We spent last weekend in Chelan. Sick!
We kicked off our first morning with a drive up one of the hills for views that Scott insisted we see.
You might recall from previous posts (Man and His Throne, Toilet Wars: The Fill Valve Strikes Back) that we’ve had some toilet quality challenges in our 107-year-old home.
I had to change the game.
I finally installed a new toilet in what Amanda likes to call our “Money Pit Bathroom” despite the fact that it’s the room we’ve probably invested the least in. Well, Money Pit Bathroom, I dropped $175 on your new throne. Enjoy. Here’s how the installation looked.
The old toilet:
Not looking forward to the work ahead:
I just completed* a week of the General Motors Diet, Amanda’s idea of a slimming solution to get our hot bods ready for summer. In the end, the gym just didn’t work out (pun). Especially after some big party weekends in June, I offered to join my wife in the diet for partner support. For better or worse, in sickness and in diet, right?
The General Motors Diet is allegedly some recommendation the automaker made for its factory workers in the 80s, though the association to the car maker proves to be untrue according to this NYTimes Op-Ed. It’s also similar to the well-known Cabbage Soup Diet. The basic regimen is a lot of raw fruits and vegetables for the first few days and then some red meat and rice toward the end of the week. A diet that includes red meat? I’m on board with that. Of course, you can also eat as much of a cabbage soup recipe as you’d like.
I shouldn’t call what we did a diet, I should call it a cleanse. They’re the same activity in my book, but cleanses are so much acceptable according to the status quo. Yes, let’s call this the General Motors Cleanse to hereafter keep positive thoughts and make a loose relation to an engine flush.
Here’s my take of the diet, day by day:
Monday, Day 1: Only fruits, no bananas. This wasn’t a bad start, maybe because I ate pesto pasta the previous night and I was working off reserves. I ate a lot of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries during the workday. I love those berries! We ate some cabbage soup for dinner. Not bad! I could do this. Let the record show that Amanda cheated on this day by eating a banana Jelly Belly “on accident.”
Tuesday, Day 2: Only vegetables and a potato. We ate baked potatoes for breakfast, which hit the spot but not quite like hashbrowns. I packed a bunch of baby carrots and snowpeas. I ate too many snowpeas for lunch and had a gag reflex. I just never felt full. The pasta reserves wore off, dammit! We ate some more soup and it was OK. On this night, Amanda officially defined popcorn as a vegetable seeing as it comes from corn kernels. I didn’t argue. I still went to sleep hungry. The honeymoon was over.
Wednesday, Day 3: Fruits and vegetables only, no bananas or potatoes. I considered committing a crime in the morning to get arrested. Prison must have a better menu than this. I ate a bunch of strawberries and carrots. I craved bread and frozen yogurt and fantasized about those chocolate fountains that you dip strawberries and cheese and bread in. Glorious chocolate fountains! We ate more popcorn, I mean vegetables, at night.
Thursday, Day 4: Bananas and skim milk. This is an odd, odd restriction. I’m already lactose intolerant (thanks adulthood!) so the combination sounded like a day in the bathroom. Coincidentally, my long awaited day trip to Facebook HQ in Palo Alto was also on this day, so I was traveling and had a good excuse to cheat (Recall that Amanda cheated with the Jelly Belly on Day 1, so I had a freebee). I still managed to eat four bananas. The only way I veered from the restriction was eating sweet, glorious beef brisket and brown rice in small portions at the Facebook cafeteria (TexMex Day at the cafeteria).
Friday, Day 5: Beef and tomatoes! You know that this is a General Motors Diet, ahem, Cleanse because that’s an American company and beef is part of the American diet. The only thing more American than American food is Mexican food, so we BBQ’d two hamburger patties for each of us and topped them with salsa, avocado (a bit of a cheat) and sliced tomatoes. I felt my appetite satisfied for the first time in nearly a week. I cried a little bit inside I was so happy. We weighed ourselves today and I lost 10 pounds, so something was working — probably the lack of alcohol and pasta. Amanda lost weight as well, though I’d never comment on how much because I want to sleep in my own bed tonight.
Saturday, Day 6: Beef and vegetables. More beef! Today we started bending the rules a bit more. I argued that Bloody Marys are a vegetable, so we each had one right before witnessing the Fremont Solstice parade where a lot of naked people rode bikes and had their flesh fruits on display. We met up with Amanda’s bosses and also decided Sangrias were a fruit, which we drank even though we were restricted to vegetables. We ate Thai soup after the parade because Thai people grow vegetables, and we polished off a couple beers each because hops are vegetables. You can start to see where the asterisk (*) in my first sentence come into play.
Sunday, Day 7: Brown rice, fruit and vegetables. Hooray, we made it! This day fell on my Dad’s 50th birthday and Father’s Day. We started off great at lunch with brown rice with egg and vegetables (Amanda threw in the egg to meet her Indiana Sunday traditions) but then got off track when Dad and Brenda arrived with pasta salad, cherry pie and tiramsu. Soooooo, yeah. It was amazing.
We did it, we completed* the General Motors Cleanse!
Overall, we were really happy with the results in weight loss as well as the challenge to control what we ate. We’re trying it again this week to see if we can keep the progress going toward a healthier eating lifestyle. In other words, we’re going to see if we can cheat this cleanse less often.
Amanda and I wanted to say Happy Father’s Day to our Dads, and Happy 50th Birthday to Paolo Sr!
