Back to the blog!

From Wednesday-Sunday I was working the Geekway to the West board game convention, and never had a chance to blog. It was four days of hard work and tons of fun gaming! I did not really stay on plan for much of the weekend... I ate Medifast and tried to stay hydrated, but my meals included rice (with sushi), roasted potatoes, bacon and eggs, and even a sandwich during breakdown.

That said, I was only up .3 lbs after the weekend, and I know that even with the extra carbs that I was eating at a calorie deficit, so while I may have gained some glycogen and water weight, I didn't gain any fat.

I'll try to post a better post tomorrow, with more info and some pictures, but right now I'm still decompressing!

This will be an interesting week...

This week is the 10th Annual Geekway to the West. It's a 4-day board gaming convention, and I am one of the board members/organizers.

This convention takes up a TON of my time, as there is a ton to do and only a few people to do it, but we're coming in to the home stretch now. This weekend I finalized registrations and got the 801 people coming off to our graphic designer so he can get badges printed, put in an order for an extra 120 games for our free game giveaway, bought another few hundred dollars worth of games for door prizes, volunteer prizes, and to fill some spots in our library, and then went to our annual 'Punch and Play' event, where we get the games ready for Play and Win, and try to play a few of them too.

Wednesday night is setup, where we organize the event space, vendor space, open play area, library, registration, and play and win areas, and also try to figure out where exactly we're going to put the 850 games we're giving away to people.

What does all this mean though? Well, I'll probably be getting a lot more incidental walking and lifting than normal, but it also means I'm eating meals out for multiple nights in a row, with limited access to on-plan choices.

It will be an interesting week. I'm going to do the best I can, but I don't expect to manage 100% plan compliance. Combining that with me skipping the gym this week because of the convention, and well, we'll see what happens. regardless, it will be fun!

General Tuesday - Hogwarts! Hearthstone! Exercise! Geekway!

I thought this would be a good time to catch up on a number of topics, just to touch on a variety of things.

Hogwart's Challenge

First off, the Hogwarts Challenge on MFP is going swimmingly. the Slytherin House is representing itself very well, we're by far the most active! We've got a great lead on our competitors:


Current House Cup Standings:

Gryffindor: 60 

Hufflepuff: 103 

Ravenclaw: 103 

Slytherin: 133

We've done introductions, initial weigh-in, an exercise challenge, and a trivia challenge. So far the entire challenge is running very well and I have to give huge props to the person running this, she's really stepped up and is making this a fun thing to do!

Exercise

My 'Goalbusters' Class is still going strong. We're up to do ing 2 sets of 70 squats at the start of class, and each station is up to one minute. Last night we did lots of partner work... waves on the rope while our partner anchored, isometric holds with resistance bands interlocked, and doing side lunges simultaneously with out partner, planking face to face with our partner and alternating claps, kettlebell squats handing off each time to our partner, and medicine ball bounces across the room from wall squats to each other. In addition to two circuits of that, we did biceps and triceps work, crunches, and stretching.

Geekway to the West

The game convention (http://geekway2west.com) I help run is in full swing. I just loaded another 10 boxes of board games to give away into my car to take to the storage unit. I still need to pack all the games that I have for the game library, get the Play and Win games packed and ready to go to the Punch and Play Day at Jay's house, cheer on my wife as she folds and organizes another 100 convention T-shirts, and finish my board game for the Game Design competition while keeping up with last minute registrations. Fun times! 

Hearthstone

I finished up an arena run last night with a Mage deck I expected to go to 5+ wins and only got 2 wins. I lost TWO games to disconnects/crashes (stupid Windows 8 tablet)  where I was crushing my opponent. Then I went from 0-2 to 2-2 playing exactly the way I expected the deck to work. My final game though, was against a Warlock. Despite over half my deck costing 0-3 crystals, my initial hand was Coin and 4 4+ cost spells. I threw everything back... and got 3 4+ cost spells and a single 3-cost spell (Arcane intellect). My opponent opened with a Flame Imp and it never got better. I didn't have a minion on the board until I was at 18 life, but I fought back and got them to 11 with enough damage on the board to kill them next turn, and two secrets in play, a Vaporize and an Ice Barrier. I had 5 life. If my opponent had just attacked, then between the Vaporize and the Ice Barrier, I'd have lived through the turn and swung in for the win. Instead he Hellfired and then Soulfired me, my Barrier never went off, and I died. Ah well. I did get a nice card out of my pack rewards, though.

