all year. Plus, two days prior to that little stretch, I had a planned rest day, so, in total, I worked out twice that week, instead of an ideal six times.

Normally when circumstances prohibit me from exercising for a day or two, I start feeling antsy to get back in the gym. Apparently when circumstances prohibit me from exercising for four days straight, I lose all interest in the gym altogether, because that’s how I felt when I got healthy and strong enough to resume exercising. My motivation had disappeared quicker than Santa up the chimney! My first workout back after recuperating was a run. I hadn’t gone running since Thanksgiving Day (when I ran my first 5K with my sister), and at first I felt great. About 15 minutes in, though, my tune had changed, and I couldn’t wait to finish. I had pre-determined my route, so I was nowhere near home by that point, so I kept running, and banned myself from checking the time. All told, I spent 41 minutes on the sidewalks of North Hollywood, and went exactly 4 miles. My route:

I calculated my speed at 5.8 mph (and, yep, I’ve added it to my running chart!). Even though I was fairly miserable by the run’s end, I was happy and proud I stuck it out.

The next day (Monday), I hit the gym for the first time in a week, and had a good workout – 40 minutes of weightlifting and 16 minutes on a bike, plus a little warm-up on the treadmill. Today was a looong travel day – I left my house in California at 5am and walked in my parents’ door at 6pm – so no workout. Tomorrow, it’s gym time. I can’t miss many more workouts – not with all the holiday goodies around!

Keep it up, David!

PS – Wondering why I didn’t weigh myself this morning? It’s because I vowed to not weigh myself again until 2012, as a way to combat a developing obsession with my scale. I found a new hiding spot for my scale, and it’s working like a charm! Find out where it is here.

PPS – Remember the micro red amaranth I purchased last week? A few days ago, I included it in a big kale salad I brought to a dinner party:

The salad was simple and easy (pre-chopped and washed kale, tomatoes, persian cucumbers, micro red amaranth, and bottled nonfat balsamic vinaigrette), and it was a big hit. I thought the amaranth tasted a little like lawn cuttings (in a wheatgrass sorta way, not an off-putting sorta way), but a couple of my friends thought they tasted like beets. Or maybe it was just the color that reminded them of beets!

OK – I’m off. Because of the holidays, my posting schedule may be a little erratic, but I’ll be keeping it up, and so should you!

Fancy-Pants Slaw

This may be hard to believe, since I’ve written so much about it over the past few days, but that 10K I ran on Sunday morning wasn’t my only weekend activity. On Saturday night (the night before the big race), I was invited to a potluck, and you know me… I love an excuse to try out or create a new recipe.

I decided to bring a salad. I’m good at salads, and my Saturday before the potluck was kinda packed, so it was something that could come together relatively quickly, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it staying hot. I found an idea for a dressing and another element that sounded good in The Farm to Table Cookbook (which I modified, naturally), but the salad they recommended serving it on sounded kinda blah. And since cole slaw seems like a very potlucky-type dish, I decided that was the way to go.

This dish has a really long name. Are you ready? Here’s how I made my…

Cabbage & Apple Slaw, with Balsamic-Soaked Currants, Toasted Pecans, and Sweet Ginger Curry Dressing.

Whew, that title is a mouthful!  This recipe makes a lot of salad, so you may want to consider halving it before you commit to buying ingredients.

Preparations began on Friday night. First thing on the to-do list: Balsamic-Soaked Currants. Currants are a variety of small raisins that date back to ancient Greece. They look like raisins and taste like raisins, but they’re called currants so stores can charge more for them (just a guess). I’ve had currants in scones and granola and other baked goods, but this may have been the first time I’ve bought them:

See? I told you they look like raisins. I put about a cup of them in an airtight container, and added enough balsamic vinegar until they were covered:

I let them sit in the fridge overnight, but all they really need is an hour or to. There! Balsamic-soaked currants… done.

I also made the dressing on Friday night. I pulled out my blender, and started with the first ingredient: a Granny Smith apple:

Hmmm… maybe I should peel, core, and chop that apple, huh?

