An Experimental Life

Monday, May 07, 2007

Busy, busy week

The last week and a bit seems to have been very hectic. I keep trying to find time to sit down at the computer and blog, but when I spend a good part of the work day in front of a computer, it's the last thing I feel like doing when I get home. Plus my evenings keep filling up with things, so trying to find a window when I'm home but no one else is using the computer seems next to impossible some days.

I am back to keeping track of everything I eat in a food diary again - I had stopped for a few weeks even though I was counting points in my head. I wasn't doing too badly, and I think I only had a couple of days when I probably went over on points, but I definitely feel more in control when I track properly. When my last food and exercise diary came to the end I resorted to just using an ordinary notebook to write everything down in. You would think that it would be just as good, but for some reason I think that was part of the reason I slackened off. Perhaps I respond better to the visual setup of a ready-made food diary. The WW one has the QuickTracker boxes which you can tick off easily, plus little pictures of food to make sure you're getting 5 veg, 2 fruit, 2 dairy etc per day. It sounds pretty trivial, but if spending $10 on it was what it took to get me writing down points again then it's worth it.

A week and a bit ago my brother and his housemate Lisa came round for dinner, and Mum had promised Lisa a while back to make lemon meringue pie sometime when they were over. Actually it was Dad who made it, while Mum sat there telling him what needed to be done - she's having mobility problems at the moment with her ankle (or knee, or pelvis... I lose track!) so she has difficulty standing or walking for anything other than quite short bursts. Anyway, Dad grabbed a tin of sweetened condensed milk from the cupboard without checking if it was lite - and it wasn't - so dessert alone ended up being 9 points per serve! And yet miraculously I still came in just on my point total for the day, plus I did 6 bonus points worth of exercise.

But over dinner Cameron kept listing all the desserts we used to have as kids - culinary reminiscing I suppose you could say. Everything full of butter, or cream, or chocolate, or coconut... I felt like I consumed 50 points just by listening to the conversation! It's alright for him - he's never had the kinds of food/guilt/weight related problems that I have. And as he was listing chocolate mousse, apple spice cake, golden syrup dumplings and coffee mousse, all I could think was "Is it any wonder this family is so unhealthy?"

But despite all that, I decided to weigh myself last Saturday morning and in total I am down 10.6kg (since 20 February). That's about 10 weeks, so I'm pretty happy with that! Also, yesterday I reached a new record for the number of k's I did on the bike in one go: 14.2km in half an hour, up from about 12.6 in roughly the same length of time! And wow it felt good afterwards. I do love that post-exercise high! That brings my total to just under 350km ridden since the end of January - I will get to 500km easily before I go overseas in August. In fact, I'm aiming to get there before I leave for Perth. I thought about aiming for the Queen's Birthday weekend, but that might be just a little too ambitious. But we'll see.

Yesterday Concordis had a concert in at the ABC studios which was broadast live across the nation. It went well, I think, except for the last item, where Andrew gave us the wrong starting note (a tone too low). And of course, me being me, I could tell instantly that it wasn't right, and the piece is low enough as it is for sopranos. I did try to say "Andrew, are you sure that's right?" but he didn't hear me. But everyone else could tell by four bars in that it wasn't clicking, so we restarted the piece again on the correct note. A bit embarrassing to do on national radio, but at least it was handled professionally. Everything else went well. Better than I expected, even. I was so happy with the Eric Whitacre we did, Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine. It's a very challenging but absolutely stunning piece, probably my favourite item from our repertoire at the moment.

I will definitely miss this choir while I'm away, although it's made somewhat easier by not doing a whole lot of music that I'm really crazy about. There's a fair bit I like, but nothing I'd be upset at not getting to sing for 9 months.

I finally got organised enough to archive all the minutes and so on to CD for Claire who will take over as secretary as of the meeting this Wednesday evening. I'm not sad at all to be handing it over; it's well and truly time someone else had a go. But I have really enjoyed the past 9 years, playing such a formative role in the group. I love the sense of ownership one gets from being so involved, it's so much more rewarding than just rocking up to sing each week. Plus I love that we are where we are today because of all the work that people have put in. We don't get any funding, and we aren't attached to a university or music organisation, so everything we've done, we've done ourselves. I know I haven't always been the perfect secretary, but I'm sure I've been better than some.

Last Wednesday night I had to be at a meeting for work until after nine o'clock while my boss and her family went off to Cirque du Soleil. Her family had bought the tickets not knowing she had a meeting, so I filled in for her. Don't know how useful I was, but man, that is so not a committee I would ever want to be part of. They're hopeless!! No idea how to get anything done, a president who isn't the one to chair the meeting (and wouldn't even know where to start), a secretary who's even slacker than I was for Concordis, and a whole lot of people who bitch and moan about how much they pay for administration but who keep hurling work our way because of how disorganised they are. There's also way too many people on the committee - more than 15 though not everyone was there. My absolute maximum for an effective committee is about 10, though 8 is better. The more people you have the less gets done, and the more unnecessary bickering there is. I know from experience!

Anyway, I will leave it there for now, and hope that I can post again this week. There's at least one pic I want to put up, when I get around to it. Don't hold your breath waiting, though!

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