Anyway… I found this picture in amongst my May photos from 2011…

24/12/09 - It's me Robert. I am seven on Christmas. My dad is poo. Merry Christmas.

I was with Eva in a pub near Black Friars Bridge that day. We had been just roaming around London and then stopped for lunch. I seem to remember that the food was okay and the ale was lovely. They had a guestbook lying around, and this entry was just one of many. It made me wonder about this poor 7 year-old kid, in the pub with his old man on Christmas Eve.

like the window full of herbs and lemons?

There it is! It has other marvellous attachments (like a blender… Welcome to Margaritaville : Population – Me).

You can see in the picture I made some mayo (that’s the gloop in the jar, and I’ll write more about that later). But the very first thing I did was cut myself on the fucking thing. Twice.

first boo-boo

second boo-boo (the big cut)

After some emergency first aid (and a hell of a lot of whinging) I used the machine to first make mayonnaise and then the MOST GARLIC-FILLED GUACAMOLE IN THE UNIVERSE.

five cloves of garlics. and a shallot. vampires beware.

Now that I had some deliciousness happening, I decided I should probably pull something together for lunch. I had a butternut squash hanging around, so I thought I would roast that as a start.

I usually buy the squash already cut up (I’m lazy, yo), but this time I had a whole squash to cut up. Fresh-cut butternut squash smells good. It is like pumpkin… but more apple-ly. I was surprised that there were seeds in there. I don’t know why I was surprised. I suppose that’s what happens when you are used to buying all your food already processed.

lookit all those seeds!

Seeing those seeds gave me an idea: Could butternut squash seeds be roasted just like pumpkin seeds? They sure look the same. So I thought I would give it a try. Win! They did roast up exactly the same and were super delicious.

In the end, my lunch ended up being home-made mayonnaise (with chipotle paste – so good) with roasted butternut squash, guacamole (again, home-made – I rock) and tuna wrapped in seaweed with glutton-free soy sauce and with butternut squash seeds to finish. SO YUMMY.

I also had fresh iced tea. I used the blender to crush the ice for it (fancied it up a load, didn’t it?). It is just rooibos tea with ice and a sprig of mint. I’m getting very used to iced tea with no sugar or other sweeteners. Some teas (like rooibos) are fairly sweet naturally, so you don’t need to add anything to it.

nom nom nom

This lunch was WAY too big. It ended up being 1067 calories. I should have had half the amount and saved the seeds for a snack later. But it worked out okay – I ate this late in the day and just didn’t eat again, so I came out ahead of my ‘allotted’ calories that day (thank you Fitbit for tracking all that for me!)

It’s been an interesting month of eating well. It is delicious but a hella lot of work. I would definitely make this again – but would eat less of all of it.  Either just the tuna and avocado wrap or the squash… or half servings of both.

Signing up for the free service was hella easy. The only snag was that if you want me to enter a valid email address as a username – say so before I click submit.

Once I was all signed up I needed a co-conspirator to try out the shiny new internet thing. Fortunately I work with geeks.

So Rich and I tried and tried to set up a meeting. Not as easy and intuitive as it looks on the surface… probably because we were trying to invite each other. Which you cannot do. You send out the meeting link and that’s it. That’s the invite. You can’t search for and invite other MeetingBurner users. Which is a bit odd, no?

The site itself is nice and the service is a great idea. I think it is missing that one piece – that you should be able to find and invite specific people so that the meeting ends up in their Meeting Burner schedule and they can easily click into the meeting if they are already logged in.

Once we had it up and running, it actually was nice. A great feature is that you can choose to share your entire screen, a particular program, or part of a screen. Could help avoid those potentially embarrassing Growl pop-ups during presentations.

I’ll definitely keep an eye on this one. It’ll be interesting to see how it ends up playing with other websites and apps. (By the way, there is an iPhone app, but I didn’t play with it yet. Meetings on the go-go?) If you want to try it, there is a free account available so you can have a play. I think this is a great option for small businesses and start-ups that don’t need something crazy like Web-Ex but do need something a bit more robust than what Skype can provide.

As I said in my previous post – my weight has dropped each week for the first five weeks. Going forward, I hope to do this each Tuesday.

