Day in the Life of an Idiot

I decided that the long walk that Mason and I have planned at the Minnesota River Valley Wildlife Preserve today is the same as jumping around at the gym for an hour this morning, so I decided to skip the whole gym thing. Besides, I'm getting disheartened. I can't seem to shed a single pound of fat. I've been eating really carefully and excercising like a fiend and the scale stays the same. I mean, I gave up drinking pop entirely. I eat my veggies. I cook from scratch nearly everything we eat. I feel like I've done about all I'm willing to do. Give up my high-calorie coffee drink? Screw that. I have to have one vice. And, besides, I have one cafe Vienna a day. It's not like I guzzle sixteen frappacinos a day.

sigh.

In other news, I just printed out the story I'm going to pass out at class tonight: "On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi" (William Tenn) which is one of my all time favorites. It's the longest story I hand out, but it's also one of the most humorous. I think I may break with my syallabus and hand out "World Well Lost" by Theodore Sturgeon after that, since I'm kind of on my politically/ethnically themed stories right now. We're still having a semi-lively debate/discussion about race in SF/F on SF Novelists. A woman who identifies as a European African who grew up in South Africa during Apartheid has really moving response. We must have been posting at the same time, because I didn't see hers when I posted mine. Anyway, I think she's absolutely right. "Stock-standard" races and cultures have had their day in SF (and hopefully in American politics.)

Speaking of, I'm still incredibly nervous about the upcoming election. I even saved the ACLU's "protect our vote" phone number into my cell phone. I can't imagine that anything dire is going to happen here in Minnesota where we have paper ballots and a history of strong voter turn out, but... I don't know. This is such an important election. The good guys HAVE to win. It all makes me bite my nails.

In other news, Mason has been complaining of a stomach ache a lot at school. I don't know what to make of that. His teacher says it comes on after lunch and she's sent him to the nurse a number of times (although recently because he cried so hard he made himself hot... he apparently took a bite of snack before he was supposed to and completely freaked out -- he is desperate not to be a "bad" kid or get into trouble.) Which makes me wonder if it's stress. He never, ever complains of a stomach ache at home, and though he did get that stomach flu that went around, it seemed to pass (no joke intended) in a day. Of course, Shawn found an article in the New York Times about kids and kidney stones, which has me worried about that now. This is less hysterical than it might seem. Mason was born with a condition called "hydronephrosis," which is a fancy way of saying one of his kidneys doesn't drain properly. Stomach aches are something we need to worry about and kidney stones would be a real problem for him, particularly if they occured in his good kidney.

So... we're going to make a doctor's appointment for him, probably for some time early next week.

I'm off to go write now. Hey, for those of you who care... my plan to work as Tate one day, and as Lyda the next seems to be working out (knock on wood.) I'm making progress! Whoot.