Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Boxing Debacle

I'm lazy so this is a cut and paste from my Facebook invite.  Don't worry, if you can't swing the trip to London, I'll make sure there is a video posted on YouTube.

debacle n. A sudden, disastrous collapse, downfall, or defeat; a rout. A total, often ludicrous failure

Mark your calendars.... In a moment lacking any sort of judgement, I have agreed to box in a White Collar Fight night. No friends, you did not just misread that sentence. I have been boxing (for fitness purposes) at Rooney's Boxing Gym for the past 4 months and they have managed to wear me down and convince me to subject myself to what I am sure will be sheer embarrassment for myself and unadulterated pleasure for all of you.

 
I will have more details in the next few weeks, but the event will be somewhere in the London Bridge area after work on Sept. 22nd. I think tickets will be around 20-30 quid, let me know if you're in and I'll find out more about tickets.


I'm still working on my "ring" name...any suggestions are welcome ;)
 
I've been working on my "mean" face
 

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Fighting Fit Update

If you remember my post from a couple of months ago, you'll know we were doing a Biggest Loser competition at work.  Well the competition has ended and I WON!! I won £620, but even more exciting I lost 6.5% of my body weight, which is a little more than half of my total goal!  I think I could have done even better if I hadn't spent almost 3 weeks in Texas eating Mexican food during part of the competition!  The three biggest contributors to my success were my boxing, my Lose It app on my iPhone and the fact that I didn't "diet". 

I absolutely LOVE my boxing gym! I finally found a work out that I can stick with.  I love how competitive it is and the small "family" feel of the gym keeps me going back 3 times a week.  I will admit, the morning of the final weigh in, I went to the gym for a 7 am work out with Mick and he made me wear a trash bag under my shirt so I would sweat more.  I little gross, but I lost almost 2 lbs (probably just water weight) that morning right before the weigh in!  Oh, and they are also trying to convince me to fight in a real fight at a White Collar Boxing event in September....eek!!!

I am obsessed with the Lose It! app on the iPhone!  It is so easy to track your calories and your goals.  The only bummer is that is is all American restaurants, so I usually just have to find something similar, but it is still really helpful.  One of my biggest problems before, I think, was that I was so confused as to why I had put on weight.  I really didn't think that I ate that bad or that much, but once I started tracking it I was shocked at how badly I was actually eating. It was nice to put it in perspective!  Plus I LOVE adding exercise each day and getting more calories. I have found that I have been walking everywhere a lot more lately just so I can press the add exercise button and get a few extra calories!

As for dieting, I decided not to do it this time.  In the past I have used both Weight Watchers and Atkins to lose weight.  While I was successful in the end goal, I found that neither were sustainable for long periods of time and as soon as I went off of the diet I went right for all of the things I have been deprived of.  This time I just went for reduced calories and exercise.  I didn't deprive myself of anything.  If I wanted a candy bar I had one, I just made sure I exercised that day enough to work it off.  I did cut out drinking during the week, but with this year as one of the best British summers...I couldn't manage to cut myself off on the weekends :) I also started cooking for myself again.  When I moved to my new flat I started eating almost every meal out, since I don't have much in the way of a kitchen.  But really I was just being lazy.  So I am back to cooking my meals for the week on Sundays. 

Everyone asked what I am going to do with my winnings, but since I owed a lot of money to the IRS this year, my macbook got stolen and I JUST smashed my iPhone screen (yesterday, ugh!!) I think the funds are already allocated :/

Monday, July 5, 2010

Summer Reading List

I seem to go through serious phases with reading.  I'll go for several months without picking a book up, when I try I can only get through a page or two before I lose interest...and then one day it will just flip and I'll read incessantly for a few months.  Then it is gone, just as suddenly as it came.  Well I have been OFF the written word here for the past few months in a bad way.  I have 3 books on my nightstand, that I really want to read, but I have only managed to get a few pages into each before I try another one to see if I can get into that one, to no avail.  Last week I met my friend Meg for lunch.  She and I share the same affinity for travel and she took me to this amazing bookstore that is three stories of ONLY travel literature.  It seems that my idea to go travel the world and then write about it has already been done a time or two!  They were having a 'buy 3 for the price of 2' special and before I knew it I was at the checkout counter with SIX books (but for the price of 4!).    It's going to be hard to keep my wanderlust in check with a summer reading list like this......



By examining the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man, who in 1992 walked deep into the Alaskan wilderness and whose SOS note and emaciated corpse were found four months later, internationally bestselling author Jon Krakauer explores the obsession which leads some people to explore the outer limits of self, leave civilization behind and seek enlightenment through solitude and contact with nature. "An astonishingly gifted writer: his account of 'Alex Supertramp' is powerfully dramatic, eliciting sympathy for both the idealistic, anti-consumerist boy - and his parents" - "Guardian". "A compelling tale of tragic idealism" - "The Times".



Ever since Stanley first charted its mighty river in the 1870s, the Congo has epitomised the dark and turbulent history of a failed continent - from colonial cruelty under the Belgians to the kleptocratic chaos of Mobutu Sese Seko and the current post-apocalyptic riot of robber-baron politicians. However, its troubles only served to increase the interest of "Daily Telegraph" correspondent Tim Butcher, who was sent to cover Africa in 2000. He remembered his mother's stories of her own genteel river journey there in the 1950s and his connection deepened when he discovered that Stanley's expedition was funded by the "Telegraph". Before long he became obsessed with the idea of recreating Stanley's original expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings from old Africa hands that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher spent years poring over colonial-era maps and wooing rebel leaders before making his will and venturing to the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. He travelled for hundreds of kilometers on a motorbike, dogged by punctured tyres, broken bridges and dehydration. As he drove through the most dangerous areas, he stopped only to sleep - biking through the bush for hours and speeding up every time he passed a soldier. And then he reached the legendary Congo River, making his way down it in an assortment of vessels including a dugout canoe. Helped along the way by a cast of characters - from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he passed through the once thriving cities of this huge country, saw the marks left behind by years of abuse and misrule, and followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers, and of the visitors - such as Katherine Hepburn and Evelyn Waugh - who had been there in very different times. Almost 2,500 harrowing miles later, he reached the Atlantic Ocean a thinner and a wiser man. His extraordinary account describes a country with more past than present, where giant steamboats lie rotting in the advancing forest and children hear stories from their grandfathers of days when cars once drove by. Butcher's journey was a remarkable feat. But the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still.


