If Music Be

Archive for May, 2008

The sun is shining, the birds are singing and its Friday. I’m expecting some news at some point today so will be waiting for a call or to check a website. Tenterhooks I believe they’re called.

I’m now a week into my new gym programme and it seems to be going well so far. I’m aching in new places which has to be good because that means that different muscles are being worked. Exactly what I wanted to happen. The ab-crunches are going well too, I thought they’d be a lot more difficult than they have been (obviously never had a ball to do them on before and boy does that help) so I have been zipping through my 100 in about 5 minutes. Go me! The treadmill is still really hard though, I don’t think I’ve got through a full run on it without having to make any adjustments yet. Not that it’s a problem because I have another 5 weeks to make it easier before things get moved around again. It’s such a great idea having 6 week intervals of what you do.

This morning was strange, I got to the gym at 0700 as usual and there were no trainers there. There were probably a dozen people there working out, but we couldn’t load our programmes up onto our machine keys and half the machines were off. Someone eventually arrived at around 0730 and sorted it out but it was fairly surreal.

The diet week 1 is going well too. I haven’t changed my breakfast of a cereal bar (although I don’t have any left today and its charity day so there are cakes everywhere) because I like them and they are enough to not make me crave anything else before 1200. I’ve had salad with a variety of additions for lunch every day (swapping between salad dressing and cottage cheese as well as cocktail sausages or cheese) and an apple. Dinners have been a bit different as well, I haven’t used any oil in any cooking this week and I’ve had steamed potatoes and veg as well. Not that I’ve noticed any weight difference at all yet but hey, it’s a start.

Katy has come up with an ingenious way of making sure she is getting her 4 glasses of water a day. I think I might try a similar thing and see how I get on. I drink a lot of water at the gym in the morning but then drink tea (or more recently coffee) for the rest of the day, which although my tea is herbal, is not a good idea.

Jenn seems to be having balance issues with her exercise ball. I can see where she’s coming from because if you get off kilter with it you will end up on the floor, but so far I’m doing ok with my work. Mind you she’s doing a lot more than I am with it so that might have something to do with her problems.

All in all it’s been a successful week. I can’t really call it good because of the events of the beginning but I do feel as though I can turn a corner now and move my life on to somewhere I’d like it to be.

Now, back to the tenterhooks.

I totally tea-leafed this from one of the lovely Anna’s guardian blogs (click the title to go to the original article) but I thought it was worth repeating.

Restaurants for weight watchers around the world

Saf
London, Munich and Istanbul ~ A vegan raw food restaurant must be good for the waistline. The really surprising thing is that the food at Saf actually tastes good, too.

Les Sources de Caudalie
Bordeaux, France ~ The chef at this Michelin-starred restaurant has created a three-course menu containing fewer than 500 calories.

Nicte restaurant
Barcelona, Spain ~ This innovative Spanish restaurant offers four separate menus: new trends; local market; classic; and health, which is full of low-calorie options.

Thermal Spa Resort Ronacher
Bad Kleinkirchheim, Austria ~ The Michelin-starred restaurant at this Austrian spa prides itself on its healthy, largely vegetarian cuisine using locally sourced produce from Carinthian farmers. It also offers a menu based on the Hay diet.

Restaurant Osnabruck
Tver, Russia ~ This Russian restaurant introduced a special low-calorie menu in February, featuring such tempting dishes as salmon ‘spring fantasy’.

Four
Toronto, Canada ~ Every dish on the menu of this Canadian restaurant contains no more than 650 calories.

There’s nothing terribly exciting going on in my world at the moment. Which, after the dramas of recent months, isn’t necessarily a bad thing but doesn’t make for interesting reading. Actually it doesn’t make for particularly interesting writing either but you know how it is.

I’ve been trying to cut down on TV over the last few weeks. Because it’s the summer a lot of programmes are coming to an end, with nothing much replacing them. So I have managed to get my viewing down considerably. I guess it was all helped in a way by the writers strike, with a lot of seasons being shortened and a lot of short running things cancelled. I have found though, that the vast majority of things I watch are US imports. I know, I know, you guys are just better yadda yadda, but in terms of television you really have got the market sewn up. For some reason in the UK, we get period drama or reality shows. There hasn’t been (and correct me if I’m wrong here) a decent, UK drama series in the remit of US drama series for a very long time if ever. It seems we come up with concepts that have a finite life span, 2 series and it’s all wrapped up. Is it because of soap operas I wonder? In the US (again correct me if I’m wrong) the majority of ‘soap’ equivalents are on during the day and decent programming is on at night. Here we have 3 soap operas that are on 4 nights a week, between 1900 and 2100. What time does that leave us for a good drama series?

Mind you, there is some total trash we end up with from over the pond. All those formulaic, criminal, police, investigative dramas that we seem to have on every night of the week, you can have those back for a start! They’re the worst kind of chewing gum for the eyes, mindless brainless characters and leaps of logic that would make Superman proud. They make our soaps look good.

In the spirit of multiculturalism I thought I would list my favourite TV shows…but then I remembered I did that here already. So go and look and you will see, they’re all American!

Oh, but we beat you at football last night

Sorry about yesterday, normal service is being resumed as we speak. My Mum reliably informs me it was PMT so there we go…no, I don’t know how she knows either.

One of the reasons I know I was in a bad mood yesterday was because of the impending Friday night…so I cancelled. I can’t sit in a room with cheat girl talking about EBM all night, and I know she will so I have told them I can’t go. It’s a shame about not seeing my other friends but I know they’ll understand the reasons. Unfortunately she now wants reasons because it’s been planned for ages and I don’t know what to say, short of telling her it’s because I don’t want to be in a room with her for an evening when she was the girl my boyfriend cheated on me with. Especially when she keeps rubbing my nose in it every time I speak to her.

So I have just replied now (not that you can tell but there has been a 10 minute time delay between these 2 bits of this post) and said that I can’t face it, and I couldn’t do it without it breaking my heart a little. Hopefully that’ll be the end of it now.

The other reason I was in a bad mood yesterday was because I had a social science essay to write and I didn’t know how to do it. I realised that I hated the course and I didn’t understand what it was about really so I have withdrawn from it. I can decide later in the year if I want to do it again or choose another course to do instead. I am thinking of this or this as my next course but neither of them have an 08 start date so I might pick something else while I’m waiting.

To be honest now those things have been sorted I feel a lot better about everything and am in much less of a bad mood. Hopefully I will be able to relax more now and really start working my brain round the world.

Today’s giggles were brought to me by Scaryduck Jnr who came up with many new and exciting TV shows.

Also Jenn is absolutely right when she says that drinking orange juice with pulp is nasty…smooth baby, it’s the only way.

Guilt Trip Alert: Message in from cheat girl…she’s going to avoid everything now, I’ve made her feel really bad, and she got dumped again at the weekend and it’s all horrible and everything is rubbish.

What can I be expected to say to that? Answer ~ Nothing

grumble, grumble, whine, whinge, mutter.

I’m in the mother of all bad moods today.

May post something actual later when I don’t feel the need to hit things.