Christmas is coming, and the goose is getting fat, but I'm not. I'm back on track, keeping to my regimen, getting my exercise and my sleep.
1750 calories a day and 4 or 5 trips to the gym each week. Last night around 9 I had to have an apple and a big (2 cups) bowl of Trader Joe's generic cheerios to get to 1700, but it all worked out.
I didn't do much at the gym, since I felt I was still keeping some sort of minor bug at arm's length, but sometimes the important thing is just to get to the gym, work up a little sweat. I took my friend Stewart's advice and did some weights, because, as he tells me, muscle burns calories. I've got a lot of muscle. My legs have always been like tree trunks, even when I was a 160-pound 17 year old.
A friend invited me for lunch on Wednesday. I didn't realize it was an invitation, so I suggested we meet at Jose's, which is what I always do with friends, because the chicken fajita salad is cheap ($5.95), yummy, and only about 600 calories. As long as I have an iced tea rather than a Corona.
My friend countered that it was an invitation for lunch, meaning, like at her house, and suggested that I suggest something that I would like for lunch. I was stumped.
Eventually I expressed my stumpedness, which made it appear that I was stressed out by the question. Maybe I was. I don't know for sure. I feel a bit dense on the subject. One silly thing about being on my BMGS regimen is that I occasionally get stressed out trying to determine how many calories are in a meal. This is no doubt a case of one kind of compulsion being at loggerheads with another kind of compulsion.
But most of the time I manage to take it easy. Even if part of ability to do that is tied to my tendency to be pretty repetitive about what I eat. If I have the same thing for lunch 4 or 5 days a week it does tend to help keep track of the calories.
I'll be sure to report on what my friend makes for lunch on Wednesday. And at some point I will ask her some pointed questions about the ingredients and their calories counts.
Meanwhile, I have an exciting new project going. The book about the Amazon Kindle has merged with another project and become a book about using the Amazon Kindle as an independent publishing platform. Indie publishing is a topic that I am passionate about, and it is good to be writing about something that I am passionate about (other than music, women, the Red Sox and the Celtics).
So yesterday I wrote a 3500-word* chapter, which also works as a stand-alone article, and published it in both a Kindle edition and a hard copy edition. In my usual balls to the wall approach, I am trying to bring the book out before the end of December. We'll see about that.
Also yesterday, Amazon sold the first electronic copy of the first article/chapter from this project, which I had published on Thursday. So, there is one person out there who has spent $399 for a Kindle and then paid Amazon another $1.99 so that she can read a little article that I wrote when she is on a train, in a plane, or eating bread at Au Bon Pain.
We've come full circle, and I am pleased. Amazon will be sending me 70 cents at the end of February, as my royalty from that transaction. But my view of the Kindle is that it starts with a trickle. Like Priuses and Blackberries and Christmas music, soon those Kindles will be everywhere.
*(Thanks, Ned and Raven).
A Long December - Adam Duritz and Counting Crows
The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that its all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl
Saturday's Soundtrack
This was my number one "sing Danny to sleep" song a few years ago, and remains near the top of my repertoire in the shower or when I am driving. I'm very, very good in the shower.
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