Luke’s Notebook

I forgot to mention this last night, but the calorie total was 1,530, marking the 11th straight day of eating less than 1,600 calories.

I’m off to another good start today, as I did 20 minutes on the cross-trainer in the morning along with a few different free-weight exercises. I’m pretty sore in my shoulders and legs, but it’s that good kind of sore.

Last night, I spent some time exercising with the “hopping shoes.” Basically, they’re half-shoes. You place the front of your feet (while wearing regular shoes) onto this little block — kind of like the front half of a platform shoe — then you Velcro your shoe to that, to make it where you’re kind of forced to always stand on your toes, which is more work on your calf muscle. Anyway, while wearing these “shoes,” there are a variety of different exercises you can do, and basically the idea is to improve foot speed and your vertical jump. I’m hoping to, as a result of exercising with these, be able to gain a few inches on my jump, and possibly be able to dunk a basketball when it’s all said and done. That would be really cool!

So far I can’t really tell how effective the shoes are, only knowing that my legs do get tired after working with them. Maybe I’ll snap a picture of them sometime to give you an idea of what these funky things look like.

Many, many moons ago I wrote about the possiblity of us getting a much better Internet connection out here — through a wireless ISP that services our area. As amazing as it is, I still don’t know if we’re able to get service from this place that’s based in O’Fallon. This one guy from Wisper ISP, the provider I’m talking to, has been really difficult to get a hold of. I think their company is keeping busy and maybe they’re even a bit overwhelmed by the response of prospective customers, but it has been so hard to get anywhere. The guy was out here several weeks ago to check if we were able to get a signal. We weren’t at that time, but he had a few suggestions, which I wrote about a while back — with all the different scenarios and such.

I spoke with him a few weeks ago, and he said that they have some new equipment that may be just the ticket, and he said he would be out here to test it a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think he ever made it out here yet, and I just feel like I’m in an awkward spot now. I don’t want to be pushy and keep calling and calling, but at the same time, maybe I just need to keep pressing until I can get some action.

What concerns me is knowing that sometime in the near future we’ll probably be receiving a bunch of hits and e-mails as a result of the Montel Show airing. It’s going to really hinder things if we’re still on the satellite connection then. So I’m really hoping that somehow we’re able to get a better connection before the show airs. We’ll still be able to get by if we’re on satellite, but it would just be a lot more cumbersome to deal with the e-mails, whatever site changes we’ll want to make — all that.

So I’m going to keep praying for God to provide some alternate connection. If He wants it, though, we can stick with satellite and make do with that. Hopefully I’ll hear from the Wisper guy, though. If I don’t hear from him over the weekend, I’ll probably call on Monday, explain the situation and beg him to swing by our place.

It was a pretty busy Wednesday. In the morning, after a 20-minute stint on the cross-trainer and some weight-lifting, I left for Belleville to take care of various errands, such as stopping by the post office, getting a haircut and making deliveries at some law offices.

In the early afternoon, I watched part of the Mets/Nationals preseason game on ESPN. It’s the first game ever for the new-name Nationals (the ex-Expos). It’s nice to have baseball going on again!

I had volleyball in the evening, as we had a game at 7:30 in Belleville. My team, Family Ties, won all three games against Applebees. We’ve been playing much better recently!

After my game, I was asked by the mom of one of the girls on Blue Steel, another team, if I could sub for them at 8:30 since they were missing a guy. I told her I was happy to stick around and play if they needed me, so we started warming up.

We (as Blue Steel) lost all three games against Tinnian LLC, but it was fun to get some extra playing time in. I told them to let me know if they need a sub on another week. So who knows, maybe I’ll be helping out now and then.

After that, I stopped by Schnucks to do a little bit of grocery shopping — mostly picking up fruits and veggies.

So that’s pretty much it! This morning, by the way, I got up at 7:30 and did a shorter (10-minute) workout on the cross-trainer, along with some work with weights. Later on today, I’m going to hopefully use those hopping shoes. I’ll have to explain what those are.

I’m really tired since it’s been a very full evening. So what I’ll do is I shall wait until tomorrow to write about this here day, particularly this here evening.

My calorie total was 1,150 for the day. Not bad, not bad, not bad.

Well, good night!

I’m going to make this a quick one, since I’m anxious to get to sleep in order to get up early tomorrow morning. I’ve got a lot to do.

But, let us run through Tuesday real quick. Calorie count: 1,190. I didn’t have a typical workout, but I did exercises with my legs with some special new shoes we bought. More on those at another time, though.

Today we decided to order the MLB Extra Innings package with DirecTV, which essentially means we’ll be getting to watch a LOT of baseball over the spring, summer and fall. It boasts over 60 out-of-market games per week, which would average 8.5 games a day! So that will be really neat to have once the Major League Baseball season kicks off in about a month.

Jude seems to be doing pretty good despite his mono. He definitely has to take things easy and can’t or shouldn’t do much, but he’s been up and about, so that’s really good. Thanks for the prayers, and please continue to pray for him!

Now I’m going to go to bed. It’s not even midnight yet, and I have nothing else holding me back from sleeping… except this entry. So I’m going to get to bed, wake up at 7:30 (I hope!), work out, and get the day underway. Until then, though… good night.