Week 200 Update

It was 04:50 and 43° when I stepped up on Mr. Scale and he said, "186.0 pounds!"

It is hard to believe that I have been on my journey now for 200 weeks. If it were 200 days, that would be about 55% of an entire year. And yet, it is just a beginning. The journey is the destination, and it continues.

Here is how week 200 went...

Saturday - I weighed 185.5 to start the week off.

In the late afternoon, Dotti and I walked to Sweet Tomatoes for lunch/dinner. It 57° and we went 2.10 miles on the way there, and taking a shorter route on the return trip, it was another 1.90 miles. The meal was very nice and only 6.5 points.

In the evening, we watched the movie 1984, which had been filmed on location in London, in 1984. It really did a good job on following the book, as far as any movie can. I had read the book a couple of times before, and then I had just listened to the audio book. So, it was all very fresh in my mind. I could see where they had squashed things together and skipped over things, but they carried the essence of the story along very well. It would do Americans a lot of good to read that book periodically, before they let it become any more like a true story.

After snacking, and meals for the day, I ended up eating 43.5 points.

Sunday - I weighed 186.0 when I woke up. Dotti and I decided that we were going to visit a couple of places that she had seen advertised in the paper. The first was a flea market in Gresham, not far from the old bowling alley where I used to bowl on the men’s league. As it turned out the flea market had a very Mexican flavor, and I could have sworn we were back in Tijuana walking among the shops there. Nearly all of the music, the merchandise, the proprietors, and the customers could trace their roots to south of the US border. In Portland that was quite a surprise. The atmosphere was festive and friendly and we browsed for quite a while before we moved next door.

The change was abrupt, as if we had passed through a magic portal, and we entered a world of the past, filled with antiques. It was wonderful. Here were shelves of old books, some not only written before I was born, but one American history book I purchased was written before my grandfather's birth in 1900. Dotti and I looked at an old, and quite large, dollhouse that was exquisite in its detail. There were so many reminders of times past in that store, and it made us sad to finally have to leave it.

On the way home, we stopped at Shari’s for lunch/dinner in Vancouver. We split a breakfast platter, holding our points down, and getting a nice meal at the same time.

In the evening I spent some time reading in the old history book that I had purchased and it was quite enjoyable.

By day's end I had consumed 42.5 points.

Monday - Back to reality, and to work. I weighed 187.0 pounds in the morning. I got out the door early enough to where I could have walked at least a couple of miles before work, but I didn't feel like walking. On Mondays there are often a few problems that the customer has put off over the weekend until Monday morning when I arrive, and I decided to get an early start on those. Once I got inside and checked, I was surprised to see that there was nothing pending. I had a nice quiet day as it turned out, which was pleasant on a Monday.

At lunch I still didn’t feel like doing a long walk. I had asked Dotti if she would be willing to take a walk in the evening with me and she said that she might, but wasn't sure. So I just did my 2.4-mile loop. It was 65° and I didn't need a coat. My flannel shirt was plenty, and I even had to roll up the sleeves near the end. I completed the loop in 34:56.

On the back road that I cut across on this loop, there used to stand a yellow attractive single story home, well back off from the road. At first when my walking partner and I would pass it, we wondered if anyone still lived there, but as time went by, the house was slowing showing signs of being abandoned. There was a lampshade that sat in the front window and it never changed position. The grass grew, and it seemed if the house were receding even farther off the road. Monday, that same location was a flat field with heavy machinery actively working. The house is gone. The trees are gone. The house had been sitting on a very large lot, and now that lot is being developed. Roads are already laid across it, with positions marked out for apartments or townhouses, just like the ones that stand on the land to the west of it. That little yellow house had sure looked a lot homier, and it will be missed, at least by me when I walk by.

At the end of that road, I turned left onto the road that my 3.17-mile loop shares with this loop, and started my last mile of the walk. I crossed over a creek, and I noticed how sad this stretch of it looked, with numerous dead hulks of trees standing in its path. Life, death, and change: it is the story of planet Earth. Just ask the dinosaurs.

The afternoon passed quickly and soon I was on my drive home. We decided not to take a walk when I got home, and I ended up working on a Visual Basic program for the evening.

