Todays music: Star Wars Phantom Menace Soundtrack

Week one of our healthy dare. I've been doing well except for two. I've been baaadd in the eating department. I haven't been eating too much, but too much sweet stuff. I'm working on it. I also didn't get any writing related work done this week, until tonight. I did get three chapters done. There's only two left.

On the exercise front, Tuesday I went to a Tae-bo class that I discovered my gym was holding. Actually, they have a room with a TV and the tapes available for use, and a group of people just meet at the same time to do them. I had never done Tae-bo before. The warm-up was just like many aerobic classes that I'd been in. Some of the kicks, off to the side especially, I felt like I was just flailing my leg about. I stopped during some of those reps and walked in place because I felt like an idiot. After I was through with the basic workout, I decided that I felt all right enough to go lift weights. That day I was scheduled to work my legs, and right then my arms felt worked out, but my legs could use some more work. They seem to be more resilient and I can lift more weight with my legs too. So, I did my usual workout, only skipping the cardio warm-up. The next morning I was so sore, that it hurt just to roll over in bed. But the worst areas were from my hips up. My stomach, back and arms hurt the worst. My legs hardly felt bad at all, only my gluteus muscles were slightly sore. The other thing that hurt was my ankle, the one that I broke almost a year ago in the car accident. It ached off and on all day long. It hadn't hurt like that in a while. I decided that Tae-bo just isn't for me right now. If it hadn't been for my ankle, I'd have wanted to do it at least once a week, but I don't want to re-injure it right now.

In the room where the Tae-bo tapes are, there's also Yoga tapes and a book. I'm thinking about trying that video. I've never done Yoga either.

In other news, I've been spending a lot of time with Z. I've started giving him left over meat that we were going to throw out as treats. He won't eat store bought treats. He usually sniffs them and walks away. Once I force-fed him one to show him that it was food and he ate it and another one after it, but he never ate another one after that. So, I've started giving him the meat and today I rolled some of the Milkbones(tm) in the fat of the meat and gave it to him. Maybe I can slowly work him off meat and onto the treats.

His training is going better than I ever expected. I've steered away from the negative reinforcement and only use verbal reprimand when he does something wrong, or, very rarely, a bop on the nose when he won't pay attention. He can now sit, sit-stay, lie down, down-stay, up (stand on back legs without jumping), and come when called after staying. Today we started working on two new things, one of which I don't think he's getting and so we tried something else. At first I tried to get him to walk on his back legs when he stands up, but he doesn't like staying up like that. He'd also get mad and be severely disobediant because he didn't understand why he didn't get the treat when he went up two or three times but didn't walk when I gave him the command. So we started working on down-come. This is where he lies down and crawls toward me. He's getting it, slowly. Another thing we worked on today is going from lie down to sit. For some reason, he didn't understand to do that. I'd make him sit, lie down, and sit again. He'd sit perfectly on command, lie down fine, but then stay lying down when I 'd say sit. I'd say, "No, Z, no, no. Sit." and he would cower as if he didn't know what I meant. I'd pull his shoulders up to a sitting position, say 'sit' as I did so and he still didn't figure it out. Once or twice I thought he had it, but then he'd go back to cowering again. It'll take a while to get that straight.

I can't think of anything really exciting going on around here. We went to see Castaway and James and I were extremely upset at the ending, but it was still a good movie.

I got several more crits back on, "The Wishers". I'm still waiting on two and I'll make my final decisions then, but most likely one character will need to be revised and maybe a few other changes. We'll see. TTFN!