Will complete tonight after work and do an extra set of ab circuits as penance.

On the positive side, my various registers are now balanced and we are now just 4 months away from being debt-free except for the house.

As usual, I felt it in my shins for the first five minutes or so, but after that, my legs were fine. I LOVE skating–all the cardio benefits of running with none of the gasping, joint stress, or general awfulness of running (for me). And more glute engagement, too.

This is probably the cardio I was born to do.

The gym is only 1.5 miles from the house, so I expect it to take only 10 minutes or so to skate there tomorrow morning for another round of weights. I was secretly worried that I wouldn’t be up to snuff with my skating to roll to the gym this week, but today’s skate convinced me otherwise.

The only negative: Given that I just did a heavy leg workout yesterday and skated today (not to mention that Aunt Flo is visiting), my hamstrings and quads are totally engorged with fluid today, and all of my stretchy pants are in the wash. I’ve been yanking down the legs of my pants all day when I stand up because they keep getting stuck on my thighs, hah!

Can’t wait until the fat loss starts to outpace the muscle (re)gain in a few weeks. I’m feeling fantastically fit, strong, and energetic these days, but dang…I miss seeing my muscles.

EXERCISE
As of this week, I am doing the program outlined by LL Cool J’s Platinum Workout book (LLCJ) with a week of Red Carpet Ready (RCR) workouts while I’m away from my home and gym on a trip to see my sister. This will get me through the “Bronze” phase of the LLCJ program.

Week 1
M/W/F: LLCJ Full body machine circuit (1 circuit x 15 reps each; 30 sec. rest between exercises) + 15 minute incline walk or HIIT

Week 2 (Trip to California)
M/W/F: RCR Action Hero Babe workouts with Valslides, resistance tubing, and bodyweight

T/Th/Sa: 20 min. HIIT Run or 20 min. Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout cardio boxing with the Wii

Week 3 (3 x 12 rep straight sets w/ 1 min rest between sets)
M/Th: Upper Body + 15 min cardio @ 60% MHR)
T/F: Lower Body + 15 min cardio @ 60% MHR)

Week 4 (3 x 8 rep straight sets w/ 1 min rest between sets)
Mon: Upper Body + 20 min cardio @ 55% MHR
Tue: Lower Body + 15 min cardio @ 60% MHR)
Thu: Upper Body + 20 min cardio @ 60% MHR
Fri: Lower Body + 15 min cardio @ 65% MHR)

NUTRITION
I am going to keep calories close to maintenance this month at 1800-2000 calories per day. I’ve been off program with exercise for so long now that I’m confident that just adding the extra calorie burn back in while eating at the same level will cause me to drop fat and build some muscle back up without resorting to calorie restriction. The meals in the LLCJ book are calibrated for males, however, so I’m going to look at the New Rules of Lifting for Women and Muscle and Fitness Hers 12 Week Makeover meal plans for my recipes.

- 1800-2000 calories/day
- Macronutrient ratios: 40-50% carb / 30-40% protein / 20-30% fat
- 5 meals per day on non-lifting/rest days, 6 meals (due to added PWO shake) on lifting days
- 16 cups water per day
- Supplements: multivitamin, calcium + D, 6 fish oil caps, l-glutamine, creatine/l-glutamine pre-workout

MAKEOVER
There are almost too many things I want to fix up around me, but I’m going to keep this realistic and choose my living room and patio as my makeover victims for this month.

The patio houses my weight bench and Powerblock weight set as well as some extra pairs of free weights, a small round outdoor dining table, lots of resin chairs, two wicker novelty chairs, and DH’s grill. It has no discernible style at all, and now that it’s getting warm again, I find it too stifling to work out in there.

Our living room has decent couches, but it’s a mess at the moment with one of the sofas commandeered as Yarn Central for my crafting hobby. We have a very tall wall in there thanks to the vaulted ceiling, so there is a lot of vertical space to fill up. Neither of us loves what we have going on up there now, and I really want to put up the set of four Chinese scrolls my sister brought back for us from Australia last year.

EQUIPMENT/PROGRAM

The best part about Gir is his removable drawstring mask. His robot eye stalks fit right inside the bulging eyes of the dog mask. The whole shebang is tied with a drawstring on the lower edge at the back of the neck.

I used my Sackboy base for the body, but improvised Gir’s head and the mask as I went along. The top of Gir’s head is stabilized with a 4″ plastic canvas round.

More photos are up in my Gir gallery.

(For more information about commissioning a custom doll from me, please visit http://dolls.maggiewang.com. I will be opening up my queue for June 2009 later this week.)

Additional photos and details:

While working on this fellow, I noticed a lot of similarities to the Kratos (God of War) doll that I made earlier this year. Both characters have greyish white skin, sport some swirly tattoos, and wear red and gold man-skirts. The Nameless One came first, though, so maybe the designers of God of War are fans, too.

The Nameless one has dreads decorated with pony beads, asymmetrical buff-colored blocks on his limbs to mimic the bandages worn by the character in game, and crocheted front and back skirt panels. His right leg has three polymer clay “bones” wedged into his sandal straps, and a spiked knee pad protects his left leg. More polymer clay was used to sculpt his animal skull belt buckle, to make the bone spikes in his belt and shoulder harness, and to construct his axe.