Oooh.. Golden Holy Wrath! Shiny!

Hogwarts Challenge on MFP and Weekend Update

I just started a Hogwarts Challenge on MFP. 120 of us got sorted into the four houses (I'm Slytherin, obviously!) and will be tracking our weight for 10 weeks and doing food, exercise, and trivia challenges.

My 30 house mates and I are already working hard, and are kicking butts and taking names, with only the pesky Ravenclaws keeping up with us so far. (Edit: Scratch that, now we are clearly in the lead, with Hufflepuff chasing us, and Gryffindor is eating our dust!)

Our first challenges have been basic: Introduce ourselves, give an initial weight, and our first exercise challenge, do 100 jumping jacks.

I'm looking forward to the challenge, and I'm sure Slytherin will destroy the competition and take home the House Cup!

In other news, you may have noticed I failed to blog this weekend. It's getting easier to skip blogging on the weekends, and then catching up on Monday. This weekend I did a ton of yard work on Saturday: mowing, trimming, cleaning up branches. There's still a lot more to do.

Sunday we had a board game afternoon, and ended up playing two games of Eminent Domain with the Escalation expansion... one with  Scenarios, one without. Then we played Euphoria, the game I showed a picture of last week. We played two-player this time, and while it wasn't as good as 4-player, it played in 40 minutes, which was nice. We closed out with a quick game of Can't Stop and did some work on our Puzzle as well.

Finally, I am still playing Hearthstone! Not as much as some of my friends, but I've gotten over the hump and and am making decent progress. I'm trying to get all nine heroes to at least level 15 right now, and I want to level them up together, as I think playing a Hero is the best way to learn how to beat it!

Not great, but I'm getting better!

I failed at blogging over the weekend

It's interesting how as I begin getting into better habits in general, blogging gets harder to do every day.

This was a good weekend. We cleaned house, did lawn work, went to Columbia Missouri for Midwest Geekfest and exploring the town and campus, and had an amazing dinner at Addison's (Seared tuna, mushrooms, asparagus! I was on plan)!

Sunday, we did more tidying of the house and had friends over for board games. We played Kingdom Builder, Euphoria: Building a Better Dystopia, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and Sushi Go!

Exploit your workers to grab territory and ancient artifacts. Keep them happy and stupid, or they'll revolt!

That said, I haven't made any new Medifast recipes recently, staying on plan hasn't been too tough, weight is coming off, and my exercise regimen is still in place.

The next couple weeks we're getting ready for Geekway (http://geekway2west.com) and going to be doing yet more yard work and basement/garage cleaning as it finally is warming up.

I'll try to be better about blogging on the weekends from here out!

Happy Easter

No post today of note... I spent a few hours doing yard work,  then played Hearthstone,  assembled a custom insert for King of Tokyo, then watched two episodes of A Game of Thrones.

Changing my food schedule for today!

Tonight I'm going to be out at an event that isn't a place where I can eat dinner. I mean, I could eat dinner, but it's an area that has a food court with things like pizza, hot dogs, and ice cream.

So tonight I'm not going to have a good opportunity to eat my lean and green, so what do I do?

Well, the first thing I did was to cook some chicken and mushrooms this morning and packed them in my lunch. At lunch today, instead of Medifast Mac and Cheese with an ounce of chicken, I had Medifast Mac and Cheese, a cup of mushrooms, and 6 ounces of chicken.

Combined with my shake this morning, and a bar, and I'm good. I'll have my pretzels on the way to my event, and then I'll eat a second bar around 8:00 pm.

That will get me my 5+1 for the day and not impact my ability to run the event.

