Overeating ... a sin?

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Quote du jour:

Sin passes itself off as an expansion, an emancipation at the moment of yielding to it, every sinner is inclined to believe this. The very opposite is true. By sinning I emancipate myself only from my own proper nature, my own happy destiny, choosing a falsification of myself, following a road without a goal, or, rather, one whose goal is not what I am seeking: my own perdition. What a queer emancipation! ...
Fr. Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P.

If you replaced the word "sin" with "overeating" or any other unhealthy activity, this quote works just as well.

Goal for the month: 30 day purge





Goal for the week: I swear, nose to pillow. 9 p.m. Me. Why not?




Exercise du jour: C25k week 3
Brisk five-minute warmup walk, then do two repetitions of the following:

• Jog 200 yards (or 90 seconds)
• Walk 200 yards (or 90 seconds)
• Jog 400 yards (or 3 minutes)
• Walk 400 yards (or 3 minutes)

Not so much fail, as otherwise succeeded. Pushed the C25k off until tomorrow, since I did it yesterday. Walked 4 miles instead. Plus, got up at crack o' dawn to do yoga for 1/2 hour. Why has no one ever mentioned the smug after-effect of doing yoga before the sun comes up?





Quote stolen leveraged from the Happy Catholic blog.

No reason Tuesday

No reason for the picture. Just made me go "awwwww."

Quote du jour: Of the blessings set before you, make your choice and be content. - Samuel Johnson

Goal for the month: 30 day purge




Goal for the week: I swear, nose to pillow. 9 p.m. Me. It can happen.




Exercise du jour: Walk to/from the Max station
Done! Worked in yesterday's C25k run as well. Efficient, that's me. Also quite damp. Turns out the raincoat is not completely rainproof :(



Plus, at lunch, the 200 squats, week 2

6
8
5
5
10
Done!

Why did they ever invent Mondays? Who thought that idea would be a good one?

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Quote du jour
[On reincarnation]
The only thing no one was in a past life is boring. You have to wonder whatever happens to dull souls.
- Susan Conant

Site du jour: While a bit harsh, the Oatmeal makes some good points: "If you do this in an email, I hate you."

Goal of the month: 30 days of purging, sorting, shredding, filing, donating and generally getting Stuff out the door.

Goal of the week: Nose to pillow by 9 p.m. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?
Done! It is simple. All you need to do is feel not well at all, and going to bed early is fine. The only problem with achieving that goal is that the other goals were left by the wayside.


Exercise du jour: C25k week 3
Brisk five-minute warmup walk, then do two repetitions of the following:

• Jog 200 yards (or 90 seconds)
• Walk 200 yards (or 90 seconds)
• Jog 400 yards (or 3 minutes)
• Walk 400 yards (or three minutes)

Weight Watchers -- no point?

Irritation du jour: Weight Watchers -- now pointless?

I'm glad that they're trying to keep up to date, but it seems strange that a system that was working (more or less) before is now "wrong." Or, according to this article "the previous style of calorie-counting had been proven to be inaccurate and ‘outdated'."

If the old system had been completely inaccurate, surely someone would have noticed before now? If they said the new system was more accurate, that wouldn't bother me so much.

Selfish moment du jour: Okay, yes, I'm glad the Chilean miners all made it up to the surface safely. Nevertheless, this story irks me: Chilean Miner trained to run marathon.

Yes, I'm all for showing bravery in the face of adversity, but sheesh! I mean, here he is, trapped underground for months , forced to eat short rations and not knowing if he'd ever see daylight again, and the man trains for a friggin' marathon? Doesn't this man realize how selfish he is? How he's making all the rest of us look bad! What excuses do any of us have left?! Really, some people.

Goal for the month: Still going strong on the 30-day purge. Every day, I devote time to sorting, organizing, shredding, filing, or donating all the stuff I have been hoarding for all these years. It's okay to let it go!





Goal for the week: Nose to pillow by 9 p.m. Sounds so simple when I put it up on the blog. In reality, it means being disciplined, organized, all those things that do not come naturally to my scatter-brained soul.

Exercise du jour: 200 squats week 2:
6
8
5
5
8
Done!

Trend Micro Rant ... or, how not to win friends and repeat customers

[Warning: the following is long. There is ranting. There are no funny animal pictures. It is only a rant.]

Geez. Wasted much of Thursday night helping my mother upgrade her anti-virus software, and got so miffed that I had to blog about it. Probably I wouldn’t be so miffed if I weren’t in this profession doing this for a living for the past 10 years. I’ve easily done thousands of installs and upgrades. There was no need for a simple procedure like this to take over Two Friggin'Hours.

