The fact that I’m up 20 pounds since hitting my low probably has a lot to do with why I’ve not been posting. The blog is my browser’s default page, so it’s always there to greet me with a reproachful gaze of abandonment when I fire up the web. I think ScribeFire (a lovely Firefox blogging extension that I highly recommend) has updated about 12 times since I last posted. Yep, it’s been a long time.

(“Reproachful gaze of abandonment”? Pretty good for a Saturday morning, eh? I’ve been listening to Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton for a couple of months on my iPod — it’s something like 35 hours long — and the language of that era has gotten into my head. I’ve been dying to work the word “calumny” into casual conversation: “Your comments about how I refactored my C# code is a calumny, sir, and I shall not stand for it!”)

So much of keeping weight off (or putting it on, for that matter) seems to be about routine, and routine has been hard to maintain this past few weeks. That’s not quite right: healthy routine has been difficult to maintain. Life has been difficult to manage, what with the move and upheavals at both of our places of employment. We have all of our stuff over here now, and now we need to start living the life we want to live.

There are a few rules we’ve decided to live by that we need to start actually living by. We’ll ignore the fact that I’m breaking Rule #1 right now:

  1. Meals are eaten at a table, not in a chair in the living room. Meals are something that you stop and do, not do while doing something else. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth stopping everything else to do it.
  2. Laptop power supplies are not allowed in the living room. That means you can only work as long as you have battery. Then you have to go do something else (or move somewhere else where plugging in is allowed — like the basement). This is to prevent us from becoming like the human characters in Wall-E.
  3. The Roomba gets run at least once a week, preferably twice. That way we have to keep the living room picked up.
  4. The day isn’t done until the spills are wiped up and the dishes are out of the sink and off the counters.
  5. We’re never to be more than one hour of straightening up away from being able to invite people over. And less is better.

For myself, I have to figure out the breakfast thing. I’ve been stopping for fast food on the way into work way too much lately. If I get something substantial in the morning, I have a much easier time making good choices during the day. This is one I need to work on.

Oh, and I need to blog more often. For one thing, it makes sense to start focusing as much on the “returns” part of the title as the “diminishing.” part. And there are so many.