Techno Nonsense...and a Squirrel

I've just spent roughly three hours setting up a few links on my blog, plus an hour doing things to encourage traffic to it. Really the way I wanted to spend half of my Memorial Day weekend Sunday! I never thought that in the year 2005, with the whole thing of making computers easy for *normal* people to use, that I would have to dredge up memories of my college programming classes of 20 years ago in order to do a simple thing like adding links to my blog. I mean, HONESTLY! That's a pretty basic thing, although not so basic it's necessary for the blog to work properly. But the internet is all about links, after all!

But in less techno news: All this week, Tom has been working on getting our pool drained, cleaned, and refilled with *clean* water (it was turning into a swamp--YUCK!!). Finally got it filled up on Friday. Then yesterday, I was standing here in the dining room talking to Tom, and I looked over his shoulder and there was a squirrel frantically paddling around, trying to get out of the pool! So we fished the poor little thing out, and it was pretty nervous around us, but we went to the other end of the pool deck and watched it from a distance. It got itself dried out, and bounced off about its business after about twenty minutes. I was extremely happy to have found it before something bad happened to it...that is the worst thing about having a pool, in my opinion. It's not the cleaning or the maintenance, it's the drownings. (Especially upsetting for me, being what they call an ethical vegetarian--so please don't e-mail me with any animal-related tragedies.) But this story had a happy ending, so that helps (we hadn't put any chemicals in yet, so it was just plain water, fortunately, so the squirrel shouldn't have any problems later from that). And I saw a squirrel on our fence today, which may have been the same one we rescued!

And now for the topic that is the ostensible reason for this blog's existence.... We are at nine weeks into the BFL Challenge, and I am having what Skwigg ( http://skwigg.com/) said to expect: the week-nine recurrence of the "four-week freak-out." I just can't see any difference from the way I looked in the very beginning. Tom said today, when I was bemoaning this, that he could; for example, he thought my face looked thinner--but it isn't exactly my face that I want to change the shape of! We are doing photos tomorrow, so you will be able to see for yourself on the website in a few days. I did, however, have a minor revelation this weekend. I have had a lot of trouble going from eating once or twice a day (pre-BFL) to eating six times a day (as BFL instructs), so I need more food at one time when I do get around to eating than the amount considered a standard meal in BFL. The revelation was that if I eat what would be considered a normal meal (outside BFL)--which has been a necessity a lot since beginning BFL--I feel bloated and very unhappy with my progress. If I eat BFL-sized meals, and don't have anything "outside the program" to eat, I never feel bloated. It all goes together. Maybe on my next BFL Challenge, I will have it all figured out for myself and will actually show some results!!