New Year’s Resolutions and other What’s Upedness
I made some new year’s resolutions this year. Yeah, I know, it’s February. Frequent updates to Specialization is for Insects was not one of my resolutions.
My main resolution this year is to lose weight and be more physically fit. To help accomplish this, I joined MyFoodDiary.com. My Food Diary is an online calorie counter. I just enter what foods I’ve eaten, and it tells me how many calories I’ve had so far, and how many I should have if I want to maintain my weight, lose one pound a week, or lose 1.8 pounds a week. It has decided that 1.8 pounds a week is the maximum safe rate of weightloss for me; if I lose weight any faster, I risk slowing my metabolism.
A supporting resolution is that I’m going to do at least 10 minutes of calisthenics every day. Calisthenics are great because I don’t need any equipment, and since I’m not working to failure, I don’t need several days of recovery time. Most days so far this year, I’ve actually done more than 10 minutes, but sometimes I’m pressed for time and 10 minutes is all I’m able to do. But it’s pretty tough for me to make the excuse “I don’t have time” when all I’m talking about is 10 minutes.
Of course, I enter my calisthenics into My Food Diary, and it tells me to eat more. For every calorie I burn, I have to eat that calorie to stay above the “maximum safe” weight loss rate. This has turned out to be a great motivator to do more serious exercise. Most days this year I have either gone for a long walk, shoveled snow or, if I’m at the fire station, used the treadmill or elliptical machine for 45 minutes or so. So usually, in the evening, My Food Diary tells me I need to eat a couple hundred more calories. So what’s the solution? Ice Cream.
Since January 1 I’ve lost 11 pounds, lost 1.5 inches around the waist, and I’ve gone from 30% body fat to 26% body fat. I eat whatever I want (although I limit how much I eat) and I’ve had ice cream most nights. This is the greatest diet in the world.
Another resolution this year is to learn spanish. Estoy aprendiendo español con Coffee Break Spanish. It’s a podcast, and I mostly listen to it while I’m shoveling snow or out walking. It’s important to be somewhat alone while listening, because there’s a lot of repeating what the instructor says. Oh yeah, and the instructor has one of the thickest scottish accents I’ve ever heard, so I’m muy curioso to find out if I’m learning to speak spanish with a scottish accent. I kind of doubt it; el profesor seems pretty conscious of accents. Mostly he teaches the Spanish pronunciations (grathias & thinko) and points out the Latin American pronunciations (grasias & sinko).
I’ve also been working with Andy building our family tree on Geni.com. Geni is a social networking site with some features for genealogy. Using a social networking model to gather information about family is genius, because information about family tends to be very distributed. Our tree has grown large very quickly. Now we need to work on some of the details.
Geni is not perfect. The interface is impressively easy to figure out, but it’s also pretty slow. It can take a while to render the tree on the screen. Sometimes you have to go through several steps to get what you want. And sometimes it makes assumptions that are hard to correct. Also, there is no support for uploading documents like birth certificates and such. The documentation suggests uploading them as jpeg images, but several users on the forum have complained that this doesn’t work well because the images get scaled down to the point where you can’t read the text. And at some point we are going to run into someone in our family who already uses Geni, and we will want to merge our family trees. But we can’t do that yet; supposedly that feature is coming soon.
Annie, Mary & Fiona have been busy with school. Mary seems to be doing a lot better this year than last year. What a difference a good teacher makes. We joined the Museum of Science and Industry this year, so expect to see more photos of that place on the gallery in the coming months.
We’ve had the coldest, snowiest winter in a long time this year. I’m getting pretty sick of it. Yesterday it snowed slush, which promptly froze solid. Scraping that off the sidewalk might be good for my waistline, but I’m sure I could find a more entertaining way to burn calories. Fortunately, we are all off to the Wisconsin Dells for the weekend. Nothing beats the winter blues like sitting on an indoor concrete deck while the kids slide down the water-slides. Well, I’ll probably slide down a few times too.
Fiona will be traveling to Central America with my parents over spring break. They are going to look at Mayan ruins. Fiona is very excited about it, and I’m more than a little jealous. Annie, Mary, Liz and I will be doing something while Fiona is gone, but it probably won’t involve leaving the midwest.
Well, that was a lot to catch up on. I’m sure I’m leaving a bunch of stuff out. But as I said, updating this blog didn’t make the cut on my resolutions. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.
