February, you've outstayed your welcome

I am bored with winter.
And with trying to exercise in winter.
And with whining about trying to exercise in winter.

But wait! I know how to cheer myself up -- I'll write something brilliant and funny and heart-warming and endearing and totally, like, interesting and all that stuff! I am creative! I can write anything!

Um... no. Not today. Thus the urge toward self-expression is thwarted and diverted into the default behavior of searching on Google to see if someone else has something interesting to say.



I thought there might be some good sites out there on How To Make Exercising Interesting Even If It Is February, but they all involve me doing something that resembles hard work. So I found some other sites instead.

Equine Insanity wrote a good post about fear and animals.

The Ironic Catholic noted that a worldwide chocolate shortage brings people closer to God.



My new love Chart Porn posted a graph that charts women's earnings against men's earnings in the same field. Useful tip: don't go into banking if you're female.



An old post from An American Girl in Singapore led me to a fascinating study. You know how people of European ancestry used to complain that all Asians look alike? Turns out from the Asian perspective all Europeans look alike too. Caucasians and Asians don't examine faces in the same way.


A humorous site, stolen leveraged from PastaQueen, is the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator. Create a best-seller, just by clicking!



And a video: Don't you ever interrupt me while I'm reading a book! (Stolen shamelessly from Librarians are weird.)


Photos of a hibiscus and condo on Maui, plus a random beach on Molokai. Sigh.

In a rut? Or in the groove?

I've not noticed myself losing any weight lately. While this might mean I'm building muscle, yeah yeah yeah, I'm inclined to think it's due to the fact that I have been backsliding over the holidays.

I was going to cook Christmas dinner but thanks to all the snowstorms most people couldn't come visit, so I have had a whole helluva a lot of saturated fat in my fridge in the form of ham, turkey, chicken, turkey, mince pie, turkey, stuffing, turkey... anyway, I have not been doing my previous 90% vegetables diet.

Bad Merry, bad. No celery.

Also problems with the usual routine, that I find extremely hard to shake off. I have great difficulty in doing two things at once: eating right and exercising regularly. Depressing to look back over a year ago and find a similar blog entry. I'm hopeless, hopeless, hopeless, hopeless...
scrreeeeeeech
Sorry. Got stuck in a rut there for a moment. Better now.

Note to the climate: I'd be even better if it would stop snowing already. Just saying.

Note to my sad excuse for a conscience: I have spent the whole day doing absolutely nothing. Navel gazing, internet gazing, making lists of all the chores I have to do... these do not count as activities. Dear conscience, I don't mean to tell you your job but I'm going to anyway. Get to work motivating me!

New schedule:
Okay, both Theresa and Xenia mentioned Hal Higdon (along the lines of "I mostly ignored Hal Higdon's schedule..." but still... ;)
So what the hell.

Exercise du jour: Per HH, a 1.5 mile run.
Done. Probably. I could NOT run on Orlando Manuel for that long, and it's too cold to run outside, so I ran for 30 minutes. Probably that adds up to 'around' 1.5 miles (more, I am pretty damn sure), but I really wish I could run outside. Still, it's done.

Very depressing day. I am very depressed today, that's how I can tell. Why am I depressed? Who knows? Who cares? (Did I mention that a dose of apathy was thrown in free along with the depression?)

Why am I here? For that matter, why are you?

The trouble is that I always want there to be a Reason for everything.

There has to be a point for a blog. I've read that most blogs have only one author and only one reader -- and they are one and the same person. Basically they're online diaries. Why are these people posting their private lives online, making them public?

• Many blogs out there are exercise/diet diaries; the poster putting the minutiae of their daily life out for public view for anyone or no one to see, presumably as a way of keeping themselves on track for their goal.
  
• Writers post blogs that serve this function too, as well as keeping their readers involved in their progress.
• Some blogs are public rants; the poster holds forth on their opinions about all and sundry.
• Some blogs are private parties; the poster or posters hang out online with their physical and virtual friends. (I've enjoyed a couple of these blogs myself; you meet some good peoples online.)
• Some blogs are the online year 'round equivalent of a Christmas letter: the poster uses the public forum to keep their friends and family au courant.

Some of these blogs are well written, some are not. A lot have spelling errors and typos, so many that the impression is given that the poster doesn't care what they look like to the world. (It's the editor in me, but I can't fathom that. Would these people go out in public with their hair unbrushed or their clothes wrinkled and askew?) But all of these blogs seem to be posted by people who really believe in what they're doing. There's the rub.

Maybe the problem is that I can't quite believe in myself enough to think that my musings will hold much fascination for anyone else. Even the dog curls up for a nap when I start telling her my troubles. My family nods politely, eyes glazed over, when I tell them about my exercise schedule or dieting struggles. Why would posting a blog be any different?

Perhaps the only way to find out is to blog about something. Here. I'll tell you what, Dear Reader. (I'm presuming you exist.) I'll try a slice of life (low cal, just a dash of chocolate on top):

I'm sitting here typing and out my window I can see planes flying back and forth, jets passing low overhead, helicopters buzzing the trees. (Okay, one helicopter.) You'd think I was in the middle of a Baghdad neighborhood, but in reality it's just the local air show. The small airport is actually about four or five miles away, but there's always some overflow. Usually I enjoy looking at the planes going by. When I go shopping, I can see the acrobatic biplanes doing loops and crazy stunts, safely thank Heaven. I'm hoping to catch sight of the Blue Angels. But this year I'm also a bit nervous. My newly developed fear of flying has extended to when I'm on the ground and they're in the air. Last year a friend of mine went on a garden tour with another friend. When they got back to the other woman's house, they found it on fire. A plane had crashed into it, killing the pilot and setting two neighboring houses on fire. My friends had been running late that day; they'd originally planned to have returned about fifteen minutes sooner, in which case she wouldn't have been around to tell me about it. The moral of the story, to me, is that's it's not always a good thing to be on time.

There. I've now created a slice-of-life blog post. Maybe next time I'll try posting my diet and exercise schedule.

p.s. I've just discovered a blog that has tips on how to blog, if you're interested.