This week: Success. On track for 6/52 weeks so far. Yay!

1. Eat smarter
2. Move more
3. Measure that shit

Pretty simple, no?

Eat Smarter

For me, this has meant following what is probably most commonly known as the “Paleo Diet” (or Paleolithic Diet or Caveman Diet or Hunter Gatherer Diet). To me, it should be just the “Whole, real foods (sans gluten) diet”, because that’s really what it is.  Single ingredient foods for the most part with a few little bits to make life sunnier (red wine, dark chocolate, good coffee).

It goes a lot along the lines of what Michael Pollen says in his book In Defense of Food: ”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

It’s a fairly easy rule to live by.

And I’m trying to live by these “rules” about 80-90% of the time. Except this month, during which I’m subjecting myself to DEADLY DETOX FEBRUARY. Same rules as above, less fruit, the wine, chocolate and *sob* coffee (gave that up as of Thursday last week). And I’m sticking to it 100%. Six days in and no one has been maimed. Yet.

I’m going to enjoy the SHIT out of the next glass of red wine I have, let me tell you.

Move more

Actually, right now I’m failing at this pretty hard. STUPID LUNGS – BE LESS STUPID. I’m so tired all the time because of this damned cough so I’m not doing much exercise. I’m hoping that later this week I’ll be back to the plan, which is to walk in the morning, lift weights at lunch, and run in the evening. BAM.

Measure that shit

I’m actually measuring using a few tools that I’ll go into in separate posts:

1. Fitbit (food, sleep, mood, weight, activity)
2. Fitocracy (exercise)
3. Runkeeper (exercise – cardio)
4. Withings Scale (weight)

Some of these connect to each other. Some don’t. Altogether, they ensure I’m totes on top of this shit. Measurement is important – it helps track progress. I’ll give some in-depth reviews on those tools and how I’m using them in later posts.

That’s the quick and dirty outline of what I’m up to. I will try to talk about each in more detail as time goes on, and let you all know how it is all holding up.

My goal for this year is regarding my weight, to wit: To get rid of some of it.

I tried this last year (and the year before, and the year before, etc.,etc., ad nauseam). And in 2011, until all the holidays at the end of April, it was working. I lost nearly two stone (28 pounds). Unfortunately, because I didn’t keep on keeping on… I gained it all back and then some for the beginning of this year. Not too smart.

I’ve tried a lot of different ways to measure success around this, but nothing in the last 27 years (let’s just say I’m 27, okay?) has worked. So I’m trying something different.

This is the plan/goal: For forty of the fifty-two weeks of this year, I will weigh less than the week before.

How much less is not relevant. As long as it is less. If I actually hit my goal weight (which if – IF – I behave the entire fucking year should be early October), I may change “weigh less” to “weigh within two kilos of” so I don’t go too far.

Why forty out of fifty-two? So when life throws things at me (Vegas in January, Irish wedding in April), I don’t have to feel like I can’t enjoy myself because I don’t want to fail at this goal. I’ve built in some buffers so I can stay successful.

So far it is working. It has been five weeks so far, and I have dropped every week, even post Vegas (even though that was only 0.2kg, or just under 1/2 a pound). In fact, as of this morning I’ve lost just over a stone (a stone = 14 pounds, for y’all not in Britain) since my first weigh-in on January 3rd.

So. Here is me being publicly accountable for what I’m doing with/t0/for my poor body. I am not quite ready yet for other confessions (like how much I currently weigh) but may be once I get closer to my goal. I’ll try to keep updating about how I’m doing it and how it is going.

Wish me luck! Here’s to a healthier Jodi in 2012. (Yikes.)

No big confessions… but I am going to publicly announce a goal, which I’m not a big fan of doing.

Why? Because then I will feel like an absolute asshole if I don’t stick with it.

I have made public announcements on resolutions/goals before, with mixed results.

While still in university, I called off eating McDonald’s for a year. Doing that now would be so easy… I don’t even remember the last time I ate it. It’s been ages. But during uni? Easily twice or more a week. It was cheap and it was fast and I swear it is addictive.

