Friday, March 22, 2013

Marriott and Me - A love story

I freakin love the Marriott, and I want to shout it from a rooftop. Due to a major SNAFU at the hotel I was planning on staying at in Savannah last week, I had to make same-day reservations, and I decided to go with old faithful and stay at the Marriott again. And it was, of course, amazing. I love their service, their beds, and pretty much everything about them. Even their coffee is pretty decent, and their bartender can make a good martini.

Why am I boring my ghost readers and wasting my own time? Because now that I'm out of debt and rockin my finances, I've decided to do what countless yuppies and travel hackers  (same group) have done for years, and get a Marriott Rewards card just for the benefits, and because it's black metal and I'm 5.

Here's the way I see it. I don't use cash most of the time anyway, and using my debit card gets me exactly zero things, other than a way to avoid getting charged interest. Meanwhile, I really like checking out new places, not paying full price, and acting classy. At this point, I'm responsible enough with credit and hopefully savvy enough to game the shit out of the system and reap the rewards.

AND ITS MADE OUT OF BLACK METAL.

With any luck, this will work out great and then I can pick up another card for airline travel, and maybe switch between the two and have all my travel covered. How cool would that be?

Anyways, brave new world!

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Where I is...

I had a pretty lengthy post on where I'm at with the weight loss, so I'll skip that one for now and move on to the rest.

#2 - Declutter, Digitize, and Destroy. I'm happy to say this one is pretty much working itself out one bit at a time, between selling my stuff to a second hand store and using Amazon's trade in program I've pretty much cut every down to the limits I set for myself, or at least have them set aside to get rid of one way or another.

Except for my damn CDs. Once I get into the nitty gritty of it, it shouldn't be too hard to eliminate about a quarter of them just based on tastes that have changed. And let's face it, the much bigger problem is preventing that kind of stuff from having a permanent spot to begin with, which is why instead of buying The Wire, I'm using Netflix's DVD service. Yes, it's slow, but it also ties into...

#3 - Not sitting on my ass and watching every episode of The Wire in a row. That's called transitioning. With football season over, this is a lot easier. I have about two hours worth of shows that I watch each week, and I watch my Wire dvds as soon as they come in because Omar will kill me if I don't. The only real change up here is that I find myself going to bed earlier. Working through The Wire is pushing me into six hour territory each week; not my goal, but hardly worth whining about.

Anyway, here's an ad for it! Just because I've never tried this before.

#4 - Yeah I haven't studied at all for the GRE lately. No excuse. 

Friday, March 1, 2013

For the month of February!


So a few things...as you can see, I definitely didn't lose another 10. Closing in on 5 for the month (kind of stealing the extra bit from last month), but halfway to 175 overall. Buuuuuut I've definitely started to feel some changes. I'm easily fitting into jeans and suit pants that I had struggled to put on back in November, which is freakin awesome.I realize that weight loss (specifically, fat loss) is not just a numbers game, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that I've added massive amounts of muscle. I'm pretty sure the body fat and muscle percentages aren't accurate. 

I have also changed things up on the exercise front. I've started running and working out more, nothing too crazy, so that is probably adding a bit to the "tighter" feeling. As I had previously noted, dropping down to this point has been easy for me in the past, so going beyond it is going to be interesting. So I'll be shooting for another 5 pounds lost during the month of March.