Fatal Flaw in the Weight Loss Plan...

...We can't find our bathroom scales. We had two sets, a manual one and an electronic one, and I remember wrapping them both up together in a towel when we moved. I don't remember where they went after that, and not long after we moved in Rob wanted them. We kept saying that we'd come across them eventually, but it's been three weeks and we only have half a dozen or so boxes still to empty. We've looked in them all and there are no scales to be found - and that also means I'm missing a hand towel :).

So keeping an eye on my weight has proven a bit difficult of late. We had junk food every night for the first week we were here (we had a functioning kitchen within 2 days but after unpacking all day the last thing I wanted to do was cook) and judging by the reading on the scales at the gym the other day, I did put some weight on (although I was fully clothed and with my trainers on). But we've been eating a lot better and I've been exercising regularly again, so hopefully the weight I put on will have gone again by the time I find/buy some scales.

I mapped out a 3km route (actually 3.05km) from the new house and ran it for the first time on Tuesday. The route from our old house (3.15km) was really flat, but this one is a bit hillier - there's a downhill then an uphill on Wildern Lane, Upper Northam Road is all uphill (only a gentle incline) then Turnpike Way is a combination of uphill and downhill. I posted a fairly slow time on Tuesday because I didn't know what the rest of the route was going to be like, but today I did a much better time - my fastest time yet, although this route is 100m shorter than the old route.

I didn't feel too out of breath and my legs weren't too tired, both on Tuesday and today, so I've decided I'll do one more route at 3km then I'll modify my route a little to 3.5km.

Back to the Exercise Programme

Until about 2 weeks before we moved, I was exercising 6 days a week, but then preparations for moving house took over and I only managed a couple of times a week. Not long after we moved here, Rob and I joined the local gym, the Hampshire Tennis and Health Club, which is about a mile away. Included in the (ridiculously high) membership price are three sessions with a personal trainer, and my first one was this morning with Ben, an ex-army officer who's originally from Bolton, down the road from Manchester.

He's set me a programme based on my going to the gym four days a week - if I want to exercise more often than that, I can go running on the road or just repeat one of the four sessions in my gym programme. I have two sessions of cardio-vascular work only - cross-trainer, stepper or upright bike, or a combination of these if I don't want to stay on the same machine the whole time - then two sessions of a short CV workout combined with other exercises: weight machines for one session and mat work for the other. Both the weights and the mat sessions are intended to work all my major muscle groups - he's picked 6 weight machines which work my legs, chest, shoulders, back, arms and tummy, and the mat ('functional') exercises are intended to simulate movements that I do every day, like bending down, reaching out, squatting etc.

By the time we went over my aims and objectives and did a couple of minutes on all the machines and mat exercises, I'd already been there nearly an hour and a half, so this morning I just did a further 25-minute session on the cross-trainer and I'll do one of the combined CV/other exercise sessions tomorrow. I'll have my second personal trainer session with Ben in 3 or so weeks' time to assess my progress, at which point he said he will modify the programme if needs be.

Reconnected

What did we ever do before we had the internet? I had quite a frustrating week last week without it - I couldn't do my work properly because lots of our systems, including bookkeeping and file sharing, are web-based; I couldn't look up the name and number of a local plumber and a burglar alarm company, and the previous people didn't leave their Yellow Pages; I had to use the phone - the phone! - to book tickets for Harry Potter on Saturday (brilliant, by the way). Still, that's all over now, because our broadband was connected today.

Lots of people have asked to see pictures of the new house, so here they are. I haven't taken any of the upstairs yet, because it's still quite chaotic up there - we stripped the wallpaper off the walls of the main bedroom at the weekend in preparation for it being decorated next week; the rest of the rooms are still full of boxes so there's not much to see yet, but I'll take some pictures when it's all finished.

It's ridiculously difficult to take pictures of entire rooms, but I've done my best. First, there's the outside of the house, which you might have seen already on my previous post, but here's another one taken in better weather.




The window downstairs on the left in the above picture is the one you see here in the lounge.






This next picture is taken from the doorway in the previous picture, showing the other side of the lounge and the double doorway through to the dining room.





Here's the dining room from the other side, looking through to the lounge. The table won't stay against the wall - once it's in the middle of the room, I think there's room for an upright piano against that wall. Just need to start saving my pennies now...



