The temp has dropped, the wind was blowing, but the evening walk is becoming a habit, we got out there and did it. Murphy was not enthused and wanted to be carried for the first half of it - it was cold and windy and he kept making this little "Ooof!" grunt and looking at me. He's so expressive, you can almost hear what he's thinking - "It's cold! Why are we out here? Can't we go home? Please wrap your jacket around my butt, I'm cold!" However, he did walk the second half like a champ thanks to my constant encouragement, "Let's go get dinner - you have chicken for dinner!" (Leftovers mixed with his dry food.) That got him moving very briskly - in fact, he prefers to run. The problem is he can stop on a dime and I can't - he can sniff a good smell while running flat out and stop instantly to check it out, and I live in fear of falling over him. So we do run part of each walk, but slowly and cautiously, and I can't take my eyes off him. It's getting easier every day, though, and we haven't even been at it a week. Ideally I'd like to work up to actually jogging with him, since he seems to enjoy that more than mere walking. And yes, it is All About the Dog - just ask him. The great thing about jogging with a Yorkie is you can do it really slowly and claim it's because the dog is so small- those little short legs, you know, he can't run like a big dog - the truth is the dog can run like a damn jackrabbit, his human is the one who has to bounce along cautiously on her bad knees, toting her extra poundage.

Bess is on the money again today, with her rant about doctors preferring cutting on people over exercise and diet. I have bad knees - they are hereditary, and weren't helped by my reckless and clumsy youth on roller skates and the like. Though I'm at most 30 pounds overweight - and only about 15 by some reckoning (with which I do not agree) - I feel every damn one of those extra pounds in my knees and lower back. People tell me I don't "look fat" and again I disagree, but that's not the point - I can't carry this weight on my body, I can feel it's too much. I'm small boned with joint problems and every extra pound is a little bit more trouble. I am at the age where it's deal with it now or deal with the consequences later.

I don't know whether to credit the increased walking or the low carb diet or both, but I have a lot more energy at work this week, I feel focused and able to plow through massive piles of work -- not without whining for the secretary we don't have and desperately need, but that's like whining for a winning lottery ticket right now. Beloved Boss and I have been cranking out the paper, figuring out the angles, and doing great things, though he is sick as hell, poor thing, with some sinus infection or whatever it is that will not quit. He's miserable and I'm hoping he's not contagious, because we have been in close proximity and will be off on document productions together for the next two days, sitting in conference rooms with boxes and boxes of construction project paper (one of my favorite pastimes - really!) so if I haven't caught it already I will get it by the end of this week, or I'm not going to catch it at all. Which reminds me, I need to go take my vitamins.

Oh, and it's cold again and I'm without a quick portable business travel project. I should bring Girlchild's Bardot and make some progress. Right now I'm laundering and trying to figure out what to pack from my sorry-ass wardrobe. I want nice clothes - but even more, I want a nice body to wear them. I haven't felt this motivated in decades - maybe since Boy was born and I experienced my first bout with overweight since childhood - I gained a ton with that kid, like sixty pounds, and lost it fast because I was very young and energetic. I didn't have to diet, I just ate reasonably, breastfed the baby and resumed my normal activity level, and was 125 again by the time he was a year old. (After child 2 and more exercise, I was able to wear the same clothes at 135. Muscles really do weigh more.) We walked miles in his first year of life - it was nothing for me to load him in the stroller and walk two miles up and down hills to a friend's house for the afternoon, and home again, just for fun - I had a car in the driveway, but it was fun to walk. I really wonder how much of my current fitness woes are really due to middle age and how much are caused by lifestyle changes - I suspect that if I still had occasion to walk four miles up and down hills for a day's entertainment I would not be bitching about my weight. It's the years of sitting that did me in - sitting in meetings, on airplanes, at a desk, on a couch, then worst of all, in hospitals and nursing homes for the past two years, which was unrelieved sitting time inflicted on a middle-aged body. I'll be working this off for quite some time, I think.

Girlchild bought the Windsor Pilates tapes at Tar-jay, she gives them two thumbs up. I think I want them.

I also want to make a Shapely Tank in my former body size. Dammit, I will wear it by May.