Mule (deer) Train

While the girl is out helping her dad get settled in after his heart surgery I'm being a good house husband. Doing the chores, cleaning up stuff here and there, trying to keep the place from turning into a pit while she's gone.



The mule deer in the pic aren't that easy to see so I tried to make them more obvious by cropping the photo. :D I'm also going out for walks in the morning and doing a workout. Trying to keep my giant ass from eating the rest of my life.

She'll be home soon. And that's a good thing.

It's time to DIE-T

We're starting a new diet today. It's the 6 Week Cure For The Middle Aged Middle. It's been out for a good while, basically a targeted keto diet designed to work on the fat in a persons middle that lies under the stomach muscles. Apparently that's a spot where fat really isn't supposed to be. That leads to things like fatty liver disease and other gut related problems.

We've done well dieting and working out and getting our mass reduced a bit. Our friend Rich suggested this diet as he has done it a couple times before this. After deciding to do it together for mutual support we all got blood work done to see what changes it might make. Turns out Rich kinda needs to do this diet right now. That works out well.

So for 6 weeks, starting today, we'll cut out caffeine and alcohol. We've already cut out sugar and most of the carbs, months ago. The diet goes in 3 sections of 2 weeks with slightly different eating patterns for each set of 2 weeks. Section one will consist of 2 isolate whey protein shakes and one low carb meal a day. The second section contains eating more actual food, still low carb and the last set are the "meat" weeks. Crys and Rich will use fish for that, I'll eat enough eggs to float a boat of chickens. :D The diet is really built for vegetarians, but we'll make it work and get through it all together.

Crys takes off late today to be there for her dads heart operation tomorrow. Looks like they'll really do it this time. We got the fellas apartment tidied up last week so it should be a nice easy visit. She hopes to return on Friday, but we shall see. Operations and doctors are seldom specific things. She's taking her shake stuff with her, and it's not like they'll be going out a lot anyway. :D

And we're off!!!!!!!

Now THAT was a drive home.

Today we drove home from Las Vegas, NV. YEs, we make a distinction because there is a Las Vegas, NM. :D They're slightly different.

We left at 2:30 AM.

There is a one hour time difference that ads an hour. We got home in 14 1/2 hours of drive time. It's normally 10 1/2 hours so we did pretty well considering. Sure.... Crys got a little nervous when I was passing trucks with snow spray in less space than we needed with no real sight lines.... but ..... hey.....

It was really a pretty good trip. We left Las Vegas and got well over an hour in before we started hitting snow. :D Apparently there was over 3 feet of snow around the Arizona continental divide. At some points we were following the twin tracks of semi trucks and it really wasn't possible to pull off the road so we had to keep going. :D It all ended up just fine. Had a good trip. Ate a good lunch. Got home at a good time.

Now we're home, chilling and relaxing and waiting to see what the next chapter holds for family and friends.

Strolling for Vegan Food

Today we took a nice long walk. We decided to just hang around our room and chill, maybe take a walk, possibly grab lunch.........



We saw some places to check out later on. Like the one above. That was after we took off in the WAY wrong direction, lost Crystals hat, backtracked, figured out we'd gone the wrong way and then found the hat and started going the right way.

Whew.



I found this place through an app on my phone (Happy Cow, it's $3) It's kinda new to Las Vegas but it's Mexican and American food and completely vegan. And they have a duo of two good things:



Dude, they have the Impossible BurgerAND Beyond Meat Burgers.

It's a Mexican/American menu and decent sized with a fair number of choices.



Yeah, I know it's sideways. :D Then we got into eating. The food arrived quickly and the folks were friendly and helpful.





We had the Super Nachos and the Tacos. Nachos had vegan chorizo and the taocs had vegan asada. :D Then we took a nice long walk back. Tonight it's raining out, and some of it might be snow by morning. We're going home Friday morning and we're hoping the weather doesn't jack with us too much.

Tomorrow will be another day of cleaning and banks and working on setting things up well.

And there will be family and good food.

Life is good.

Vacuums and banks

Today we worked on getting things ready for Crys to be here next week to take care of her dad. That means we cleaned and prepped. We vacuumed and mopped and did dishes and wiped things down and went to Bed Bath & Your Mom to lay in supplies. We also went to a cool 3D movie and tried to work on some banking and prep stuff for the guy having heart surgery. Crys made a great dinner and we had a good time chilling and eating and visiting.

Tomorrow will be a day of Crys and I and hanging and she'll work on fiber stuff and I'll...... lazy around I guess? :D

She'll be back next week when the surgery we came down this week to support actually happens. With any luck, our prep work will have made it all as easy as possible.

Las Vegas trip

Towards the end of February we traveled down to Las Vegas to help Crystal care for her dad and some medical "stuff"

Of course it's doctors and VA and all the other "stuff".

So now we took off a week of work and traveled down and the surgery has been postponed to next week. When I CAN'T take another week off.

