Workin' out, Life, and NaNoWriMo

I've been feeling rundown the past three days, and I think fighting some kind of mild intestinal bug. Despite that, I have managed to get to the gym two days in a row, which is a good thing, and I've upped some of my weights. I'm doing lifts and flys of sixty pounds, up from the fifty I started with four weeks ago. I've added a ballcrunch (no, that has nothing to do with testicles) to my abdominal routine, resulting in extra pain and extra definition.

I had Yamaraashi-chan mould the hamburgers last night. She was tentative until I suggested she think of it not as dead cow, but as clay to be shaped. I let her turn one of the burgers in the grillpan but she mangled it so I turned the others. Both girls got a lesson in washing one's hands before cooking and after handling raw meat, and Yamaraashi-chan got an extra lesson in when one can use a metal tool and when one cannot.

I've only been mildly interested in doing NaNoWriMo this year. The main reason, I think, is that my family simply won't permit me. There will always be too much to do, too many opportunities for interruption. I have been struggling to do 500 words a day, so trying for 2,000 words a day is simply not going to be possible. I'm told that eventually life gets easier as the kids become capable of doing more for themselves, but at the moment writing at the rate I'd like simply isn't practical.

The Billy Joel Effect

So there's this guy in one of my programming groups that I go to from time to time who, for lack of a better word in English, is a schlump. I've never seen him better than half-shaven, hair unkempt, shirt untucked. He wears a worn denim jacket with tassels that went out of style back when Michael Knight was still cruising the truckstop restrooms of America with the former governor of New Jersey. His jeans have holes in them.

The other night his wife came by to pick him up after the meeting was over. She's an f'ing Hegre girl (NSFW)! I don't mean that in the sense than she's been in front of the camera, but by the Invisible Pink Unicorn (BBHHH) she should be. Tall, willowy, blonde, gorgeous, clothes impeccably stylish, with librarian-fetish glassses. Cheekbones of doom!

I just don't get the whole Billy Joel Effect. (Come to think of it, there's nothing remarkably creative about this fellow either that I know of. He's a middling-level ruby coder.) It makes me think this whole goin'-to-the-gym thing isn't going to help. What's the point of being in good shape if it doesn't matter? Live slow, die old, and leave a good-looking corpse doesn't quite have the same ring, ne?