I'm going to the gym

Maybe I've turned a corner, or maybe I'm just looking at the next 24 hours (Girl Scout overnight--yikes!) and recognizing that I need to work off some stress before I go into that, but this morning I woke up and realized that I *wanted* (in fact, maybe even needed) to go for a run today. I hadn't planned on this since I volunteered at the book fair at Claire's school this morning and can't really justify that amount of time away from work, but I'm going anyway. This will be my fourth trip to the gym this week (although I think Emily has me beat--it looks like she's been just about every day!), so I'll be keeping up with my minimum number of aerobic sessions each week that I'm aiming for. That was a really convoluted and badly written sentence. Sorry.

Unrelated: I just signed Connor up for swim lessons! I've been looking for a program for a while that would be able/willing to teach him, and it turns out there's a program based in Ellicott City/Columbia that specializes in teaching kids with special needs to swim. It ain't going to be cheap, but it'll be worth it if we can get him to the point where we don't have to fear for his life when he's around a pool or lake. How cool is that?

And more related: I heard about a device this week called the Bodybugg that is supposed to help with weight loss by tracking your actual energy expenditure and measuring that against the calories you're taking in. It's a little device that you strap onto your arm and it measures motion, skin temperature, skin conductivity and things like that to determine how much energy you're using. You plug that information into a computer program along with your food intake and it compares what you burned to what you ate. I was skeptical until I read a review by a real person, who said that as long as you're completely honest about what you're eating, it seems to be pretty accurate. I don't think I'm ready to drop $250 to get this information, but I thought it was cool that there's a commercially avaiable gadget that will tell you how many calories you're actually burning (instead of just guessing based on what you think your activity level is and how hard you ran on the treadmill).