Archive for October, 2010

I am now having bums of steel. No, no, they don’t look good and tight like steel. They feel like steel though and my thighs feel like stone. This is after I tried the pilate exercises to errrm tone up the tummy, bum and thighs. Ouch. Ouch.

It is fun to try different exercises though. They target different parts of the body so the other parts get to rest if I rotate them around. I will try anything. Anything that involves, cardio and stretching. I can’t stick to one exercise. I will get so bored to tears!

Anyway, with regular daily (except weekends) exercise, I can feel my stamina improving now. When previously, only 10 minutes gets me panting, now I can do 20 minutes easily. However, I will usually continue till 30 minutes or more. When I am lazy, I stick to 20 minutes.

I am rather lazy to push myself to exercise but the effects is usually worth it. Usually I feel much more relaxed after exercise. After exercise, stretching and cooling down, I will usually have a glass of water and then listen to a piece of relaxing piano music before showering. I like this one. It is First Love by Utada Hikaru. I love it. Let me share it here.

126.6kg. WHAT????? It is 26 October. On 19 October in the first part of my weight loss journal, it was 126.8kg. OUCH! This is hard. Extremely hard. I have been such a good girl too. I controlled my errrmmm desire to eat. I exercise daily during the weekdays for 30-45 minutes sweating it out each time. I even toned down my weekend binging. And I only lost 0.2kg?????? That is hardly a loss as my weight fluctuates during the day. So it hardly counts as a loss. It is a mere fluctuation!

Sobs. This is so hard. Hmmm… it must be that carrot walnut cake hubby brought home. No one will eat it and I do love carrot and walnut……

I won’t give up. If I do, that scale will easily read 132kg in no time. Now, tipping that way of the scale is TOOO EASY. I can do it easily. All I need is indulge a little. Only a little.

Right. Back to work. Back to workouts. I’ll be back with more records of my “progress”. At the moment there is none.

The weekend that just passed was an emotional one for me. The boy had his kindy concert. Each time I see him go on the stage to sing and dance, I would have this silly grin plastered on my face. Every proud parent has this grin you know, it surfaces whenever you watch your kid being themselves, being adorable. Of course the grin disappears into a growl when they are acting up. However, at the concert, there were only silly grins. Every parent was smiling from ear to ear.

At the same time my heart was laden. Just the day before, I had visited my dad at the ICU. He had suffered a 2nd stroke. The first stroke several years ago left him with dementia. He was otherwise rather healthy. Despite taking medication to control his blood pressure, he had a 2nd stroke. Sigh. This time, it was worse. It was not due to a blood clot but due to bleeding.

Though somewhat knowing somewhere deep in my heart that this may happen, nothing, nothing prepared me for the sight of dad looking so frail on the hospital bed. I thought I would be strong but the dam burst and the tears flowed. I had to get out of the room fast to compose myself so that dad would not see me in that state.

Dad is having another scan done today, after which he may be transferred out of ICU into a normal ward. I hope that that means he will be on his way to recovery. The road ahead is rough and hard though. Perhaps the fact that he has dementia will slightly cushion the impact for him of the fact that he may not be able to walk. Perhaps he will. We don’t know yet. We will get there one day at a time. For now, there are more pressing things to worry about.

This weekend I am taken to the wheel of life celebrating youth, watching happy proud parents and then talking about aging with all the relatives. We are all mostly in our 40s and 50s and watching dad, we all realise that we will all get to this place one day. We will all become old one day. What will it be like for us when we are old?

It has been a roller coaster weekend. Perhaps that is why I am tired. The boy is home with me today because he has a rash on his face and his left eye is swollen. An allergic reaction, I think, from all that makeup slathered on his face. After getting the girl ready for school, I went back to bed and slept like a log till 10pm. No exercise for me today I guess. I am tired.

When someone loves you unconditionally, it is hard not to love them back.

I have such an unconditional love from my son. He is constantly telling me how much he loves me. He is always giving me hugs and telling me he loves me “the best of all”.

When he sees me in pain, he will rush to my side to comfort me. When he sees me busy he will say “Mummy can you play with me, later, if you are free? If you are not, I will play by myself.” He is very understanding.

It is fantastic to be loved like that. It is also very easy to give love in return when you receive love like that. That is why they say, “give love and in return you will receive love.”

I am elated. I feel like a genius. No longer an ordinary boring old housewife. And all because I managed to download mini YouTube clips, join or merge them all up into one big file, then convert them into dvd format for watching on my TV using my regular dvd player. Yahoo! Oh, and I forgot to mention, I did it all for free!

Who says there is no free lunch? There is. Not one, but three. That is how many programs I used to do the task. Hubby likes to watch those old school chinese martial arts movies in Cantonese. They are so old that you can’t find them in shops. Most of them no longer have any copyright issues so you can find plenty of them on YouTube. However, watching twelve 10 minute clips online is a pain. So I decided to download and save them on our pc for watching. Then I realised that I could merge them. Then hubby suggested that I burn them onto a disc for watching on our dvd player. To do that, I have to convert it into dvd format first.

And that was how, I finally got round to creating my very first dvd yesterday. Woohoo! (Psst. No copyright issues. So don’t sue me.) Cool. The dvd creator is quite cool. Here are the 3 programs I used. They are all downloadable for free.

1. Cucusoft YouTube Mate - First, I used this to download and playback YouTube videos on my computer.

2. Free AVI/MPEG/WMA/MP4/FLV Video Joiner - Then I used this to join all the mini videos into one complete large file.

3. DVD Flick - Finally, I used this to convert the video file on my computer into a dvd for playback on my dvd player and to watch on my home TV.

(Note: CuCusoft YouTube mate is also a converter. However, when I first tried to do part 3 that is convert my video file into dvd format, it has an irritating watermark sign right across the screen which says “TRIAL VERSION”. So I got DVD Flick instead.)

That’s it. It may be a long process perhaps but it is not too hard. All you need to do is get the processes going and do something else in the meantime and when you get back, it’s done. You’ve created a dvd. You can probably turn your home videos of your kid into a dvd as well. Very nice. But I haven’t gotten round to that yet. I’ve just started using the DVD Flick so I have not played around with it too much nor found out the tips and tricks but this is good enough for now.

Note: If you don’t want to watch the videos on your pc. You can skip step 2. Just download the videos using Cucusoft YouTube Mate, then use DVD Flick to merge convert the files into one big movie file seemlessly.

It is now confirmed. I am a nerdy housewife and I don’t mind it one bit.

If you want to learn in more detail about how to download YouTube clips and merge them, you can read my old posts below.

Related Posts:

1. How to download and watch YouTube videos on your pc

2. How to merge flash (.flv) videos and watch them one after another