Category: Uncategorized

A couple of different people have commented to me about my rather ambitious spring/summer to do list. So I thought I’d post a bit of an update on how it’s going:

• Lose weight. It’s going a bit better. Depending on the scale, etc., I’m down about 8 to 9 pounds. I’ve been hitting the gym a bit more regularly now. Slow but steady, I suppose….
• Write book about eating. I’ve done a bit, but not much. I’ve been spending more time actually reading about competitive eating, and I kind of feel like that’s helping me think about a novel version of it all. And lately, I’ve been thinking more about a book proposal on blog writing, which is something that is more of an “official” and/or professional writing project.
• Get up stupid early. Well, no and yes. I basically can’t get enough sleep if I get up that early every day, so I’ve been setting the alarm at 5 am three or so days a week. I normally just wake up by about 6:30 anyway.
• Not touching the computer on Sundays. Well, given that I’m typing this on Sunday, that’s obviously gone out the window. Maybe I’ll get back to that sooner than later….
• House cleaning, house maintenance. Some progress on this one. I rearranged half of the basement (the other half is still a bit of a mess) and we’ve made quite a bit of progress on the yard. I don’t think I’ll be painting until after we get back from Europe at the earliest, though.
• Italian phrases. Eh, not yet. Maybe when we get closer to actually going. I kind of think that we need to start doing a bit more planning of what we’re going to do when we get there though. I had a student who went to Europe last year and he bought all of his tickets for different museums and such online; seems like an idea to me….

Annette and Will and I are engaged in a game of Risk which I have just conceded to Annette, who is essentially the queen of world domination when it comes to this. In any event, while Will and Annette engage in a “mop-up” exercise, I thought I’d post a few thoughts here about the spring and the summer.

You see, as an academic-type, summer (and most of spring) time is where I get a break. It’s not that I stop working; it’s just that, with a reduced teaching and service workload, my schedule is even more flexible than it was before. Now I have time for scholarship, but I also have time for, well, anything I want. So, without any exact ordering here, these are the things that I hope to accomplish this spring/summer:

• Lose weight. I’ve started the process, though to be honest, I’ve been a bit disappointed to date. It seems to me that the last time around with the South Beach Diet, I had lost at least 10 pounds by a month into it. This time around, I am hovering at around 7 pounds lost, and it seems that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if I religiously follow it or if I am moderate to less than moderate cheater. Diet plateau-ing is common of course, but I had hoped it would have happened after about 15 or so pounds. Fortunately, this is the time of the year when I really do have the time to get more exercise.
• Write a book about eating. Ironically enough, I have also been reading lately about competitive eating and I am hoping/trying to write a (very) rough draft of a novel set on the backdrop of a futuristic world of professional competitive eating during the summer. Long story short, I’ve been interested in competitive eating in a sort of fascinated/horrified way for a while now, and I recently purchased two non-fiction accounts of the current state of the “sport.” I have wanted to try to write a novel about this for some time, sort of in the vein of National Novel Writing Month, which is sort of an unofficial contest on writing a draft of a novel– even a bad one– in 30 days. We’ll see how it goes. Oh, I should point out that I have more official/job-related writing projects this summer too, but that’s a different story.
• Get up stupid early to write eating book and to work on academic projects. I’ve always gotten up pretty early, but lately (well, the last week or so), I’ve been getting up at 5 am to work on stuff– taking notes on the novel, working on getting my spring/summer teaching ready, miscellaneous other reading and writing tasks. What I’ve been finding is that after I get over the initial shock of being awake at 5 am, I am really productive for a couple of hours. True, I’m ready for bed by 10-ish, but as far as I can tell, all that means is I miss some “late night” television. Big deal.
• Not touch the computer on Sundays, which is one of the reasons why I am typing this post right now. I want to plan on spending my Sundays this summer doing things like yardwork, making day-trips, and/or reading the newspaper for a change of pace. It’s probably the way I ought to do things during the school year too, but it rarely works out that way. Normally, Sunday ends up being at least a partial work day for me.
• House cleaning, house maintenance. We’ve got stuff to do around here like a little painting, a lot of cleaning (especially in the basement and the garage and such), etc. Will and I have a major rearranging of the basement in mind that will allow us to once again use the ping-pong table as a ping-pong table. And the yard. I could go on here– but I won’t because it might be the subject of future posts.
• Learn some basic Italian phrases. Annette and Will and I are going to go to Europe in August, first to Italy and then to Germany. There will certainly be more discussion here about this later. But for now, I’ll just say that I bought a “course” on very basic Italian phrases so that when we get over there I know I’ll be order a cup of coffee and find a place to pee and such.

I’m sure there’s more coming, but that’s enough for now. The spring has begun!

Colleague/friend/golf player of sorts Bill Hart-Davidson commanded me to blog about this January 2006 post, “How University Administrators Should Approach the Facebook: Ten Rules,” which is on the very cool blog by a PhD student named Fred Stutzman.

Like Bill, I think Stutzman’s comments are spot-on about Facebook. But I’m not sure I agree completely with Bill. He accused me of being “too curmudgeonly about social networking apps.” Well heck, I like blogs, don’t I? And, as I mentioned just the other day, I think Facebook is a different animal in oh so many ways than MySpace. For one thing, if college students, who are ultimately “adults,” want to say things on the ‘net that may come back to cause them problems, that’s up to them. Stutzman suggests that people in the internet age, where search engine caches can always be retrieved, are being held to an unfairly high standard for mistakes they might have made in college on their Facebook (or other) sites. Maybe. But I seem to recall a lot of conversation about a young Bill Clinton’s status as a draft dodger or someone who did not actually inhale.

For another, according to Stutzman, most folks using Facebook are a lot more careful than the press would have us believe. I think he’s right about that; and again, that’s different than MySpace, IMO.

Anyway, go follow the Stutzman link– smart stuff.

Tulips on the sunny-side of the house….

So, how’s the diet going, you ask? Not bad. In the first week, I have lost about five or six pounds, depending on how I stand on the scale. I thought I had lost more than that, but that’s really my inability to do math.

I felt like I was pretty good as far as sticking to the diet goes this week– I’d give myself about a B or a B+. Annette and I did drink on Saturday night (hey, it’d been a long week), but otherwise, I wad pretty dedicated to the “phase 1” concept of the diet, which essentially amounts to a diet of low-fat meats, cheese, lots of vegetables, and no alcohol. Thus my B or B+. By the way, if you’re wondering about the “healthiness” of the SB diet, look at it like this: basically, you don’t eat starches and/or baked goods. It’s like a wheat-free vegan diet, except with meat.

My weight loss for the first week is pretty typical for the first part of SB, which, like most diets like this, give you a sort of “quick start” at the beginning. When I mentioned my weight loss this last week to my mother on the phone, she said “Oh, that’s just water weight.” And she’s probably right. But you know what? I don’t care. Five pounds is five pounds, and it’s nice to have that kind of start.

I don’t anticipate losing this much this week, but I’ll keep plugging away. And as I get caught up on my mountain of school work and as the term draws to a close, I’ll be able to get back to the gym, too.