Progress?

It's going to be quite a balancing act, between meeting the deadline and keeping everything else afloat. So far, this half week, I'm barely keeping up with my projected word count (I'm at 13500 at this point), in part because of a rather productive Monday, and some good grinding at work tuesday night. Cautiously optimistic? nah. Still daunted...

There's a lot of things I'm noticing about my writing progress, though. For one, I'm pretty good at inanimate description, at least, it feels that way to me. I feel pretty weak at dialogue. At work, I'm pretty good at identifying plot inconsistancies, and if I'm stressed, I'm no good at anything except seeing how bad my writing is. If only I could keep stress away..... (a chorus of me too's out there, eh?)

The other thing going on these days is fitness. In November, we (Irma and I) started working with a personal trainer in order to deal with our ongoing health issues. We actually started with a nutritionist, who besides confirming that in general, we knew what we were supposed to eat, gave us some useful tips on avoiding some of the many pitfalls. After that, we started with Charity, and the YMCA.

Though she varies the routine each week, basically she has us do 25 minutes of cardio warm up on our own before the 1 hour session. Often she'll come in and see if we're working ourselves hard enough on the elliptical, treadmill, or bike (we get to choose), if we're not sweating and panting, she'll speed us up or otherwise correct our laxness. Then, the tough part begins.

Yesterday, with Irma out with bronchitus, I faced the dragon-lady alone. For me, one of the goals of this program is to get off bp and cholesterol meds, Charity expects that by my next FAA physical, I'll be able to petition my doctor for just that. In order to reach that goal, however, she's hammering me hard. Yesterday, it was 45 minutes of hard hard weight training, focused on the upper body, followed by 10 minutes of crunches, sit-ups, and stretching. Oh, there was that 5 minutes of running up a 14 degree slope on the treadmill in the middle of the weight training just to break up the routine.

I'm really feeling it. And tomorrow, I'll feel it more. Remember Tim Conway's shuffling old man on the Carol Burnett show? That's me.....

However, building the muscle will help with the weightloss. So far, 11 lbs gone out of the 60 I need to lose. Since we're focusing on changing our exercise habits, and keeping our eating habits healthy but not "dieting", it's a more sustainable way of losing weight. The diet is balanced so that, with no extra exercise, I'd lose about 1 lb a month. With the exercise, it's about 1.5 per week, and a big part of that is replacing flab with muscle mass, which is heavier.

We'll see how it goes, but... belts are looser, my watch flops on my wrist and will need to be adjusted soon, and I'm not out of breath just hauling folded clothes from the laundry room in the basement up to the bedroom on the second floor.

Anyway... Fitness and Writing. Now, for that stress... Where's that bottle of "15 year old Macallen"...