So I called it off and announced that I was doing so. And I did it for the entire year. I had nightmares during the year, now and again, about breaking the resolution, but I never actually broke it. I did have a Big Mac on the first of January as soon as the year was up, but I made the year.

But last year I publicly announced that I wasn’t going to drink for the year. And I made it until April before I decided to completely eschew from drinking was ridiculous. Somewhat hilariously, when I started again no one said a word. It was strange that I stopped… no one thought twice when I started again.

But this year… this is a big one (no pun intended) that I’ve tried and failed again and again. I’ve never shared about these struggles… I mean, people can *see* that I struggle with it, but they don’t know how much. Okay. This was the disclaimer post about my fears around sharing this. The next one will be the share.

raR. Here’s hoping being public will help me stick with it this time.

It’s the kind of thing you get for Christmas and have to wait for the first of January to start using. And I would be so excited to start using it. Various years of my life, a journal would be started, in earnest,  on 01 January.

And after a few days, for whatever reason, I would miss a few days. And I would hate that there were blank pages. I’ve always been an all-or-nothing kind of person.

And then I would read what I had written over the last few weeks, and critique not just what words were there, but the handwriting and the pen (or, heaven forbid, pens) that I had used to write with. But I was especially hard on the words. What I had thought was brilliant at the time of writing (often just a few short weeks prior) had become drivel. I mean, I was doing this to myself at 7 years old.

Fast forward to autumn of the same year. I would find that diary and decide that I would try to give it another go. Blank pages be damned! And so a mostly empty diary would be given new life as I wrote in it again for another solid 10 or 15 days. And then it would be abandoned again, just as it had been before.

Eventually I would find that diary tucked away a year or two later and read it again, thoroughly embarrassed by the absolute garbage I had written. And what do you do with garbage? You burn it. Oh, the bonfires of words I have enjoyed. So many.

I’m only bringing this up (feel free to leave a “cool story bro” in the comments) because it struck me this weekend that my blog follows the same pattern. Like this blog in Janaury,  I seem to remember that all my shiny new diaries, so full of promise, always started with the same sentence: “This time I’m going to try writing every day…”

I could come up with something pithy and hopefully witty. Or at least, I could try. But I worry that “noodle for a catfish” is a euphemism for something dirty unknown to me.

Confession: I’m going to Google it. While I do, you can enjoy this amusing image of a cat. On the internet. With a caption.

I’m back. Good news: It apparently doesn’t mean anything dirty.

However, Urban Dictionary  tells me that “to noodle” means “to mull over, think about, contemplate, ponder, puzzle over or brain-storm”

Which makes this question weird.

I might think about a catfish now and then. They are worth some contemplation. Weird looking little buggers, aren’t they? So they are worth mulling over. Mostly I think about how gross it would be to have my hand caught in their mouth. EW. And the whiskery-bits give me THE FEAR.

But a circumstance where I would have to think FOR a catfish? As in: On behalf of said catfish? Well, I can only think of one. I bet this guy was hoping someone would think of a way to get this freaking basketball out of his mouth. So if I came across a catfish with a basketball in his mouth, I would definitely noodle a solution for that poor thing.

The Year of the Dragon. I’ve only had to wait 12 years for it. The last time it was the Year of the Dragon was 2000 – 2001. I was 24. I had just graduated Univeristy.

And I would have never dreamed that by the time it came around again I would have travelled all this way, met all these fabulous people and be living in London. No one dares to dream that big.

But here I am.

And although I have come a long way, I still have a long way to go. And I would like to focus on some of that stuff this year.

I don’t know how well a Fire Dragon (that’s me) will do in a Water Dragon year. But I have some plans to get where I want to be.

There are improvements I would like to make in regards to my creativity, finances, health, lifestyle and relationships. I’m putting a big focus on my health, and I’ll post more details about that soon.

I hesitate to call any of my plans this year “resolutions” or even “goals”. I think I’ll stick with “plans”… but they will be measurable plans. And because they are not going to be NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS, I’m going to wait until after the Year of the Dragon officially kicks in… and after I’m back from Vegas (work trip) before I get going on anything in earnest.

Here’s to making this year a good one!