I sit here eating jellybeans, which are free courtesy of the General Manager’s assistant Dorea. She keeps a small dispenser of them nearby.

See those last three jellybeans at the bottom? The red, orange and green ones? Yep. That’s the last handful of sweets I’m going to eat until I weigh 190. Crazy isn’t it? I didn’t plan this event when I woke up this morning. I’m just staying late as usual, finishing up some budget work, and realized I have 289 e-mails still to go through, plus tons of notes from my notebook and over 100 RememberTheMilk.com tasks. So, it’s become very clear to me that I will never catch up. So why wait until I’m caught up to finally get my workout and exercise plan into gear? It could take yet another month, and imagine how much I could lose in a month, especially the first month.

So, that’s it. I’m starting today, September 3, 2008, and plan on hitting my 50-pound goal on February 2, 2009. I’ll call it a Groundhog’s Day celebration.

I feel bad that I haven’t blogged since I was so upset about giving up the house, but hey maybe I’ll retro-blog. It’s better than no blogging at all. And I want to document our first month in DC, since the past 30 days have been such a life-changing event.

I added a reminder each afternoon to take some time to blog my thoughts. Whether I publish it or not is ok, at least that gives me a few minutes to destress and gather my thoughts.

This job is not what I had expected, but I’m still glad I made the move and took on the challenge. It’s a much bigger challenge than I expected, and the learning curve is much higher than anticipated. There’s over 50 web applications, programs, usernames and passwords I have to learn and remember. That’s on top of learning budgets, managing a larger team, understanding the DC market, working with Gannett Digital. And that’s all work-related. On the personal side, I’m trying to get used to wearing suits, taking the Metro to work and back, not driving more than a 100 miles a month, living together with Lindsey for the first time in 5 years, discovering all the wonderful resources in DC, going from a 3-bed 2 1/2 bath home with a 2-car garage and full basement to a 2-bed 1 bath apartment…that costs $500 more than my mortgage (that I’m still paying because the house isn’t sold yet). Yep, life change. But on top of all this, I finally got to put my mini-pool table in my deluxe cherry-oak furniture office!

And I put up a disco ball, too, but I think the general manager (my boss) hasn’t noticed it yet. He doesn’t really look up that high. It’s a pretty tall ceiling.

Lindsey will be here in a few minutes. She’s coming back from a dvmOurTime station event (Baby Boomer’s site powered by WUSA 9), and so we’re driving back together and I’m going to hit the gym and get this diet started. I’m coming off of a 4-day cold, which kept me inside the entire Labor Day weekend. And it was so nice here! Ugh. Now, Lindsey is coming down with something. Hope it’s not as bad as mine.