I'm Trying to Convince Myself That Exercise is Fun. It's Not Working.

Wow, I just finished watching Lost, and ... wow. This show is rocking the hell out of this season. I'm so sad that there are only a few new episodes left. And if you don't watch Lost...well, why don't you? My co-worker just rented the first season and is just now starting to watch it from the beginning. I'm so jealous of him that he gets to watch all the episodes in a row, and I'm sitting here begging for the precious 48 minutes they throw me once a week. Holy cow, I love this show.

So, we didn't quite make it to the rec center for the girls' fitness orientation yesterday, but I rescheduled it for today. The reason we didn't go yesterday is that it was supposed to be from 11am to noon, and Danni wanted to go to a movie at 12:30pm with her boyfriend. This was fine, since boyfriend and his family left today for Reno, and are going to be gone for the rest of spring break.

Dear boyfriend's mom,
Dude, I want to go to Reno! What are you going to do with four kids in Reno? Take me instead!

Anyway, the girls went to the rescheduled orientation class for the teens from 9am to 10am this morning. There was a group of 7 kids, 3 boys and 4 girls, between the ages of 13 and 16. They got a tour of the whole place, but it was mainly about teaching them how to use all the fitness machines, weight machines, and free weights safely. Every time I looked over at their group, one of the boys was being used to demonstrate one of the machines, while the girls watched. I thought this was biased at first, but then I realized that none of the girls wanted to demonstrate, not in front of the boys! As you can see, my girls were pretty thrilled during this class:



That's Danni in the red shirt, and Shannon next to her in the blue. In case you're wondering where Kylie is, they also have a child-care place in the rec center! And don't worry, I wasn't embarrassing my kids by hovering and snapping pictures. I was sitting on a rowing machine near them, pretending to text on my phone while I was taking a picture. Actually, all I have right now is my phone camera, because my MySpace, picture-taking daughters seem to have misplaced my awesome, lovely, worth-more-than-their-lives digitial camera. If it doesn't show up soon, someone's head is going to roll.

While they were taking their class, I decided to walk around the indoor track that goes around the upper level and passes by the fitness machines. There's a sign on the wall that tells you that 10 laps = 1 mile. There's also an arrow pointing, telling you "today's direction" on the track. That made me laugh. Maybe every other day they change the direction you walk/run, to mix things up a little? I walked around 10 times, then looked at the time. 9:17am. Dang, what now? Check out the machines, of course.

Speaking of machines...the machines in this place are state-of-the-art awesome. I had to take a picture of the display of the rowing machine I was sitting on:



See, that big 399 is the amount of calories I would burn if I rowed for an hour at the pace I was rowing. As you can see, after 4 minutes and 12 seconds, I had burned a whole 26 calories. Woohoo. What they don't tell you is that you will die of boredom waaaay before you've rowed for an hour. Oh, see those two little boat-looking thingies at the bottom of the display? You can actually have a wireless race against the person (people) next to you. I tried to have a 1000 meter race with Danni. For some reason, I was thinking 1000 meters wasn't very far. Since it was a race, I was going as fast as I could. I gave up after about 300 meters, because I was about to pass out. Not really, but I was pretty winded.

Also, the treadmills, stationary bikes and elliptical machines in this place are awesome. Why? Because they have little TV screens right on them! You can bring your own headphones, and watch/listen to the TV while you work out. They also have an iPod dock on them. Hopefully you can get the idea from this pic:



I know the picture of the screen didn't come out too well, but it's very clear. And notice the channel, Discovery Health? Besides Discovery Health, they have some other cool channels like the History Channel, an entertainment news channel, sports, and several others. This might just get me to stay on a treadmill for more than 10 minutes. Honestly, usually I just want to pull my hair out from boredom after that long, even if there is a TV mounted on the wall. But this, my friends, is way, way cool.

Shannon was next to me on a treadmill, jogging...at about 5mph. She wasn't even breathing hard. She was like, "I could do this all day!" Shut up kid, before I push your scrawny little butt down and you fly off that treadmill backwards. Now that would be funny. The only way we could get her to leave was to promise her that we could go back tomorrow. In fact, we even reserved a racquetball court from 9-10 tomorrow morning. They've never really played before, so I think the three of us are going to have a little game of cutthroat. Ha. I'm going to kick ass. Oh, who am I kidding? They're softball players...they'll be whacking that little ball all over the place. It'll be fun though.

I finished off my late morning/early afternoon taking Kylie on a little trip over to Jen's house. I was going to try and install Photoshop on her external hard drive, but it wasn't working so well. (Sorry Jen! I tried, really!) Kylie had a lot of fun over there though, because Grace has some cool stuff! A playhouse in the backyard, and a trampoline!



Grace's 13 year-old brother Chris can do some pretty awesome stuff on the trampoline. Like a forward flip with a full twist. I wish I had taken a video of that, because I was amazed. Then we had to leave, because I had to come to work. Bleh. There will be none of this working stuff tomorrow though...yay for my two days off! I love Friday and Saturday. The pool is open from noon to 5pm tomorrow, so hopefully we'll make it down there. Oh yeah...80 degrees tomorrow, but a high of 58 and rain by Sunday. And then back to 80 by mid-week next week. That's some crazy weather right there. I'll be enjoying every single minute of Sunday.