Still here!

OK, the folks are gone so no excuse for eating non-stop. Managed to only gain back a couple of pounds while they were here. Back on the wagon. Sigh.

Urban Life

The Filipino neighbors - Alex's family - are playing mahjong on their back patio tonight. We joke about them sounding like a bunch of chickens, but really it's a nice kind of sound: exuberant, and perhaps mildly intoxicated. The cook - as we call him - is back again from one of the several-month stints he does on Alaskan fishing boats. Alex lives there with his girlfriend, her parents, and their one year old son Noah. And sometimes the cook. It's an eclectic neighborhood we live in but we know all our neighbors and there really aren't any bad apples. Music from the community center gets a little loud some Saturday nights, and the herd of drunken bikers firing up their choppers when the Queen of Hearts closes can be enervating. Hope, the 92 year old spitfire across the street is out working in her yard most days and likes to chat. Hmmm... I just looked up "spitfire" and the definition is more negative than I intended. She's actually quite nice, just shockingly active and sharp for her age. That's what I meant. Terri, across the other street, asked us what color we'd like her to paint her house since we'd be the ones looking at it. Funny. We seem to run into our friends from the cafe all the time. I almost ran over Nick the other day when he suddenly appeared from a side-street on his skateboard. He was too busy smoking and jamming out to some tunes on his comically huge headphones to notice. He and Sarah have a daughter, Coco, who is Austin's age. Nick still thinks he's 19. Toshi and her sons Cameron and Devin moved in with her parents John and Sylvia (behind us) a while back. I could go on and on, but this is starting to sound like the news from Lake Wobegon. Mostly I'm just rambling in a more or less continuous stream of consciousness as we contemplate maybe moving downtown to the Pearl in a year or two. That would certainly be a higher class neighborhood, and with a pretty great high school for Austin. But then, we know everybody here. This is the first time in my life that I've really felt comfortable with my surroundings. I think we all do. Hmmm...

The House Burned Down Today

Not really. Just checking to see if anyone's actually reading this. Hellooooooooooo???

Oh yeah, 193 lbs. today. Like watching a glacier melt.

The Drinking Man's Diet

Anyone ever heard of the Drinking Man's Diet? Looks good to me. Basically Atkin's with cocktails. While Googling how many carbs are in an olive (about 0.5 for green olives, practically 0 for black) I kept getting listings for calories/carbs in various Olive Garden dishes. Um, if you're trying to lose weight, don't eat at Olive Garden. Duh. 193.4 lbs. today.

Visual Aid

194.2 lbs this morning. I guess as long as there's measurable daily progress I can live with it. My face is noticeably less chipmunky and my jeans fall off without a belt now. Less than 30 lbs to go.

Food Poisoning

Lost a couple of pounds rather suddenly last night/this morning due to some bad ham. Not recommended.

New Scale

Pretty exciting, huh? I weighed 198.8 lbs at 5pm. At 6pm I weighed 199.2 because I drank some water. After going pee I was back to 198.8. Finally, an accurate (or at least consistent) scale. We'll see what it says in the morning.
Today I only walked 1.24 miles, but burned 2001 calories against consumption of - ready for this? - 759 calories. No wonder I feel faint. Everyone reading this blog (which means Cari I think) knows how stubborn I am and here's where it pays off.

End of Week 1

It's been about a week and I'm down about 8 lbs so far, but some of that's probably water. In the past, by eating zero carbs, I've been able to lose about a pound a day up to about 25 lbs and then it gets harder. I'm hoping the added exercise will speed things up. I don't have the patience for prolonged dieting and would rather just tough it out for few weeks. I realize permanent changes must be made as well, but I want to be at my target weight now, not a year from now.

I ordered a new scale from Amazon that will hopefully be more accurate and consistent so I won't have to guesstimate as much. (Is it so hard to make an accurate scale? The last one wasn't cheap and it just sucks.) When I get it, and assuming it lives up to all the gushing reviews, I'll start posting my weight as well.

Thank you Cari for reading my blog! :-)

2.25 Miles

Not so impressive really. But - 2045 calories burned against 1043 consumed - almost two to one. I have just enough energy to hold my head up and breathe occasionally. I need a new scale so I can see what I really weigh.

3.68 Miles Today

2.5 or so of these miles were at Silver Falls State Park. Doesn't sound like much, but a mile down into the canyon and another mile back up plus miscellaneous hiking around. Pretty grueling really but at least it was a nice day. Austin was worn ragged as well, so it wasn't just me. :o) Also, I only consumed 839 calories today (against a burn of 2649 calories) if I added right. Am I skinny yet? Not quite. Another month or so to go I think. Ugh. I haven't bothered to weigh myself 'cause the first few days are always all water loss anyway. Maybe tomorrow.

4.54 Miles Today

...and almost zero carbs. Do you know how hard it is to eat no carbs? Yeah, since if you're reading this you're probably related to me, you probably do. Speaking of which - is anyone reading this? Seems like mostly cobwebs and echoes in here. Spooky.

Improvement, but...

4.37 miles today - a marked improvement over yesterday. The bad news is that walking only burns about 85 calories per mile. Clearly I'm going to have to diet as well. To illustrate the point, look at the handy little Fitbit graph. Can you see the difference between today when I walked 4.37 miles and yesterday's 1.42 (the two right-most bars)? Not much, is it? The days where I did next to nothing aren't dramatically different from those when I was quite active This supports my theory that while exercise is important for other reasons, you can't walk yourself thin without also drastically reducing caloric intake. I'm consuming about 2500 calories a day and that needs to be more like 1500 to make any significant headway. By the way, did you know a grilled cheese sandwich has 400 to 500 calories? Won't be having another one of those soon. Likewise, our favorite Roundtable pizza runs about 350 calories per slice. Yeah, I usually have four or five of those. Ouch. Widmer Hefeweizen (my favorite beer) has 156 calories per 12 oz bottle. Not as bad as I thought. Could I just have ten of those a day and forgo solid food? Hmmm... Might have other, unintended consequences.

