Diets, yoga and life in general

I ate a gingersnap today. It was stale, but I dipped it in coffee and it tasted pretty good. And then the guilt hit me--a cookie is not on the diet I've sort of invented for myself--no bread or rice or pasta, only occasional potatoes, no ice cream sundae every night (okay, I really was doing that, but they were very small sundaes), and no bread and butter at ten o'clock at night (especially bad, since the kids always say, "Have a little bread with your butter, Mom--I really like butter). And no eating after seven or eight at night. I don't weigh daily, so I have no idea if its working or not, but I feel better about myself and feel thinner--which of course can be horribly misleading. I also heard the other day about a woman who lost 40 lbs. in ten months or so by doing yoga faithfully--and I'm doing that, though not daily. I alternate with my bike so that I get the cardio--I do four miles in 20 minutes at an average of 11 mph and at the second level of resistance. No one has told me if that's good or bad, but it seems pretty good to me. So then tonight I had that ice cream sundae--hey, its Friday and I needed a splurge. I feel much more guilty about the gingersnap than I do the sundae--no carbs there!
This weekend I'll cook meals pretty much on my diet--open-faced egg-salad sandwiches with smoked salmon and fresh tarragon, accompanied by gazpacho, tomorrow night for old and dear friends, and Sunday a leg of lamb with a potato/onion/tomato something--you put the vegetables in a baking dish, layering with thyme, then put the lamb over it on a cake rack and roast the whole thing, so the drippings go down into the vegetables. This is in part a splurge for me--we frequently had leg of lamb when I was a child, and I love a cold lamb sandwich--and a thank-you to my neighbor Jay for taking Scooby to the groomers.
The AgentQuest listserv that I'm on has been kicking around the term "postmenopausal woman." One of the writers wanted to use it to describe her heroine in a pitch to an agent, but most of the others felt the word was a pejorative and conjured up bad imagees. The originator replied she meant it to imply zest for life and later explained how wonderful her life has been since 50. I totally agree with her--these are the happiest times of my life.
Fridays are sort of like my vacation. I worked this morning and did a lot of planning for the spring '09 season (we have to work way ahead), went to one grocery (another tomorrow), and did manage to go through a very short (56 pages) manuscript for the second time. But tonight I'm indulging, reading the Deborah Crombie novel I bought earlier in the week and enjoying it, though I have some questions about structure. I've been embroiled in an e-mail argument with an old friend in El Paso about Cormac McCarthy--a recent article, by another friend of mine, suggested that McCarthy ought to go back to being a recluse instead of appearing all over the place on Oprah, etc. My El Paso friend found that mean-spirited and launched a lively defense of McCarthy and his brilliance as a writer. Frankly I've never thought that--he's way too bloody and graphic in his violence for me, and I thought All the Pretty Horses was affected rather than natural. Besides, his emergence as a media star after years of shunning everything public has a sort of unbelievable air about it--like his agent convinced him. But my friend beat me down, and I finally agreed to disagree. I talk with people who think McCarthy's work is great, but I also talk with as many or more who have no interest in hm. The world of literature is amazingly lively.