I started back to work yesterday after 11 days in a row off work. I think I may have had 13 consecutive days off when Lennie was born and thanks in part to an additional hospitalization on Mleeka’s part, but that was hardly a relaxing break. This holiday season wasn’t altogether relaxing, but it was very nice.

We stayed pretty busy, going on a trip to the aquarium with Zac and Ella and family and going to a couple of holiday parties. Then we unloaded Lennie onto her Aunt Abbey for a day while we did some cleaning up around the house (our bedroom closet now looks like something off a home enhancement show). Then I spent the better part of a day shopping for and buying and returning (a defective) TV and buying a replacement and getting that installed. We now watch our 10 basic cable channels on a glorious 32-inch screen rather than the postage-stamp we had been accustomed to viewing. What a waste, huh? We also got a Playstation 2, having enjoyed hours of fun playing Andy’s (sorry, Mike, I know you recommended a modded X-box, but I just didn’t see myself doing all the work to mod it and I’m not into pirating games, so I figured I should get the same system several of my family members have so we could swap games, have big ass-whipping tournaments, etc.). So Mleeka and I spent a fair amount of time over the last week beating (almost) the 007 game we bought.

The best thing about the break was all the extra time I got to spend with Lennie. I’m pretty well accustomed by now to getting her up between 8:00 and 8:30 and hanging out with her until 9:00ish, trying to get some breakfast in her while watching cartoons together. But the last week or so, I had just hours and hours more time with her, and now that I’m back at work, I miss her. Even when I wasn’t actively playing with her, it was nice to watch her toddling around getting into various things and chattering about various usually unintelligible things.

She seems to me to be on the verge of a language explosion. She’s learned possessives, for example (the concept, if not the grammar). She’ll say “Daddy juice” when she wants some of my drink. And she keeps picking up new words (I bought some Wheat Thins this week, and she’ll run over to the counter where we keep them, saying “cacker”). She’s long said “up, please” when she’s wanted to be picked up or lifted over one of our gates, but now she says it (though she’s actually trying to say “help, please”) when she wants help with something like wiping her hands (she’s very picky about having clean hands). There’s lots more that’s not coming to mind, but she’s definitely getting more and more intelligibly verbal, and it’s fun to watch.

Last night, I was sharing some of my beverage with her, and we spilled it all down the front of her shirt. She immediately got up and ran into the kitchen and pulled a towel out of one of the drawers so she could dry herself off. It was a first and was very funny. She’s getting a sense of at-homeness, I think. She knows where things are and is starting to figure out how to take care of some things on her own. Similarly, when she’s got a booger, she’ll tell us now. The other night, when she kept dipping her fingers in some mustard (which she now favors over ketchup) and asking us to wipe it off her hand, I finally just gave her a napkin and showed her how to use it, and she made a pretty good go of it. Now she tells us when she’s pooped. She’ll come up to me and say something that sounds like her version of “apple” (which if you think about it, “diaper” and “apple” are pretty close linguistically) and then lead me into her room and lie there calmly while I change her. She’s not always so calm about diaper changes that I initiate. The next step will be to start getting the little potty out when she does this to help reinforce that association.

In other brain development news, she’s slowly getting her colors, and she’s pretty good at shape sorting and stacking. We got her one toy that’s four colored pegs on a little board. For each peg, there are different numbers of shapes in the corresponding color. The first time she played with this toy, she started putting the right color shapes on the right pegs. She continues to be a very good colorer and an able musician (she can now play the harmonica, the keyboard, a little xylophone, her drum, various shakers, etc.) and seems to have a pretty good sense of rhythm. We think we may have a little artist of some sort on our hands.

That’s it for now, I guess. Have to get back to work, which is unbelievably hard now after such a nice time off. Maybe I’ll go out today and buy a few hundred lottery tickets. Or maybe a philanthropist will venture across this post and decide to fund the further development of my obviously bright child by giving me enough money to sustain my family and play a more active role in her rearing. Here’s hoping.

In weight loss news, after a couple of weeks of pretty lousy adherence to the low-fat diet and a week off from the gym, I figured I’d be up 5 or 10 pounds, but I’ve held pretty steady, weighing in at 191 today. I’ve recently modified my workout so that hopefully my body will burn fat more efficiently. This should get rid of the remaining spare (bike) tire I’ve got and some other less than firm areas that I’ve had limited luck toning to date.

Sorry, Mike, but I seem to have misplaced most of those 13 pounds you asked me for. I’m down nine more pounds in the last three or so weeks. A week gorging myself in California oddly enough always seems to drop five or so pounds. Then I spent a week not eating much at all thanks to the plague that struck my family. Now I’m back more or less on track and am down to 189 after a two-week absence from the gym. The once-thought-unattainable college weight is four pounds away. Oddly, I think I’m still technically obese or borderline obese. I’d like to get my body mass index down to a reasonable range, and so my new goal is to drop to 170ish.

Don’t worry, I’m not wasting away or anything. I still have a pretty substantial girdle of fat around my midsection along with some fat I’m paring slowly away from my upper arms that I think will account for most of that. Once I hit or get fairly close to my goal, it’ll be all about maintaining and not about losing anymore.

That’s a 51 pound drop since September 3, when I began chronicling my weight loss. I’ve lost more than 20% of my body since then. That’s two toddlers, or a third of an average-sized man. I’m four-fifths the man I used to be.

So today I went to the gym. My plan for now is to cycle my way into the outer regions of fitness and then perhaps to add other things designed specifically to trim pudge here and there. The main focus is to get cardiovascular exercise, and if I can eventually get some muscle-tone, that’ll be an added benefit. So I got to the gym, checked in, and went to the cycling machines, which recommended that a person my age get his heartrate up to 154 and (as far as I could tell) sustain it for about an hour. So I ramped up and kept my heartrate up above 165 for most of the time, but I only cycled for about 25 minutes. I didn’t want to go into cardiac arrest on my first day, after all. I think it’s important to ease into this a little. I stopped way before I felt tired enough that it was imperative that I stop, and I think it was a good limit. I’ll do this for a week or so and then look at increasing to a tougher routine.

Lenny Kravitz’ album 5, it turns out, makes for great cycling music.

Once I had gone for about 25 minutes at a good rate, I slowed down for a couple of minutes to cool down, then wiped up my sweat puddle and headed down to the locker room. They had a scale, of course, and I weighed myself at 229. So I’m apparently down 18 pounds from two weeks ago, though I need to qualify that heavily by acknowledging that the weights were measured on different scales. I was dressed about the same on both days and my weight was measured at about the same time both days, so those variables aren’t a major factor. It’s not really about the pounds so much, though, as I’ve always been much heavier than I’ve looked. It’s gratifying to see progress, though, and I look forward to being able to measure progress (from one angle at least) on a regular basis rather than just every couple of months at the doctor’s office. I suppose I could break down and buy a bathroom scale.

On Tuesday, I go in to have my liver ultrasounded. My last two sets of bloodwork have turned up a high liver enzyme. This could mean anything, including things like Wilson’s disease, fatty tissue invading my liver (a likely candidate, I’d say), hepatitis (but not, as I tested negative for that), and cirrhosis (which isn’t always caused by drinking and which, when it is caused by drinking, takes really heavy long-term drinking but which, given some of my drinking history, is scary nevertheless; I don’t exhibit some of the usual symptons of cirrhosis, though, so I imagine I’m ok). We’ll see how it goes.