Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Summertime... and the living is... easy?

It's the last day of the regular semester for me; I just have to give one exam today. And then grade of course. But, yay. Summer. Three whole months in which no one will ask me to explain something that they would have known if they had actually come to class. Three months in which I don't have to try to sell anyone on why statistics is interesting. Three months in which I will not have to hear any imaginary (or real) reasons why assignments haven't been done. Except from my son, of course. Don't get me wrong, teaching college is absolutely the best job in the universe as far as I'm concerned, and most aspect of it I just love and feel incredibly lucky to be allowed to do, but on the other hand, every job has its tedious aspects. For me... #1 is grading. #2 is explaining things to people who didn't bother to do what they were supposed to (not to be confused with people who tried but really didn't understand, a different category altogether). #3 is a lot of college administrative crap.

And so the summer kind of stretches before me. This partly is a very anxiety-inducing thing because last summer I was kept busy with a lot of contract work that paid really, really well, allowing us to work on the house and do a lot of things without worrying about money too much. Now it seems to have totally dried up, but in a weird way... every time I talk to the publisher's rep, he says, oh, this will be coming up, this will be coming up... and then I hear nothing. So I can't figure out if it's me (I don't think so) or them (probably, but how has this gone from work all the time to zero so very fast). I'm going to have one more shot at talking to this guy in the next couple of days and see if I can extract any information (it's not pushy, is it, to follow up on things that you've been told will happen, right?). But on the assumption that I'm not going to be so busy with that this summer, what am I going to do? There are some specific school things, and I need to get my finances in order (deep, anxious sigh), but mostly I think, I need to spend some real time working on getting into shape. Working on figuring out how best to strengthen and increase flexibility for both of us, given the limitations.

My epiphany of a while ago (see here) is that the trouble with trying hard to lose weight is that you can only spend so many hours a day working on it, and the rest is a waiting game. So I figure that part of the goal is to spend more time on the "actively working to lose weight" hours. So... what can those be? Well, I consider this blog part of that, and the time I spend every morning and some evenings checking to see what other people have written. That's time thinking about weight issues. Then it's a rare day that Michael and I don't spend some time discussing weight in some way or another. So that's time talking about weight issues. (Aside: one day, I think it would be nice if this did not have to be a daily topic of conversation.) We try to do some kind of exercise most days... this is, I guess, active time devoted to weight loss. And I suppose cooking and meal planning kind of falls into that category, too, though it's marginal. So the goal should be to increase those active hours, and how can we best do that, all things considered? I don't know yet. But with more time, we can (1) increase the intensity of the seated workout, (2) try the chair aerobics DVD I got in the mail yesterday, and maybe (3) do more stretching and deep breathing exercises.

What's for dinner? Green salad with sauteed squid and heirloom tomatoes.

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