What event you might ask? I'm representing Geekway at the St. Louis Science Center's 'First Friday' event.

If you don't come for the games, come for the dinosaurs.

Geekway will be there with a small board game library and will teach people games and promote our convention this May. We did this back in January and it was a great time. If you're in St .Louis, you should check it out!

Late night blogging!

I just realized I hadn't blogged today!

Today was a busy day.  I took Lauren shopping to spend birthday money,  went grocery shopping,  and hit the gym for some cardio. Then I cooked dinner and we went to play Pathfinder/D&D.

That got cut short and we ended up playing Lords of Waterdeep instead.  I won by always having reasonable quests to complete.

Good night!

Back in the Kitchen!

After eating out two days in a row (oh, the luxury!), I was surprised to see I'd lost weight again! But, we can't keep eating out every day, so I hit the grocery store and spent some time in the kitchen tonight.

Today was a stay home and clean house day for most of the day, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, organizing some board games for Geekway to the West, cleaning the kitchen, putting away boxes, that sort of thing, but I did get out this weekend to buy groceries and go to The Container Store and Target.

The Container Store allowed me to pick up an extra shelf for our Elfa unit that is now 'Medifast central'. It also let me pick up a dozen little containers perfect for Medifast-sized almond snacks. We re-organized the unit and got more cereal and crunchy snacks in there, and have a lot of ready-to-go almond containers as well.

Target, I got two new pairs of jeans in a smaller size... they should end up being too big, but they were on sale so they will do for now. We also picked up a bunch of plastic shoe boxes to try to increase our organization some.

But, this blog post is about getting back in the kitchen! I made Ginger Orange Chicken with peppers, seasoned white mushrooms, and baked Medifast Reese's Cup Brownies.

The mushrooms were tossed into a pan with water, rice vinegar, hot mustard, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, and soy sauce and boiled until they were well seasoned.

The chicken, I diced it and tossed it in a large bowl with soy sauce, ground ginger, orange peel, and green bell pepper, and then stir-fried it in olive oil with a dash of sesame oil

While it was missing rice, dumplings, and eggrolls, it was still excellent. I baked the brownies in the oven while cooking and let them chill in the fridge for a couple hours.

At some point I'm going to have to start taking pictures when I cook, so I've got something interesting to show on the blog posts!

Finally, tonight I made some edits to my blog layout... I added my HabitRPG character (just an image capture for now, I'll have to manually update it until I find a way to automate it). I also edited my World of Warcraft banners so that if you click them it takes you to their Armory pages. Now you can see just how much I ignore my poor Horde Druid compared to my Alliance Warlock.

Gaming with friends!

We had friends come in from New York last night to hang out with us... it's been a while since we've had a group hangout like this. Normally we'd have a cheese plate, fruit, crackers, cookies, chips, dip, brownies or cake, chocolate candy, wine and beer, all sorts of things.

This time, though, we skipped the dinner out and had a simple veggie tray... broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and peppers, Veggie dip, some buffalo cauliflower (I had high hopes. It was heinous). We also set out a little candy and cookies for the people not dieting!

This worked really well. Our friends still had cookies from the bakery, but we had healthier stuff to nosh on. We played Cards Against Humanity and Rock Band, and had a blast.

Cards Against Humanity went well with 8 people, and I should have taken some pictures of the winning combinations to post here... unfortunately, I didn't think of it at the time. After an hour or so of that, we had a relatively short Rock Band session... Desh sang his standard playlist of Conventional Lover, Ace of Spades, Charlene (I'm Right Behind You), Skullcrusher Mountain, and Still Alive while Ezra played guitar, Zac on drums, and me on bass ... then I jumped in on vocals and sang California Über Alles, Cool for Cats, Drop it Like it's Hot, Du Hast, and It's the End of the World As We Know It (and I Feel Fine).

The more events like this we successfully navigate, where we get away from the food and just hang out with buddies, the better we'll be. I can totally see doing this in a few months and limiting myself to a couple cookies and not using it as a grazing buffet for four hours.