Fine Day for a Holiday

Days off work are good for everybody, whether they are workers or employers. In my family, we're mostly self-employed, but we still take days off on public holidays. We have our little rituals of parties and fun. Unfortunately, most of the public holidays in Australia are either religious holidays or celebrations of nationalistic ideas or wars.

Melbourne Cup Day just celebrates the crooks in the racing industry, who can easily be ignored by those of us who don't actually care about horse racing, leaving us with a fun day off at a good time of the year. I'd like to see more silly holidays, scattered through the year, as a sign of good will towards the mental health of the entire community.

Public Goals Revisited

Some time ago, I wrote about my hope that stating some goals in public might assist me in achieving them. In particular, I mentioned a desire to shed 10 kg in 100 days and invited people to keep on my back about it.

As it happened, this wasn’t interesting for many people and just one friend did remind me and ask me how I was going at suitable intervals. I’m very grateful for that. The sad thing is that it doesn’t seem to have worked for me. The 100 days ended at the start of this month and my weight is unchanged. To be specific, the day I started it was 78.8 kg and it was 78.8 kg this morning. In between, it has fluctuated between 76.7 and 80.0 kg. I think it’s fair to describe that as “no change”.

So what’s next? I still wish to lose that weight, but it is clear that I will need to adopt a better strategy to accomplish it. While I was away in Sydney recently, I managed to get in some decently long walks and thought I might be able to make a specific time for walking every day back at home. I have now been getting up at 5:00 every morning and immediately going for a brisk one hour walk. It is too soon yet for that that have made any impact—as the scales make clear. However, I am hopeful that, by doing this walk regularly, I might make some progress.

Public Goals

That title has nothing to do with football, just to get that out of the way. I have seen many people in the business of helping the rest of us to sort our lives out who advocate setting goals and committing to them in public as a way of focussing attention on the pursuit of those goals.

I've avoided that for most of my life, but today I'm going to dip a toe in the water and declare a goal of shedding some weight. Forty years ago, I weighed a little under 60 kg. Now I weigh a little under 80 kg. I have added the weight in teensy increments over the whole forty years, at the rate of about half a kilogram per year, and have hardly noticed it happening. But that's heavier than seems healthy for a boy of my build and height, so I have a plan to reduce it.

I have no illusions of getting back to the trim 58 kg of twenty-year-old me. But it seems feasible to aim for 70 kg. To make this concrete, my goal is to lose 10 kg in the next 100 days. If anybody wants to hold my feet to the fire over this, make a note in your diary and we'll see how I go.

I plan to announce some other goals here over the next few weeks, but I also have plans to talk about software before long, so maybe I can combine the two.