Actually, Acme, the move left both of us fatter than we had been in years. After so long in Ottawa, and with all the shenanigans surrounding release from the Army after 30 years of service, we were wined and dined a great deal during the spring and early summer of last year, to the extent that it seemed we were in one fancy restaurant or another pretty well every weekend for about two months. Then the move itself put us in hotels for almost two weeks in high summer, and eating all our meals in restaurants and diners. We both got seriously chubby.

When we finally finished unpacking the books (a job that took ages), Himself looked at me seriously across the dinner table and said, "We have completed the task of Moving To Stratford. It is now time to start Living In Stratford." Within a couple of days, he had entered into a contract with a personal trainer at the gym and joined the local hiking club. Then he downloaded MyNetDiary, a diet-tracking application, onto his phone and started weighing and measuring his food. He said it made counting calories into a video game.

Neither of us is any good at fasting. Himself gets grumpy and impossible to live with when his low-food light is flashing, and I find that I really must eat when my stomach starts rumbling. I don't have to eat much, mind you, and it's important that I wait until I actually feel hunger, but if I don't eat when those signals start arriving I am likely to gorge when I finally let myself eat at all.

With the kitchen renovation project and the redecoration of the rest of the house to manage, I do not really feel that the Moving To Stratford phase is quite finished, at least not for me. In fact, just the other day I found yet another box with movers' tape on it, cracked it open, and decided that its entire contents could go to the Sally Ann. I won't really settle until the bedrooms are patched and painted, and I've put up curtains in the upstairs windows.

It's another unseasonably beautiful day in Perth County, sunny and warm, so I have decided to jettison my original plan for extensive housework in favour of a nice walk downtown to mail my brother's birthday present. Yesterday's workout did not leave me with the stiff legs I suffered on Saturday, so my body has evidently decided to forgive me and get with the program.