Had to uninstall the existing program before installing the upgrade. Fine. Annoying, but fine. I plodded through the installation wizard until I got to an error message I couldn't decode.

What I got was an error message saying that I'd already installed this program on three computers and I couldn't install it on any more. Since the program had ONLY ever been installed on that one computer, and not re-installed ever, this was a puzzler.

The installation wizard thoughtfully provided a link that would explain what to do if you got this message. The link was broken.

I googled for it, and found the page at another location, and thought I was home and dry. But no. That page didn’t explain the problem; it repeated the words on the error message. (“Why does the installation tell me I have 3 computers already running this software? Because you have installed this software on 3 computers already.”) I truly loathe customer documentation that simply repeats the error message. I call it the “Duh” school of writing.

Turns out what that meant was that even if it were only on one computer, I needed to deactivate the program before re-activating it on the same computer. Not only did the instructions not suggest anything remotely like that, the support page didn't even suggest that as a solution.

Honestly, if they want their error messages to sound like riddles that you're supposed to guess the meaning of, why don't they try for something more Zen and poetical?

The snow falls on the butterfly's wings
While the wolf howls at the moon.

Finally, after jumping through every hoop, leaping every chasm, decoding every cryptic error message and exhausting the batteries in my cordless phone (I was doing this long-distance, talking my mother through all the steps), we came to the final challenge. To activate the program, you had to reboot.

On the surface, this seems like a simple obstacle to overcome. You normally have to reboot when installing a program. Ha! You fool! That's just what they want you to think!

When you reboot, you see nothing. The application's icon in the task bar is grayed out. If you open the application, it says you have to click a button before you can activate the application. If you click the button, the computer restarts. And you see nothing. So you look at the application and it tells you that you have to click the button and restart the computer again. And again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Turns out what that means is that you're supposed to wait for 10 minutes or so while the application starts up. Since by this point I'd already been doing this uninstall and upgrade for over two and a half hours, waiting was not my first impulse.

There wasn't even any evidence that the Trend program, or anything Trend related, was running while all this went on. Usually you can check the processes in Task Manager to see what the computer was doing, but even that didn't help. And how many average computer users would do that?

Besides, I'd already been caught on that waiting thing. Earlier on, the install wizard got to 98% done before it hung. It kept saying it was "almost finished." Turns out what that meant was that I had to stop using the installation wizard and switch over to start configuring the program before the wizard had finished the install. Not that there was any message telling me this. You're supposed to wait around looking at a message saying "almost finished" until Hell freezes over?

The cherry blossoms pine and fade away
The installation cannot proceed until you deactivate the program before re-activating it.

No, wait. I would've understood that message.

Jogging along

Quote du jour: You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe day-light-savings time. - Dave Barry

Study du jour: Obesity is contagious

In the study, the team found that an American adult has a 2 percent chance of becoming obese in any given year, and each obese social contact increases the risk of becoming obese by 0.5 percent per year.

And while having fat friends increases the odds that you will become fat, befriending thin people does not appear to help you lose weight.

"We didn't find having more healthy-weight friends made it more likely to help people lose weight. It fits in with this idea of thinking about it as an infectious disease. You don't really catch healthiness," she said.

Well hell, there's a simple solution. Just don't have friends.


Goal for the month: 30 days of a sort, shred, file or purge fest.
Done! One hour's worth of sorting



Goal for the week: Put nose to pillow by 9 p.m.
Oh crap. It's already quarter to ten. Don't mind me, I'm off to pillow-land e'en as we speak...


Exercise du jour: Walk to/from work, and Week 2 C25k. Jogging didn't seem to do Daniel Craig any harm.
Done! Well, the C25k part, anyway. And it kicked my butt, too. I didn't look nearly as carefree as Mr. Craig there.

Photo courtesy of suanie.

Row, baby, row

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Quote du jour: Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. - C.S. Lewis


Site du jour: You've probably already seen this, but I appreciated this informative and useful procedure on how to put on a sports bra. (Thanks to K D James.)


Goal for the month: 30 days of a sort, shred, file or purge fest.

Goal for the week: Go to bed by 9 p.m.

Exercise du jour: 30 minutes rowing.
Walking to/from work.

Week 1 day 3 of the 200 squat challenge.
5
6
5
5
7
Done!


Failed on everything but the squats. Got home and had to spend the next two hours and thirty-seven minutes helping my mother upgrade her anti-virus software. TWO friggin' calls to support. I mean, I've been working in the software industry for over ten years, and I've never had an install that was this badly bungled. Argh!

