I’m officially three weeks into the “Life of Leisure” chapter. To recap, I’ve moved to Arizona in less than 3 weeks by getting rid of all my furniture, sending my car full of things on an auto transporter, this is the big truck with a bunch of cars hanging from it, then renting an SUV to drive my clothes down with a quick stop in LA.

The Drive
I drove down to LA and stayed at my cousin Genelle’s new apartment and we had a great time catching up at Roscoe’s House of Chicken & Waffles. I had the chicken breast and waffles, she had the chicken salad sandwich, which I’m planning to get next time, it was yummy! The next morning we had breakfast at Good Stuff in El Segundo, so glad we had the big breakfast because I was able to drive straight through to my mom’s house with just quick stops for gas and snacks. By the way, it’s not a good idea to have Pop Rocks as a road trip snack because you have to keep tilting your head back to get the candy in your mouth. If you’re driving by yourself, I learned it’s best to keep eyes on the road because there were giant semi-trucks I had to zoom by. I made it to my mom’s house a little bit late because I exited too early on one freeway, thankfully my sister Czarina got me back on track, she is my personal positioning service (the GPS died because none of the cigarette lighters would charge it).

The first few days in Arizona, I would read a lot and take naps during the day. Now that the kids are back in school, I get up around 7 am to make breakfast or pop Eggo waffles into the toaster and drop off. Then it would be time to hit the gym, afterwards I can work on my various projects.

The gym
About the gym, I’ve had a membership to 24 hour fitness for ages and paid $5 a month. However, the closest one is about 30 minutes away. I went once to see how I would like the gym and I was underwhelmed by the experience. As motivated as I am, I don’t really want to drive that far to workout. When telling my family about the trek to the gym, my mom mentioned LA Fitness was close and it was a new. I went to check it out the next day and upon walking in saw about 3 cute guys, bonus! OK getting back to the gym, they had a ton of fitness classes, cardio equipment upstairs, new weights, huge basketball court on a bouncy floor, a lap pool, and one free personal training session. The rates were pretty reasonable so I decided to sign up. By the way, I don’t play basketball at all and I have no intention of doing laps in the pool. I was pretty much sold by the new facilities and the cute guys. It’s great to have good scenery while working out because it breaks up the monotony. At the end of the week, I convinced my sister to go to my personal training session with me and after our session, she ended up signing up too. In the last week, we’ve gone to Zumba twice, we worked out with weights, did cardio, I also went to yoga. She went to the gym with me 4x in a week and that’s more than she’s ever been in her life!

The rest of the family is now getting on the fitness kick. The kids are taking turns using the Wii fit program and everyone has a Mii which is to track BMI. Sadly, I have a fat Mii but she’s steadily inching that BMI down to normal levels. My dad remains an inspiration because he bikes for 30 mins and does his dumbbells 6 days a week. He also tracks everything he eats and logs his fitness activities in Excel spreadsheets, this is something I need to incorporate.

Getting organized
So perhaps I’m a little OCD when it comes to getting organized, this week I created spreadsheets on my phone with the house budget, my budget, and my sister’s budget. This way, we can add things we need to purchase on the fly and see how it affects the remaining budget for the month. I’m also creating a spreadsheet of what will go into each room, what is needed, which are wants, and how much will all cost. We kept talking about all the things that we wanted to get for the house without really knowing how much we had to pay for so the spreadsheets should keep us grounded in reality.

Love my calendar
Today, I was reading the paper and found a couple cool activities to do with family but the events were in December. I decided to put them in my Google calendar then invite the rest of the family via email so they can get it on their calendars too. Now I don’t need to keep the newspaper because I put the date, time, the website, phone number, address, and a summary of the activities we can do at the event. I showed my dad how to add things to his Google calendar and my daughter said she would teach him how to use his calendar because she already figured it out on her own. She’s super cute, she changes the themes in her email and shared her Google calendar with me as she was exploring Gmail.

I also booked my daughter’s birthday party, created the invitations with her, and put the invitations in her backpack to give to her friends at school on Monday. We just need to wait to see who RSVPs so I can adjust the reservation then we’re good to go.

It’s about 2 am now and I spent the day cooking. For breakfast, chilaquiles in salsa verde, lunch was shrimp penne alfredo, the kids liked that so much, I had to make a new batch for dinner. The dinner version was shrimp, broccoli, mushroom rotini alfredo and my sister is packing that for lunch. I also made trail mix: raw almonds, dried cranberries, and white chocolate chips, then put those in sandwich bags as snacks for everyone on Monday. With that said, I’m logging off and calling it a night!