I ate 38.0 points for the day.

Tuesday - I weighed 187.0 pounds. When I arrived at work, it was later than I like it to be to be in order to get in a 3.17-mile walk. So, I set off, still not sure how far I would go. I started on my 2-mile out-and-back route, knowing I had plenty of time to complete that. When I reached the corner marking the 1-mile point, I decided that I had time to do a one mile out and back from there that I sometimes use, and then when I got back, to that corner, depending how my time was looking, I could opt for either the 1-mile return along my original path, or take a shortcut of 0.75 miles to return.

In the park I saw a lot of baby geese, and I thought of Dotti. She loves baby things. J They had cut the brush back from around the park's creek, making the whole thing visible. I hope the vegetation grows back soon, because it looks far less attractive this way.

When I reached the decision point, after 2 miles of walking, I saw that I had more than enough time to get in the entire final mile. I pulled into the finish line with 3 spare minutes, having completed 3 miles in 39:30.

I didn't even get a cup of coffee before the fun started at work. I was in the clean room immediately working on the equipment. It made the morning go by quickly.

I wasn't as motivated this week to walk. (I think it is the weather. I love it when it is windy, cloudy, and rainy. All this sunshine and heat just doesn't call to me to be out walking.) In that vein, at lunch I decided against walking, and I read instead. After lunch, things had quieted down again, and I spent the afternoon at my desk.

On my drive home, things were a bit crowded on the back road that I take, and I was waiting in a line to get through the stop sign and the bottom of the hill. I was looking around at the scenery and I noticed that Mount St. Helens was looking bleak with not a lot of snow on it for this time of year. It was just sitting there quietly doing nothing that I could see. However, about 20 minutes later, as I was pulling into traffic on I-5 north, I noticed that the mountain had changed. Now St. Helens had a fist of ash shooting up straight into the sky, several times taller than the mountain itself, but only about a third as wide.

Wow! I was looking at an eruption! I called up Dotti to tell her. It had just happened, and the news media had not gotten the story yet. She went outside and snapped some pictures (from our house the mountain itself was not visible but the ash cloud sure was), and I continued to watch the eruption develop as I went along. The ash cloud at first didn’t move at all, other than upwards, and then the top started to expand as the wind caught it and started to drive it eastward. Fortunately all the ash was sent off to the east and it just created a visual spectacle without causing any problems to the metropolitan area. (Later I saw a time-lapse sequence of images of the ash cloud, which began with where the cloud was at shortly after I had noticed the eruption, and continued on until it had been blown nearly horizontal by the increasing winds.) It was one day that I was actually glad that I was making my drive home! What a view.

When I got home Dotti had her tortellini soup all ready to eat, and it was delicious as usual. After dinner Dotti and I walked to a drug store to pick up some prescriptions. It was 64° and I felt a little overdressed with my Columbia coat on, but not bad. I only really felt overheated when we were actually inside the store. The walk over was 2.65 miles, and we took 53:29 to do it. The walk back was 1.79 miles and we did that in 34:35. The temperature had dropped two degrees for the return trip.

By the end of the day I had eaten 41.0 points.

Wednesday - I weighed 185.0 pounds. In the morning I walked 3.17 miles in air that was 43°. I wore my red Columbia jacket, knit cap and gloves, and completed the walk in 42:33, a fairly good pace (13:25 per mile, or 4.47 mph). The sun was out, though there were some foggy patches.

When I came out of the first tunnel, there was a grounds keeper’s truck coming around the pond on the walkway driving very slowly. It followed me up the hill and all the way to a point where the walking path crosses a driveway connected to the main road. There the truck, broke off its "pursuit" and cut all the way across the road, for purposes unknown. As I continued on around the 3.17-mile loop, I found that the air temperature was just right for what I was wearing. When I finished, I felt good, and had 11 minutes to spare.