Now that the results are in...

For those of you who've been doing your bit to make this nation a better place by voting, incidentally that's really cool snoozing, here's a quick recap.

I am failing to the point of flailing on the goal of getting out the door by 7:30 in the a.m. and by that I mean in the early for-Pete's-sake morning.

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Methinks I'm approaching this goal from the wrong angle, i.e. I'm putting the hart before the course cart before the horse, i.e. I'm looking at this wrong.

Logic 101:

1 - I want to get up early
2 - Until I get my thyroid straightened out, I need, and yes I do mean NEED 10 hours or so of the sleeping stuff, not to be confused with the lying away in bed gritting my teeth kind of thing.
3 - To achieve both 1 and 2, I need to get my sorry self to bed by 9 p.m.

This is written on Tuesday night. I'm updating this post at 9:30 in the p.m. I still haven't done my 30 minutes of exercise for the night, so sleepy-time is not going to be in my game plan for another hour or two. Luckily, I'm starting this goal as of Wednesday. Watch this space for a gold star Thursday morning!

Goal for the month: 30 days of a sort, shred, file or purge fest.




Goal for the week: Get out of the house by 7:30 damn it! Getting to bed by 9 p.m.
Not exactly 9 p.m., but I'm getting there.

Exercise du jour: C25k, week 2. Also walking to/from work
Did the C25k. Ran faster than usual; got a good workout.

Not what they usually mean by 'check that guy out'

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Site du jour: $20 to check the man out before you start dating seriously? Is that wise or foolish?


Goal for the month: 30 days of a sort, shred, file or purge fest.
Done. For today. 28 more days to go. Turns out purging involves actual thinking. That's going to slow progress down a bit. Still, it was good. I got into a rhythm, going through boxes and assigning things homes.




Goal for the week: Get out of the house by 7:30 damn it! (Going to conquer this one.)
Fail. Oh, just shoot me now and be done with it. Got to sleep by 1 a.m.

Exercise du jour:
Rowing 30 minutes
Done!



Walk to/from work
Semi-sorta done. I mean, I walked at lunch. Does that count?




Week 1 day 2 of the 200 squat challenge.
Done!
5
5
3
5
5

November: always a challenge

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A whole new month! 30 days to have fun! Excitement! Bloggerz gone wild with exclamation points!!!

Something about November seems to inspire 30 day challenges. A lot of people are going in for NaNaWriMo, the challenge to write a novel in a month. Methinks I'll leave that to those more qualified.

I might manage the NaBloPoMo, the challenge to blog for all 30 days of November, but I don't think I'll hold myself to it.

While I enjoyed the 29 days of giving, I think this month I need to make this a month of purging. If I can give things away then so much the better, but I need to focus purely on getting rid of all this stuff that I've got. Cleaning out the garage resulted in a lot of boxes going into the house. (Despite my best efforts, some of the little suckers snuck in.)

So I'm going to make a pledge that every day I am going to sort, shred, file, or purge. Or maybe even all four in one day. Whatever it takes to get it done.

Goal for the month: 30 days of a sort, shred, file or purge fest.
Done! Sorted and purged.



Goal for the week: Get out of the house by 7:30 damn it! (Still working on this one.)
Fail. Need to change the goal to Go To Bed By 9 Damn It. Going to bed after midnight does not produce best results.

Exercise du jour: Walk to work and back, c25k at lunch.
1/2 Done. Points for the C25k, not for the walking. Still (note: feeble excuse ahead) it was an absolute stinker of a day: very windy, rainy, stormy. Yes, I know that's a feeble excuse. At least the C25k got itself done.

Planning break time before anything is broken

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I've been thinking about how working 8+ hours a day is unhealthy even if you do work out. Seems to me the thing to do is take a break at lunch to exercise. Usually, if I'm not taking a lunch-time walk, I work through lunch. Not the best way to treat your body, I know.

I figure I'll try doing the C25k runs at lunch, around the Nike track, rather than trying to run in the dark around my scruffy neighborhood. That would take care of three lunch-times a week from now until pretty much the end of the year. (The last two weeks are usually caught up in family visits and I can't keep to a schedule then.) And since I seem to do best with a bit of structure, I thought I'd try the 200 squats challenge. At least it's something that I can do at lunch without frightening my co-workers.

Tried the squats trial, and was appalled at how stiff my knees are. Is the 40s too early to develop arthritis? We'll see how it goes. Might have to smuggle in some arm weights and do weight lifting instead.

