I sure dodged that bullet!

If I hadn't moved to Arizona 3 months ago, I would totally be living at Qualcomm Stadium right now. My whole neighborhood in Rancho Bernardo is pretty much toast. I got a text message from my friend Dave who said he saw my house on TV. He said it was a shell. It's not on the official list but I hear the official list is far from complete. Mine was the only yellow house on the street, so if there was a yellow house on fire on Duenda Road, it was mine. So far I've heard from my parents and all my San Diego friends except my neighbors, the Fishers. I didn't see their house on the official list (but the houses on either side of them are on it) so hopefully they got lucky and have a home to go back to. No one else I know has suffered any damage other than having some ash to clean up (my parents said their pool looks like an unflushed toilet.) I even got a phone call on my cell last night from our Virginia friends Beth and Sterling. They wanted to make sure we weren't on fire. We forgot to tell them we moved. Oops! They were pleased to know we weren't homeless or anything and safe in Arizona.

The diet is still going well. We've been pretty low on money for the past few weeks so that's prevented me from eating a lot of extra junk (we're feeling much better now, we just have to learn to not spend money like drunken sailors.) Last night's dinner was so many levels of awesome and crazy super healthy too. I followed the recipe for "Smothered Tofu with Peas" in the book, "Enemy of the Steak" and added a buttload of mushrooms and served it over whole wheat noodles. I also seared the tofu before I added it to the onions. Searing the tofu gives it a nice texture and evaporates a lot of the liquid out so it can soak up sauces better. I'll definitely be adding that recipe to the regular rotation.

The exercise hasn't been going so well since moving. We're still getting stuff organized. Now we only have piles in our bedroom (it's always last because we're the only ones who see it.) After tonight (we won't have time to workout tonight since we're going to buy some furniture from someone) we'll get back on track. Sean told me to drag him kicking and screaming to the gym.

154!!!

I hadn't weighed myself in almost two weeks so I hopped on the scale last night fully clothed. It said 158 which was pretty good since it was the end of the day and I had all my clothes on and I'd just eaten dinner. Later on I was curious so I got naked and hopped on the scale again, 155, SWEET! Lowest weight ever! Which was pretty awesome since my workouts have been inconsistent over the last few months. This morning I hopped on again, 154!!! HOLY COW!!! That brings the grand total up to 66 pounds! How much does that rock?! I'm only 9 pounds overweight now. After that I'll re-assess and come up with new goals. I'd like to get rid of those 9 pounds before thanksgiving so I'll be all skinny for christmas. It'll be the first time in my 32 years of life that I've been a "healthy weight". I'm not sure if I can wrap my brain around that. It's something I've been working towards for years but I never thought I would get there.

I totally forgot to mention...

I finally got into those size 6 jeans. I'm wearing them right now and I just realized that I hadn't mentioned on here. I'm not in size 6 everything though. I'm somewhere between 6 and 8. I still have a few pairs of size 10 pants but they're baggy. In shirts I'm in smalls and mediums. I still have trouble fitting into button-up shirts though because of my most excellent well-endowedness. When it fits around my chest, the rest of the shirt is super baggy (not particularly flattering at all) and when it fits everywhere else, the buttons pop open. Oh well.

I've been having trouble getting my workouts in since we're still unpacking and getting our house put together but my eating was awesome yesterday. Tonight I'll take care of the piles in my bedroom and tomorrow I'll hit the piles in the living room. I'll be hitting the gym again by this weekend, I can feel it!

The cool thing about the house is that our animation artwork collection is coming together nicely. Most of the stuff we have is just cheap posters in frames but we've got the totally awesome Speed Racer cell and Sean bought a Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles production cell all framed up with the line drawing for $50. I don't know if the cell and drawing are worth anything but it's a cool piece and the frame is worth at least $50 (it cost $100 to frame speed racer.)

We were looking at animation art for sale online last night and we totally want to buy this:

It's $395 and it was signed by June Foray, who played Witch Hazel and was the queen of animation voices (she played all the female characters on Rocky & Bullwinkle.)

Sean wants this one:

They have one in stock that was signed by Arleen Sorkin, who played Harley Quinn and Mark Hamill, who played the Joker and he was also in that one space movie that Sean likes

Here's another cel we're drooling over:

We used to watch Animaniacs with Nick every day when he was little. It's still one of my all-time favorite cartoons.

I'm not sure how we've lived so long without this one:


Anyway, here's what I ate yesterday

B: oatmeal with blueberries
S: apple, carrot sticks
L: Kashi frozen mango black beans and rice meal
S: edamame
D: seitan fajitas with mushrooms, green and yellow bell peppers and onions, corn tortillas and fat-free refried beans. It was delicious. I should post the recipe for all to drool over and enjoy. I adapted the Chili's Fajita recipe from the Top Secret Restaurant Recipes cookbook. I just used seitan instead of chicken.
S: cocoa via dark chocolate bar (drool, drool, drool!)

First Blog in Arizona

Okay, I've been slacking long enough. I decided this morning that I was going to blog and then I couldn't decide on a title because so much stuff has happened between my last blog and this one.

