Happy 2007 (Why am I still here edition)

Here is the view of my backyard taken this morning:

Before you start swooning over the beauty of the snow covered trees and the ice covered lake (especially if you’re from an area where it doesn’t snow), let me remind you that winter royally sucks. It gets old after the first dozen or so you suffer through. Even though this winter has been pretty mild so far, it’s still winter and therefore, still sucks.

I had really hoped and expected to be on the road by now. But what can you do? Since my last update, I’ve been in a holding pattern waiting for my house to sell. December is a crappy time of year to sell a house. I have however been surprised with the level of activity I’ve seen in the last two week when I figured it would be dead. I have a good feeling about the next 30 days and I hope that I’ll have something by then.

In the meantime, I’ve been doing some low-level stuff getting ready for my trip. The biggest thing has been changing my diet. In the last 2 months, I’ve lost about 15 pounds. This has been a function of nothing more than eating less and eating better. I have cut out almost all fried foods and sugar and I try to only eat when I’m hungry. As a result of this, I’ve also reduced the point at which I’m satiated, which means I consume smaller portions as well. I’ve dropped a full pant size, but oddly enough, I have yet to have a single person say to me “have you lost weight?”.

The next step to move from just dietary changes to physical ones as well. I’ll be starting up the gym membership again within the next day or two. I’m going to try and get back in some sort of reasonable shape in the month or two I have remained here in Minnesota. I think there are two reasons for the success I’ve had in losing weight this time around: 1) I kept the plan simple, and 2) I have created an enormous negative incentive if I fail. I’ll be doing the same with my work outs. (while I know this smacks of New Year’s Resolution, this is really part of something I’ve been doing for months. It just happens to be occurring over the holidays)

So that’s basically it. I’m waiting for my house to move and when it does I expect a flurry of activity for a few weeks after that moving getting ready. In the mean time, I can do some more work on this website (like get a real designer) keep pimping my myspace page out.