Losing a part of me

I was slightly better yesterday than I was today. After my initial fear that I had nothing in the house, I discovered a piece of salmon in the freezer. I also had tomatoes and onions, and while that is not much, my mother used to make a lovely salad with just those two ingredients and seasoning. She called it Maichel, which is really just the Yiddish word for food. When I sent a picture to Leslie, she was impressed by what I had scrounged up.

After my class, I did go shopping. I now have lettuce and chicken and broccoli. Yes, I bought a handful of peanuts. Add to that, I also had an extra meal replacement bar. I was just a bit out of sorts last night. My weight stayed exactly where it was on the scale, and I know it would have been down, save for that late-night bar.

My class went very well… I think. In truth, an instructor might have his (or her) feeling, but you do not know how well a course is received until the students submit their evaluations, which I expect they will do this afternoon after class. I do know there was active participation, and that everyone completed the exercises that I assigned. I was also very pleased with the timing of the course – I have taught some classes in which I can go through three or four modules in a single day, so creating four modules was a risk. I was also worried that the exercises might be either too simple or outright ignored. They actually seem to have been well received, and there was active participation in the review process. I suspect that at the end of the class the students (and thus the customer who hired me) will be satisfied. YAY! With luck, they will ask me to deliver it again in the future. While I am being paid my maximum daily rate as an instructor, when you factor in the time it took to create the course, it drops me down to under my minimum daily rate. Essentially, the first delivery (this week) paid to create the material; another delivery would make it profitable.

On the other hand, while at the end of the class I was relieved and elated, I was also fried. I went shopping and then came home to make my salad. I tried to sit through my class in the evening, but I was just not in any frame of mind to focus on networking and subnetting and port security after the stress of the day. I sat on the balcony with a cigar and spoke with some friends I have not chatted with in a while.

That, by the way, is my plans for this evening as well. I will either be smoking on my own balcony, or with friends. That will be determined at some point today. I just know that the culmination of this class will be something to celebrate, and good cigars will be smoked!

Today is the one hundredth day of my diet. Truth be told, I have not achieved nearly the success I would have liked to have achieved by this point. Okay, that’s part of life… No, I did not get as far as I wanted to, but I got this far. The old expression, “Aim for the stars, and if you miss then you still hit the moon” comes to mind. No, I have not hit the moon… but I’m also no longer as big as it is. This journal is also less than eight hundred words from hitting the 100,000-word mark. As I have said before, I can be verbose. However, this time around, I am not just writing for myself. Each article that I post (and I have posted at least one article every day for the last one hundred days) is written into my journal in Microsoft Word, and is then transposed into my blog, www.losingapartof.me, which I hope might be an inspiration to someone. When I share my articles on Facebook, they get noticed. When I do not? Well, I still know that my biggest fan is reading what I write every day.

I am truly looking forward to this weekend and having this class in my rear-view mirror. I only hope that I do not stress-eat at any point today before it is over.

Have a great day folks!