Today one of the guys, Lee, who goes to all of our morning workouts was making his final appearance before he is shipped to Japan to assume his new command.

Lee is a Captain in the Coast Guard and is really fit. He always shows up for the workouts, flies through them, and encourages anyone struggling. He seems like a really good guy and he'll be missed in the class.

As a tribute to Lee one of the other guys in the class, Mark, made some cool shirts and worked with another guy, CW, to devise a final workout for the Capt. consisting of some of his favorite exercises.

A Captain has a military paygrade of O-6. So, flipping that around a little the workout consisted of six exercises:

• 60 Double Unders
• 60 Burpees
• 60 Pullups (I used a giant rubber band thing to help me finish these)
• 60 Thrusters (65 lbs)
• 60 Kettlebell Swings (I used a 36lb KB)
• 600 m run.

This was just one round - you couldn't split into six rounds of ten reps. It was hard but not as hard as I thought it would be. However, my upper-body muscles are certainly tired. I'm sure I'll be sore.

The Capt. #MURICA workout. Add it to your routine if you're looking for a free and powerful start to your day.

Today's Workout was pretty tough. Maybe not the toughest one we've done since I started but it was still a killer.

Five rounds with decending reps per round of five exercies per round. The title of those post shows how many reps of each exercise were to be performed per round. 50,40,30,20, and 10.

Here are the exercises in the order they were performed:

1. Wall Balls (12 lbs)
2. Rope Raises? (I'm not sure what these are called but it's a couple heavy ropes you have to flip up and down. They are attached to a wall on one end and you grab the other. Then kind of flip them up like you're helping someone else play jump rope).
3. Sit Ups
4. Push Ups.. (I had to cut some reps out of this; I did 40, 30, 20, 20, 10)
5. Double Unders (jump rope that passes under your feet 2x on each jump. I suck at these so I did 3x the rep count of normal jump rope jumps; 150, 120, 90, 60, 30).

I suspect tomorrow I'm going to be pretty sore.

This video starts with a guy doing the rope exercise.

Emily has been playing the violin for about a year now I guess. She does okay with the level of songs she is tasked with playing but she doesn't care much for practice so she doesn't excel.

One of her good friends is going to start taking violin lessons soon and so the two of them decided to work on a song together and play a violin duet. Bear in mind her friend, Lilly, had never played the violin before so Emily had to teach her how to do everything; hold the violin, hold the bow, bow positioning, and translating the music on the sheet into things for her fingers and arm to do.

They picked a song that is very rudimentary called the "one finger race." Honestly, I have no idea what the song is supposed to sound like or if it is even a true song or if it is merely a training device Emily learned earlier in her training. Suffice it to say it is a relatively easy violin piece.

Today was the talent show and I think they did a pretty good job considering. Emily clearly didn't teach her exactly how to hold the violin or the bow or posture or all those little fundamental things that can make a huge difference in the long run. But it is pretty much the first time Emily has ever tried to teach someone else a complex skill and I think it went well. To me the talent show for Emily was showing that she could teach Lilly the song.

Just as equally impressive was Lilly getting up there and trying to play this song without really knowing anything about playing a violin. She dove in head first into a task that would make the most hardened showman a little nervous and she did it with aplomb. I was really impressed with her composure and effort in doing something like that in front of her entire school of peers.

Both of them were pretty awesome today and none of it had to do with actually playing "the one finger race"

I am not doing nearly as good of a job of logging these as I wanted to.

Thursday, May 14 2015

14 minutes do as many sets as you can; I think I did three sets

• 50 double unders. This is a jump rope thing where the rope goes under your feet twice on each jump. I am not good at getting this rhythm yet so it is particularly hard and time consuming for me so I did a bunch of double unders and regular jumps for a few minutes then went to the second exercise. Othewise I might have spent the entire 14 minutes on the first set of double unders.
• 25 Wallballs - I used the 12 pound ball.

After that we did a "fast mile" run. My fast mile was 6:57 or so - not very fast. Here is the garmin data

Friday, May 15 2015

Fridays are our run day so we run before we workout. Today we did a workout Mark calls "the bitch" because he knows people will be complaining. It is an interval run where the amount of sprint time increases but the rest time between sprints stays at 30 seconds. Marks watch had some problems early on though so we had one extra long rest. Here is the garmin data.

