I am desperately behind on my television viewing.

I skipped the last four weeks of "Dancing With The Stars" out of sheer boredom.

Although I love "Heroes," I am now two weeks behind.

It seems the workaholism has creeped back into my life. However, it's what I call the good workaholism. Sure, the sweeps period means I'm working way more than the daily eight, but I've been devoting my off time to some projects that mean a lot to me.

First and foremost, I'm trying to get into shape. Hell, I say this every year at some point. Trick is, this time I have mastered two aspects of my diet that have always caused me fits. First, I have curbed my midday chocolate cravings with hard candy, which satisfies the sweet urge without all the calories. Second, I have eliminated ice cream for cereal.

Even a cup of Frosted Flakes, that yummy, sweet concoction of flakes and sugar that tastes GRRRRRRREEEEEAAAAAT! is significantly healthful. However, I've also significantly curbed portions, and I'm counting virtually every calorie for the sake of knowledge more than for anality.

The result is a tangible, non-dehydrated five-pound weight loss.

I have dipped from 215 to 210 in one month. I don't think that this drop is too steep. My exercise level has only been moderate, although I've found that the more I work out, the more I want to. It's not so much that it's addictive; it's that I find I can tolerate much more of it as I go along in addition to the fact that, yeah, it's addictive.

My goal is 175. Once I get there, I plan to pack on 15 pounds of muscle. Ripped. Torn. But, not like Rip Torn. Ripped and torn. You get the idea.

And, Britney Spears is my inspiration. I'm gonna marry that girl someday.

Headlines for the morning after:

I'm moving into a new phase of designs for ryanwelton.com, meaning that I'm headed for a new look. In an attempt to keep up with the blog joneses, I realize that my blog needs to incorporate way more photos. Images. Video links. The best blogs in the biz -- perezhilton.com, gawker.com, TMZ etc. -- all are image and video heavy.

One of my projects involves listening to as many albums from this year as I can in order to put together a Top 10 for 2006. Most of the albums on my list will be CDs that have pervaded my existence positively for some part of the past 12 months. The CDs need to have been either new this year or prominent this year, meaning that it could have been released in late 2005. So far, I have identified eight albums worthy of the list, a couple of which might surprise or stun you. Stun is probably a tad drastic.

Freelancing. I'm doing lots of that. I've got three articles to do for an edition of Practical eCommerce, so the writing chops are getting some work.

Lastly, snoozes. I'm getting as much sleep as possible, literally sleeping in to excess some days or going to bed extra early on others. I guess the transition I've made from this summer to now revolves around time management. For example, I spent three hours last weekend doing nothing but playing my guitar, which was time perfectly spent considering my growing fascination with the instrument, my steady improvement on it and the general zen associated with strumming, writing and listening.

TV be damned. I might not watch again.

Never worry. Idol comes back in two months. No chance I miss that.