In 1978, gifted student and writer Greg Roberts turned to heroin when his marriage collapsed, feeding his addiction with a string of robberies. Caught and convicted, he was given a nineteen-year sentence. After two years, he escaped from a maximum- security prison, spending the next ten years on the run as Australia's most wanted man. Hiding in Bombay, he established a medical clinic for slum- dwellers, worked in the Bollywood film industry and served time in the notorious Arthur Road prison. He was recruited by one of the most charismatic branches of the Bombay mafia for whom he worked as a forger, counterfeiter, and smuggler, and fought alongside a unit of mujaheddin guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan. His debut novel, SHANTARAM, is based on this ten-year period of his life in Bombay. The result is an epic tale of slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison torture, mafia gang wars and Bollywood films. A gripping adventure story, SHANTARAM is also a superbly written meditation on good and evil and an authentic evocation of Bombay life.

Paul Theroux sets off for Cape Town from Cairo -- the hard way. Travelling across bush and desert, down rivers and across lakes, and through country after country, Theroux visits some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth, and some of the most dangerous. It is a journey of discovery and of rediscovery -- of the unknown and the unexpected, but also of people and places he knew as a young and optimistic teacher forty years before. Safari in Swahili simply means "journey", and this is the ultimate safari. It is Theroux in his element -- a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere.



Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi behind the wheel of a Honda. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the slums, the shopping malls, and the crippling traffic jams, Balram learns of a new morality at the heart of a new India. Driven by desire to better himself, he comes to see how the Tiger might escape his cage...



'Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die' - Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan. In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants' kindness, he promised to return and build a school. "Three Cups of Tea" is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools - especially for girls - in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscape of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as the Taliban rose to power. His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.


The last book I have read before, several years ago on a work trip to Chicago.  I cried the whole flight home while I was finishing the book.  It is, and will always remain, my favorite book.  It is awe inspiring the impact one person can have on the world, even when they just set out to repay one village for a kind deed.  If you read only one book, let this be the one, the world will be a better place if you do! 

Oh and here are the three on my nightstand that I still have to get through....



We all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it. Dambisa Moyo’s excoriating and controversial book reveals why millions are actually poorer because of aid, unable to escape corruption and reduced, in the West’s eyes, to a childlike state of beggary. Dead Aid shows us another way. Using hard evidence to illustrate her case, Moyo shows how, with access to capital and with the right policies, even the poorest nations can turn themselves around. First we must destroy the myth that aid works– and make charity history.


Do you believe in miracles? This collection of extraordinary tales of survival is guaranteed to astound and inspire you in equal measure. Meet ordinary people who have found extraordinary strengths facing seemingly impossible challenges – like the woman who fell from the sky, or the man who floated 300 miles out to sea after the Asian tsunami. What is it about some people that they seem born survivors, or how does someone find the incredible strength from within not to give up on hope against all odds? Are some people just lucky? These and many other true stories demonstrate the strength we all possess to come through our life's toughest challenges, and the precious wisdom that results from surviving. This book is based primarily on conversations with survivors and experts around the world


The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of an American family in the Congo during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. This tale of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction, over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, is set against one of history's most dramatic political parables. The Poisonwood Bible dances between the darkly comic human failings and inspiring poetic justices of our times. In a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption, Barbara Kingsolver has written a novel of overwhelming power and passion

I'm off to read....

It Has Come And Gone

as quickly and quietly as ever...my two years in London is up.  July 1st marked my two year anniversary in London.  I still remember exactly what I wore, what it felt like pulling up to my flat in the cab, what I ate (Bodeans!) that first day.  What an amazing two years I have had.  I came to London full of hope for the future, I knew I would love it and that I would make the best of whatever it would throw at me, that's just how I do things.  I came to London because I knew I would always regret not coming, but I was pretty sure that I would never regret coming.  But what I didn't know then, and possibly didn't even expect, is how happy I would be here.  That I was about to make a life for myself here, not just a temporary existence, but a real life with real friends.  It still surprises me sometimes how settled I feel here, everyday life feels like just that...but still with a little something extra!  I know a big part of my happiness has to do with the friends I have made here, but a huge part also has to do with London, I have totally fallen in love with this city.  I love Londons character, the charm and curb appeal of West London, the raw edge and people watching of East London. Every neighborhood has it's own identity, if you take a walk across London (which I often do) you can not only see the change, but you can feel it too.  The music blaring out of the bars begins to change, the people change, the architecture changes...just when you start to vibe on your new setting. It changes all over again.  I love it.  I love a lazy weekend as much as the next, but it's hard to do that here.  There are countless markets to discover, festivals to enjoy...music, sports, food... In the past couple of months I have my weekends have consisted of polo matches, horse races, rooftop BBQs, Pearl Jam and Paul McCartney in Hyde Park, boozy brunches, picnics, World Cup watching with people from all over the world.  The list goes on...you would have to make a serious effort to be bored here! 

Before you get too worried Mom...no I'm not staying here forever!  But rest easy at night, I am happy!