Time to make lemonade.

Coming down we kept going through snow squalls. We left home at 3:40 AM on a Sunday morning. I think we drove through 5 snow squalls on the way down, though the only really sketchy spot was in Gallup, NM where we stopped at Carl's Jr for a beyond meat burger.

We arrived in the mid afternoon on Sunday when we met up with Crys' dad while we waited for our check in time at our Air B&B. That dinner we went to McMullins which is an Irish Pub for Irish Nachos and some beers. It was a good time with Dad and Daniel.

That was a good time, after that we all went home to sleep. This morning Dad picked us up and we did a fun tour of Las Vegas with our own personal Uber driver. First we did breakfast at a place called Blueberry Hill.

Where I very much enjoyed the totality of what is my favorite pancake breakfast place kind of spot. Following that we went to Ethel M chocolates, a spot started by Forest Mars when he retired from the Mars candy coglomerate. We did the chocolate tour, which was delightful and then wandered through the cactus garden.

Ethel M is Ethel Mars, Forest's mother and most of the candy recipes at Ethel M were those developed by Forest's mother over the years. Forest also loved the local desert and built a 3 acre cactus museum on the property. It's a lovely space to walk through.

After that we did a few fun things in Las Vegas. We went to the airport to watch planes land for a while, it's a thing Crystal and her dad do and it was fun to tag along. Dad, Glen, took us on a little dry run of how he spends his days as an Uber driver. We visited Total Wine and got Crystal a bottle of Bourbon Cream from a distillery in Butte Montana that we can't find anywhere else and it's a favorite of hers. It was a good day. We might run to a vegan restaurant for an early evening snack tonight, just for fun. And it'll be a good end to a good day. 

In Las Vegas for another delightful vacation

Thus far this year the theme for vacations is "stuff that family needs"

Crystal and I are in Las Vegas, NV (not to be confused with Las Vegas, NM which is kind of a pit) to help out her dad. He's getting a bit of surgery and might need some help getting back and forth for a few days.

We drove down today (Sunday) and got in during the mid afternoon. The drive was fine, about 11 hours of it, and we are in our Air B&B after joining dad and Daniel for a stop at an Irish pub. That was fun. :D. We had beers and Irish Nachos (tater nacho kinda things

So we're all having fun. The waitress was great and the food was good and beer is always good. :D

We'll find out tomorrow, we hope,How and when the surgery will go down. We're hoping that Crys gets to ride home with me on Friday, otherwise it'll be a while. 

Looking for good news

Tomorrow we'll head to Las Vegas, Nevada. The girls dad is having heart surgery. We're not sure how far they'll go or what all will need fixed. The docs at the VA say they aren't sure until they get in there to look.

At this point we have all our stuff ready to go in the car at about 3 AM. We can't put it in there tonight. The whole pile will freeze solid. We have an Air B&B for the week, and we have a plan to get there. The rest is up to the whims of fate.

With any luck it'll be a fun trip full of adventure and frolic. Updates as conditions warrant.

Lifting and HIITing, Scuba and Sailing

We're working on being healthy and our new hobbies for retirement.

Santa Rosa and Blue Hole got us set up for being able to scuba dive and enjoy it. We now have much or our equipment and the ability to go to 130 feet deep in our full face masks with some decent buoyancy control. We'll get better as time goes by, but the basics are all set.

Our next trip will be to Bonaire, one of the Dutch Caribbean islands not too many miles from Venezuela. (like 89 water miles). It's a scuba shore diving spot that's supposed to have some really cool things to see. We've got a place to stay (The Caribbean Chillout Apartments) and have figured out how to get around to the various dive sites. We'll be using AB Drive & Dive, an outfit that bundles rent-a-truck with Nitrox/EAN air tank swap outs. It's kinda cool, they have lanes set up NASCAR style where you pull in, they run out and swap your tanks with a minute or two to verify enhanced oxygen content, and you race off to the next spot. They claim it takes less than 3 minutes! Since you're supposed to do an orientation dive when you go somewhere new we'll be taking a little class PADI style with 2 dives to learn to hunt Lion Fish. It would seem that in the late 80's a hurricane dumped lots of salt water aquariums into the Atlantic Ocean and lion fish escaped. In the Atlantic ocean they have no natural predators, eat 3 times their body weight each day and live from the surface to 1,000 feet deep. In short they're hell on the coral reefs biodiversity so the scuba world is now actively hunting them. They're also rumored to be delicious. Crystal will let us know, since she actually eats fish. We'll do 2 tank dives and learn to use the ELF speargun to hunt the buggers. (ELF = Eliminate Lion Fish) catchy huh?

In addition to that we're keeping up with dieting and LIIFT4, which is killing me personally. I'd much rather drink beer and get fat.

Early summer will find us learning to sail a keel boat. Right now we're doing the book work for that.

Lots going on, but we don't like to be busy. It's mostly just fun!