It’s nice that the heat is free in this apartment but we can’t turn it the hell down either. We have eight histrionic radiators which make a big hot fuss several times a day, which is great if you are a Sonoran lizard or a fondue or some other kind of heat-loving thing, but not so great otherwise. It gets worse as it gets colder outside, so if you’re cold in your apartment you should come on over, and open your pores and stay awhile. And then we’ll put some of that hot in a Ziploc baggie for you to take home.

Anyway. How are you guys? How about those Bear people not winning that super thing last weekend? We seem to recall hearing something about this.

I’m still doing This Thing I’m Doing, though the week after we hit the hundred-day mark last month Chris and I took a little break. We had Santullo’s and ribs and burgers oh my, and this time my stomach didn’t protest as much as it did over the holidays, so apparently I haven’t completely transformed into a lily-livered herbivore. I’ve been back on the wagon for a couple weeks now, so to speak, but I haven’t made much new progress yet. (Of course, the vegan wagon is probably not a terribly speedy wagon, you know? Because it’s not like you can use oxen to pull it.)

However, in totally old news that I have neglected to tell you, we made it through the “holiday survivor” challenge at our gym. That’s where they give you a nice little gym bag for not gaining several pounds of festive butterfat between late November and mid-January. We also got t-shirts for trying six new classes. I hope we get a chance to earn pants next, since the ones we bring to the gym were simply bought, with dirty old regular money and everything, and how can you expect to have a decent workout if you’re wearing pants you can’t respect? But whatever.

I was freaking out a little by the end of the challenge, because it was happening right around the time I had to fly to Albuquerque again. I wanted to do my final weigh-in before I left on the trip but the perky gym staff kept telling me, “Oh, that’s okay! You can just do it when you get back!” I wanted to tell them that no, they didn’t understand: I signed up for the Holiday Survival Challenge, not the Death Of A Loved One Endurance Challenge. But I got through them both somehow.

A few days after I got back, both Chris and I came down with some kind of buggy stomach thing that compelled us to sleep straight through dinnertime and most of the next day. When I could finally get myself out of bed I padded over to the scale. If I believed what the scale told me, I could say that I’ve lost twenty pounds since October, but of course I was dehydrated and the moment I actually ate something again, that number flitted back into purely hypothetical territory. It’s going to be awhile before it comes up again. In the meantime, though, we’ve been getting back to our Weights/Hateful Pop Remixes class (now with new remixes to hate!), and I swim whenever I can talk myself into it.

Plus, it’s so hot in here that whenever I shift around on the couch it totally counts as Bikram yoga.