We were sitting on the front porch last night watching the bats. (Yes, we're the weird family on the block.) There were so many in the sky that I went running for the camera. I took a lot of pictures of black blurry stuff, but in this fine photo, I actually captured a bat! It's the fuzzy dot right and center. Impressive, eh?

We bought a Jeep this week, a Wrangler Unlimited with a hard top. I like it. It's a blast to drive. I noticed that in my Honda, there are all of these things to keep it from tipping over - traction control, stability assist, onboard computers. In the Jeep, there's nothing at all to keep you from going over, just a roll bar and a wench, as if they expect you to find yourself upside down from time to time. I'm supposed to order some special dog seatbelts so that the "kids" stay harnessed into their seats even if we're tumbling end over end.

I've been playing with the BodyBot workout robot dealy some more. There are a couple of things I wish it did better or differently. I wish you could save and share your workouts, or run some preset routines. I wish that as soon as the workout ended, you had an option to repeat it rather than having to create it again, which only takes a few seconds, but just being able to hit a "repeat" button would be nice. Still, it's pretty slick, and really fun to play with. I can imagine it eventually being expanded to create longer workouts with different formats. Right now, the 4 minute Tabata intervals are a blast. Ripley doesn't think so, however. When she hears the music playing and I start jumping around in front of the computer, she attacks me. Jump squats and Russian twists really make the speckled nutcase angry for some reason.

Here are a couple of the routines I've been playing with. It's 20 seconds of blasting out as many reps as you can get, followed by 10 seconds of rest. It really kicks your ass quickly. In 4 minutes, you're sweating and your heart is pounding.

T push-ups
jump lunges
jackknife crunches
kettlebell swings
decline push-ups
sumo squats
bicycle crunches
burpees

And this morning I did:

jump squats
explosive push-ups
Russian twists
reverse lunges
spiderman push-ups
full crunches
kettlebell swings
mountain climbers

You can also create workouts for abs only, or upper or lower body only. Or you can use the same exercise throughout. Like 8 sets of kettlebell swings with 10 seconds of rest between them. Pretty fun, but I'm still figuring it all out. I'll feel dumb if there already IS a way to save and repeat and I'm just not seeing it.

New favorite chicken thing - buy boneless, skinless breast strips, mix them in a little olive oil and sprinkle with hickory seasoning, cook them on the George Foreman grill for 5 minutes, dip them in barbecue sauce. I've been having that for lunch almost every day this week with some fresh fruit.