Last Friday was the belly dance performance for which I had set the goal 'dance with bare belly' and for which I started loosing weight. Mission accomplished: I danced with bare belly, feeling very good about myself. I received a lot of compliments, both to my weight-loss and my dancing. Yesss!!

Total weight loss last Friday was 13 kilograms. I'd like to drop even more. I want to go below 70 kilograms. Some people seem to be afraid that I'll become a stick figure, but they do not have to worry. I'm not striving to weigh as much/little as I did when I was 16 (60 kg if I remember correctly, BMI bottom is 59) but I want to be completely happy* when I look in the mirror at my naked self. (* As completely as any woman will ever be about herself, that is. Let's be realistic.)

Aside from just loosing weight I want to keep working on my muscles and shape by continuing my sports and morning exercises (weight lifting, sit ups and taking a 30+ minute walk). There's some hard weekends coming up however. This weekend the missionweekend of EE and the weekend after that rehearsal weekend with Amersical. Both means snacks, semi-unhealthy food (someone thought it wise to have fries as an evening meal at Amersical...).

Work is going slow at the moment, lots of request from customers but getting a 'go' for a formulated workplan takes ages. And I won't start on something without a 'go'. Between work and sports/Amersical I'm doing 2 Coursera courses at the moment: "Introduction to Genetics and Evolution" and "Dino 101". Just for the fun of it. The first one is quite a challenge with lots of material per week and no feedback on how you did on the quizzes until after the deadline. Before the deadline you can try a 1000 times, however. The Dino course has all it's material online already and gives you feedback on your quiz directly after submitting, but you can only try a quiz twice. The Dino course is more about learning definitions and facts while the Genetics course is definitions and understanding of how/why certain calculations are used.

Well, enough to keep me busy. Tonight we'll watch the video footage of the belly dancing of last Friday. And after that I really hope we have a lesson with some new stuff. Last weeks have, naturally, all been about the performances and I could do with a bit of variation.

It's time to say goodbye to Mist (or 58 Dolle Grieten Zonder Rijbewijs, as the license plate reads), our mist-grey Kia Pride. She's behaving more and more oddly these days. First there was a soft whining noise when driving, now it is really getting louder and annoying. The hand brake seems to do less and less. With some effort you can push the car 'through' it. And when we wanted to go to Zeist for the Knalbal and had to pick up someone from the train station we nearly decided not to go because the transmission kept slipping.

Today Matthijs took Mist to the garage to find out if repairs were worth it. They are not. We'll be a happy 1000 euro's along to get her reliable again (new transmission, 4 new tires, new shock absorbers, brake check) and that is not worth it when soon she'll be rusting away for real (we already have holes here and there) and the 'distributieriem' (timing belt?) needs replacement in a couple of kilometers, or next year. Even with the 1000 euro fix she won't pass the APK this spring.

So, after this check for 30 euro's we now know that the brake is always down... which explains why pulling up at a green light is sometimes difficult. This does not make for 'green' driving and it won't get any better all by itself. And the transmission can give out any moment, which means that the car will roll out and then never move again. We won't risk this. So, even though Mist is still parked in front of our house, we're practically car-less now. We do not want to drive any longer trips than within Amersfoort itself.

The garage had a car for sale. An Opel Astra 1.6-something for 850 euro's. Perhaps we'll go for a test drive tomorrow. I want to get this fixed before our first larp in April, but with some luck even before the EE weekend next week.

Now with the Extinction stress behind us my body decided it would be a good time to have one of those horrible colds again. So I'm sniffing and coughing and feeling like someone stuffed my head (through the nose) with cotton-wool. Bluch. This does not help for a good sleep, so it is self maintaining too.

Extinction went quite well. I was really nervous in the weeks up to the event because our plot was quite complicated, and would they like it, and would everything fit like it should. Etcetera. It did. I'm not on Facebook so I don't know what the talk is, but I did get some positive vibes while talking to people on the event itself. So yay! A good ending to all the stress writing and checking and rewriting, rechecking etc.

The tiles for the toilet are in. Another source of stress because we had to go get them on Thursday while we had better work on Extinction/work some more. Because on Friday we would leave for the event, on Monday the tile store was closed and on Tuesday Matthijs' father would come over to help us tiling. So we did a quick run just before closing time. The car was sagging so much that the bumper hit the sidewalk when we tried to park the car. But it survived yet again!

Unfortunately because of some trips to the hardware store we didn't get much further than 2 rows of wall tiles yet. Matthijs was gluing them in place while his father was sawing them. I was upstairs working. Since Matthijs had some work waiting for him as well he did not continue after his father had gone home. Next opportunity is tomorrow, due to all kinds of appointments and work. Will we have a downstairs toilet again before Christmas? I don't know yet...

Next up: bellydance tonight, birthday of a fellow Amersical member tomorrow, helping some friends with their move from Enschede to Hengelo on Saturday, Christmas dinner with Matthijs' old student flat Saturday evening and an as of yet blissfully empty Sunday. However, we have not cleared away our Extinction larp stuff yet and the attic and shed need some work too because of the Elder Sign project we had there.

Well.. back to work now. *Snirf*

Have a very nice new year!

Now with al the parties over I can concentrate on my diet again. I only gained 0.5 kilogram after Christmas and nothing after New Year's Eve, though I did not loose any weight either. Not bad for about 6 splurge moments in 2 weeks and no sports.

Now I have to get back on track again and see if I can drop to 70 kg before January 17th (belly dance performances), that's 2 weeks to drop 2 kg... but it is no hard goal with consequences if I don't make it. It would just be really awesome to have dropped 14 kg total since my last performance. I'm looking forward to comparing photos.

No specific 'good intentions' for this year, just don't get over the 74 kg again.