Well, Rich is HERE!!! I almost titled this, “Long-distance marriage is OVER!” but then I realized that didn’t sound right. The truth is, Rich’s last day of work was today, and he’s now HERE – no more depressing end-of-weekend goodbye’s. No more tears on the phone every night saying goodbye. My best friend is here, so now we can drive each other up the wall worrying about him finding a job he actually wants and finding a place to call home. Yes, we have a place reserved, but there’s always this…”what else is available” thing that lurks in the background. That, and we have a “rental tour” to go on tomorrow; the relocation company set us up with a rental specialist who has our laundry list of items we want and need in a place we’ll live in. That specialist has scoured the listings and will be taking us to various places to view the properties. We’ll see if anything ends up beating the house we applied for last weekend. I think it might be tough to beat the convenience, at least.

So, I meant to blog earlier about this, but I finally took a spin class at the gym. In short, I don’t think it’s worth the money and should be offered free.

Here’s the thing – I was at a gym where the spin class teachers wore cycling shoes, cycling gear, and sounded quite out of breath with you as they taught the class. Yes, maybe at times the fact that the classes were based on a prescribed formula might seem a little old, but it was always consistently a fantastic workout.

The class I went to here was taught by a girl who I think is probably a good aerobics instructor, but had no cycling experience. She had no gear on – no, not necessary, but I’m used to the cycling instructor at least having the cycling shoes. Most of the people in the CLASS wore the cycling shoes that clipped in. It was an hour long class, and it didn’t even remind me of the occasional “spin-only” class I had done! We pretty much went either 80 rpm or somewhere over 100 rpm on the bikes (equipped with gadgets that measure distance, rpm, etc.). No “reach out to race,” a little climbing, but no “give me more if you’ve got it!” No intervals, either. The teacher never seemed to break more than MAYBE 110 rpm – this guy next to me probably never went UNDER 110 rpm. I finally started doing my own thing, then decided I’d never go back.

The two free classes at the gym actually seem to be better than that spin class – one’s a 25 minute ab class (I did that Monday, after spin, and my abs STILL ache!!!), and the other is a step class. The guy that teaches the step class is AWESOME. He’s gay, he’s hilarious, he’s energetic, and he keeps the beat. The ONLY thing is that, though he keeps the beat, he’s sometimes off on the 8-counts. But, hey, he’s ON the beat, and that’s good for me. I told him after the first class that I actually had done BodyStep, and he commented that the class he’d just taught was probably a walk in the park, then! Well, not quite – I gave it my all and had aching calves for the weekend. I did his class again this last Wednesday, after doing my own RPM (a little scaled down, since I wanted to do the step class), and still enjoyed it. I think it might be a keeper.

So, that’s the gym right now. I’m actually getting into an evening workout groove, though I think I’ll need to change back to mornings again with Rich here, so that he and I can actually have time together in the evenings.

I’ll have to write about my Metro Transit adventures later…let’s just say it wasn’t bad, sure beat having to deal with traffic, but I got so confused with all the routes and stops! And when it’s getting dark, and you’re in downtown Seattle, of the female persuasion, you’d rather you knew what bus was going to get you home.