A Scot in Australia
Archive for October 2005
Today was one of those days when I felt sorry for people who have to, or chose to, live in cities.
Today I:
Today marks 12 months since I decided to get rid of some superfluous weight. For me it was as simple as that - on the Sunday evening I decided that the next day would be my first weigh-day, to be followed by a weight reduction program.
So, how am I doing?
Well, I’m 20 kg (44 pounds) lighter than I used to be, I’m now mid-range “normal” rather than mid-range “overweight”; and I’m exercising more.
I’ve maintained the same weight for the past five or six months, and, over that same period, I’ve been jogging the 4 km with the dogs in the mornings rather than merely walking with them. A few weekends ago I also ran an additional 6km a couple of times. I hope to continue with the extra distance after we move onto daylight savings time which gives me extra daylight in the evenings. The goal is to be able to run to a local river crossing and back to give a round trip of 11 km.
I’ve always eaten a fairly sensible diet - but probably just too much at a sitting. My “secret”? For 6 months I ate a bit less than I normally would have, and had a small tub of yoghurt for lunch instead of homemade-bread sandwiches.
Having maintained a steady weight for the past six months I feel that I could still usefully stand to lose a few more kilograms - but I won’t actually know what my comfortable weight is until I’ve gone one or two kilograms too far the other way.
So, at the end of this journey I feel pretty happy with myself. Strangely, perhaps, its been fun - I enjoy setting myself these little challenges (in much the same manner as gradually working up to running those 11 km). I still weigh myself on a weekly basis and graph the result - that way I’ll get an early warning of any deviance from the norm.
I seem to have been discovering new and exciting music every week recently. I’ve just ordered two CDs from Fraser Fifield - a sort of “Folk/Balkan/Jazz” fusion. I recently heard some tracks from the Fraser Fifield Trio on the BBC Radio Scotland Be-Bop to Hip-Hop programme and was quite taken with them.
More on those in a few weeks time.
Over the past few days I’ve been re-ripping a few hundred CDs at a higher bit rate. I’m also taking advantage of iTunes new feature whereby individual movements of classical pieces can be aggregated, or joined, to a single track. This latter feature makes per-track shuffling a more practical proposition.
The CD that I’ve just finished listening to, and re-discovering, is “World Fusion“, a Magnatune compilation. The compilation is a selection of works by musicians in Magnatune’s “World” genre.
Of the fifteen tracks there was only one track that I felt slighly disinterested in to begin with, but then it grew on me.
I think it’s the unusual (to me) mix of old and new, traditional and modern, that is most refreshing:
