Hopefully I can work on the infrastructure of the blog tonight – getting rid of those boxes around the pictures for a start..

Update: Woo Hoo! No more ugly boxes.

Well coming off my fast started pretty good, but by mid day I decided that I didn’t want to “overdo” my control so I thought I would cut myself some slack so that I wouldn’t feel like fasting was too much of a pain to do often.

Strangely, I thought of my body as a horse and my mind as its rider and I thought that maybe I should “give em some reign”. Show him that if he will obey when he needs to, I’ll give him freedom when it isn’t so important.

It is a good analogy, and I think I will use it more often going forward. But a half a pizza later, I realized that my horse is still wild. It hasn’t been broken yet, so I need to be very careful about letting go, or I’ll be going for another long ride and have to restart the training all over again.

Learning more about animal training might be exactly what I need to bring myself in line.

Of course, there is another way of looking at things that I like too. It’s from “Being John Malkovic” when Craig (the puppeteer) first successfully takes over John Malkovic’s body he explains how he did it:

“It’s all a matter of making friends with the Malkovich body,” Craig tells Maxine. “Rather than thinking of it as an enemy that has to be pounded into submission, I began imagining it as a really expensive suit that I enjoy wearing.”

I like that.  My body is an expensive suit that I like wearing. Now if I could just get my mind to tailor things up a bit and bring in the gut a few inches… I’ll be styling.

Ok, it was hard to get to the actual writing today. Still trying to improve the look of the website… got the opening fortune cookie graphic up, and did some small stuff, but most of my night was spent writing a letter to the parents of a friend that died over 20 years ago.

Apparently I do keep commitments to myself, I am just a bit slow.

Speaking of keeping commitments, I successfully fasted some 27 hours yesterday. Water only, except for 2 cups of green tea that I planned on having. I even flossed at the end of the day for good measure. I went to bed early thinking that I would be tired but I must not of been as I woke up a full 90 minutes before my alarm.

My body needed a break from all the stuffing I have been forcing down it. I kind of wanted to feel hungry so I could remember what it felt like. Not that I did, it wasn’t bad at all.

What was harder was not gorging myself coming off the fast. I have gotten to used to feeling really full after every meal and I am finding it hard to stop eating before I am bloated. But so far today I have done well. A couple of bananas, a salad with red vinegar dressing, come cottage cheese, and a small bean salad.

I feel good about my efforts and I am having thoughts of incorporating a fast in the middle of every week. The idea would be to ease in and out of fasting with days of all soup/salads and fruit and progress into bigger more complex meals on the weekends before getting simpler again and re-fasting.

This would make each day distinctive as to what type of food I would be eating and give my body time to detox regularly. Not sure I am ready to put it into practice, but I like the idea.

Ok. That’s all of the update that I have time for today. This feels like I am having a “soft opening” to the blog. Most of the next few weeks are going to be me talking about the things that I need to do to make this thing look and act right.

Like making it easy to comment – not sure why you have to click on an individual blog entry to make that happen.

Then, I also need to tie this into my twitter account and facebook page so that they show when I make updates. All in good time I suppose.

Well, well. Here is step 2, I have just set up the WordPress app on my iPhone so I can upload pics and blog mobile-ly. Excellent. Let’s try a picture…

“A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” — from Frank Herbert’s Dune.

I wish I had the time to take the “most delicate care” – but sometimes its hard to tell the difference between balancing and procrastinating.

So here I am. Starting before I am completely ready – much like having another child. Could I ever really be ready?

I am fasting today, for many reasons – I want to mark a break between the past and now, I want to clear my mind for the tasks ahead, and I am fat.

I have a lot to share, and I am looking forward to finally getting some of it out.

Well, there it is… a beginning.