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Monday, August 25, 2003

what I'm reading, how my diet's going, stuff like that

Mood: Cheerful

Music: "The Kiss" from The Last of the Mohicans soundtrack

I took a good brisk walk this evening, 9/10ths of a mile each way, in just under 15 minutes going downhill and just over 15 minutes going uphill. And that is REALLY up hill, for a lot of it. I didn't do the whole almost-two-miles at once, though; I had a choir practice in between. I realized today just exactly how much exercise there is in doing stuff around the house. Cleaning my room this morning for example -- lots of bending and lifting, and I kind of exaggerated the motions, if you know what I mean, to get more exercise out of them (with caution so as not to hurt myself though). I'm sure it looked kind of silly but oh well, I was the only one looking ;). I am SO turning into my mother (and that is a good thing; I adore my mother) in so many subtle little ways. That is exactly the sort of thing she'd do if she thought of it.



All summer I've been on this committee trying to figure out how we're going to run and fund our community chorus in the future, since we were being dropped by the college which had supported us in the past. We had meetings, earnest discussions, lists of options and flow-chart like if/then scenarios worked out. Then the powers that be went to actually withdraw the class from the college to have it transferred somewhere else when we had finally, after all this, decided what to do, and the college decided not to drop us after all. Which simplifies things but sure as heck makes all those meetings look like wasted time. Oh well. :)



I am reading four or five books at once right now. I had resolved that this year I would do almost no re-reading, and I would read a bunch of new stuff. It lasted about seven months but now I'm buried in a bunch of comfort reads. To be fair, two of them are for online discussion groups, and one I'm in the process of reading to my dad. But I'm in the middle of Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, Silas Marner by George Eliot, Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati, and The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis. I kind of wore myself out on new-to-me books after a flurry of reading a bunch of Maeve Binchy and Elizabeth Berg. I'm temporarily a bit burned out on them and there hasn't been another new-to-me author to kindle my interest yet. What I should do is go through the books I own but haven't read, one by one, and read them all. The problem is, some of them are torturous -- like Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, and War and Peace (or anything by Tolstoy for that matter), or anything by Henry James. I get a few pages in and can't stand it any longer, and put them aside to try again in a few years when I've grown a bit or when the kids aren't demanding so much attention. And I feel like a total loser for doing that, and then I go re-read an Austen or Jane Eyre to prove to myself that I'm not a Harlequin-consuming twit who can't handle real literature. sigh. (Besides, if I start perusing my bookshelf on a regular basis I get sidetracked by the discovery that I'm really in just the right mood to read that book for the five-thousandth time. So that's kind of a self-defeating idea)



I had a "first" today. I had to eat a bit of something to put me over my minimum calorie consumption. If that 1200 calories thing is untrue, someone tell me! Anyway, I totaled up my meals (had no snacks) and found that I was only at 1150 or so. So I had a root beer float with diet Barq's and sugar-free vanilla ice cream -- total 100 calories from the ice cream. Yummers. The thing was, I wasn't feeling hungry or munchy and would just as soon have gone without but I don't want to make weight loss difficult or unsafe by eating fewer than what my body supposedly needs in order to avoid burning muscle and making me all weak. Again, if that's some kind of dieter's myth, puh-LEEZE let me in on that...



oh goodness. I just looked at my computer clock and it is far, far later than I thought it would be. Off to bed!

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