Roseyland

Yeah, so I blogged every day in November and not once in December. I have a number of excuses, but none of them are very good. In order to get back into the swing of things, let me try an easy blog post to update you on all things Roseyland. God bless the bulleted list:

• I put up a Christmas tree for the first time this year. I actually liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It felt like Christmas lasted for the whole month of December rather than just a day or two. Plus, it became a project where I had to make measurements, comparison shop, and then buy accessories. These are the things I truly love.
• I travelled to Florida to visit family for New Year’s. It was fun, but it should have been warmer. I think the state of Florida owes me a refund.
• I’m on a diet. I weighed myself after New Year’s and discovered that I weighed more than I have ever weighed. Go me! My BMI is about 28. Last year it was 24. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at losing weight. I watch my calories, work out, and magically I’m thinner. This time I’m using myfitnesspal.com. This is a website that let’s you track your daily calorie intake and calories burned from exercise. They have a large database of foods and exercises, and even an iPhone app. The website calculates how many calories you should eat to lose a certain amount of weight, and then as you enter food or exercise during the day, it lets you know how many calories you have left. I think the technical term is “Easy-Peasy”. I’m going for a loss of 2 pounds per week. I’ve lost 5 pounds in the first week, that never keeps up though. You can follow my progress by checking out the badge over on the right.
• I’m reading SuperFreakonomics. The book Freakonomics is the closest thing I have to a bible, and SuperFreakonomics is just as good, if not better. Freakonomics is basically an economist analysis of the world. I love these books because they show how many of our preconceived notions are just plain wrong. I think these books should be required reading for anyone who wants to have an opinion. I also recommend anything by Malcolm Gladwell.
• I’m pretty sure that I’m going to Italy in June with my Mom, Aunt, and maybe a cousin or two. After going to London and Paris last summer, I’m afraid that I want to see the whole World, and by the whole World I mean Europe and Australia. My plan is to fly to Rome and stay in a vacation rental apartment. We will have 5 full days in which I would like to see: The Vatican, Ancient Rome, Ostia Antica, Tivoli, and maybe even a day in Florence. I’ve also been learning Italian on livemocha.com.
• I need you to watch Chuck. It’s one of the best shows on TV and if it get’s canceled, I’ll cry. You don’t want that do you? It’s on NBC, Monday night, 7C/8E. You can watch previous episodes on Hulu. I’m also watching Big Love on HBO, which is another one of my favorite shows.
• My Mom and Grandpa had an interesting discussion about healthcare over New Year’s. I stayed out of it, but it did make me think of a couple things. One being that we are all part of a system, and every “personal freedom” you take affects the “personal freedoms” available to others. The other thought I had was about complexity. There are a million different ways you can analyze our heath care issues, but the ultimate problem is that our health care system has grown into a very very complex system. The only way we will get out of this mess is to transition to a significantly less complex system. I can’t say that the current health care reform bill accomplishes this, but it still has my support. Partly because it does fix some significant flaws in our current system (pre-existing conditions, benefit caps), and partly because I think this is the best first step we are going to get at this point. This would be a good topic for a whole blog post, maybe I’ll write one.

That is all. I’ll write a real blog post soon. I promise.