CSN Stores - Online Shopping Mecca

There's online shopping, and then there's online shopping on steroids .... aka CSN Stores. You've probably read about CSN Stores on other blogs, and a few months back I did a giveaway on this blog for a CSN Stores gift certificate. Apparently I didn't scare them away the first time, so we're teaming up again. This time, however, I'll be ordering something for myself (or more likely for Mrs. Evolving), and posting a review of the product and the whole shopping experience. Hopefully I can manage to not get injured in the process of ordering or using the mystery product, but the betting odds point to me headed back to physical therapy.

So what is this CSN Stores? CSN Stores is an online conglomeration of over 200 stores/sites offering an incredibly broad range of products. The stores represented include luggage.com, allmodern.com, cookware.com, and bedroomfurniture.com. You can find everything from power tools, to Herman Miller chairs, to great cookware, all from the comfort of your own couch, which you can then replace with a new couch from CSN Stores. The online-shopping circle-of-life if you will.

Like this ... but with credit cards

Speaking of Herman Miller chairs, many years ago a coworker of mine, due to a chronic back condition, was issued a Herman Miller chair. He worked from home on Fridays, so I asked if I could borrow his chair on Fridays. Holy comfy. It was like work was giving my butt a hug. If one could fashion a chair out of clouds and sunshine it would have a Herman Miller label on it. Sadly, the other four days of the week I had to return to my chair made from thorn-bushes and broken dreams, only to count the hours until sweet Friday came around again.

Using the ‘Search’ feature on CSN Stores is a sight to behold. Search on ‘cooking’ and you’ll be met with 6,391 items. Perhaps you’ll be interested in a cookware set, or a new set of knives, or something both functional and sensible. Not me. I’m picturing this guy hooked up to the back of my truck with enough burgers and brats to fill Lambeau

I’d be dreaming up reasons to tailgate. Jury duty …. Fire up the tailgate grill. Parent-teacher conference …. Bubba Burgers for everyone. Sunday morning mass … never good to pray on an empty stomach. The possibilities are endless.

Perhaps you find yourself dealing with an injury or two. A search on ‘physical therapy’ returns 3,262 results. Most of my therapy sessions consist of painful stretching, followed by painful strength exercises, followed by some part of my body being subjected to electrical current. However, per my CSN search, apparently this falls into the category of Physical Therapy as well.

At least now I have a goal behind my assorted breakdowns. One day they’ll take me to the room where this thing lives, and it will be glorious.

What item will I choose for my review? Not entirely sure. Maybe something running related, or maybe something cooking related. There are almost too many possibilities. Maybe I’ll get something to help with my impending return to the world of Yoga. A search of ‘Yoga’ returns a bountiful 365 items. I’m a bit intrigued by these:

I haven’t read the description or the reviews, but clearly they allow you to do yoga on the wall, or suspended from the ceiling. Imma be getting my Namaste on Spiderman-style.

Check out CSN Stores the next time you find yourself doing some cyber-shopping. You’ll be amazed at what you can find.

Disclosure: I was asked by CSN Stores to include the hyperlink to the “Herman Miller” keyword as part of their promotion, in return for a CSN credit that I will use to order and then review a product. My lust for Herman Miller chairs is genuine, as is the fact that they are way out of my price range. Butt comfort is cruel that way. Anybody that subjects themselves to my blog on a regular basis knows that customer service is a BIG DEAL to me, so I’ll pass along my ongoing experience with CSN Stores without bias based not only on the product, but the overall shopping experience.

Chai Tea and Tai Chi

Serenity now.

