Keeping up with the resolutions

As some of you may recall, I boldly published my New Year's resolutions on this very blog a few months back. As I admitted then, I very rarely make resolutions, in part because I don't really bother to keep them. However, as Chloe pointed out at the time, making them public is an incentive to actually meet them. So now that we're past the halfway point of the year, here's a quick update for those of you who've been dying to see how I'm doing.

First, the bad news. My half-baked resolution to write more has been staunchly ignored. As I phrased it, my goal was to periodically write something (anything), as long as it was beyond the scope of either this blog or my dissertation (i.e. keep a journal or write a prize-winning short story). Well, I've been intermittently good at keeping up the blog, but I'm still in the middle of a dissertation chapter that stalled out sometime in January. As for writing anything else, well, it just hasn't happened. So here's my renewed commitment to at least remember to take a journal with me the next time I go out of town.

As for the equally half-baked resolution to exercise more, I was doing quite a bit better at this one for a while. I had to make it a little more concrete after the first time I stepped on the scale at the gym and discovered I'd put on a few pounds since college. Actually, I'd put on a few pounds since a couple years ago when I stopped doing slimming field work every summer. So I made the ambitious goal of losing ten pounds by the end of March. Although I didn't pull it off in March, I managed to lose the weight by the end of May. Unfortunately, that's also about the time I lost my volition to go to the gym every morning. The World Cup and a class that was a lot more work than I'd anticipated also intervened. So just this past week, I made it back to the gym for the first time in a while. Luckily, I hadn't gained back much of the weight, although the equilibrium was probably in part due to my mid-section taking back some of territory it had ceded in the spring counterbalanced by muscle atrophy. Anyway, I'm hoping to hit the gym with a little more regularity for the rest of the summer. The class I'm TA'ing this fall has an 8:00 am lecture, so I don't like my chances once school starts back up, but we'll see.