Travel, Birthday and Fitness Band

So last week I went down to Christchurch for a bit of a break which was great, and no shaking while I was there so that was a bonus, I also managed to checkout a bit of Timaru which seemed like quite a nice place indeed.

Money book

I’ve started reading a book called your money or your life, which I got to after I brought the book rich dad, poor dad cheaply at this crazy as second hand bookshop. While I haven’t read much of the rich dad, poor dad book yet I did check out the reviews on Amazon and someone recommended that your money or your life was a better book.

I’m 2/3rds of the way through it as I type this, and I know I will have to re read it again and follow the steps in the book, and the steps aren’t hard, some of them I already do now (like the tracking of money) and I will see how it all goes. So far it has already started making me think about money differently. I’ll update more as to how this all goes.

Birthday

So two days ago was my birthday, not that many people knew that, but it was interesting. The reason it was interesting is that at some point in the past I had removed either the app or the notification thing that resides withing Facebook, the thing that announces to everyone that it is your birthday. And while it is nice that people do wish you a happy birthday, isn’t it better that actual people you know already know when this is and you don’t need the mechanism of a social media site to inform people about this?

So I got to spend it with the people I wanted to spend it with (well almost everyone) and it was really good. My ex was a bit surprised I hadn’t been out to lunch or had some dinner thing planned for it, her idea of celebrating 30 was to go to Las Vegas.

But it just reinforced some of the money things I was reading about, I didn’t feel the need to spend money to celebrate my birthday with food.

I am now part of the fitness wear craze

But what I did spend some money on, and the plan here is that it will help me maintain my health (something I am worried about with my bad back/the work I now do) is a fitness tracker band thing.

I’d thought about it for a while, and man there are a lot of options out there with a lot of prices and features, so you really do need to have a think about what you want and how much you want to spend etc.

I went with the Garmin Vivofit, which looks like this:

The reason I went with that one over some of the others is that I know a couple of people that have these, and haven’t said anything bad about them, I like Garmin stuff, ever since I got my first GPS many years ago. And it runs off some watch batteries that last up to a year from normal use.

If I had to plug something else in every day to charge it would drive me mental.

It’s quite simple compared to some out there but you do get clock/date, step counter, calories used, goal your heading towards, distance covered. And it syncs via bluetooth to your phone to the app or to your PC with the little USB dongle that comes with it.

And a feature that sounds pretty basic but which I like is that if you haven’t moved for an hour, this red line appears on it, you have to move and walk around to get rid of it, and it is a reminder to get active. Which for me is good. It’s also very light compared to my very light watch I was wearing before. Oh and I shelled out for the heart rate monitor, which you need to get if you want it to show it to you.

It’s one of those chest straps you wear and it communicates with the band, not a feature I need everyday but handy when walking or riding my bike.

I’ll keep this updated to how it’s all going and any other comments I have about the whole thing.