Exercise du jour: 200 squats week 1

3
4
3
3
5
Done! But *damn* I've got stiff knees. I'm too young to have stiff knees!

Steppin' out...

I'm betting none of these guys do a lot of sitting around...

Study du jour: Even if you work out every day, if you spend 8 hours sitting at a desk every day, you're at greater risk of a heart attack.

Now there's an incentive to take a walk at lunch. And walk down the hall to talk to the engineer instead of sending an email. And get up every hour or so to touch my toes. Or someone's toes, at any rate.

Plus, as of last night I have ... wait for it... actually parked my car in the garage. Yes, I know. It's un-American not to leave the car outside and stuff your stuff in the garage, but that's what I did. It feels meaningful somehow, like I'm putting the car away. Is this an out of sight, out of mind thing? I don't know, but it does feel like a positive step.

Exercise du jour: Week 1 of the C25k. Walk to and from the Max rather than taking the car. And maybe a walk at lunch, if the foot feels amenable.
Done! Well, the morning, evening, and C25k part. The foot said @!#%$ at lunch time. I'll try again next week. It's still encouraging that damn foot is letting me do this much without problems. So far, fingers crossed.


Photo montage courtesy of uppityrib.

Start over, the foot doctor said

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Start over, the foot doctor said.
And he's the expert, so I figured he said whereof he knew.

To me, "start over" means the Couch to 5k.

Yes, I've done that before. So why repeat myself? Because lame is the name of the game 'round these parts I need to find something that will help guard against my worst problem -- doing too much too soon.

It's weird. In the past, I did C25K to get me started running, now I want something that will tell me when to stop. Preferably before I hurt something. I need to work on stopping.

Yesterday, for example, I kinda sorta didn't hear the podcast guy say "stop running" so I ran through a walking section and onto the next run interval. When I was a couch-newbie, I wouldn't have missed his saying "walk now" -- hell, I'd have been listening most intently, almost begging him to say it. I'm not saying that I like running (stop laughing, Marie!) but... well... it is awfully nice to get into a groove and keep going. But that doesn't mean I enjoy it or anything like that.

Pretty much, anyway.

Exercise du jour: 30 minutes rowing.

These are the times that try women's soles

I hadn't previously held this truth to be self-evident: not all soles are created equal.

When I went to the foot doctor, I wore my old(ish) Asics, which I'd now designated walking shoes.


He pointed out how worn the tread was, and told me that you shouldn't be able to flex a shoe past the toes. Then he flexed the shoe up until the toe was nearly touching the heel.

I was astonished. I mean, I'm not a marathon runner. At my craziest most fit, I've never run more than 8 miles a week. And yet in just one year, those shoes were toast.

What's weird is that I then went home and tried the same flex test on my old Pearl Izumis. (No, I don't throw old shoes away. Hell, I don't throw anything away. Hence the archaeological dig through the garage.)

Lo and behold! The Pearl Izumis flexed the toe area and no further. And the tread looked pretty good too. (I'm planning to wear the P.I.s to the foot doctor next time, just to see what he thinks of them.) I've had those shoes a full year more than the Asics, and even though I haven't run as much on them, I've run a lot and walked more. Yet they seem in way better shape.

Today I go back to the foot doctor so he can try fitting my feets with orthotic inserts. He warns me that this might involve buying bigger shoes. If so, I'm heading for the running store this time.

Exercise du jour: If it's not too much to ask, God, I'd like to try a little running today. Please?

Done! Now off to visit Mr. Icepack and his cousin Mr. Ibuprofen

My own personal archaeological dig

Move over, Xenia, there's a new archaeologist in town.

I was originally supposed to go into work this weekend, but they pushed that off until next weekend. And since this was a traditional dark and stormy night weekend, I thought I might as well do something useful while I was listening to the rain.

So I spent most of the weekend sorting through the layers of stuff in my garage. Like a tell, you can tell* a lot about my life by looking at the stuff I've kept for so many years.

Sorting through a heap like this involves time travel. I'd hit certain boxes that were micro-capsules from the past, mini-representations of entire eras in my past. It's tiring to sort through things; you end up re-living the memories and sometimes you dig up some pretty heavy stuff. I have always set great store by my storage, and it's traditionally been very hard for me to get rid of things.

Now, however, my biggest question, with most of this stuff, is "why?"

This weekend, I got rid of things that I'd kept for 10, 20, even 40 years. In some cases I have no idea why I was saving them. Is this a sign of old age? Am I evolving into a more spiritual being, detached from material possessions?

