Malaysia Bound!

Malaysia, travel

Malaysia World
Well, we’ve finally selected the destination of our next trip: Malaysia. I’ve put up an image showing its location in the world, but it’s right in between Austrilia and China.

Currently, the plan is to be travelling during our usual timeline. That means flying out around Halloween and returning a couple of days before Thanksgiving. We haven’t set our flights yet. Hey, it’s us!

MalaysiaHere’s a closer view of Malaysia. The country has two parts. The western part is on the peninsula, south of Thailand and north of Singapore. The eastern part shares the island of Borneo with Indonesia and Brunei. We’re pretty interested in Borneo because it has a lot of wildlife (ex. the orangutan), some interesting sites (ex. the city of Kuching, also known as the ‘Cat City’), and the food sounds fantastic (again, it’s us!).

I’ll keep posting about our plans, and I hope to be posting here during the trip.

Fitness Transform

health, Santa Barbara

Okay, if you’ve known me for awhile and seen me lately, you know that I’ve lost a lot of weight and have been working out. At some point I’ll go into more details (okay, so far I’ve lost 76 pounds-but there are other changes as well!), however in this post I want to talk about my fitness trainer, Mikki Reilly.

I started losing weight with the Weight Watchers program, and it’s a great program that got me thinking about food and what I ate. But it was working with Mikki that really got me into my current shape: not just my weight, but also my strength (muscle increases metabolism), and cardiovascular capacity.

Her Fitness Transform website has a lot of information, but I really want to recommend a new article on interval training that she’s written. Interval training has been a big part of my work-out regime, so I’m a testament to its effectiveness.

You’ll also find a testamonial section that has a still somewhat embarrasing set of ‘before’ and ‘in process’ pictures of me along with my written testamonial. And yes, I need more sun!

Hello World!

general

Mona AlanI love the title of this post because it is such a programmer’s cliche. For those who’ve never taken a programming class, Hello World is the time worn test phrase used when learning or demonstrating a new language.

I’ve got several vague plans for this blog. First, this is the place where I plan on noting any items of interest that don’t fit in my other blogs: projects, personal observations, messages to family and friends, and anything else I can’t anticipate. I may even discover some topics that deserve their own, separate websites.

This is the blog of my wacky life, and may only end up being interesting to me. Maybe my family. Probably not Harriet.

Oh yeah, my picture here and on the About page came from the French Festical in Santa Barbara. This year I attended that festival with my youngest niece, Monica. I’ll add some other photos and notes from that visit in another post.