ChaLean Day 1

I did my first Chalean Extreme last night. I like it. It's only half an hour, there's plenty of lifting, and the emphasis is on weight, not reps. I think this will do until the end of the year, when things may get a little Insanity. Like I said, Chalean is aimed at women, so there's a lot of encouragement, and she tells me I'm worth it and I deserve to look good just about every single minute.
There is nothing at work for me to do. What I have been doing is planning my trip home, converting video files into mp4 so I can put them on my ipod, and surfing on the net. Really boring. Thank god it's Wednesday.
I was told that on a Japanese TV show recently, the host asked the audience of 50 people how many of them would die to save the lives of their children. 8 people put their hands up. What kind of people are these?

Chalean Extreme

I went for a really long ride the other day, much longer than I had planned. My motorbike, like most, I'm guessing, does not have a fuel gauge. Instead, it has a reserve tank. So when the main tank runs out, you just switch over to the reserve tank and then you have about 20 or 30 kilometers of petrol to find a service station with. I was just getting up into the mountains when my main tank ran out. I thought I had more, but no dramas, I just switched over to the reserve tank and told myself to keep an eye out for a servo. I got deeper and deeper into the mountains without seeing one, and after about ten kilometers I was starting to get worried. I had one more relatively large town coming up before it got really mountainous and winding. I was pretty relieved to see the sign in the distance when I got to the town. Yes. Now I could relax and fill the tank and go for a nice ride up in the hills proper. Except that the servo was closed. Sunday. Fuck!
My only option was to turn around and go back into town, which I knew was another 12 kilometres away. I would be cutting it pretty fine. If I do run out of petrol, I would have to walk or hitch-hike, and it's 35 degrees and people are going to think I'm a fuckwit foreigner and they would be right. So I turned around and only accelerated when I had to, up hills. The rest of the time I had the clutch in and coasted. Whenever I let my mind wander and think about other things, I was always jolted back to reality when it hit me that at any moment I could run out of petrol and my day would become a nightmare. Finally I got to a petrol station and filled up. I turned around and went back up into the mountains and had a great ride, but I'm feeling it today. My back is nice and sore, and my legs are sunburnt to the shiezenhouzen.
I missed the workout on Saturday, so I doubled up on the Sunday, and then felt so crap yesterday that I had another rest. I had hay fever all day which dragged me down, plus a few late nights watching football and early mornings watching golf. I can't believe Y.E. Yang won the PGA. I hate it when nobodies win tournaments. It devalues the brand. And by the way he isn't the first Asian to win a major. Tiger's half Asian, more Asian than black, so if he's the first black man to win the Masters and everything else, then he has to be the first Asian to win everything too. So they say this guy is the first "Asian-born". Big deal. He can't putt. He comes up out of putts like a middle-aged man whose nerves are shot, and misses everything to the right. Tiger played crap, so it was a really disappointing day. All the majors this year finished up crap.
I've decided to start "ChaLean Extreme," which is a workout series from the same company as P90X, but designed mainly for women. The workouts are short but pretty intense, there's a lot of resistance exercises, and I'm getting a little tired of the P90s. Been doing them for nearly a year! So I'll start that on Thursday.
I think that for the moment I still need to be doing a prescribed schedule of workouts to keep the motivation and discipline up. Maybe in the future I can go out on my own and decide what to do, make a hybrid schedule out of all the workouts I have, but not right now.