A few candidates were:

"Check out my awesome house"

"Me and Sean have lost a combined weight of 165 pounds"

"Hot Damn! There's a vegan hot dog stand in downtown Tucson!"

and my favorite....

"Holy Crap! I met John Flansburgh over the weekend!"


So let us begin with "Check out my awesome house"



I've got a whole slew of other pictures on this webpage

Unfortunately my commute is about a half an hour but work is in kind of a sucky part of town and kind of far away from stores and stuff we like (which kind of makes sense since they build super-secret missiles for the government there.) The part of town where we live is awesome though. We're in a subdivision called Continental Ranch. It's one of those neighborhoods where they have the really nazi-ish covenants and rules. Call us crazy but we LOVE those kinds of neighborhoods.

And on to the next topic.....

"Me and Sean have lost a combined weight of 165 pounds"

Yup, it's true! Sean has lost a grand total of 100 pounds. He doesn't even recognize himself. The other day someone questioned that he was really the guy on his drivers license. We were cleaning out the garage and found a picture of the two of us at a christmas party like, 7 years ago. We look like completely different people. It's crazy. Sean scanned it into the computer last night but we haven't uploaded it to our website yet so I can't post it.

And now for...

"Hot Damn! There's a vegan hot dog stand in downtown Tucson!"

Tucson has this weird phenomenon of late night hot dog stands all over town. No matter how late we stay out, we always see hot dog stands with huge crowds of people around them. We hadn't checked them out to see what the big deal is because we don't eat hot dogs anymore. Well, there's this vegan restaurant that we frequent because it's awesome. Only Lovin' Spoonfuls could inspire a teenage boy to express a deep and abiding love for a veggie burger and an 11-year-old girl to have wild, uncontrollable cravings for tofu nuggets. Seriously, it's that good. Anyway, a little over a month ago, they opened a vegan kielbasa cart in downtown Tucson. It's open for lunch on weekdays and late night until 2 in the morning on the weekends. We almost never go downtown so we didn't have the opportunity to try it until this past saturday night. It was totally awesome! I had the kielbasa on a whole wheat bun covered with maranara sauce and onions and Sean had two beer brats with saurkraut, mustard and onions. We topped off the feast with some vegan chocolate chip cookies and diet soda. It was delish! No, it was better than delish, it was freaking awesome! But it raises the question, what were we doing in downtown Tucson on Saturday night?

The answer brings us to the next topic...

"Holy crap! I met John Flansburgh over the weekend!"

In case you don't know who John Flansburgh is, he's the non-accordian-playing John in my all-time favorite band, They Might be Giants (yes, I'm a weirdo.) Shortly after arriving in Tucson, we found out they were playing a show here and we immediately bought tickets. Turns out it was part of a huge downtown music festival they do here in Tucson twice a year. The Giants were the headliners. Though they were scheduled to play for two hours, they weren't starting until 11:00 so we got to wander around downtown and see a bunch of local bands. One of them (who's name I've already forgotten) was pretty cool. They had a violin in the band and I'm always a sucker for bands that feature instruments that aren't traditionally used in rock music. They did a cover of Punk Rock Girl by the Dead Milkmen. It was awesome. Anyway, this all took place near the vegan hot dog stand so we got to eschew the expensive, crappy, greasy fair-food inside the festival and chow down on some totally awesome vegan sausages for dinner. After dinner, we meandered back to the theater to check out Oppenheimer, the band who's currently touring with the Giants. It's two guys from Ireland. The singer played the drums and the other guy played the guitar and synthesizer (at the same time, it was pretty cool.) We liked them a lot. They were really different from all the other new music that's coming out these days. We would've bought their CD, but we'd just spent $25 each on They Might be Giants t-shirts. The Giants started at 11:00 (way past my bedtime). They've changed up their show a bit. They used to shoot off the confetti cannons when they play "James K. Polk" but this time, they didn't play it and instead shot them off during "Older". I was also disappointed that they didn't play "Man, it's so loud in here" but they've got like, 10,000 songs so it's not like they can play all my favorites in a two hour show and they do have a new album to promote ("The Else" is their best album since "John Henry", which came out 13 years ago and is second only to the greatness that is "Flood".) Anyway, it was a great show. I've seen them 6 times now and this was the first time I thought to bring a camera. Here's a few pictures we took during the show...






(okay, we took that one after the lights were back on and we were standing right in front of the stage.)

While we were milling around after the show, John Flansburgh came out and signed autographs. It was very, very cool. I shook his hand and told him about the time when Sean proposed immediately after a TMBG show 13 years ago and we've been going to their shows whenever they come to town ever since. Here's a picture of me and Sean and John:

When Sean looks at the picture, he doesn't immediately recognize himself. He thinks, "Who's that guy?...Oh yeah, that's me!"

I think it was the drummer who handed me a copy of the set list

And because we're suckers and apparently They Might be Giants doesn't have enough of our money yet, we bought an autographed copy of "The Else" on vinyl even though we already bought it on iTunes a month ago.


It was a most excellent evening.

And just because I think it's awesome, here's a link to the video for my new favorite song

The Mesopotamians


Anyway, until next time. I'll try not to be so absent in the future.