Well, it's the 14th of February and none of you bitches bought me a card, so here's a romantic poem, actually a sonnet, for women everywhere who don't know what they are missing...

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Shall I Compare Thee (Sonnet XVIII)
by William Shakespeare

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Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
HELL NO!

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Okay, let's try that one again:

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Shall I Compare Thee (redux)
by Nick Gisburne

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Shall I compare thee to a lump of clay?
Thou art more fugly and more heavy-weight
An arse that no mere bathroom scales can weigh
No sumo wrestler downs the pies you ate

Sometimes the sweat pours off when hot sun shines
Your gut blocks out the light, the whole room dimmed
That facial hair won't cover up your lines
You really need to get your moustache trimmed

But thy enormous belly shall not fade
Nor lose some weight by eating cheese on toast
You're putting half the country into shade
And your external size just grow'st and grow'st

So long as you can breathe you'll eat with glee
I have but one request - please don't eat me

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One more:

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A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns Nick Gisburne

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O my love's like a red, red rose
Covered in dirt and surrounded by pricks
Biiiiiiiiiiitch!

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Happy VD :o)

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Exercise update:
I suppose this fits in here, because next Valentine's Day I plan to be super-fit and getting dozens of offers... er, maybe!

So, if anyone's interested, my exercise and diet is going extrememly well. I started with the bike on 9 January, doing that every day until my resistance bands arrived on 22 January and I now do those 3 times a week, alternating with the exercise bike, also 3 times a week, and the seventh day when I do nothing at all.

With the bike, I've gone from 20 minutes on very low resistance, burning 290 calories, to my current 40 minutes on much higher resistance - today I pedalled for 20 km (12.5 miles) and clocked up 1049 calories! There are a lot of different programs on the computer console, so I change them quite regularly, just to keep it interesting, and push myself a little more each time I change it.

The bands take me longer, but I went from a 30 minute workout to a 60 minute one, which actually takes me about 80 minutes. I also keep upping the resistance on those because some of the exercises start to get to the point where I am doing 30 or more reps before getting tired, so at that point I add more resistance and go back to fewer, but harder, reps.

I mentioned before that I have a punch bag, but the damned wall fixing for it has still not arrived, so I've not used it yet.

The diet is cool, I'm not feeling hungry, but eat ridiculously small portions when compared to the great hub-cap size dinner plates of old. All good, tasty, healthy stuff. And as well as losing pounds in weight, I save pounds in money because the food goes a lot further. The key to not getting hungry is this: drink lots of water. And drink it from a water bottle, not a glass, because then you just take lots of little sips through the day, you don't get fed up with it, and it all adds up. Er, and you need to pee a LOT more, unfortunately!

I've lost something like 11 pounds so far, most of them since I started with the resistance bands AND the bike together. I suspect that before that I was so out of shape that I wasn't able to push myself far enough to actually lose much weight, but now the sweat literally pours off me, so it's all definitely going!

I saw this quote today which I'm going to retrospectively adopt as my exercising/diet motto:

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."

Mark Twain

I like that quote because the big task is to lose a shed-load of weight, which I'm now achieving, in little steps, daily. I'm just glad I'm doing this, because I feel a LOT better in myself. And one last point is that because I have more than one type of exercise equipment I don't get bored. I had a day, last week in fact, when I really couldn't face the resistance bands, so I just got on the bike instead that day. And I have one day a week when I don't do either - luxury!