(For more information about commissioning a custom doll from me, please visit http://dolls.maggiewang.com. I will be opening up my queue for June 2009 later this week.)

Additional photos and details:

Lobo’s facial hair and facial markings were crocheted from black mercerized cotton crochet thread using a size C hook. He wears a removable vest, silver crocheted shin guards, a black belt with skull belt buckle, and black skull knee pads. His weapon is a silver hook on a long chain.

I hand sculpted the hook, silver skull belt buckle, and black skull knee pads in FIMO polymer clay.

(For more information about commissioning a custom doll from me, please visit http://dolls.maggiewang.com. I will be opening up my queue for June 2009 later this week.)

Additional photos and details here:

(For more information about commissioning a custom doll from me, please visit http://dolls.maggiewang.com. I will be opening up my queue for June 2009 later this week.)

Additional photos and details here:

Azkaban wears a full-length A-line robe with gold crochet thread chain trim, an olive cloak with silver border, gold and blue removable gauntlets, and burgundy shoulder pads with black tentacles and gold and red crochet thread epaulettes. I don’t think I’ve ever used so many colors in a single project before in my life.

His epic grade Frostscythe weapon was sculpted out of Sculpey II and painted with silver acrylic paint. It was finished off with a layer of Dutch blue acrylic paint diluted with clear varnish to make a transparent blue wash.

(For more information about commissioning a custom doll from me, please visit http://dolls.maggiewang.com. I will be opening up my queue for June 2009 later this week.)

Since October 2007, we have gotten quite a bit done, though not necessarily with what Dave Ramsey would dub gazelle intensity.

Debt Snowball:
- $4,000 HELOC for a new A/C (Paid in full)
- $3,200 used car loan (Paid in full)
- $5,600 credit cards (Paid in full)
- $12,000 student loan (Paid in full)
- $25,000 2nd mortgage ($8500 in extra principal payments made; a bit under $17,000 left to go)
TOTAL DEBT PAID SO FAR: $33,300

Savings/Retirement:
- $10,000 saved in the emergency fund
- Maximum Roth IRA contributions in 2008
- 4% ongoing contributions to 401(k) accounts
TOTAL SAVED SO FAR: $20,000 plus 401(k) contributions

Big Cashflow Items (that we didn’t have to borrow for!)
- $750 siding and garage door repairs (Cash flowed)
- $2300 hall bathroom remodel (Cash flowed)
- belated honeymoon trip this coming September (Currently saving)

What’s been the most surprising to me is how painless this process has been. We’ve been able to chuck a lot of money at our debt snowball without significantly cutting back, stopping our retirement savings, working extra hours, or selling anything big. (Bear in mind that we weren’t particularly extravagant to begin with and don’t have any kids cutting holes in our wallets yet.) It just feels like the money to pay down all of these debts has been there all along, just like the googly eyed stack of bills in the Geico commercials. We just had to make the decision to become debt-free and tell the bucks where they needed to go.

I’m still using Microsoft Money 2007 as my primary financial tracking software and supplementing with a Debt Snowball spreadsheet that I run in Google Docs, Excel, or Openoffice, but I’ve also started using a standalone budgeting program called YNAB Pro for Windows as a much more effective alternative to Money’s two built-in budgeting applets.

The difference between YNAB and every other zero-based budget spreadsheet and program I have tried in the past lies in its methodology: instead of distributing the income that you expect to come in for the current month towards expenses for the same month (Let’s use May in our example), you purposely pad your checking account with enough extra money to cover a full month’s expenses, and use that “buffer” for this month’s outflows while allowing this month’s income to pile up. When you are ready to budget for June, you actually budget for everything based on your accumulated income from May. In practice, this means that you could literally pay all of your bills and fill all of your cash envelopes on the first of June if you chose. No more juggling bills and dates throughout the month because you won’t have enough to cover the power bill until the 15th. No more splitting the grocery envelope into two withdrawals because the mortgage comes out at the same time. No more overspending because you didn’t bring in quite as much as you had predicted in a given month–an especially important benefit for folks with variable income.

It’s such a simple concept, but even Dave Ramsey, king of the zero-based budget, somehow missed the importance of the one month buffer. We are transferring a bit of money out of the emergency fund and back into checking so we can start May with a full buffer. Ultimately, we still have a three month emergency fund; it’s just that one month’s worth of it is now residing in a different account where it will make our budgeting lives much, much easier. I honestly feel like this is the next logical progression if you have already mastered the basic zero-based budget and want to truly get out of the paycheck to paycheck rut.

You can try a fully-functional copy of YNAB Pro free for 60 days. Give it a spin and poke around in the YNAB forums and online video tutorials if you need help. If you are the household Nerd, you will be playing with it happily for hours. If you are the Free Spirit type, don’t worry–you can get set up in less than 30 minutes.

For those of you who get hives from touching an uncool PC, a platform-independent version of YNAB Pro is in development and scheduled for release this year. Version 3.0 will run on Windows, Mac, AND Linux.