Or maybe my psyche is starting to feel like I'm on a sinking ship and I need to lighten the load.

p.s. Xenia, why don't you warn people that a large part of archaeology involves fighting off big, ugly, scary-looking spiders? I do feel someone ought to have mentioned that somewhere along the line.

Exercise du jour: 30 minutes rowing.

Fail. Fail, fail, fail, fail. There are times when life gets in the way, and then there are times when you look at the schedule and say "WTF? Who scheduled this in today's list? Even Superman would have said "The heck with this," and gone back to the drawing board.
In other words, goals created in theory had no basis in tonight's reality. Not that I'm all that much in favor of reality, in general.

*Hey, it's Punday. You're supposed to make puns. Nobody said they had to be good puns.

Rude awakening

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Last week's goal was to get up and get out the door by 7:30 a.m. Sounds simple enough... in theory. In practice, it went something like this:

Monday: Out the door by 7:50 a.m. Not too bad.

Tuesday: Well, okay, so it's closer to 8:00 a.m. Still not that bad.

Wednesday: Hey, a lot of people might consider 8:30 to be quite early, really.

Thursday: Crap, why does the clock say 9:15?

Friday: @#!$!% this @#$%, I need to catch up on my @#!% sleep and I don't @#!% a !@#% what @#%!% says.

In other words, there was a fatal flaw in my plan. I thought forcing myself to get up at crack o' dawn would naturally result in my falling asleep at an earlier hour. Not even close. By the end of the week, my brain was writing checks that my body couldn't cash.

Goal for the week: Forcing my fool self to go to bed early! And, yes, another crack at the goal of getting out the door by 7:30 in the a.m.


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Done! Up and out the door by.... well, okay, 7:45 a.m. But that's better than last week. (Not by much, okay, but still better.) Plus, I tried running. 20 minutes, with a few walking breaks. Slow running indoors, trying to put some of the weight on the heels. Off to ice and ibuprofe before it starts hurting. We'll see how it goes.

Another Friday, another picture of Hugh

You're not the only one who's happy it's Friday...

Study du jour:

Interesting. A study from Stanford suggests that people who feel pain but also have a strong sense of being in love are better able to cope with pain than people who are isolated and do not feel loved and appreciated.

"It's important to recognize that people who feel alone and depressed may have very low pain thresholds, whereas the reverse can be true for people who feel secure and cared for.

All the pieces are starting to fit together rather neatly...

Goal for the week: Yes, again with the getting up early and out the friggin' door. I just know this is going to become second nature. In another decade or so.

Exercise du jour:30 minutes rowing

Photo of Hugh courtesy of Nala WarriorLioness

No diet is perfect, no exercise routine is infallible

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Quote du jour: Over the past four years I've come to realize that losing weight isn't about any one right way, even for one individual. It's about whatever way is working for you at this precise time in your process. Sometimes flexibility is key. Other times, you've gotta be hardcore. The trick is figuring out which approach needs to be applied when.
- From the It's all about the walls blog

Goal of the week: Out the door by 7:30 a.m. I can do this. I think.

Exercise du jour: 30 minutes on the elliptical

If this is Hump day, does that mean I'm supposed to... never mind.

Quote du jour:Both success and failure are largely the results of habit.
- Napoleon Hill

Goal of the week: Get out the frakkin' door by 7:30 a.m.!!!
Update du 8:21 a.m. Um... this one's not looking too good. Will keep trying.

Exercise du jour: 30 minutes rowing
Done! So I've accomplished something today.

The true cost of eating Bad

Every Friday, the powers that be almighty admin brings a spread of pasties to the kitchen in our office. All sorts of dainty delectables that somehow have the power to call Merry! We need you! Come over to the dark side!

Something must be happening to my eyesight. Last Friday, I looked at the pasties and instead of imagining how good the food would taste in my mouth, I calculated how long I would have to ride the elliptical to balance out the caloric intake of that one mouthful.

I think I'm onto something here. I mean, forget putting calorie labels on the food, put something that the average human can measure quite clearly -- the toil of a treadmill, or whatever. That's the true cost of eating bad food.*

Goal for the week: Out the door by 7:30 a.m.
Um... I'm going to say no. Like yesterday, it was close. But it wasn't as close as it had been yesterday. Out the door by 7:55 a.m.

Exercise du jour: 30 minutes on the elliptical

Plus, half an hour's worth of yoga done first thing in the morning. How's that for smugly virtuous.




*Yes, okay, and also that it's not good fuel to run your body on. But that doesn't have quite the same emotional impact, and when it comes to making food choices I'm all about the emotions.

Photo courtesy of Sifu Renka