So, I've been off blogging for almost three months now -- from about mid-August to now. It's been kind of guilt-ridden, and it's also been kind of a relief. Being a B-list blogebrity is a direful burden, and having some time away was restful and relaxing and energizing. But now I'm ready to come back!
One of the reasons that I haven't been blogging is that once you fall behind, it's really hard to catch up. So I've decided to not do the entire task at once. Instead, I'm just going to start a page on my 2007 Hiatus and fill that up as time permits. For those of you who care greatly about exactly what I did each and every day for the last three months, you've got a spot to read it.
And, truthfully, I dropped out of the B-list ranks on Technorati during my time away. I'm back to my natural position as a C-list blogger, and baby, it feels good. Get ready for some photos of my cats, coming up soon!
tags: blogging blogs me c-list hiatus
Feelings of loss
One of the other main reasons I haven't been blogging in the last few months is that I've been losing weight. A lot of weight. I've dropped from a high body mass index (BMI) of about 43 -- dangerously high -- to my current sane but still high 33.6. I'd like to get down to a more reasonable BMI of 30 ("overweight") by the end of the year, and be somewhere around 25 ("normal") by next summer.
I can lose weight pretty easily when I put my mind to it. Well, actually, it's still insanely hard, but I'm so damn stubborn and obsessive about things, when I actually sink my teeth into them, that it seems easy to the casual observer. My recipe is simple: reduce the amount of food I eat, do low-intensity exercise about an hour a day, and measure everything as well as possible.
I eat 3 good meals a day -- about 50% fruits and vegetables, 25% complex carbs like rice or bread, and 25% protein like beans, tofu, fish or cheese. I steer clear of sweets and I drink alcohol only on occasion, and seldom more than a glass or two of wine. For exercise, I've been running around Parc Lafontaine or on a treadmill three days in a row, then on the fourth day lifting weights at a local gym on rue Gilford.
I still have a ways to go, but the results have been good so far, and I'm feeling like I'm getting close to the neighbourhood of what I "should" weigh. I've been getting a lot of compliments from friends and family, which is a great motivator. Most of all, I feel good running, jumping, and playing with my daughter, which is the biggest reward of all.
All that said, the exercise is taking an extra 1-2 hours out of my day, and blogging has been the main thing cut out to make room. But I think I can work around that now.
tags: weight loss BMI diet exercise
Road trip
We're leaving Tuesday for a trip to New Jersey to visit my dad's family for American Thanksgiving. (Yeah, they're my family, too.) We're all looking forward to seeing aunts and uncles and cousins and other extended family, but we're also looking forward to spending our powerful Canadian loonies in the US.
The Canadian dollar's gone up and up this last few months, and though it's no longer trading at its ridiculous high of US$1.10 (!), it's still above parity, which means our money stretches pretty well. Coupled with this is the fact that most products here in Canada are still priced as if the loonie were still worth US$0.62. It's not atypical to see a book priced for $7.99 US, $10.99 Canadian.
So we're going to do some shopping for clothes, books, music and other goods while we're stateside. I plan on bringing an empty suitcase with me and bringing it back full. (The fact that I've lost a lot of weight makes shopping for clothes particularly enticing.) All within our legal limits for customs returning to Canada, of course! Not to worry, random customs official who's reading this blog for who knows what reason.
I'm also looking forward to this trip because we haven't done a driving trip together in a while. Going to Thanksgiving in 2005 was Amita June's second long trip (our overnighter to Ottawa for our anniversary in Oct 2005 was her first), and I think she's going to enjoy it again this time.
tags: road trip thanksgiving loonie parity shopping
Painful upgrade
I just upgraded my main server, Antipater, from Debian "sarge" to Ubuntu "gutsy". I was getting pretty frustrated by being 3+ versions back from a lot of the important software running on the system. I wanted to get on Ubuntu for my server platform to have more frequent upgrades (about every 6 months).
The upgrade went well, mostly. I updated /etc/apt/sources.list to use the Ubuntu archives, then got all the packages. The installation was pretty quick, even for something like 700 packages. However, when I rebooted to use the new 2.6.22 kernel (up from 2.6.8 or so), the server's responsiveness went way down. My guess is that somewhere in the 2.6.x series, one of the new schedulers is causing my particular configuration some grief.
I've trimmed my cron jobs and background processes down to a minimum, but the server is still running a little too loaded. The great folks at iWeb have been really helpful, but they don't support Ubuntu, so I've got to brainstorm for myself. I'm going to have to go in over the next few days to reboot the server and experiment with other kernels -- not fun.
One-liners
Some other odds and ends:
- It's getting cold! We had our first snow flurries a few days ago, and it's been regularly under freezing around here. Time to get winter coats out of the closet -- or, better, buy new ones in the US.
- My friends at Kokoromi are organizing an excellent games+art event called GAMMA 256 on November 28 at the SAT. Should be a lot of fun.
- One such friend, Heather Kelley is going to be talking at the Montreal Geek Girl Dinner on Tuesday. Good for her!
tags: gamma kokoromi weather heatherkelley montrealgirlgeekdinner