I have a cold.  One of those irritating illnesses that doesn’t seem much of a problem until I try to do something.  Then I start to sneeze, my eyes water, my nose runs, and my temperature rises.  It’s boring and it’s making me grouchy.

I like to make cakes.  I find it fascinating how they change in the oven.  Today I made two cakes before lunch.  I don’t normally do that but I had plans to take them to my friend’s house.  It turned out that I wasn’t able to go but Marty took most of the two cakes with him.  I just have to resist the pieces that he left behind.

For the past week I have been exercising more than usual.  This appears to be making me hungry.  I’m not really sure what to do about that.  When I’m in Japan I am very careful with my diet and I don’t know how much extra I can eat to compensate for the additional exercise.

The other problem I am having with exercise is the amount of time it takes.  I spent an hour and a half exercising and about another 40 minutes getting ready to exercise and getting cleaned up afterwards. I imagine that I won’t do this much exercise every day, but then I didn’t plan to do the aerobic exercise today.  It seems that exercise may also be addictive.

I haven’t had any problems following my weights program for the past 5 days but day 6 was terrible.  Instead of doing one set of exercises followed by a rest period I got to combine exercises and to work with no rest period.  Marty actually came out of his study to find out what I was doing as he could hear my laboured breathing through the door.  He told me that it’s called supersetting.  I don’t feel at all super and  I am really glad that day 7 involves resting my muscles and stretching.

I should have looked at the structure of this program before starting as Monday would have made a better rest day because the gym is closed. I may not have to lift weights tomorrow but it won’t be that much of a rest day as I still plan to do an hour of aerobic exercise at the gym.

I’m going to be spending September at home so it’s time to get serious about exercising again.  I have a book called “Smart Girls Do Dumbbells” that contains a 30 day plan to improve my muscle tone.  I have learnt how to do most of the exercises but I have never managed to do this work-out for 30 consecutive days.  I’m going to try to do that this month.  This means getting over my shyness at using free weights at the gym.  I have a small set of dumbbells at home but I need a wide range of weights if I want to exercise all my muscle groups and buying them would be silly when the gym has many more than I could afford.

I managed to complete day 1 but I wonder what my motivation will be like a week from now?

(Actually since I’ve had problems with both the network and my blog this week I wasn’t able to post this on Wednesday.  So far I have managed to do this for 5 days in a row.)

I submitted my 10 Things To Do With A Conference T-shirt talk to YAPC::Asia.  I could give this talk in English, but I’ve been in Japan for over three years now and I think it’s time to attempt a Japanese talk.  There is no way that I am ready to give a full-length talk in Japanese but I should be able to manage 5 minutes.

I have written the talk description in Japanese, which I will include in this post, and today I started translating the talk.  There is no way that I can ad lib in Japanese so this is going to be my most prepared talk I have given since I stopped doing public speaking competitions!

会議のTシャツでできる10の事。

私は今までにYAPCの二十の会議に出席してきました。ですから会議のTシャツが山のようにあります。今からお話するのは、そのTシャツを私がどうしたかについてです。

I had friends over for dinner tonight and I decided to make the first chocolate cake I’ve made since moving to Japan.  I have been making fruit cakes that involve a lot of preparation and thankfully the chocolate cake was much quicker to make.  One of my friends was concerned with my obsession for removing fat from cakes but this is one cake that really needs the butter.  It was moist, rich, and incredibly yummy.  It’s not something I would make all the time but it makes a great special occasion cake.

When I moved to Japan I put a lot of my clothes into vacuum packed bags.  Today I decided to go through the ones that aren’t open yet as I need to find some storage space.  My bedroom is full of clothes that I like, but don’t fit.  And since I managed to put on the wrong jeans today, and they nearly slid off as I was taking a parcel from the postman, I need to sort this out.

I’ve also decided that if I can store something in a plastic bag for nearly four years that maybe I don’t need it, or won’t want to wear it again.

I had three large bags of clothes to go through and it took me a few hours as it’s just too hot.  It’s too hot to carry arm loads of clothes and much too hot to actually try the clothes on.  But in the end I got through them.  I have some things that I will keep that don’t get worn often, like evening dresses, and I also have my wedding dress and some clothes that have sentimental value.  The rest of it appears to be mainly winter clothes that do actually fit, but I’m not sure how many I should keep.  I threw out a whole bag of ugly as really I don’t need to keep ugly clothes in my closet.  I had a suit that appeared to be in RUC green.  It’s a truly horrible muddy green colour and the suit is now in the bin. (For those people who didn’t grow up in Northern Ireland, RUC stands for Royal Ulster Constabulary, and used to be the name for the police force.)

I also had some clothes that I have never worn.  I had two pairs of three quarter length trousers that looked ridiculous.  I think it’s because they are actually too long, and end up looking like trousers that are a bit too short.  They make my legs look huge as they accentuate the large muscle at the back of my calf.  I could alter them but I don’t like short trousers and they would have made ugly wide shorts.    I have no idea what I was thinking when I bought these, but I was probably trying to find something that could be described as summer clothing.

Actually after spending the afternoon in my closet I think I hate clothes.

I bought a copy of Mary Berry’s Baking Bible at the weekend and today I made the almond and chocolate chip cake.  It was incredibly easy to make, as all the ingredients are put in one bowl and mixed together, and it’s lovely.  Maybe a bit too lovely as I’m craving a second slice.

Learning to make new desserts is one of the objectives on my 101 list, but I can’t make too many cakes as that would be a disaster for my diet.  I also want my cakes to have less fat than the one I just made so the next time I make it I’m going to replace the butter with mashed bananas.