Then we went to class and did the following:

• 3 hang clean into squat (95 lbs)
• 25 situps

Increment hang clean by one each set until you complete a set with 10 hang cleans. Because we got to class late and I'm slow I only finished the 7 hang cleans set.

Hold a high-plank (arms fully extended) for time. I made it to about 3 minutes. Overall it was a good workout after a crappy nights sleep. Without it I'd be dead and useless at work today.

I haven't been to the Y in a few weeks. I had some sort of nasty chest congestion thing going on and I've had to take the girls to school more often in the mornings. But I've made it twice this week - Yesterday and Today. Here is a rundown of what I managed to do.

Tuesday, May 12 2015

3 Rounds (was supposed to be 5)

• Prowler Push - a weight sled with about 150+ lbs on it. I'm not sure of the weight. You need to push it about 100 feet.
• 16 Pull Ups - hahaha I can't really do 16 pullups. However, there is a rubber band thing I can put one foot in to make it feasible to finish.
• 9 hand stand push ups - Even more laughable. I can barely do a handstand. Though I did manage a handstand a few times each round. I basically attempted 20 handstands instead of doing handstand pushups. If I succeeded in the handstand I held it as long as 10 seconds.
• row machine for 25 calories as fast as you can. I am not sure how far that equates too but it's more than 200m and pretty damn exhausting. The last round I took 41 rows to get there.

We were supposed to do five rounds but I had to take a break to use the facilities between rounds 2 and 3 and by the time I was done with round 3 everyone was done and we were out of time. I'm glad. I might have passed out trying to do all five rounds.

Wednesday, May 13 2015

20 Minutes, as many rounds as you can complete.

• 30 seconds chin over bar - this is like a single pullup that you hold at the top for 30 seconds. I did it the first round mostly but in each progressive round I had to fight a lot more to keep my arms bent. I usually made it about 10 seconds before my arms started to sag and my entire body was shaking.
• 3 box jumps, add 3 more each round (so 6 in the second, 9 in the third,etc)
• 6 burpees, add 3 more each round.

I made it through five rounds in 20 minutes. The best guys got through 8! After that we did an ab exercise contest where you laid on your back and held your feet about a foot off the floor as long as you could. I had no problem with this exercise and was coasting along at about 3:30 when I thought everyone else had given up. I didn't want to just lay there so I got up only to realize two others were still going. When I got up one of the other two collapsed but the last person fought it out for another couple minutes. I could have probably kept close to her had I realized the contest was still going. Next time.

It was nice to get back to the gym though this morning was strange because I was woken during deep sleep by my alarm. It was, maybe, the first night in a couple months where I slept soundly the entire night. It was sad to wake up.

If you know who Jeffery Tambor is you probably never really thought of him as a Broadway singer. I certainly never did until this morning. Anyway, to give you some context, before we move on, here is Jeffery Tambor being funny (he's the older guy who is a prisoner in this bit).

While driving the kids to school we were listening to the Broadway station on XM radio and a song came on from the musical "Closer than Ever" - I'm not sure which song but it featured a male lead who, to me at least, sounds like a singing Jeffery Tambor.

The guy I'm thinking of pops in at 18 seconds and then has a solo at 37 seconds.

The guy is Richard Muenz. It turns out I was completely wrong.

However, my ear proved a bit better later on the drive. Donna Murphy was singing a song from "Passion" and I tought, she sounds like the lady who stole the baby from Tangled (Mother Gothel) and I was actually right.

Here is Donna singing a different song entirely but it's neat to see a cartoon character's voice in reality.

I know the Echo has been around for a few months but I just got one after pre-ordering back in January. I've had it for a couple days and used it for one so these are some thoughts based on a very limited amount of usage