Sehr Heiß

Warm. Will had a bit of a fever today so we all stayed indoors and chilled, literally, in front of the air conditioner watching play school and napping and reading. I got a bit restless in the afternoon and went for a bike ride and then came home and did P90 Sweat 3-4. It is amazing the energy riding takes, especially in the arms and shoulders. Every time I ride I find that my arms are tense and rigid, and I'm always having to relax them and shake them out. I love riding my motorbike. I love it how when you're riding the temptation is to look too close in front of you, but if you can look fifty, one hundred metres in front it makes it so much easier. I can be approaching a bend and looking at the bend thinking there's no way I can get through that at this speed, so I brake and get all out of shape and just make a horrible turn. But if I look past the bend and at the next bend or the straight road after it then I just glide through the bend like it wasn't there. It's so counter intuitive that I have to keep reminding myself that it's true, and every time I do it it works. Really fun. Anyway, once I started P90 Sweat 3-4, with the three rounds of arms up, I knew my arms were spent from riding and I had real trouble keeping them up. After that, smooth sailing, and the CH200, the 200 sit-ups, awesome. I really don't want to push myself too hard at the moment, because I think I'd just start 'missing' workouts and fade away. I want to keep in shape, and then when it cools down, give it another shot.
The guy who's paying me to talk to him in English, Nori, is a good guy. He works for Toyota and spent a year and a half in Atlanta so he wants to keep his English going. He was telling me how he found it tough to make friends in America, I'm guessing because most of them are douches, so he went to strip bars and chatted with the strippers. Even went on a couple of dates. He said once he went to pay for a dance but didn't have enough money, so he said the the stripper, "I'll go to the ATM and withdraw money." "Withdraw?" said the stripper. "Is that Japanese?" Ha!
So only a few days of Summer Holiday left. Maybe I forgot to say, but I have got another 10 days off. I probably forgot because this is the default state. Not working. I work nine days this month. You might think that this would mean that when I do get to work I'm raring to go, but the opposite is true. My job would be a lot better if some people weren't there. But then I guess someone else would piss me off. The real question is, do I piss anyone off? Surely not.

P90 Back To Basics

I've started doing P90 again. I'm looking for something that I can stand the thought of doing while it's so warm. This is perfect because it's 30 or 40 of workout as hard or as easy as I want to make it. I did Sweat 3-4 yesterday and absolutely tore it up. I felt better than I have since about day 70 of P90X. I guess a few days of air conditioning will do that.
I went to the immigration centre the other day to pickup my re-entry visa for when I return from Australia. Every time we leave Japan, we have to get a re-entry visa beforehand in order to be able to, you guessed it, re-enter. It's a pain in the ass. $40 bucks, and a three hour round trip into the city. But it means the tickets done paid for and the visas done got, so all set. I just have to wait another 7 weeks.
Busy day today with taking Will to a river and wading and then to a bath house to get clean. It was another scorcher. The problem is that there is not a breathe of wind ever. There was a massive earthquake yesterday morning at dawn. Woke me up. It was looooong, about ten seconds. Usually they are over before you have time to wonder if the house you live in is going to collapse. Not yesterday.
I scanned this picture of Will that we took a few months ago. I think I wrote a blog about it and I said I would scan it and put it up.

Checking In

Damn it's hot today. High 30's. Nothing much going on. Junko took Will and Jo Jo to one of her friend's house, and I'm guessing Will spent the day playing with Kurumi-chan, the friend's daughter, in their little wading pool. Nice day for it. They are not back yet. I went and bought some undershirts at Uniqlo, some golf balls for the trip home, and a couple of drawing pads for Will. Read some Hyperion, and now typing this instead of watching people fall on their face on Youtube. Still thinking about what to do regarding working out. I was thinking about doing another round of P90 again until is cools down. Quick and easy, and should keep me in reasonable shape until I come back from Oz at the start of October. Yea, I think that's what I'll do. Starting Monday.
Till then.

Hyperion

I'm reading Hyperion again. I bought the last book in the series in Hawaii, so I've decided to buy the first three one at a time and read them again. It's about seven people who are making a pilgrimage to visit the Shrike, a mythical killing monster who traditionally kills six and grants the wish of one. It's kind of beside the point because the book is basically each of them telling their story of why they are making the pilgrimage as they travel to meet the Shrike, so it's like six connected but separate short stories. I remember the first time I read it, I loved the first story and thought that they couldn't get any better than that, but they did. The second book in the series continues on with the actual pilgrimage and meeting with the Shrike. The third and fourth books are excellent too. I was reading it this time last year too, all through mum's sickness, so it makes me feel kind of sad, but that's okay. It's a great book.
Today is Willy's 4th birthday! Except that I have to work, and after work I have to go and talk with that guy who wants to pay me to talk with him. So we didn't mention his birthday this morning, and we are going to celebrate it tomorrow. We asked him what he wanted for his birthday, and he said "cake." We can do that. He's a great little boy, all he does is sing and dance and draw and play, and I don't know what I did without him. Happy birthday William!