This post chronicles the scenes of the oh-so-epic graduation party this past Saturday.
The beer!
The MSM subs!
The microbrew keg!
And don’t you forget it! I got the paperwork to prove it, yo.
I slapped a GoPro on my cap and documented the commencement ceremony today. The soundtrack is “The Ave” by Blue Scholars, an homage to the U-District in its own right. Enjoy. I’ll follow-up with some photos later.
I spent last week at Vail, CO, for Teva Mountain Games, an annual adventure sports event. I shot photos and ran content for E. Bauer. Here’s a few of my favorites. Not pictured are my awful tanlines on my calves and chest. Ouch.
Kicking off with some whitewater kayaking by my friends and EB sponsored athletes Ben Stookesberry and Chris Korbulic.
Then I shot Dock Dogs, a competition where dogs compete in big air jumping off of docks. Awesome. This dog below went huge!
A guest post by Courtney Chaffee
“Honey, I can’t. It’s ski season” is a sentence that haunts me six months a year. It’s a sentence that irritates me, makes me happy and tests my patience all at the same time. This sentence is uttered to me more times than “Honey, have you lost weight?” “I love you” and “Why can’t we hang the antlers in the living room?” I figure all famous people have their tag lines, and this is Scott’s. Paris has “That’s hot” Schwarzenegger has “I’ll be back” and Britney has “It’s Britney Bitch.” Scott likes to think he is a celebrity, so this one is his.
See, my husband Scott is addicted to skiing. Addicted may not be a strong enough word. It’s all the matters to him. He wants us to plan the birth of our children around the ski season. He figures I can get pregnant in January. That way I can ski the next couple months and have the child in October and will be able to ski in November when the mountain usually opens for the season. Apparently, childcare is at the bottom of his list of priorities, or maybe he has a pack of wolves on retainer that I am not aware of yet.
Most people in Seattle wait through the nine months of grey.They look forward to the three months of blue skies that Seattle has to offer, when Seattle looks like a preview of heaven. These three months are the most dreadful to Scott. He tells me he tries to “keep his head down and trudge through.” While most people In Seattle suffer from a lack of vitamin D, too much seems to put Scott in a coma.
Between Thanksgiving and Easter, I am not allowed to plan anything. These are the months that I am sentenced to a life of being cold, tired and eating nothing but chili at the lodge. Every Friday we are to leave directly from work, retreat at the mountain for the weekend and not come down until Sunday. You could consider this a mini life sentence.
While to some this sounds like a wonderful life, to me I “keep my head down, and trudge through.” I had never skied until I met my husband. I grew up in a family where if there was a heavy frost outside on the ground we would hunker down and survive on cheese and crackers until it warmed. Hurling ourselves down a mountain with a couple of planks under us would be something we would do right after joining the circus. Scott told me, “I like you, but if this is going to work out, you are going to have to learn to ski.” These should have been clues to the imminent torture I would soon endure.
So here I am, doing the best I can to be supportive and a good sport about this addiction that so many people have. I have learned to ski and do enjoy it. I am supportive and quiet through the season, BUT I CANNOT STAY QUIET ANYMORE.
For La Nina has reared her ugly head at me, and I for one am not taking it! Too many Christmas parties I have missed out on because “Honey, I can’t, it’s ski season.” Too many Valentine’s Days I have been neglected because “Honey, I can’t it’s ski season.” And too many times my body has ached due to ski boots, falls, or hiking. One Christmas Scott gave me an I.O.U. for new granite countertops. Unfortunately, the birth of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ falls in ski season, so it was once again “Honey, I can’t right now, it’s ski season.” My Christmas gift arrived in June, after begging, pleading, and threats of hiring the most over-priced crew I could find they went in. One ski season, the electricity went out in the bedrooms in our house. Once again, “Honey, I can’t it’s ski season.” I was forced to wear a head lamp while getting ready in the morning. It was the only way to navigate through the closet in the morning and get dressed. This went on for almost a month until I threatened to leave him for a hotel with electricity.
This ski season was supposed to end in April… APRIL 17 to be exact. The ski season was unfortunately extended due to record snowfall (boo), and Scott has tried to ditch the family on Easter, cancel my trip to Maui in the beginning of May and revoke his RSVP to two weddings all in the sake of “Honey, I can’t, it’s ski season.” And they are predicting this ski season to go to July. Let the battle continue.
When Scott Chaffee leaves this earth, his tombstone will read, “Here lies Scott Chaffee, beloved Husband, Son, and Friend. Honey, I can’t, It’s ski season.”
THIS IS ME HATING MY LIFE
Here is Scott saying “Keep bringing it, La Nina.” Also, a rare photo of Scott wearing his wedding ring.
Happy Anniversary, Amanda Renee!!!
Amanda and I celebrated our first anniversary last weekend on the Washington State peninsula, a place where few tourists venture because of its distance from Seattle, but unquestionably one of the most beautiful places in the U.S. Seriously, where else do you see sea, land and mountains so dramatically (reference the picture above)?
As you can see below, we started our trip traveling from Tacoma to Hood Canal, where I had a speaking engagement, and drove up the east coast of the peninsula on Highway 101. 
We stopped at Mt. Walker to take in the views of the North Cascade and Olympics on one side and Seattle and Mt. Rainier on the other. It was like taking the vantage point of the Olympics when they stare back at you in Seattle.
