Well, it is Dec. 31, 2006. Time for some random reflections.



First of all, my holiday vacation in Southern California: AWESOME. Weather was beautiful (70's most of the days, rained one day only, sunny, just gorgeous. As my brother would say, a shitty week in paradise. Food was plentiful. This is where the problem comes in. Despite several attempts to rally myself, I did quite poorly controlling my eating for the past week and a half. My mother cooked a lot, including loads of Christmas cookies, a full turkey dinner complete with several meals of leftovers, a prime rib roast, and scads of other food. We ate, and ate, and snacked, and snacked, and ate some more. Whew! When I finally weighed in last night after a long day of traveling (and, to my credit, a big meal of beer cheese soup in a bread bowl to weigh me down), I had gained about four pounds. Ouch. Now, we did manage to get some exercise in, doing my least favorite thing ever: running. My husband and I ran/walked (well, he ran much more than walked; I probably ended about half and half) over about a 3-mile course near my parents' house several times during the trip. I hate running. More than pretty much anything except evil people and the Oakland Raiders. It sucked. Bad. But it probably lessened the damage.

The celebrity deaths coming in threes, within a few days of each other? Weird. James Brown will be much lamented. The hardest-working man in show business made a few mistakes during his lifetime, but for the most part his musical contributions greatly outweigh the downs. We'll miss him. President Ford was overall a good guy. He didn't really have a chance to strut his stuff, sort of shooting himself in the foot with his pardon of Nixon. But I think he did the right thing, and he was certainly a good person outside of the Oval Office too. He will also be missed. And then we come to yesterday's surprise: Saddam Hussein. Shall I break into "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead"? The only thing I can think of that would have been more fitting is that they should have handed him off to the Kurds to let them have a little fun. Saddam will not be missed, and I hope Satan is toasting him over the fires with a long fork. I sincerely hope Iraq can get past all this and enjoy a little peace in the new year. They deserve it. As do our servicemen and women all over the world.

New Year's Resolutions? I guess I need a few. Let's see...

1) The weight needs to come off. I didn't manage to celebrate Christmas at 170 lbs like I had hoped. Oh well. It's time to start over. I need to make the goals easy again so I don't get disappointed. We'll start with a short-term goal of 170 lbs or less by the time my Spring Break rolls around in mid-March. The long-term goals would be 160 lbs or under by the end of the school year (end of May) and 150 lbs or under by the beginning of the next school year (mid-August).

2) In order to accomplish the weight goals, I must have exercise goals. This resolution is to get back to my two-a-days. I haven't quite gotten back into a good routine. I need to work out in the mornings doing primarily cardio for a hour every weekday (on weekends we hit the gym once a day for either cardio or a couple games of racquetball). Then, in the afternoons, I need to either get to the weight room at my school to lift and do more cardio for another hour, or get in the pool before swim practice. That is the only way I'm going to reach my weight loss goals. I simply have to do it, no ifs, ans, or buts (or butts, either).

3) I need to be better about grading papers promptly. Especially towards the end of this past semester, I would grade the easier, less time-consuming assignments first, saving the more complicated stuff for later. By the time I'd get around to it, I'd have several hundred papers to grade and no time to grade them in. It meant taking up a lot of time I would have spent with my husband and my dog at home, to grade papers instead. I'd like to avoid taking so much work home this semester. So I need to make better use of my planning periods and the time I have available after school. I will try to make sure that I grade everything that was turned in that day. When they turn in projects, I will set a number of projects to grade each day, and the rest of the time will be to grade the normal homework the girls have done.

4) I will try to blog more regularly, primarily about the eating and exercise but in general about life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff ("That's 'pursuit of happiness'." "Well, all your S's look like F's." "It's stylish. It's in, it's very in." "Well, if it's in...").

5) This one's an annual resolution that I rarely make good on, but I must include it again, as tradition if nothing else: I need to get better organized and get things cleaned up and put away. I love to make lists (like I'm doing now!), but I rarely follow through on them. My house is a disaster, as is my classroom at school. I need to get everything in some semblance of order. I have good reason to do this at home: my parents expressed an intention to come visit during my Spring Break in March. Nothing like imminent "Mom" to make you want to clean up the house! At school, it just helps to find everything easier, like handouts and homework that got turned in. I'm not quite sure how to go about doing this. I guess the first step is to pick a room to start in, like the guest bedroom/kayak storage closet. I need to clean out that room and figure out a better way to store some of our kayaking and outdoor gear. Since that's the room my parents will be staying in, it's a logical place to start. Hopefully if I can organize that room, it will be a springboard to the rest of the house.

You'll note that the last resolution, the organization, is the one for which I don't really have a concrete plan. That's because I am not by nature an organized person and never have been. So I suspect that will be the one that causes me the most trouble. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

For anyone who reads this blog, either regularly or just passing through, I wish you the most wonderful of new years. May you have peace, health, prosperity, and a lot of fun. God bless you and your loved ones in this holiday season.

I think I can remotivate myself, the same way I got motivated in the first place: The Biggest Loser.