Much better. That’s two cups of apple, which actually turned out to be one and a half Granny Smiths. Then I added all sorts of good stuff:

• 2 teaspoons fresh ginger
• 1 tablespoon curry powder
• 2 garlic cloves
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons honey
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (apple cider vinegar would be good too)

The Farm to Table recipe called for 1/2 cup of oil, but there’s no way I was adding that much oil, so I modified it, and added 2 tablespoons olive oil, 2 more tablespoons vinegar, and 1/4 water. Blend it until it’s smooth, and you end up with:

It’s the curry that gives it the fantastic color!

The last thing I did on Friday night was toast some pecans. I forgot to take pictures, but I threw about 2 cups of pecan halves in a 10″ skillet (no need for oil, butter, or spray of any kind), and put them on medium-low heat for about 5-7 minutes. You know they’re done when you can smell ‘em! And they smell great!

On Saturday, all I had to do was assemble the salad, which involved a lot of chopping. First item on the cutting board: cabbage:

That’s a savoy cabbage, which has leaves that are more wrinkly than regular green cabbage. I removed and tossed the outer-most leaves, chopped it in half, cut out the thick core, and chopped it up:

The entire cabbage went in the bowl. I wanted a little color and variety, so I also added 1/2 of a red cabbage:

Then, about 6 or 7 stalks of celery, chopped:

And half of a red onion, sliced. A little onion goes a long way:

Next up, more apple. I wanted to buy Braeburn, because I’ve read that they’re the most resistant to browning, and I thought I bought Braeburn, but when I got home from the store, it turned out they were Honeycrisp. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to the signs in the produce section. Or maybe they were mislabeled. Either way, Honeycrisps are great apples – firm and crunchy and sweet – so I chopped 5 of them. I left the skins on, to add color.

Time for the finishing touches! I pulled out the currants, which had been soaking up the balsamic all night, and started scooping them out with a slotted spoon:

These are pungent little fellows! Sweet, with a balsamic kick – very tasty. I put about half of them in the bowl, along with half of the pecans. I added the dressing…

…and tossed it all together. Then, I sprinkled the other half of the currants and pecans on top, to make it purdy. Wanna see the final result?

TA-DA!

I added a sign so everyone knew what they were getting into:

That’s painters’ tape, so the bowl doesn’t get damaged.

The potluck was a lot of fun. I met a lot of new people, and I think the slaw was a hit. People seemed to be eating it!

I bought too much cabbage, though, and there’s still 1/2 of a red cabbage and an entire second savoy cabbage in my fridge. Another slaw may be in my future…

Keep it up, David!

Garden Fresh Salad. Literally.

You know by now that I love produce straight off the tree.  Or vine.  Or bush.  Most recently, I scored some great lemons and oranges from my friend Robyn’s backyard and some limes from my friend Emily’s.  Although they’ve told me about it, I had completely forgotten that this year, my sister Sarah and her husband Justin put in a little garden along the side of their house, and Justin and I raided it to help put together last night’s dinner.

Here’s the garden:

They’re growing tomatoes, and these two guys were ready to go:

Justin harvested four cucumbers from his cucumber plants (he says they can barely keep up with the cucumbers they’re growing):

There’s also green peppers that are coming along nicely:

And some strawberry plants that haven’t yielded much this year, but I did find this little green guy:

So what did we do with the tomatoes and cucumbers?

We made a salad, of course!

Both tomatoes and 2 of the cucumbers got chopped up.  My 5-year-old nephew Sam helped – I did the chopping, he put them in the bowl.  We added a few more store-bought veggies: baby arugula, mushrooms, and 1/2 an orange bell pepper.  For dressing, we added a little olive oil, some vinegar, and salt and pepper.  This may be one of the freshest salads I’ve ever eaten:

Delicious!

The rest of my dinner was two sliders (each burger was 2 ounces), with tomato (also from the garden), lettuce, pickles, and mustard.  I split 1 bun between the two of them, and ate them open-faced.  I also nabbed about 4 french fries off my nephew’s plate.

My back is doing much better.  If you saw yesterday’s post about pools and high-dives and moving and skyscrapers, then you read about how I threw out my back.  Ouch.  I consulted the fitness professionals in my life today: Richard Simmons, among other things, suggested a massage (which is a great idea), and Craig laid out a plan for when I should get back to the gym, and what I should do.  Over the course of the day, during which I occasionally did stretches, my back improved.  It’s not 100% better, but it’s improved.

Tomorrow I hop on a plane and fly to Michigan.  Hopefully, this travel day won’t be as long and arduous as my last flight!

Keep it up, David!