2011 has gotten off to a stressful start for a variety of reasons, and my hip issues have left me largely without my main personal recalibration tool, running.  Actually, injuries continue to add to the overall fog of stress that permeates my personal landscape these days.  I was hopeful that some time off during the holidays would cause the stresses to pack their bags and head for warmer climates, but instead they seem to have quietly rehearsed and choreographed their efforts, and met me with a Youtube-caliber stress flash-mob to start the new year.  Time to fight back.  Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Chai Tea is something I’ve discovered in the past couple years, and it seems to have a stress-relieving effect on me.  Not in a cheesy ‘International Coffee Moment’ kind of way, but more in a ‘forcing me to hit pause on my day for a couple minutes’ way.  Even just a couple minutes of processing can make a world of difference in my personal and professional effectiveness.  BIG fan of the Big Train brand Chai Tea, which I order from Amazon in the ‘Rodeo Clown Drum’ size container and keep in my office at work.  I’ve never been a fan of hot drinks, so I was thoroughly surprised to find I like this stuff.  Worth a try if you’re not a coffee drinker, which I am not.  Juan Valdez and I have just never really hit it off.

I’ve never tried Tai Chi, but I thought it fit today’s motto and made for a catchy title.  I have, however, tried Yoga, and I’m planning to give it another shot.  I had added yoga to my routine as part of training for my last marathon, since I am brutally lacking in flexibility and thought it might help ward off injuries.  Ironically, just when I was getting going with it, I had to stop because of the Plantar Fasciitis in both of my feet that was badly agitated by the calf stretching inherent in yoga.  The PF hasn’t really gone away, but I think it’s minimized enough now to give yoga another shot.  I’m going to ease into this slowly, to see how my hip responds, and hopefully make this a significant part of my routine while I’m not training for a specific race, and figure out how to make this a x-training activity when I do start actively training again.

I'm confident that one day I too will be able to bend over and touch my waist.

Man vs Yoga

In an attempt to live up to the name of the Blog, I have made several changes since crossing the first-marathon finish line back in March, both in my running life and my personal life. I’ll try and cover those in another blog post as a way for me to personally take inventory, and share some of the results of those changes. One change that I’ve been slowly working up to is adding Yoga into my cross-training mix, and last night I finally got my Yoga on.

 

*Not pictured: Me

 

Kind of hard to really give a review of the experience since it was a lot of stopping and watching the video to figure out what exactly they were doing, but overall I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my training. I did a 60-minute base strength routine, and by the end of the routine I think I had most of the sequences and poses figured out. Synchronizing the movements with the breathing is going to be a bit of a challenge, and in the many words I’ve used to describe me ‘graceful’ is not one, so I’m sure it wasn’t pretty, but pretty is not what I’m shooting for. First impressions:

• Despite having done my PT stretches every day, and sometimes twice daily, for almost 2 months, I’m still crazy inflexible, mostly in my hamstrings. Didn’t help that of the three people in the video doing the movements, the guy could have bent over and touched the toes of a person standing downstairs from where they were shooting. However, by the end of the session I was within striking distance of my toes when I bent over.  Dare to dream.
• Really need to move the furniture around in the kids’ playroom if that’s where I’m going to keep doing this. I’d like to say that is a function of Feng Shui to allow for proper Namaste, but it’s actually a function of making it look more like yoga and less like me practicing martial arts on the couch, chairs, and anything else unfortunate enough to be within my YogaJudo reach.
• Need to close the door so my kids and/or the puppy don’t come in every 10 minutes to see what’s going on. Hard to get centered when someone’s asking you how much longer until they can use the Wii.
• Think I may need a bigger yoga mat. Don’t know if there are actually different sizes, but I’m using my wife’s mat and I was having a hard time staying within the mat boundaries. Again probably more a function of my Yoga-ninja impression than the mat, but it’s easier to blame inanimate objects.

In other news, we’re mourning the death of the hard drive on our Tivo. I’m not a big TV watcher, so the Tivo meltdown wasn’t a big deal to me, but dead Tivo = unhappy Mrs. Evolving. We were one of the first folks to jump on the Tivo bandwagon many years ago, and although we’re on our third box we’ve rarely had any issues, but Friday night Mr. Tivo went into full Hard-Drive-Cardiac-Arrest, and despite our best efforts we weren’t able to revive him. Casualties included the not-yet-watched final episode of Lost, the last 6 episodes of Season 2 of True Blood (also not yet watched), and the season finale of Biggest Loser. Aside from my wife being highly displeased with the lost shows, it made for an interesting social experiment with my kids, who have never really experienced real-time TV, where you can’t pause, rewind, pick a recorded show from a menu, etc. It was actually pretty funny. Already ordered a replacement hard-drive, and surgery should be complete by the end of the week, but in the meantime the family is living like savages, having to watch shows when they actually come on the air.