Then there's the kitchen, first taken from the dining room doorway:






Then from the conservatory doorway. The conservatory is currently empty - we've ordered furniture for it today which will be delivered in 4-6 weeks, so again, I'll take pictures when it's furnished.




There's another room downstairs - the garage used to be double-length and the previous owners converted the back half into an office, and Rob's going to use it for his den, but again, it's not decorated yet and there's no furniture.

Rob's Mum and Dad are coming to visit this weekend, then they're staying the rest of the week as his Dad's a decorator. He's going to tackle as many rooms as he can in the week then we'll get someone in to do the rest.

More pictures to follow...

We're Here!

We arrived at 15:00 on Friday afternoon and spent all weekend unpacking. We now have a working living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, so at least we can function properly... The conservatory is full of boxes, as is the garage and one of the bedrooms, but we'll just have to get around to that when we can. The downstairs is bigger than I remembered it - I thought we might have problems getting our massive sofas in the living room but it's fine. We took a break from unpacking on Saturday to look for some reclining chairs for Rob's den and some furniture for the conservatory - we've found some potential candidates but have a few more shops to look in before we decide.

We don't have broadband at the moment (will be up in a week) so I'm at Adrian's house, catching up on e-mails and doing some work. His kids have just arrived back from school so I don't think I'll get much done now - in fact, I'll probably just give up and watch Tweenies or something...

More later.

(Slight) Change of Plan Again

We're all packed up and waiting for the removals men to arrive. I called the company earlier on and asked them where they would be storing our stuff overnight - I was told when I made the booking that they would pack everything except our bed today, then come back for the bed first thing in the morning and go straight off to Southampton after that. The guy on the phone today told me that the van would be stored in a lorry park with 24-hour security. Which is great, except the lorry park is in Southampton. So there was a lot of confusion when I asked why they would be driving 230 miles to the lorry park today, only to come back again in the morning for our bed...

The van they have sent is not a sleeper van, and clearly the message about coming back in the morning has not filtered through. So we have had to take down our bed and the removers (if they ever get here - they left Southampton at 06:30 this morning for a journey of 6 hours, including two decent breaks, and it's now 15:00 and they haven't turned up yet) will pack all our stuff up tonight and drive it down to Southampton, then we just need to call them tomorrow when we're about an hour away and they'll bring the van round to the new house.

So we've had to book a room at the local Premier Travel Inn for tonight (for which the removals company will reimburse us). Which is no big deal, but we feel a bit robbed of our 'last night in the old house'! And it also means that I won't have internet access after they've packed the router etc, so I'd better get this posted now. More news in a few days when we've got broadband set up at the new place...

Surrounded by Boxes

Not much to report, except that we've been packing since last Monday and are nearly there now. We've given 6 bin bags full of clothes and 3 bin bags of shoes to charity, thrown out a car full of stuff we don't need any more (and have another car full to take this week), and got rid of a LOAD of out-of-date food. We just have the garage to do now, then the rest of the stuff will have to wait until Thursday when the removals company arrives. My lower back aches after I've been packing boxes for a few hours but Rob and I are doing the exercises on his Easing Back Pain CD most days so it's not as bad as it could be - and nowhere near as bad as it was last time we moved.

On the running front, I've done my route another three times, so that's four times I've run the entire route (and another twice I've walked part of the way). Yesterday morning I found it really tough, though, and was a bit slower than my last couple of times. My calves started hurting not long into the run and were killing me by the end - had to do lots of stretches when I finished. I still don't like this running malarkey but I will stick at it for a while longer yet...

Scratch that... change of moving date

Last Friday I posted that we would be moving house in a week. I then had a call from my solicitor around noon that day, saying that our vendors, the ones who have already completed on another purchase and are only staying on in the house until we need them to move out, are refusing to complete on 29 June. Something about not being able to find a removal company... Out of all the things we anticipated could go wrong in this whole process, our vendors didn't even feature in our list - the agent told us they'd have moved out long ago.

Needless to say I was not entirely happy about that, given that we'd spent most of the previous week getting ourselves into a position where we could complete this Friday so as to fit in with our buyers and their buyers. Sure, it was difficult to find a removal company for me too, and I had to ring 24 of them before one said they had availability, but I managed it in the end. Obviously our buyers weren't too pleased either, because they had done similar things to get themselves in a position to move out on 29 June, including booking a removal company and taking time off work.