After a fairly quiet day at work, I headed for home. After dinner, Dotti and I both ended up working on our computers for the evening. I have been scanning some old picture and it has been fun. I scanned one of my Mom and Dad on their wedding day in July, 1950. Dad was 23, the same age that I was when I met Dotti. Mom was only 19, the same age as Dotti was when we got married. They looked so young and happy in that picture. J I had to really work on getting out various picture flaws from the original print, but when I was all done, I had a very nice 8x10 picture that I printed up and put into a frame that Dotti had purchased just for that. It is now on our wall where it can be enjoyed regularly.

I ate 38.0 points on Wednesday.

Thursday - I weighed 184.0 pounds. When I arrived at work I had just about enough time to do a 3.17-mile walk, but I would have had to rush it. So, I decided to just do a 2.4-mile loop. The temperature was 47° but towards the end of my walk it was feeling warmer. I think that it was partly due to the moisture in the air.

The fog was quite thick that morning. Of course it was not dark, as it was just at that time of day a few weeks ago. But visibility was quite low. I doubt that I could have seen the uprights at the other end of a football field. Even car headlights that were that distance away were dim if visible at all. Within a 25-foot radius things looked quite normal, but beyond that a haze started interposing itself between me, and whatever lay beyond. The gray mist thickened with distance, and finally formed an impenetrable wall beyond which nothing could be seen.

After I got inside, I found that things were happening, and I had a busy morning. It made the time fly by.

At lunch I just couldn't get motivated to walk in that bright, and warm sunshine. Once again I read while I ate my lunch.

After lunch things were pretty quiet. It appeared that our repairs done in the morning were working fine.

It was a nice quiet evening at home, and I ended up eating 38.5 points for the day.

Friday - I weighed 186.5 pounds. This jump up was due to some Ibuprofen that I had taken the day before, not the amount that I had eaten.

I arrived early enough to do my 3.17-mile walk in the morning. It was 47° and my breath was easily visible when I started out. It took me 43:39 to complete it. The sun was up high enough to where my shadow at the 0.75-mile corner, did not even reach halfway across the main road. (It was only a short time ago when my shadow stretched all the way across at that time of day.) In fact when I got down to street level and crossed the intersecting road there, my shadow didn’t make it across the closest of the 4 lanes.

There were a few issues at work, but it was not too bad. At lunch I once again I decided to skip the sunshine, and just read my book while eating my lunch.

Late in the afternoon my customer decided that he wanted to make a repair on a machine that I had been holding the new part on for weeks. Suddenly, late Friday afternoon, we are going to do it. Murphy's Law would not go quietly challenged that way, as it turned out. Instead of having a quick, change-out-the-part-and-go, another problem popped up and I didn't get out the door for home until a half-hour late.

Leaving at that time on a Friday worried me, because I feared that I might hit heavy traffic. However, it turned out not to be the case. It didn't even take a whole hour to get home. J

When I got home, I was feeling tired. The week had worn me out I guess. I ended taking a nap on the couch a little after 8 PM, and Dotti woke me up about 10 o'clock to go to bed. I definitely needed the sleep.

I ate 37.0 points on Friday, and that led to my weigh in of 186.0 this morning.

I am happy with this week's results, though there is certainly room for improvement.

For the second week in a row, I averaged under 40 points per day. So, my eating has been well under control.

I seem to have developed some difficulty in keeping my water consumption up to the level that I want it to be. Tuesday and Wednesday I only drank 3 cups each day. The rest of the week was fine. I averaged 44.57 ounces (5.6 cups) per day, which is 0.4 cups below my target of 6 to 8 cups per day: the same deficit that I had last week. Hopefully I can focus on that more this upcoming week.

Exercise was okay this week. I got in 26 miles, which is over my goal of 25 miles. However, it was a drop from the previous week, and felt like I should have done more walking. However, when I hit my goal, I can't complain. If I would have realized that I was sitting at 299.77 miles walked for the year on Friday, I probably would have taken at least a one-mile walk to push it over 300. Well, I should have no problem breaking 300 this week. J

3 years, 305 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/186.0/180±2/BMI:23.25/WK-200

GRAPHS:

Weight Loss Maintenance Year 1 Maintenance Year 2 Maintenance Year 3 Maintenance Year 4 2005 Walking 2005 Walking Data

2004 Walking Data