 

Running right now is a bit of a mixed bag. Had a great run on Saturday where all of the body parts felt like they should. Yesterday I went 6.3 miles, the longest I’ve tried to run since my knee turned sad, and had a fair amount of heel pain. My right heel has been getting increasingly more sore over the last couple weeks, which appears to be the early onset of plantar fasciitis. Good news is that my knee is doing really well, but the traveling hurt seems to have taken up residence on the bottom of my foot now. Icing, stretching, etc. to try and get it stopped and turned for the better. We’ll see where that goes.

 

Realized on yesterday’s run that it’s time to invest in a running hat. Anybody have any suggestions? Stopped at the local Inside-Out-Sports over the weekend to see what they had, but they all had a giant store logo on the front, and I’d rather not be a moving billboard.

Gimme a Beat

Quick update from the running front – Still doing my therapy every day, and have gotten into an every-other-day running groove that usually goes pretty well. I’m now allowing myself somewhere between 3-4 miles on each run, and have had some discomfort in my knee, but no real pain. Haven’t gotten to the practicing of Yoga yet, but am reading the ‘Athlete’s Guide to Yoga’ book right now, which I ordered after watching the ‘Athlete’s Guide to Yoga’ DVD and realizing I needed a bit more instruction than just diving in. Much of my time lately has been devoted to planning my wife’s birthday party this coming Saturday, for a milestone birthday that rhymes with ‘shmorty’, but that’s probably a good topic for another blog posting about my plans to embarrass myself.

As for the title of the blog entry, I realized on my last jog that I’m spending a lot of time pressing the next-song button on my iPod as I run, and am basically a bit burned out on my current collection of playlists. I’ve got 2 main go-to playlists for running, but after my last training cycle those songs and I need a little time apart to rediscover our love for one another. Thus, I’m taking to the blogosphere for some suggestions for building up a new collection of ear-candy. Once I discovered the wonderful world of Walkmans back many years ago, I found that I can’t run without some sort of music playing. I added podcasts to the mix on my longer training runs for the marathon, just for a little variety, but bottom line … I needs the noise in my ears to makes the feets go.

For reference, here’s a merge of my two go-to lists right now so you get an idea of what I like for running. Many of these aren’t necessarily favorite songs, or things I would listen to while driving if given the choice, but they keep me moving for whatever reason. I don’t look for a particular beats-per-minute or some sort of fancy cadence to match my running, I’m just mostly looking for a good tune with a good beat. I’m open to most any genre, although there’s definitely a lack of country music in my current rotation. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments and I’ll start loading my iTunes account with some $ so I can start the buying:

Bad (Live) -  U2
Won't Go Home Without You -  Maroon 5
My Life Would Suck Without You -  Kelly Clarkson
Lips Like Sugar (12" Mix) -  Echo & The Bunnymen
Use Somebody - Kings of Leon
Panama -  Van Halen
Pavement Cracks (Mac Quayle Extended Mix) -  Annie Lennox
Poker Face -  Lady GaGa
Crazy -  Seal
Just Dance -  Lady GaGa & Colby O'Donis
Eye of the Tiger -  Survivor
Far Behind - Candlebox
One Slip -  Pink Floyd
Love remains the same -  Gavin Rossdale
Shattered (Turn the Car Around) -  O.A.R.
Sabotage -  Beastie Boys
100 Years -  Five for Fighting
I Am Mine -  Pearl Jam
A Sort of Homecoming - U2
Training Montage -  Vince DiCola
Born to Run -  Bruce Springsteen
Basket Case -  Green Day
Free Fallin' (Live) -  John Mayer
Rock Your Body -  Justin Timberlake
Everlong -  Foo Fighters
The Stairs -  INXS
According to You -  Orianthi
Crazy In Love -  Beyoncé
Love Drunk -  Boys Like Girls
We Will Rock -  You Queen
She Sells Sanctuary -  The Cult
Gold Digger (feat. Jamie Foxx) -  Kanye West
Sober -  Pink
Time Stand Still -  Rush
Somewhere Only We Know -  Keane
Miss Independent -  Kelly Clarkson
My Hero -  Foo Fighters
Shine Like It Does -  INXS
Canned Heat [Album Version] -  Jamiroquai
Disappear -  INXS
Sympathy for the Devil -  The Rolling Stones
Gives You Hell -  The All-American Rejects
Hearts On Fire -  John Cafferty
You Can't Always Get What You Want -  The Rolling Stones
We Are the Champions -  Queen
Just Like Heaven -  The Cure
Happy Hour -  The Housemartins
Rocket Queen -  Guns N' Roses
Breakeven -  The Script
Remember the Name -  Fort Minor featuring Styles of Beyond
The Boys of Summer -  Don Henley

