Tomorrow marks my centennial on the #oneaday train. That’s pretty good going. I know some people are ahead of me already, but we should all celebrate each others’ milestones. And the way I choose for you all to celebrate my own milestone is to buy me cake. Particularly as it’s my birthday soon.

Anyway, cake aside, what I wanted to talk about today is exercise. I’ve managed, through some serious mental reconditioning that may or may not have involved an electric cattle prod, to get back into a gym routine. I’ve been every day for the last few days. That may sound like a lot to some, but the last time I jumped in with this intensity it had a noticeably positive impact on my body. I felt better and I looked better. I mean sure, I was still a tubby bitch, to quote Mr Kevin Smith, but slightly less so than before. Then various things happened, I left my job which was conveniently five minutes’ walk away from the gym, got depressed, ate too much, took on a job that was so far away from where I lived that by the time I got home of an evening I wasn’t able to get to the gym before it closed and finally quit that job. Clear? No? Never mind.

Now that I’m in that weird sort of “uhhh… what now?” phase without having a full-time job, I have plenty of time to get to the gym. Even on days when I do have some work, I’ve managed to get home, have a quick rest, maybe a quick blast on WoW and then head out to the gym before dinner. This time around, I feel like I’ve made much quicker progress than before. The day before yesterday I managed a 10-minute non-stop run on the treadmill, which I can’t normally do. I can’t do it consistently yet, as I need to be full of energy to pull it off, but it’s getting there. And I can do 5 minutes non-stop without too much difficulty now.

Experimented a little with some free weights today. Rhiarti has said she’s going to give me some suggestions for a Geek Workout using weights rather than machines. The machines are all well and good, but apparently the free weights actually work more muscles because you have to support the big lump of metal you’re lifting as well as, you know, lifting it. And certainly after I tried a few bits and pieces I’d looked up online today, my muscles felt like they’d had a much more solid workout than if I’d used machines for equivalent exercises. The side-effect of all this, too, is that I feel rather more positive about my body image. I know there’s no way that my shape would have changed over the course of less than a week, but I feel better about myself. I think it’s just taking the positive step to do something about it that makes me feel better. I have a lot of work to do, but I feel like I’ve got into a good rhythm now. Let’s hope I can keep it up.

No idea whether I’ll be working tomorrow yet. The irritating thing about supply teaching is that you have to get up super-early for no guarantee of work on most days. But even if there’s no work, I have some articles to write and some potentially paid freelancing gigs to chase up, so it’s not as if I’ll be short of things to do. I also applied for three jobs today, so hopefully something will come of one of those. Though going on past experiences with my saying “hopefully something will come of one of those”, I fear it will be unlikely I’ll hear back from them ever, my application lost in the Netherstorm for all eternity.

It’s time for bed. Before midnight! Good job, me.

Also, to the shouting drunken morons outside my front room window, kindly jump in the Solent.