Day 8: Chutes and Ladders

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(skimmed notes and biblio for William Tydeman's The Medieval European Stage, 500-1550)
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: one egg, baguette, cheese, vitamins
lunch: I simply do not remember, but I did eat lunch
apartment clean: yes

My new hard drive has arrived, as has my old one. The thingy that Dell made me buy in order to extract the old data has failed completely, and so I dropped the old hard drive at the Used Computer Store on Shatuck (for a forty-five-buck diagnostic, they said they'd give it a shot) and moved on as if the data was lost for sure. I've kept various projects -- my dissertation, my play, my National Novel Writers' Month project, this fitness blog thing, etc -- in purgatory for weeks now, and they're all too time-sensitive for that. So I'm calling it a done deal, and if the brain cavalry does come riding in at some point, all the better.

Or, rather, another day of re-organizing and backing up everything. I'm technically posting this on Monday, two days after my last trip to the gym (this, like the prior few posts, are backdated because of all the computer trouble). And I've spent the last 48 hours installing Windows 7 (might as well do it now, and yes, it is much better), adjusting and replacing various programs, and then sifting through all the data I have left, salvaging what I can, and organizing my entire external hard drive while I was at it (except music, which is an ongoing project and all doubled on Ara's Mac anyway), so that future backups can be quick, easy, and frequent. Then I triplicated all scholarly and non-scholarly writing onto my flash drive. And I uploaded most of my photos to Picasa, in neat, safe little albums that will sync to my hard drive periodically.

I have been sitting here at the living room table, doing all this. And there's still more catching up to do. But I'm glad I'm finally moving forward, yo. And I get mad props for continuing the fitness thing into a second week, even as my data disappeared beneath me.

Day 7: The Date is a Lie

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Lambert Danaeus's "On True and Christian Friendship")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: Mom's pumpkin bread, vitamins
lunch: tapas at the Musical Offering Cafe
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 6: The Date is a Lie

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike, 15 mins elliptical
(read Gilbert Walker's "A Manifest Detection of Diceplay")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I had limited computer access this week while I waited for my new hard drive from Dell. I'm posting these entries after the fact, but I promise they're all true.

Day 5: Bakhtin Stings

cardiomachine: 20 mins bike (no elliptical: there was a long waiting line, and I had run out of reading material)
(read Mikhail Bakhtin's "The Role of Games in Rabelais")
stretching: yes
pushups: 20
crunches: 30
breakfast: leftover miso-cornmeal porkchop and Annie's mac and cheese, vitamins
lunch: leftover slider and fries from the gourmet burger place on College Avenue
apartment clean: yes

I so almost did not make it to the gym today. As in I didn't make it there until about 5:30pm, when the post-work rush makes the place very crowded, and when the people who run the place do not adjust the lights for the fact that the sun has long set below the skylights, so the place is just a sweaty tired and dim chore. But I went.

Don't judge me for cutting out the elliptical for time's sake. The only way I can even allow myself to go to the gym is because I spend the majority of my time there going through dissertation-related reading. It is just too boring otherwise. Meanwhile, Bakhtin's writing is so fucking frustrating that it made me pedal extra fast on the bike. I mean, he is the classic example of a 60's/70's French theorist whose sense of fact-checking and objectivity is more unreliable than that of the medieval period which he studies.