Accountability report

Me

I am still on track for a thousand miles.  I logged 69.5 to a goal, at this point, of 57.5 miles.  1000 miles may have not had enough reach.

Mrs ERJ

Mrs ERJ is starting a new diet.  She does not need to, but there are some places where brave men do not tread.

The diet has an unfortunate name. The basic plan it to remove high risk food groups from one's diet and to slowly reintroduce them.  It is NOT named after food that can be very difficult to find or identify.

The Hawthorne Effect suggests that one's health and feelings of fitness should improve simply due to the attention.  If Mrs ERJ wants to eat a highly limited diet for a while, I am good with that.

Belladonna

As reported earlier, Bella fell in with a great bunch of students at college. One of the things they do together is lift weights.

I asked Belladonna how much weight she had lifted since going off to college.  After talking to one of her buddies I was under the impression that they charted the sum of every Weight X number of reps.  Example, if I bench pressed 70 pounds 30 times that would add 2100 pounds to my running total.

Bella dutifully reported back that she had lifted 68,933 pounds.  That did not make sense to me because that seemed like what she was lifting in two weeks.

I asked her to recheck.

Today she told me that she had lifted something north of one million pounds since September 1.  She had forgotten to multiply by the number of repetitions.

Thats my girl!

Kubota

We went to Kubota's mid-term conferences.

His grades are surprisingly good.  He has three "A"s,  one "for credit, no grade" and one "not-A".

Socially, things are getting exciting.  He is exquisitely, painfully, exhilaratingly aware of girls.  And so are a couple of his closest friends.  It is almost laughable.  There are about 350 girls at the high school and they are all invisible until one of his posse expresses the merest whisper of interest in her.  Then she is the only one.  They make  monkeys of themselves attempting to impress her and putting each other down.

Three boys, half a functioning brain between them.

It is interesting looking at it from this end of life.  Perhaps a third of those 350 girls will become stunningly beautiful.  I can see it in the sparkle of their eyes, their facial bones, the muscular grace catching up to the crazy things puberty did to their skeleton.

Most of the rest of the girls will become wholesomely beautiful.  Splendid specimens of womanhood.  My brother, the progressive, has three daughters and spends more time thinking about this kind of thing.  His take is that young men turn women into objects or prizes because boys are not ready for the kinds of complicated interactions that women, who tend to be more social, demand.  Boys can barely tolerate manual chokes and shifting on dirt bikes.

The best thing about Barbie is not her dimensions, it is that she is not Chatty Cathy.

Dogs

It was with a sad and heavy heart that we discovered the inert Boston Terrier in his crate.  Temperatures had been in the low, single digits.  He seemed fine the night before.  Kubota was pretty torqued about it and got a bit loud.

The inert lump stirred and then slunk out of his crate toward the door.  He walked with that "Damn.  Busted." gait that dog owners know so very well.  $%^&* cold weather is hard on puny dogs with smooth coats.

I could empathize with the little blighter.  There were days I wanted to call in "dead" to work as well.