It starts ...

Believe it or not, I set up this blog back in October of 2004. Today, May 31, 2010, is my first post. Talk about procrastination! I had thought it would be a great place to update friends and family about our lives, especially since the Navy seems to move us all too often. Then that fell by the wayside pretty much through a lack of motivation. Then I forgot about it. Then Facebook came on the scene and that became a better, faster, easier way to update people.

My husband came home for the weekend after being gone for three months and we had some really great conversations about life and the future. While he has been in language training, he has started on his goal of improving his fitness. He has started Cross Fit and seems to be really enjoying it. The improvements in his body show, too! The two things that surprised me were 1) that he did it without telling me and 2) that he has been blogging about it. We discussed the blog and how it was helping him. That has inspired me to get this one off the ground.

During the time he has been gone, I have also started on a quest of self-improvement and growth. Two months ago I started the Couch-to-5k Program and have really seen a dramatic improvement in me. The first day I remember thinking that I would never be able to run a whole 5k, especially when the 60 seconds I had to do seemed like the longest minute of my life! I took it one step at a time. Thankfully I had the smarts to get fitted for the right shoes. The people at Running Wild were fantastic with that. The knee that had given me so much trouble in the past has not been bothering me. I still  have the last week of the program to do, but I did run a 5k already. I ran the 1st Annual Navy Federal Credit Union 5k on May 22. My time was 35:25 and I am really proud of that. I have to thank Carol for her inspiration and motivation. She is 72 and runs 5ks, does yoga, and works out. How can I say I'm too old! She ran the 5k with me, and that was fantastic.

I also visited a practitioner of NAET to see if I could get rid of, or at least decrease the intensity of, my allergy to peppers (capsaicin). I felt that something happened during the treatments. I have not yet attempted to eat one, but the two or three times I have been exposed to peppers, my reaction to them seems to be far less than it was. This gives me hope for the future!

There are a few areas of myself that I would like to improve. Since my husband still has over a year left before he'll be home for good, I need to find ways to keep myself from focusing on being lonely. This is the perfect time to work on that. So here are my thoughts and goals:

Get in shape and be fit
Lose weight and fat
Learn to swim
Improve my 5k time to 28:00
Continue to learn new things
Read more books
Eat healthier
Declutter the house

It may seem like it from this intro, but this blog is not going to be solely about fitness. I want to catalog my journey through life. I have had a great life so far overall, and it would be nice to have a record of that and revisit it from time to time. I am a Navy wife and my husband and I are going through the toughest tour so far. It looks like we'll be apart for at least 16 months, maybe as many as 20 months. We've never been apart for that long. He came home for the weekend after being gone for three months and it was almost as if he had never left. I know that our love and marriage are strong enough to withstand this, but it will be difficult.

I want to use this blog to update him on the day-to-day happenings while he is gone. I'm sure he'll love to hear about the cutesy stuff the kittens do, or how the dogs almost pulled my arm out of its socket trying to chase a squirrel during our walk.

This blog will be my ramblings on what is happening in my life.

Thanks for reading this through!