2012 - let's do this, people!

Happy 2012 my Peoples!

Here I sit, afraid to even go look at this blog’s older entries to see how bad I’ve been.  I’m not going to make excuses (they all look and sound the same anyway and there’s the whole thing about what excuses are like which is an in-and-out space south of my equator and how things that come from there are just about as valuable as excuses and all of this is just to say yadda, yadda, yadda, life got busy and I suck as usual.  If you’re still reading this blog AT ALL you’re well used to that by now.) and instead going to start the new year on what I sure hope will be a better foot. 

Sittin’ here in my bathrobe at 2pm, with The Empire Strikes Back on the tv (not because I said “know what?  I feel like enjoying cheesy-but-classic movie gold…” but because the other things already on the tv when I shuffled out to the couch at 11:30am were Law and Order marathons of several flavors, Storage Wars and a truly miserable movie about a girl pretending to be a boy in school so she could play soccer.  So Star Wars marathon was an easy choice.  Also “laugh it up, fuzz ball…”  So I’ve got that going for me.) and my ½-dressed sweetie sitting beside me, also clickety-clacking on his many keyboards.  We’ve had a lovely couple of holidays and today we both decided that the rule would be “do only what you want to do, full stop.”

Tangent:  “full stop” is one of the many cool English phrases that have infected my vocabulary (or that I’ve shamelessly stolen, depending on who you talk to).  It sounds so much classier than “totally” or “period” and makes me sound worldly, as though I’ve traveled all over the place picking up phrases that are not from around these parts.  So far, though, I’ve resisted calling my mother “mum” or throwing in the additional and completely unrepresented-by-spelling syllables in the word “aluminum.”  I’ll be strong as long as I can on those.

I’ll admit that even though I support and understand the general hatred for new years resolutions I can’t help but head into each new year wanting to make some goals for myself.  Most of the time I actually come up with the goals during the fall, but I see that there are holidays and other end-of-the-year complexities coming and that trying to make changes to my life amidst all that chaos, let alone while I’ve got my guy here, is a recipe for both failure and crap-chowder, so I push them off to start after all those chowder-mixings are through.  Last night we drank many bottles of truly dangerously lip-smacky cider (I wish I could quit you, J.K. Scrumpy, but I’m probably going to become an alcoholic instead to give me many more opportunities to climb into bed cradling one of your adorable, brown soldiers of boozy goodness…) and played games where we counted dice or created innovative new products like “Motivational Cereal” and “Evil Clown Security” or debated the inherent value of art vs. medicine vs. sight and we ate chocolate fondue and raspberry tarts and my own body weight worth of ham (that last one was mostly me) and wished a Happy New Year to everybody around us.  That must mean it’s time to start planning for a better future.

I’m doing all those things that they always say not to do when coming up with New Years Resolutions:  I’m picking way too many of them and they’re all rather significant changes and most of them are gonna be challenging to do.  My only hope for this not being just a recipe of failure is to try to put some kind of reasonable scale around them, so I’m going to try to tackle one to two per month.  My goal (seriously, I cannot stress enough that this is just a goal and I’m making no promises here because you people have been let down more than enough by me on this blog!) is to come back each month and tell you how the previous goal went as well as what we’re hoping for next.  (very important note:  I am not setting this as one of my New Years Resolutions.  I’m ambitious, but not stupid.  Well, not VERY stupid.)

So January?  January is about getting back what I sacrificed for my holidays, and about setting up the rest of the year for a bit more sanity. 

In 2011 I really wanted to FINALLY get myself in better shape.  Reach my goal weight of 150 lbs and get my body to a place where I could be naked in front of my hot, super-hot and also very hot boyfriend w/out wanting to do any of the tricks from the sitcoms that they use to hide a pregnant actress.  In order to do this I counted calories slavishly, eventually becoming one of those obnoxious women who always tell you how many calories there are in your snack cake or bag of chips.  I also escalated my daily exercise to the point where if I didn’t do at LEAST 90 min. of cardio a day I worried about any meal larger than three celery sticks and a mid-sized glass of lite water.  (like regular water, but ½ the fat.)  The good news?  By June I’d reached my goal!  The bad news:  I couldn’t write a blog post because the only things I was doing in my life to write about were “working” and/or “working out.”  Blah, blah, blah, “can you believe there’s only 50 calories in this Asian pear???” blah, blah, blah, “can you believe how muscley my arm is?”, blah, blah, blah, B-O-O-O-R-R-I-N-G…

T.E. came for the summer and, big surprise, I gained some weight.  He left and I lost it again, and I lost as much more as I could before he arrived, ending my work for the year at about 147.  I promised myself I wouldn’t count a single calorie or agonize about working out at all during the holidays, nor would I set one teeny, tiny toe on my scales.  (that’s right, I have two of them.  Shut up.)  But he flies away on Friday (sad.) and I’m 100% sure I’ve gained these 3+ weeks. 

So for January I’m climbing back on that wagon to lose the weight back to my goal of 150 lbs again.  The calories – I will count them, counting on my Oogies cheesey popcorn and my sugar-free fudgickles.  The bike rides – I will make them at crazy-early hours of the morning before work in rain and cold and bleah.  The weights – I will lift them.  Above my head and behind my back and explosively and with those grunty sounds one makes when you just.  Can’t.  Lift.  One.  More…  I will go back to my obsessive, weight-losey, abs-flexy, box-kicky ways until I’m back where I want to be.  But I’m also hoping that January will be the END of this part of my life for a while, and starting in February I’m planning to find a much more reasonable, balanced way to live my life where I don’t have to lose weight, but I keep it off and maintain what I’ve achieved.  I love being in the best physical shape of my life, as well as liking how I look and feel.  It’s worth protecting, but there must be some way I can do this that still lets me… well, do ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL WITH MY LIFE. 

Hopefully.

Wow, have I actually been writing this much?  Feast and famine, people.  Well I’ve got another 1-2 goals for January, but I’m going to call this one enough for now and hope to hell that having two other things to write about will encourage me to be back here sometime before February.  Fingers crossed and Happy New Year!