It took me about two weeks to fully get over that cold. There is a pattern here. I start exercising and watching my calories, and just when I�m starting to get somewhere, I get sick. I have to back off my routine to recover, and basically end up starting all over. There is an exception, though. I am building muscle, and the muscle doesn�t completely deteriorate in that amount of time.

The routine itself seems to weaken my system. Perhaps just the act of taxing my body enough to cause it to lose weight makes me so susceptible to illness that I can�t do it without getting sick. There has to be a better way.

This time around, I�m going to pay closer attention to my nutrition. I�m actually thinking about going mostly vegan for a little while. By vegan, I don�t mean I�m going to ramp up on vegan pastries, either. The point is to be healthier.

I had a gross experience with an egg about a month ago, so that hasn�t been an issue, lately. So, this really just means eating less cheese, which I�ve been doing, lately, anyway. I�m going to continue with the low-fat dairy products because that�s the best way for me to get enough protein.

Speaking of vegan pastries, I did make a bunch of cupcakes. One might even say that I went a little overboard with the cupcakes. I got a lot of compliments on the chocolate cupcakes, at a potluck last week, and I even substituted half the flour with whole wheat pastry flour.

The vegan butter cream didn�t do as well. Don�t ever try to make vegan frosting in a ridiculously hot kitchen. It was the first day of this current heat wave, and I didn�t think it was A/C time, yet. I totally misjudged, and ended up with butter cream syrup. By this time, turning on the A/C did nothing. It would have taken too long to cool down the kitchen, and I wasn�t about to stay up half the night waiting for the kitchen to be cool enough to frost cupcakes.

I stopped a few times to put the cupcakes and frosting in the fridge to cool down, and then took them out continue to frost. In the end, they did not look so pretty, but the frosting was whole, and frosting-like and on the cupcakes.

Anyway, as much as I enjoy eating and making cupcakes, the cupcake parade has to stop, for now. I can make them vegan, I can even add whole wheat flour, but it�s still a cupcake.

I can�t take them to work, either, because half of those ingrates are on a diet, and if I wave too many empty calories in front of their faces, they�ll eventually crucify me, for real.

By the way, you know it�s hot when the cat goes over and sticks his face in front of the A/C vent.

I�ve been feeling weird, lately. Not like myself, at all. The problem that I�ve been having with insomnia for the past couple of months is fairly unusual, for me. Well, it depends on how one defines �unusual.� I had insomnia for years, from the age of 6 to the age of about 18. When I went away to college, I started sleeping through the night.

I�ve had occasional relapses, the string of two or three nights, but it always went away. For it to go on for months is rather unusual. I can�t think of what triggered it.

I�m sure the lack of sleep is not helping with my susceptibility to illness, either.

You know, about five years ago, I entered that time of life when one knows a lot of people who are getting married and starting families. It�s still going. It�s amazing to me how quickly people will pair off and marry, as soon as they hit their thirties.

Now, the divorces are coming. This year, two couples that I know, that got married approximately five years ago are getting divorced.

Wow, you hear things about that 50% of marriages end in divorce statistic, but you never really expect to see it. Sort of like the loch ness monster, or an insurance company covering a cost; they tell you it�s real, but it�s too hard to believe, until you�ve seen it with your own eyes.

Seeing this makes me glad that I got the whole marriage and divorce thing out of the way early in life. Of course, it always sucks to have your life completely decimated, no matter the age, but I think that getting divorced when I was 27 made me feel better about rebuilding. I was on the total-annihilation plan, though. I walked away with nothing, which will probably not be the case for these people.

In a way, I�m glad that I had that experience. Sometimes when I start feeling cranky about having to make a living, and start feeling regretful that I didn�t give up on the idea of love, and catch myself some rich husband to support me, I remind myself that, at one time, I did have that, and I didn�t like it so much.

Oh, I don�t mean that I was so wealthy that I had nothing to do but sun myself on a yacht and order around the servants. I could not work, and still be fairly comfortable.

Bad marriage aside, I was never really comfortable with that arrangement. I worked off and on, built skills, acquired experience, etc. There were other times when I didn't work, as well, and that always put me on edge.

I know why, too. Anytime you are financially dependent on another person, that person can always wipe you out, and I was just waiting for it to happen.

Part of it was that I always knew, deep down in my core, I just knew. The other part is that I don�t trust most people as far as I can throw them, marriage vows or not.

I�m getting better about the trust issues, I think. I find that most of the time, the easiest thing to do is to only give people power over things that I know I can stand to lose.

Well, it�s bed time for me now.

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