1. Setup requires a wifi connection - this is kind of annoying. I had it shipped to the office and our enterprise wifi encryption isn't supported on the Echo so I couldn't play with the device until I got home. It would have been better if I could have quickly paired it to my phone with bluetooth and started playing some music through it.
2. Setup is easy - however, once you've got it on wifi the setup was super simple and super painless.
3. Voice recognition is pretty good. It had trouble with only one thing I've told it so far - "add IPA to my shopping list". It just couldn't handle the letters IPA. I tried four times and the best it did was IP-eight. Other than that it has handled all of our other queries with aplomb.
4. Can't integrate with any music services I use. It uses amazon prime music and will let you integrate with some other stuff like iHeartMusic and tunein - but I don't use any of those services and doubt I will really. The amazon radio stations interface on the web/phone sucks. I already subscribe to Google Play music so it would be nice if I could natively integrate with it but the best I can do is pair my phone with Bluetooth and play my music that way. The problem there is that I lose the nice voice integration. On the plus side my wife does like Pandora and Echo recently added support for that so I'll try to set that up for her.
5. It looks nice - i like the unobtrusive look of it on the kitchen counter.
6. The echo app on my phone is slow - Because the echo basically only integrates with my phone via this echo app and the app is kind of clunky I'll probably not use the Echo much for shopping lists etc. We already use Google Keep for shopping lists and googles voice recognition is just as good, if not better. In the end I suspect this device will go into my eldest daughters bedroom to serve as a Bluetooth speaker.
7. The speaker sounds pretty good - I'm pleasantly surprised with the sound quality. It's clear and the bass is solid. I'm no audiophile and for my needs it sounds fine.
8. I don't think the device has a rechargeable battery so it is tethered to one room in the house.

I had hoped for a little more integration so in the end I'm a little disappointed with the device. Interestingly once you buy one it seems you can't buy another (not that I want to) but when I go to the amazon website I only get a "thanks for your purchase" note and no option to buy another. If you're interested in buying one you can get them at via this link at Amazon.

NOTE: When I bought mine it was $99 for Prime members. Now it is $149 for Prime members and $199 for anyone else. I think that the $99 price point is where it should be for everyone.

I am not much of a fan of ballet. I like watching Emily do it - but she is my daughter and I'm just happy to see her doing it because she enjoys it.

In particular I get pretty bored watching male ballet. Maybe it's the pants?

Anyway, this post isn't really about ballet but about a different form of dance called Hopak.

Hopak is a Ukranian dance alo known as a Cossack Dance. You've undoubtedly seen some of it when you see the guys squatting and kicking as they roam around the stage with their arms crossed in front of their chest. By the way tHat squatting kick move is really insane.

Here is a video showing a bunch of guys going through a variety of the moves. It's pretty amazing what they are able to do. NOTE: this is Virsky the Ukranian national dance company so they are all really good at this kind of dance.

Anyway, maybe if ballet were as energetic as Hopak I'd enjoy it a little more. Some of those jumps in Hopak just don't make sense - like when the guy kicks himself in the back of both shoulders at once? How is that even possible? And let's not even talk about how fast some of those guys are spinning and the one guy doing the uber-fast squat kick (officially known as the prisyadka).

I already had a project and a dvd player (playstation 3) so it seemed like it would be simple to convert our small backyard into a movie theater of sorts. I mean, I'm not looking to replicate a fully theater - but I just want to show so movies to the kids outside everyonce in a while. How hard could that be?

Video

It probably isn't hard perse but it hasn't been as straight forward as I had hoped either. First I bought a HDMI to DVI connector adapter so the PS3 could plug into the projector. It turns out there are various formats for DVI and I needed a different one. No biggie; monoprice to the rescue via Amazon prime shipping and 2 days later I had the correct adapter. Sadly, the projector can't handle the super awesome frequencies being shot out of the PS3 via the HDMI cable into it. I need to downgrade the signal a bit.

Thus I need to buy the following things:

1. Playstation 3 Analog AV Multi Out to Component Cable
2. Monoprice 6ft M1-A (P&D) to 3 RCA Component Video Cable (M1-A - 3-RCA)
3. Monoprice 103002 3-RCA RGB Coupler for Component Video Cable Extension

All of that will get here Thursday so I should have time to get it all setup and tested before I need it to work on Saturday.

Audio

Fortunately, I already have some outdoor speakers installed in the backyard. However, a few years ago our house was hit by lightning and I lost all of my receivers due to the massive spike. So I bought a newly refurbished Denon AVRS500BT-R Recertified 5.2 Channel A/V Receiver with 4K Capability and Bluetooth (Black). The bluetooth is cool because I've already been using it to stream music from my phone into the backyard.

Once the projector is working and the audio is kicking all that will leave is a screen. I bought some blackout cloth which I can hang from one end of our pergola and all should be good to go.

I am really anxious to see how our first movie night goes!