Second visit to the Physical Therapist

Made my second trip to the therapist this morning for a progress review on my ailing knee. Flexibility seems to have improved overall, but still fairly tight. I'm still experiencing pain in the same place as before, and during the same activities, so it looks like I'm still pretty far from being cleared to run again. Today we added a series of strengthening exercises to the stretching exercises, so now I'll be doing therapy 3x daily. Hard to find time to get it all done, but I'll figure it out.

In addition to the stretching and strengthening, I'll be taping my kneecap for the next week to try and force a slight change in alignment, and stretch some of the connectors from the IT Band to the kneecap. It’s a pretty simple x-shaped tape job across the kneecap, pulling it slightly towards the inner part of the knee. I’ve got some pretty ‘wooly’ legs, so taking the tape off should be vaguely reminiscent of Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin. Kelly Clarkson!!

Planning to start resuming aerobic activity tomorrow morning, as long as it’s not causing me any pain. No running on the horizon yet, but I should be able to bike and do some elliptical work. Got my yoga DVD in the mail as well, so that should be starting fairly soon. My newly revised plan/wish, so I can try and contain my frustration level, is to resume running once we get into May. That’s not based on anything I’ve been told, or any sort of progress I’m seeing, but it helps me stay focused on a short-term goal, and helps remind me that I’ve still got 6.5 months from the start of May to train for my next marathon, which should be plenty of time. Gotta stay positive.

Me and PT and my angry right knee

Made my first trip to physical therapy today to try and get my knee to rejoin the rest of my body in the quest for marathon number 2. At this point I'd just settle for being able to run again, but have to keep the larger goals on the horizon. Interesting trivia I learned today from my therapist:

- I am indeed as horribly lacking in flexibility as advertised, however, not the worst he's ever seen.

- My IT bands are extremely well defined when my knees are flexed, to the point that "we could take a picture of them for a textbook". Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but the therapist thought it was interesting.

- My vastus medialis (teardrop shaped muscle on inner part of thigh) is also very well defined (another textbook photo opportunity apparently), but noticeably stronger on my left (good) leg than my right.

- My right IT Band is noticeably tighter than my left, but both are much tighter than 'normal'

- My quadriceps, hamstrings, and calves are all below 'normal' in terms of flexibility

- They have a lot of patients that are runners .... go figure

We went through a series of flexibility assessments, followed by some stretching instruction, followed by ultrasound treatment, followed by ice massage. Overall prognosis was pretty good, and the fact that he wasn't appalled by my generally petrified-wood degree of flexibility was a relief. Left with lots of do-it-yourself home stretching exercises to be done twice daily, along with foam roller torture and ice massage. Still no running for another week, at which point we'll have our next session and see how things are progressing. Best case I'm probably 1.5 weeks from trying to run again. In addition to the PT routine, I'm still planning to give yoga a try in the next few days. After some online research I ordered the "Athletes Guide to Yoga" DVD so I can keep the comedy of my first yoga attempts contained within my own home. Don't think the world is yet ready for my unique yoga stylings.