Burpees and other healthy stuff

So, as you might have guessed, the 3 day lag of burpees back on June 17th, combined with some rather intense intensity at work, and the preparation of my wedding led to my sudden and unfortunate abandonment of the challenge. Since then I have done a set now and then, and promised myself that I would pick up where I left off, but it seems like the intense intensity is going nowhere, and we are in full preparation for one last wedding celebration and our honeymoon this fall. Is this an excuse? Perhaps.

That said, I have by no means abandoned attempts to generally improve my health, with the latest effort focusing on 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. It sounds so simple, but since I don’t eat huge quantities of food to begin with, I was surprised at how difficult it was. Even so, I believe that I hit the complete target for the first time possibly in my entire life yesterday after ramping up for the past week. The biggest challenge is that I’m not a fan of vegetables (although I love numerous different types of fruit) so my 5 servings have a clearly fruity leaning, but hey. I’m not complaining – I’m just happy that this motivation came suddenly and out of nowhere (well, not exactly nowhere: I’ve been buying blueberries just about every time I go to the grocery store since they first showed up this season, and an embarrassingly significant part of the motivation seems to have come from a form of marketing: a silly computer game that I came across last weekend called the Wonder Juice Machine, which provides (very tantalizing) recipes for smoothies after each level. Speaking of which, I haven’t actually made any since the fruit kick began (although we’ve had fresh-pressed orange+lemon juice 3 times in the past week) and we bought another stock of fruit yesterday, so I should go back and look at some recipes again – wahoo: an excuse to play games for a few minutes (before doing some work, because I’ve got an important deadline on Monday…and Tuesday…and Wednesday…and Friday: apparently Thursday will be my breathing day).

Earthquake!

Is is strange that I’m disappointed that I have only the vaguest funniest memory of the earthquake that we had just after 3:30 this morning?

I have only felt one once before (in good old Batîment A, in which a letter was later posted telling us not to worry about the cracks that had appeared in the walls…ahhh the memories) and I think another one past through a couple of years ago that I didn’t feel.

Why do I find this disappointing?

Update: here’s a short article (in French) about the earthquake (4.2 on the Richter scale).

Funny spam

So, bloggers have a whole extra type of spam to deal with, of which I haven’t received a lot, although I got 13 today. The way it works is that they send “comments” to your blog which either are published directly (although I suspect not many bloggers allow that) or are submitted for your approval. The result: their “message” is seen at least by the blogger. The comments are general attempts at being mildly complimentary without being specific, but often with words (or spelling) that don’t seem quite right. Today’s 13 included:

• “once again you outdid myself” (x2)
• “once again I outdid yourself” (x2)
• “an interesting take on a boring subject”
• “an interesting take on an interesting subject”
• “an interesting take on a fun subject” (x2)
• “an interesting take on a boring topic”
• “an interesting take on a fun topic”
• “kinda makes you wonder” (x3)

Most of these comments came from:

• buy viagra
• buy cheap viagra
• by viagra no prescription
• online pharmacy

Ok, so I thought it was funny.

New sofa!

A year after finding the sofa that appeared to fit all of our criteria (and believe me, there were more criteria than you might expect for a sofa) we finally took the plunge. Why did it take a year? Well, we first looked during the summer sales last year. Side note: there are major sales in most – all? – stores in France twice a year, for a time limited by legislation. The rest of the year, promotions are limited, and legislated, to ensure (among other things) that big companies can’t undercut mom-and-pop shops until they all go out of business.

I was quite proud of our preparation: to avoid giving in to the first decent couch that came along, we put our heads together and listed what we wanted in a sofa first (most importantly: a corner-sofa, where the corner could be reversed, with a pull-out bed that would comfortably sleep 2 tall people). Frankly, we were suprised when we found one that met those criteria and more, but (of course) it wasn’t on sale, and it wasn’t cheap. To make matters more annoying, we found similar ones elsewhere, that weren’t quite as good, but also weren’t as expensive, and made us hesitate enough that we decided to wait until the winter sales (a sofa wasn’t top priority, just a big “want”). The winter sales did little to facilitate the decision, and it was again pushed to the summer sales. This time we dug our heels in. We first looked at the competing one that seemed to be winning out, until we decided to take one last look at the first one that had really caught our attention. Still not on sale, but still as tempting as ever, and an extremely productive Saturday yesterday finally saw the purchase, transport and building of our “Niagara Bordeaux” coloured sofa (the name of the colour made it seem that much more appropriate – a great mix of Canada and France!).

All I need now is for it to be a reasonable hour to vacuum on and around our new pièce de resistance and we’re all set!

Can I ask you a question?

Yes – you: the person reading this post. What brought you here?

I’ll be perfectly honest with you: I don’t tell anyone about this blog (with a very few exceptions) and prefer to sit back and see what brings people (I mostly blog for me, but it gets much more fun when others get involved!). I like watching traffic peaks when I use certain key words (all things language tend to do it, and Babbel seems to be increasingly important. In fact, one of you got here yesterday by typing in “heatherforce babbel”. I find that endlessly cool.

My main access to how people got here comes from the search terms, which only make up a fraction of my actual visitors. Even those, though, get me pondering. What were they really looking for? Did I help them in any way? How did typing in that get them here (such as “I have made a pledge of sorts to stick…).

I hope that you will humour me and leave a comment to tell me who you are, what brought you here, and what you think about my random musings and ponderings. Oh yeah, and if you are subscribed to RSS, I’d love to know.

In the meantime, here is a taste of what brought others here over the past while:

crazy snails
end of school year thoughts
rocks and tress
trees and rocks
european charm
evolving customer service
happy words
french fusion
prune vinaigre
cooking social networking
german rotisserie chicken
euromineral 2008
heathers ponderings
georges est doux, georges est frais…
learn german
how i love les fish
look at that escargot s car got

Nothing short of eclectic, but then, so are my posts (I think).

Hmmm, about those keywords

Apparently writing about keywords doesn’t include any useful keywords, because after a significant (all things being relative) spike yesterday, today’s traffic has been nil (and no, I don’t mean almost). I am, more than ever, intrigued by this unexplained traffic (since WordPress doesn’t seem to know where any of these people came from, except for 1). Weird. Maybe it was Vianney…

Welcome to my brain…

Over 2 years ago, my friend Mat insisted that I get a blog (and to push things along, came up with the name, and chose the design for me). The results was this, and you can see just how well I maintained it. Fast forward to this week. Yesterday, when going to update my car ownership papers to my “new” address (I moved last August), I pondered to myself that I would have done it a lot sooner had I remember how (surprisingly) easy it actually was. Then I wondered where I could put random stuff like that, where I might actually find it again when I needed it. Why a blog? I’m surrounded by them. I work in emarketing, and am immersed in the web and in (pardon the cliché) Web 2. That and I figured that if I put up something that someone else might find useful (like what to know and what to bring when you want to update your car ownership papers), maybe putting it online wouldn’t be so bad. Admittedly, most of the other random things I thought of posting are significantly less useful than that (wait until I tell you about our aquarium and all the random things I’ve learned from that!), but hey; I can’t imagine that there’s a person in the world that finds everything intriguing/amusing /useful that I do. So there you go…a small tour of the random workings of a random mind. Let’s see how long this lasts…