Beginnings

For years I wrote the Carfree Family blog, which I took down in a moment of existential crisis after we purchased a car following our eight year run bicycling our children around Santa Fe. My daughter was accepted into a charter school a good distance from our house.  We had become tired of bicycling up in the dark and the snow and the ice during the winter.  I wanted to backpack more.  Still, it has been more difficult having a car than it was not having one in the since that we lost one of the organizing facts of our family life.  I wish that I had not taken it down now.  I continue to run into people who say they were inspired by the blog.  It may still be glimpsed, I believe, by searching for it on the wayback machine.

Lately I've been wanting to write again.  I particularly want to write more short stories and fiction, but I have packed the typewriters away and have been using this computer mostly for Netflix and for budgeting, or at least a semblance thereof.

At present, instead of putting my energy toward being carfree, though we still bicycle a great deal.  I have been facing down the fact that, at 48, I am moving into the second half of my life.

I want to be healthy during this second half, and I want to be happy, and I want to do all the things I've been saying I would do since I was 12.  I want to write more stories.  I want to travel more.  I want to get down to a healthy weight.  I want to play music and learn languages.  That, pretty much, is the gist of it.  My desires are not complicated in their beginnings.  It is only in my fantasies that they begin to seem difficult to achieve.  "Remember dear, that year we spent in Rome while I was working on my sixth novel, and how they loved me to play my accordion in that little cafe near the Acropolis and our long bike trip to Portofino?"  I suspect that it is the distance between the beginning and the result that has always discouraged me.  Playing "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" on any instrument is a far cry from a house gig in Greenwich Village, let alone a decent income as a busker.  I give up too easily.

Lately, I've begun to attack my weight, once again, hence the title of this blog.  I have no "big loss" story.  My weight creeps up, just like most people's.  I had been eating mostly paleo a year or so ago, after my mother's death, when I began to become concerned about the brutality of dying when you are not in particularly good shape, though of course it can be brutal even when you are in good shape.

At the time, I noticed my weight had crept over 200 pounds.  That is a warning sign for me.  I never thought of myself as being particularly overweight, but I thought I would check my BMI, (my height is 5'8"), on the internet - that reassuring source of medical information.  According to the tables I found, my BMI was 31, which put me squarely in obese land!  That was a shocker.  If anything, I thought I was slightly overweight.  According to the tables, for my height, I should be between 125 and 155.   That is almost unbelievable, and I did take the radical approach of asking my doctor, who said if I was concerned about my weight, I should aim for around 175.

Anyway, I got my weight down to around 185 before I got bored with weighing myself all the time.  I grew concerned lately because, among other things, I was dipping into the jar of Nutella in the cabinet.  I thought I might be creeping up above 190 again, so I weighed myself, and I came in at 207.  That was another shocker, so I'm trying to take some measures to make a real push to get my weight down to 175.  I want to make sure I enter the second half of my life healthy.  My father had a heart attack sometime in his mid-fifties, (though his life was ended when I teenage driver slammed into my father's pickup truck.  For what it's worth, my father was not wearing a helmet.  The big bicycle helmet debate is one of my pet topics, and I fall on both sides of it, so you'll never know if you will see my with a  helmet or without one).

The thing is, I love Nutella.  I love apricot danishes and cherry danishes.  I love spaghetti.  Pasta, red wine, and romance all go together for me, and I'm nothing if not a romanticist.

Next week, I am going to try to set this blog up more formerly with links, another post, etc.  But I thought it would be best to get started.  "Well begun is half done" as Mary Poppins says.