Camp Gladiator - 1st camp

There is a general understanding that exercise is a must and everyone must spend a few hours a week on exercise. Some prefer to hit the gym, some like running and some do like to have exercise machines at home and some crazy ones like me try out Camp Gladiator.

I had tried all the above mentioned before giving the camp a try and I admit I am not the first crazy one in the family, I took motivation from the fairer one.

So what is Camp Gladiator or better known as CG amongst it's ardent followers, in my thinking it is a boot camp but without the boot camp structure of trainer yelling in your ears, instead you will be doing exercises to nice loud music and constant encouragement from the fellow campers and the trainer itself. Of course the sound track varies from trainer to trainer (in my 8 classes, I have heard from GNR to macarena).

CG claims you can get unlimited workouts but in my 4 week experience, I was happy to get 2 in a week. Each workout is an hour long with non stop activities for the whole duration, be it running, jumping, walking side ways or backwards and so on. To an extent it reminded you of all the games we played as kids, only difference being, then we used to do in the name of playing and now in the name of exercise :). From what I could gather the trainer's aim is to keep you moving every single minute of the full hour. 

For me personally, as I stated earlier I got motivated to try it out from Sandhya and secondly my home machine workouts were getting boring at some level as I couldn't incorporate new exercises and in turn I was losing my motivation. Thanks to Sandhya, she got me a free 4 week camp to try out and loaded me up with all tips and tricks that I needed to be successful. 

I wouldn't say it was a breeze of 8 classes but it was well worth it when I surpassed my own benchmark (set during the 1st class) in the last class. I could see a big improvement with just 8 classes.

I would be doing injustice if I don't thank Julie Burns our trainer for keeping us motivated, following up after the workout, giving us tips on stretching and other exercises we could be doing to help ourselves during the recovery between workouts. 

Building a kids lego table

Avni is a big fan of Lego, such a big fan that if we ever need to got to the mall, one and only way to convince her to join us is a promise of Lego play time at the store and a promise of Lego bricks. Over time we have bought enough and more and have been thinking of providing her a platform or a dedicated table where we can store all the bricks in some form of "order" that she can play and build.

We explored lot of commercial possibilities and even spent money on a few, they either turned out very expensive or too small enough that they didn’t meet our needs/specification.

After some brain storming and internet searches, we narrowed on a plan to have multiple storage drawers and mount a big thick wooden panel on top and make one of our own (credit goes to Sandhya). The storage drawers were readily available in our favorite container store and we bought 6 total, 3 for each side. The wood was the tricky one.

Being a novice in buying lumber, I had no idea what to ask for when I went to Home Depot to buy the wood board. All I knew was I need to buy a board that is about 4ft long and about 20" wide and about 0.75" thick. When they asked what do I have in mind to do, I said "I am building a Lego table for my daughter", that almost threw them off balance. In the end they were helpful and showed me the available boards and I picked one of the decently expensive ones (don't remember much).

The board dimension was 2' X 4' and as per suggestions from the internet, it was supposed to be cut to 20” width which is the size of our drawers, I would have gotten it done but the saw at Home Depot was broken and I picked the piece intact, I am glad I did that for the 4” extra space is pretty nice to have. 

Then came the challenge of priming the wood and painting the wood, by Avni’s choice we had to paint one side pink and another side purple (considering it would be mounted on drawers, I could have saved myself time and money by using 1 color of paint, oh well hind sight). the tedious part was waiting for the paint to dry before applying next coat and the spillages from 1 side to another and those touch ups, all said and done it took more than a week to get it all painted. Few things I learned were that to get quality paint on the wood use the smallest possible brush that your work can permit and  use painters tape to save time (most importantly, apart from spilling of paint to other side it would prevent paint accumulation along the edges).

The last step was mounting to the storage drawers, per recommendation from the Home Depot Gorilla glue, here is where I should have listened to the experts. I should have put really low amount of glue instead of spreading copious amount for the glue did expand over time and it started spreading everywhere, I had to go with a knife to cut out the unwanted glue. I did manage to get most of it out but for some areas I just had to make up my mind out of sight mind.

One thing we did was to use electrical tape and taped all round the corners and the edges to make them smooth.

  

The finishing touches came from Sandhya who did awesome stencil work. One thing for sure, after the table and all blocks in 1 place Avni seems to be playing with her lego’s  more than before. All in all it was worth the time and effort in creating it.

Below are some pics, from concept to finish and the fun in between.