When I was visiting brother Dan, he guessed my weight at 315 pounds. Of course, this just means that he's a bad guesser... I actually "only" weigh 250 pounds. But it's the perception that I'm a fat guy that bothers me. Not just Dan's perception, but the world's perception. Well, not so much even that, as the fact that I *am* a fat guy. I'm carrying around an extra 50-70 pounds, and that's tiring, it really is. It makes my heart work harder and my blood pressure go up and all kindsa stuff like that. Anyways, all of that is stuff that I've known about for a long time, but I haven't done anything about it. So, well, it's time that I did something Seriously. So, I'm gonna lose 50 pounds by my birthday, and 70 by memorial day. Well, the pounds might not work out right, but I'm gonna get down to a 34-inch waist, and if I do that by developing muscles, I might level out at 200 or 210. But I'll know when I get there I'm gonna be easy on me, too. No crash diets, I'm just gonna eat less. One sandwich instead of two. A small bowl of cereal in the morning, not a large one. One piece of fudge, not twenty. One glass of egg nog, not one quart. And some serious work on the weight machine and back exercises. Since I have trouble exercising my legs, my psoas muscles are the next biggest set in my body, so I need to work them... and I need to work them 'cause my back hurts most of the time... 'cause the muscles are weak. And I can look at the self-portraits that graced these pages two years ago, and I compare them to those of the last few months.... I don't know if I'll talk about this process here or not... it's pretty boring fare, and my readers get enough of *boring* anyway... We had a pretty off-on day at work, sitting around looking at each other (I always get the raw end of that, heh, they get to look at me, while I have to look at them...) for a half hour, then running for an hour, rinse and repeat... And I got a lousy night's sleep, I think that the waterbed heater got turned down. I woke up cold this morning, so I turned it up, probably too much. Karen's out in the kitchen doing her assigned cooking for tomorrow, and I'm gonna go to bed after I go down and do some weights... We've got a weight system attached to the wall, and what I'm doing is bench presses of about 65 pounds, following about ten reps of that with supine leg lifts. I can do all of this laying down, of course, my favorite exercise position. I figger that I can probably go do that about three times during an evening, and once in the morning, and that'll account for part of a good program. Better'n what I've been doing up until now, which is nothing.