This time around, I’m riding the bike for 25 minutes (works out to about 7-7.5 miles) while watching episodes of Stargate SG-1 – I got the entire series from Amazon for half off during a recent sale. Generally I ride for 50 minutes (2 episodes) on evenings that I’m home, and so far we’re to episode 17 or so.

As for the diet part, we’ve been eating at home more frequently, which is a good thing from both a financial and health perspective.

I haven’t lost a whole lot of weight yet – whenever I start exercising, I lose fat and gain muscle for a while. My end goal is going to be to get to somewhere close to where I was in college, when I went to the gym every day of the week before my first 11AM class.

What I’ve been doing every other morning is loading up an episode on the TV and watching it while running on the treadmill. Each show is about 24 minutes, which is enough time to get up to quite a sweat. This morning I did a mile and a quarter at five miles an hour then slowed down to three miles hour, then did another quarter mile at six. My biggest problem previously when running was that I focused too much on my physical condition and would wimp out after 15-16 minutes.

The best thing about anime is that it is subtitled. When I watch it I don’t necessarily have to listened to the audio, which is very important when you’re pounding away on a noisy treadmill. I would assume you to do the same thing with other subtitled video.

I’m going to see how well this works – so far I’ve been very happy with my progress.

I got Amy kind of hooked a few months ago – we’ve watched Kokoro Toshyokan, Maria-sama ga Miteiru, Princess Tutu, and Rose of Versailles, and started in on Shoujo Kakumei Utena (until I ran out of DVD’s during the Black Rose arc), and some other random stuff (mainly Ghibili movies).

The new fall season is upon us, so we watched a few first episodes on fansub (links are to the japanese sites for each show):

Ginban Kaleidoscope – Figure skating girl who goes to catholic girls school has a hard fall on the ice and gets possessed by a dead Canadian boy. Go figure. It’s not as weird as it sounds. Amy and I made it all the way through this one. The animation quality is pretty poor but watchable.

Black Cat – Fighting show. Turned it off after about 30 seconds.

Aria – Sci-fi show, but very slow. Girl works for little alien, helping with a gondola business in a venice like city on a different planet. Goes faster than Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, but slower than Kokoro Toshyokan, and has a very nice color and character designs. We got about half way through before Amy decided it was too slow and I stopped it.

Prayers – Sci-fi fighting show with music. Lasted about 5 seconds longer than Black Cat.

Blood + – Watched this with Lucas a few weeks ago. It’s basically a remix of the Blood OVA, so it’s a vampiretastic mahou-shoujo horror show. The dialog needs work – if you think the main character is going to say “BLOOD”, she will. May possibly be interesting, depending on if a plot actually occurs.

Paradise Kiss – (also watched with Lucas) Studious high school girl is accosted by a bunch of fashion/design school students, and gets persuaded to model for them. Very high production values, and interesting characters. Quite possibly worth watching – I think I might try this out on Amy.

Mushishi – (watched with Lucas) Guy hunts forest spirit things called Mushishi, who only he can see. Pretty show with unusual character designs, but kind of creepy. May be interesting.

So, there you have it – a little slice of what I like and don’t like. As a note, I don’t really mind mech or fighting shows, provided they have a good plot. The problem is that’s a rare combination, found only in shows like RahXephon or Gundam 08 MS.

Overall, this season looks like it’ll be ok – 2 or 3 watchable shows is a pretty good ratio.