Category: Dancing

223 Again. Cookies for Dinner.

That’s right beeyatches. I had cookies for dinner. This is the best diet ever.

Weight Talk
I weighed in at 223 again this morning. A look at my weight chart shows some support in this 222-224 pound range. I’ve been having trouble breaking through. The good thing though is that, as we know from the technical analysis of stocks, support levels often become resistance once they’re broken. It’s good to know that in a few weeks I’ll be well past 222 and I’ll probably never weigh 224 pounds again for the rest of my life. Well, that’s the optimistic view anyway.

I’ve been writing a lot about what I eat in these blog posts, and I realize that it’s probably not the most interesting thing to read. It’s amazing how important food is in my life though. It’s a wonderful pretense for telling people about my day, as all our major activities usually somehow involve food. Even though the food talk may be boring, it really helps me keep track of calories in a food diary sort of way. So I’ll continue to do it, but try to be as brief as possible.

Total calories for the day is 2150. A bowel of cereal for breakfast = 400Cal.

A Big Lunch at the HC
I had lunch over at the Haverford College Coop today, talking with another alum who might be helping us with some Stranger Studios work. At the Coop, I had a “chicken salad hoagie”. I tried to describe what I wanted to the sandwich artist, but the guy just went ahead and made what he’s programmed to make. I usually see these kinds of situations as an opportunity to try something I might not have thought to order… like provolone on my chicken salad sandwich. The sandwich looked so good after it was made that I didn’t have the heart to take off the cheese. Ok, it just looked really good and I wanted to eat it.

I’ve calculated calories for the hoagie at 350 for the roll, 500 for the chicken salad, 200 for 2 slices of provolone, and 50 for the lettuce, tomato, pickels, and onion. That’s 1100 total for the sandwich.

The sandwich really was a beauty. The guy I was meeting changed his order after he saw it. And it was so beautiful that I made the decision to forgo dinner and use the calories I had left to have some chips with lunch. It was a good choice. 300Cal for a bag of Herr’s Kettle Cooked chips.

The State of Computer Science Majors
After lunch, I hung out on campus a bit and visited some old professors. I talked with one about how the number of Computer Science students is down something like 60% in the past couple years. He cites all the outsourcing talk as a leading cause. You just don’t see those kids who are all excited about Computer Science as a major anymore, and how they’re going to become wealthy programming for a living. I remember how cliche it was to major in Computer Science when I was declaring my major. But I was doing it for the love of the science, man.

(I just took a break from writing this to do an ab workout video with Kim. We did one that was on-demand through Comcast Cable. They have a lot of great exercise videos in there if you’re into that kind of thing. Also, at one point the workout required hand weights, which we didn’t have. So Kim grabbed a couple cans of veggies from the cabinet that worked out well.)

Philosophy Talk and Cookies
I hung out in one of the computer labs at Haverford for a bit, working on a blog I’ll be posting later about a cool game idea. Then at 4:15pm, I went to see Palle Yourgrau speak about his new book A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. It was a great lecture, and I’ll be picking up that book ASAP. Outside the lecture room, there was a plate of cookies, which brings us to dinner.

After the cheese- and chips-filled lunch, I had just 200 calories left for the day. By my rough calculations that was about two of the smallish-to-medium cookies at the talk. I had one sugar and one oatmeal raisin. I remember reading somewhere that a typical chocolate-chip cookie is 75Cal, so I thought 100Cal was a good estimate. Kim thought that was small though, and we looked it up online. Some pages had oatmeal raisin cookies going for as much as 280Cal, but then I can’t tell how big their cookies are compared to mine. I’ll have to figure this out if I’m going to be eating more cookies in the future.

Wine Puts Me Over 2000Cal
So breakfast, lunch, and cookies put me at exactly roughly 2000Cal. Kim had a nice two-portion-size glass of wine ready for me when I got home, which puts me over at 2150. I want to end one of these days below the 2000 mark.

On the exercising front, I didn’t hit the gym today. However, I did walk around campus a bit, and Kim and I danced for about 45 minutes before American Idol came on at 8 (I’m not really sure how I got sucked into this show).

I Put on My Dancing Shoes
Our dancing is coming along really well. Our waltz is great (for beginners). Our merengue and swing are decent so far. Our fox trot is shakey, but really good when we nail it. Our wedding song is going to be a fox trot, so we work on that one a bunch.
We’ve been learning a few new moves since our last private dance lesson. I hope our teacher isn’t upset about it. Kim and I are going to try to wow him a bit with some of the stuff we learned. We’ve found some excellent videos at Expert Village. They have videos for all kinds of things. For dance, I’m really fond of the ones put out by Leslie Sack.

Stay tuned for my game idea. I think the bloggers will either love it or hate it.