From an email I sent to Val today:

I'm really struggling with the weightlifting, and something just doesn't seem right. I've had to lay off lifting a bit this month because of Atlanta trips, but I'm getting exhausted during weightlifting sessions and it's not the kind that I get a second wind and bounce back from. Something's not right, and I don't know what.

There was more said than that, but it's unimportant. Val's response was unequivocal:

I know this body like I know my own. Boastful girl, you know better; bodies change as lives change. The man of six years ago is not the man of now, no more than you are the sum total of six years' worth of change on the body that married him on that July day.

Silly girl.

We sat across from each other in the restaurant, sharing guilty giggles over queso on conversations that cannot be breathed into other ears.

"You know me well," he said, swiping extraneous sauce from his lips with the nearest napkin.

When I slid the weight counters across the scale's slide and realized what the numbers meant, I didn't feel joy or excitement, or even my usual urge to get sniffly and teary. Just relief. I didn't care that it might've been - in all truth, probably is - partly due to water weight fluctuations. I'd finally made my second weight goal. Twenty pounds down.

I've been trying to grind my way through an ugly, nasty plateau since mid-May. By June 3rd, I was frustrated enough to write what became the entry "a knot in next week's rope," an entry that's gotten me more privately-emailed feedback than just about anything else I've ever written here.

(Those of you who have written - and I have not answered all of you - thank you. You know who you are.)

I'd fully intended for cat.net to stay silent until my return. Life rarely works out the way I planned it, though.

I loathe resorting to this, guys, but it's time. 'cat.net isn't on hiatus; it's just going to be quiet for the next week or so. I'm going to be in Atlanta for an extended period of time, DCTV and general techops stuff both need my attention, and my workouts are still eating up as much time as they usually do.I'll try to post something when I have a little time, and something interesting to say, but right now I have neither, and I'd rather not pretend otherwise.

"Oh, it can't happen to me," I said. "My trouble's eating enough calories to sustain my workouts, not paring down my calorie intake enough to make my exercise actually mean something."

Well, if I've learned nothing else from the month of May, I've learned that those statements are full of crap.