Long story short, although they're not all happy about it, everyone in the chain has now agreed on a completion date of 6 July (which was my preferred date all along, so I've got back a week in Manchester and don't feel nearly so stressed about everything now). And our solicitor has just called to say that contracts have been exchanged, so there's no backing out now; everything is set!

Stupid English house-buying system... there has to be a better way.

Another Sunday, Another Race

This weekend it was the turn of the City of Manchester 10km. It's a much smaller event than the well-publicised Great Manchester Run, with about 2,000 runners, and it takes place around Sportcity, the sports complex built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester. The route takes in the City of Manchester Stadium (Manchester City's football ground) and B of the Bang. Rick and Rob had both signed up to do the race, but then Rick arranged to visit his Mum in Scotland this weekend before realising he couldn't do both... so he ran a 10km route in Dundee while Rob ran the actual race in Manchester.

The weather was pretty perfect for running, much like last weekend, and Rob finished in a fantastic 54:39. He was aiming for under an hour, and was extremely pleased with his time. Here he is waving to us just after the start. His next goal now is a sub-50 10km.

I have run the 3km route we did last weekend twice more since then - on Tuesday I cut 15% off my original time, and yesterday I went slightly faster again. Yesterday my aim was to run all the way round (I walked for two stints the other two times) and I managed it, but I found it really hard. My next goal is to run the route a further five times without stopping to walk, then I'll look at increasing the distance.

We're Moving in a Week!

Our house purchase has progressed very quickly - our searches are done, our solicitor has received the contracts from the vendor's solicitor and we've got our mortgage offer - so we're in a position to complete. Ideally I would have liked to complete on 6 July, but our purchasers are pushing for completion by the end of June and seeing as we are able to complete next Friday, we've agreed to move out on 29 June.

I'm excited about moving, but at the same time I feel a bit harassed, because I've lost a week of time I thought I had in Manchester, and there's so much to do and so many people I'd like to see before I go. We had a really hard time finding a removals company with availability at less than 2 weeks' notice, but we managed to find one in the end. We're going to visit Rob's Grandma and Grandad on Saturday morning and he has a race in Manchester on Sunday morning, but the rest of the time between now and next Friday will be spent packing things up and seeing as many friends as possible to say goodbye. Wish us luck!

I Can See!

I had laser eye surgery yesterday afternoon. Rob was quite worried about it, whereas I wasn't worried at all. That is, until I got into the operating room... They did my right eye first, and it went really well, then when they came to do my left eye it didn't feel the same as before - I just felt pressure on my right eye, but I thought I could actually feel something happening on my left eye. I couldn't, because there was plenty of anaesthetic in there, but the fact that I thought I could made me quite anxious, so they stopped and waited for the nurse to come round and hold my hand before they carried on...

Rob went to Antwerp yesterday for SpringOne, his company's conference dedicated to its product, the Spring Framework, and associated technologies. This meant that he couldn't pick me up from my appointment so his Dad kindly agreed to come and get me. My eyes were watering a lot and, as a consequence, my nose got quite blocked and I spent the entire journey home with my eyes closed and a tissue under my nose. I had trouble opening my eyes for long enough to put my drops in, so after I'd done that I went straight to bed at 20:30, but I found it really difficult to get to sleep because I couldn't get my nose clear to breathe. Rob called me around 21:00, then my Mum called around 21:30, to see how I'd got on, and while I said I was fine, I probably didn't sound very convincing because quite honestly that period was probably the worst I'd felt - all I wanted to do was rub my stinging eyes and that's the one thing they told me not to do. I even have eye guards to wear during the night in case I rub my eyes inadvertently while I'm asleep.

I fell asleep soon after that and slept all the way through until 07:30 this morning, and I feel a million times better now. My nose is clear and my eyes have stopped stinging - they're still quite watery, but when it's not being blurred by water my vision is great! I've got a follow-up appointment this afternoon to check that everything's OK, then I'll have another one next week, then check-ups at one month, three months and six months. I'll be in Southampton soon so I'll have to go to a different clinic for the last three appointments. I'm not supposed to look at the computer screen for too long so had better post this now!

UPDATE 19:50 - My eyes stopped watering around noon and at my follow-up appointment this afternoon they said my vision was great, I was fine to start driving again and everything is healing nicely. Yeah!