The Rest of the Story

As Paul Harvey and my sister Cari know, there's always more to the story. My sudden desire to lose heft isn't particularly sudden, and it's not just that I'm too flabulous for my own good. Yeah it's uncomfortable, unhealthy, and I don't like the way I look, but I'm having trouble walking again and that's just unacceptable. It has much more to do with bad knees than being overweight, but I can't help but think the extra pounds are just wearing things out that much faster. Austin seems to be looking forward to me using a cane (like Yoda!), but I'm not so hip (ha ha) on the idea. As it happens, I finally bought a folding cane to put in my backpack in case I get "stuck" someplace, but I'd actually be pretty humiliated to use it. So, there you have it: the carrot of looking and feeling better and the stick of, well, the stick.

Here We Go Again

According to my company's annual health survey and report, I am overweight. Not just overweight, but at the extreme, extreme end of the overweight scale just before it turns into "obese". Allegedly, the healthy weight for a man of my height should be somewhere between 132 and 167 pounds. I'm going to choose the upper end of that range, thank you, and select 165 as my target weight which means I need to lose about 40 pounds.
I bought a FitBit recently, which is like a pedometer for data geeks. I'll post how far I walked more or less daily and, on the off chance that anyone's actually reading this, you can cheer me on. Or not. Mostly, the point here is that the only thing worse than the humiliation of failure is public humiliation.
Above is a delightful little photo that Rudy snapped a couple weeks ago showing me and the similarly rotund pug doing what we do best: nothing. All I need now is a full length mirror in the bathroom and I'm set.

Darwinism

Yesterday I was feeling all ambitious and decided we'd lived here long enough without indoor stairs to the basement. I got as far as moving some wiring, relocating a post, and cutting an enormous hole in the floor with the big Milwaukee Sawzall I bought a couple years ago but never used. Sawzalls are handy for this sort of thing, for cutting cars or small houses in half. But you know those old cartoons where the cat/dog/coyote cuts a hole in the floor he's standing on and falls to his doom? Yeah, that's all I'm gonna say about that.

Summer, where art thou?

Statistics can be misleading, but these seem to tell the story...

Officially sunny days in Portland since April 1?: 4

Last June wetter than this one?: 1888

Current temperature July 4 at noon: 63

It's supposed to get hot in a few days so we can all start whining about the heat soon. :-)

Rain Barrels

So, I used maybe a thousand gallons of city water to pressure wash two of our 275 gallon rain barrels in the driveway yesterday. I felt like posting a sign that said, "Yes, I do see the irony." Anyway, I've decided to give up on harvesting rain water for more or less the following reasons (look Cari, it's a list!):

1. Our yard is minuscule and these things take up about 100 cubic feet apiece, plus the connecting hoses, manifolds, and other annoying trip hazards.

2. The yard is starting to look halfway decent and it's becoming more challenging to find aesthetically pleasing ways to camouflage four ginormous white industrial containers.

3. Rudy put in a sprinkler/drip watering system that pretty much obviates the need for all that extra rainwater. Or rain, for that matter.

4. There's already a giant white rain storage setup pretty close to us from whence our city water comes. It's called Mt. Hood.

5. I thought it would take a while to collect 1,100 gallons of rainwater. It doesn't. Two or three days usually does it. One if it's really pouring. And seeing as how nothing needs water in the winter when it's raining (duh), what does one do with the water from the remaining seven months of rain between November and June? Generally, we run a garden hose out to the curb where it runs into the street and down the sewer. Kind of like it would have done anyway. Without the barrels. And finally...

6. Nasty things happen to untreated water that sits in a big vat for months and months. Especially if the vat is translucent white plastic, letting enough light through for some amazing photosynthesis. Algae blooms explode into stringy fuzzy phosphorescent, pipe-clogging goo and by spring, the water has more or less solidified into a murky biomass. Interesting I suppose, but not terribly useful. So, then I use maybe a thousand gallons of city water cleaning them out every year...

Hmmm. Maybe I'll look into solar panels...

Terraplane

I feel like I grew up with this car. Well, not this car, but one just like it. We went to watch motorcycle races yesterday and this was parked, inexplicably, in the middle of everything.

The Girl Effect

You may have seen this before, but it's still kinda cool...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIvmE4_KMNw&feature=player_embedded

Let Them Eat Cake

Austin baked an all-organic chocolate cake today for our anniversary (tomorrow). It was actually pretty good and I'm very proud of him. :-)

Two Fewer Rocks In My Head

...but two more holes. Since they weren't making me any wiser and were crowding my molars, I had wisdom teeth one and sixteen removed yesterday. I'd forgotten how generally unpleasant the whole anesthesia recovery thing is. Good thing memory loss goes along with it. Blech.

Austin Plays a Beatles Song

Life is like...

yep. You never know what you're gonna get.

My Christmas Lego Project

Not really what I probably should have been working on, but fun...

Cool Old Stuff

Rudy set up a very nice record player in Austin's room and they went record shopping today. Old stuff can be cool too.

Austin's Indoor Astronomy Project

Since we don't often see the actual sky around here...

Untitled

Why yes, it was that kind of day.

Shock and awwwww...

On the bus tonight (another story), I caught sight of the face of this old guy reflected in the little round mirror that's up front by the driver. He was of European descent, with unremarkable features but with sullen, tired eyes and a drooping head. I was struck by how sad he looked; like something terrible had happened. At the next stop the interior lights came on and I realized I was looking at myself. Ugh.