Post P90X

We spent a night at a hotel in Hamamatsu next to a pool/amusement park and spent a couple of days at the pool. The weather wasn't really great, it rained a lot, but it was still warm enough to swim. Problem was that Will really needed to do pooh on the second day but for some reason he wouldn't, so he was sooky all day and it was so annoying. He cried basically all day at the pool, and the first thing he did when we got home at about 5 o'clock was do poohs. So after that of course he felt wonderful and actually said he wanted to go back to the pool. Gotta laugh. He obviously has an issue with pooh. Daniel, the Englishman I work with, says the movie E.T. is good for that. It apparently teaches children to let go of their pooh because E.T. looks like pooh. Will's a bit too young at the moment, but I might try it if this continues.
The other day I took him to a sports store because I wanted to buy a resistance band. I might use it just for a change instead of the weights, and it's also good for traveling. I've never used one before, so I took one out of the box and stood on it in the middle and tried to bring the two handles up for a bicep exercise. But the soles of my shoes were slippery and apparently I wasn't standing on it strongly enough because it slipped off my shoes and came up and whipped me in the right eye. Will laughed, which made me laugh, but damn it hurt. I couldn't open my eye for ten minutes and tears were streaming down my face. I could taste blood in my mouth, but still not sure if that was my imagination or not. I recovered okay and it's fine now, still a little sore, but wow. I bought one at another store the next day because I was too embarrassed to go to the counter in the state I was in.
Saturday was the Okazaki fireworks festival. An hour and a half of the most intense fireworks display you've ever seen. Half a million people usually come to watch them, but this year it rained and rained, and the crowds were well down. We had dinner at one of Junko's friend's house who lives nearby and have a balcony where you can see them well. A good night. Will had a great time.
Today is the anniversary of mum's death, August 3. I'm a little down today, which is to be expected. Plus work is sooooo boring, and I'm buggered from a big four-day weekend. Like I said before, it will be a bit of a jolt when I go home and she's not there. Bayswater is not the centre of Melbourne anymore. Weird. Still, I can't wait to get down there and have some fun with family and friends. I arrive on the morning of the 25th of September, and I'm there until the 5th of October. This time I'm going to schedule the whole trip, because too often when I go home, by the time I've had a beer and played some golf, I wake up and can't think of anything to do except go to Knox. There are so many things I want to see and do that when I finally arrive I draw a bit of a blank. The last two times I was down I didn't even eat fish 'n' chips! Totally forgot.
Workout-wise I'm not too sure what to do. It seems a shame not to be working out while it's not stinking hot, but I think I have to give myself a break. It'll be stinkin' hot soon enough.
Tiger won again on the weekend. A pretty ho-hum affair. Now only two people have won more USPGA events than Tiger; Jack Nicklaus and Ben Hogan. Comparatively, he's five/ten years ahead of them both. An astounding career so far.
Swans nearly beat St Kilda. We are St Kilda's hoo-doo team, so if they can beat us in Sydney, they must be going pretty good. Swans season mathematically dead. Lately I've been watching games that the Swans aren't playing in. I'm surprised Brisbane got beat. They're my dark horse for the Premiership. I think St Kilda will choke, and so will the Bulldogs. Geelong are the team to beat. Geelong Brisbane grand final for mine.
Well, it's election time here in Japan. That means only one thing; noise! Vans driving around with massive loudspeakers booming slogans and speeches, guys outside train stations with megaphones, even the odd light plane flying around with a P.A. system attached. No shit. The Japanese are so good at ignoring information that you basically have to shout in their ear to get their attention. It still doesn't work though. No one is listening. Apparently the government will be changed for the third time since the war. That's nearly 65 years. I still can't get over that. Man this place is stale.