Happy St. Patrick's Day

I lost 5lbs this week! Tuesday is my official weigh day and I shed 5lbs. Not too bad! That's like a thing of flour. It makes me feel like my getting up early to workout is working out and is definitely a motivator when that alarm goes off at 6:07. Of course I ate one and a half doughnuts, 2 pieces of pizza, a beer, and then a burger and fries tonight, but what are you going to do? It's St. Patrick's Day. If god gives people fasting for Lent a dispensation I think I should get one too.

I've wanted to write a post about the economy since I decided to start this blog. The recession/depression/run of bad luck that we're having now is really scary. My company is doing well and we're very lucky. Everyone in the company got a (fairly modest) bonus last week, thanks mainly to the success of our biggest title. However, things aren't so good elsewhere. The company in the offices downstairs from us laid off 100 (!!!) people last week. The Metropolitan Museum's book buying office laid off 3 people out of the 7 or 8 that work there. And overall you just see a general sense of panic.

New York Magazine had an interesting little piece about how people in NYC tend to panic more and about how much worse the impact if the recession seems to be in NYC. It's crazy to go to work every day and hear about how much money we're making, yet we're still in this recession mode and everywhere else I look there is bad news.

All that said, one thing did make me feel a lot better. The interview with Ben Bernake on 60 Minutes this week was fascinating. If you haven't see it you need to check it out. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know much about how the Fed worked before last week's 60 Minutes and I'm even more ashamed to say that I didn't know anything about Ben Bernanke until this week. Since he was appointed by Bush I assumed he was an under-qualified-corrupt-idiot, but apparently he's not at all. I was very impressed and reassured.