I've previous mentioned my affinity for reality television. The show inspired my husband and me in our weight loss experiment. When I first heard that NBC was doing a reality show involving overweight people, I was offended, and not just because I myself was overweight. Reality shows really just exploit some of the more unsavory aspects of our culture, and I could just see this show humiliating these overweight people while fit Americans laughed and were glad they weren't fat. I didn't watch the first season for that very reason. But the second season somehow sucked us in, and we ended up watching the whole thing (I think we missed the first episode). We were blown away at the success these people had losing weight. Now, of course, they had a situation that most of us don't have: they were put in an environment where they weren't responsible for their families or for work; all they had to do was work out, learn about nutrition, work out some more, compete in challenges, and work out again before getting weighed each week. Most of these people lived completely sedentary lives, so just the addition of a little exercise made a difference. When you consider they were exercising for hours each day and changing their diets completely, it's no wonder they were losing up to 20 lbs in a week. If I could lose 20 lbs in a week, I'd have been done with this before Christmas LAST year. Anyway, we were so blown away last year at how much weight these people lost that we decided we'd give the whole weight loss thing a try.

Well, we did pretty well, for a while. My husband lost about 35 lbs; I lost about 40 lbs. And everything seemed great. And then March rolled around, and we both stalled out. Neither of us has really lost any appreciable weight since then. We've just struggled to stay right where we were. But then we watched the finale of this season's Biggest Loser this past Wednesday, and we weren't just impressed...we were STUNNED.

This season was interesting. They brought in people from each of the 50 states and had them work out while the trainers evaluated them. The trainers picked 14 contestants to stay on the ranch. The rest of the contestants were sent home to work out on their own. About 2/3 of the way through the season, they brought back to the ranch the male and female contestants from home who had been the most successful. And there were three competitions: the home contestant who lost the highest percentage of his or her body weight won $50K; the contestant who got voted off the ranch (a la Survivor) who was then the most successful at home won $100K; and the one of the final four contestants from the ranch who ultimately lost the highest percentage of weight won $250K.

The at-home winner was Poppi, who went from a size 22 to a size 2:




The sent-home winner was Brian, who was completely unrecognizable after his transformation:




And the ultimate winner was Erik, who started the game at an agonizing 407 lbs, and finished weighing in at 193 lbs!




Can you $^#&%@* believe that? He lost...ME! I started out at 218 lbs Halloween 2005. He lost my entire body off of his! How amazing is that?

If he can do that, I certainly can lose 30 more measly lbs. If you'll excuse me, I need to go to the gym.

My brother gave me a hard time for my lack of posts recently. It isn't that I don't like posting; it's simply that very little happens to me that is interesting. Life is fairly routine.

There are a few reasons I haven't posted much. The first is horrible, horrible shame. Despite all my chest-thumping and stand-taking on this whole weight-loss rejuvenation thing, I have been absolutely terrible the past few weeks. I've hardly worked out at all, and I haven't really been watching what I eat as closely as I should as we dive into the holiday eating season. Needless to say, I haven't bothered to weigh myself in at least a week, either. I'm afraid of what the scale will say. I doubt that I'm back into the 180's, but I'll be very surprised if I'm under 177. I guess part of me didn't want to blog because it would require that admission of guilt.

Another reason is school. I am a procrastinator first-class. When the students hand in their assignments (usually several at a time; I'm a mean teacher like that) I tend to grade the easy-to-grade ones first, the ones that take less time and less effort from yours truly. The assignments that require reading and thought on my part are the ones I save for weekends and moments of motivation. I had a serious backlog of work to grade, consisting of approximately 283 original poems composed by my students, 150 explication outlines of famous poetry, and 75 projects that included a powerpoint presentation, a podcast, and an outline each from every student. Needless to say, the past two weeks have been a blur of grading. I've stayed at school every day until it was time to head to swim practice (which is why there was no afternoon workout for me), I've taken assignments to swim practice and graded on the pool deck, I've taken work home with me to the chagrin of my husband and dog who've been feeling neglected...the work just hasn't stopped. I finally pushed through last night and finished the last assignment (with the exception of several students who have had prolonged absences and are turning in make-up work). Now I'm ready to grade EXAMS! Whoopee! Seventy-five 200-point tests! Hooray! Actually, I've made it as easy as possible on myself. The exams are all matching and multiple choice, so I can whip through these pretty fast. The first class actually took their exam yesterday, and I graded it in about an hour this morning. My next exam starts at 10 this morning, and I should have all their tests graded after lunch. Two exams tomorrow: I can grade one during the other, and have the other done by lunch; one exam Friday that I should have done in half an hour (only eight students in that class). So things are finally looking up, and I can break my self-imposed exile and start talking to people again.

And the last reason is, I'm lazy. I have to think of things to blog about and, as I've said before, not that much really happens to me. I have to be creative to come up with topics, and that requires effort.

So my apologies, Dear Reader, for neglecting you so these past few weeks. Things will start to improve. I promise. Tomorrow. Really.