Anyway, this blog is a bit on again, off again — much like my weight, I suppose — but the good news is that I’m within only a couple of pounds of my goal for the end of 2009.  I just weighed myself in at 238 pounds.

NCN is off a little weight as well, which is a very good thing.  I can completely understand how busy he’s been because he, like myself, had a new house purchase on his plate.  Hopefully his went more smoothly than mine, but if it didn’t I’d be one of the first to give him some slack.  Buying a house, especially a foreclosure, can mean putting out fires and turning on a dime.

The one thing that has been keeping me plenty active has been the blizzards that have hit the East coast.  We have a long driveway that needs a lot of shoveling, so the unexpected work has also been good exercise.

So here’s to thawing out and getting back on track a bit.

This is a very good thing.  I’ve asked him to keep needling me.

He’s a little older than I am, and he’s trying to get back into shape before it’s too late.  He’s trying a lot harder than I am, and doing what he can.  He’s admitted that it takes longer to recover between workouts than it used to, but he still does what he can.

I have done a little better at exercising than I was at the end of last year.  I’ve exercised for at least 30 minutes at least twice a week this month.  Keeping track of this is one of only two goals I have this year.

Hopefully my colleague will bug me about getting there three times a week.

Five hundred fifty-five points on beginner level.  The advanced level is still eating me for lunch.  I cracked 300 points once and most of my other tries were in the low 200s — a far cry from the maximum 655 points.

You’re reading this, and you might be thinking, whoopee, good for you, let me share my excitement, nah I’m not really excited, that’s lame.

Have I mentioned that it’s really easy to slack off on exercising?  I’ve put in a half-hour tonight and last night but there was a pretty big hiatus, as in a few weeks.  As it was, tonight I just did balance games — which is exercise but not a huge amount of exercise.

I was in good shape in graduate school ten years ago, but I was putting in 45 minutes to an hour, five or six days a week, on an elliptic trainer.  That’s a fairly hefty routine.  Now an accomplishment is playing Tilt Board, Penguin Slide, and Soccer Ball Heading a few times, not breaking a sweat, and writing about it.  This wasn’t what I was doing ten years ago, or even two months ago.

Oh well. maybe I’ll get a bunch of exercise cleaning up after the storm.

I’m still thinking that going for more pushups each workout, rather than trying to cut the breaks down to the prescribed amounts, is what I need.  I’m more than happy taking a good long time to get through 100 pushups in a row, but I need to keep myself from getting injured, and I also need to lose some more of the weight.  More pushups means more calories burned.

It’s great to provide some community service.  It’s also good exercise. Bending over, going up and down inclines in the median, carrying the bag of trash all exercise muscles that I don’t typically exercise.  And at this point, any exercise I can get is a very good thing.  I sure felt it afterwards.

For a lot of people this kind of work is part of an everyday routine, but for a desk jockey like me physical labor is something I have to go out of my way to do.  One disadvantage of desk jobs is that they’re sedentary, so weight gain can creep up on you (as it did me) unless you take active steps to exercise and eat right.

Volunteering and sweating out in the sun for a couple of hours is one way to do that.