Week 216 Update

It was 07:15 when I stepped up on Mr. Scale and he said, “185.0 pounds!”

Being on the road for a few hours in the evening usually is a problem, in that I eat more than I would if I were not driving. This normally leads to a bump up on the scale in the morning, and on my weekly weigh-in morning, that is not good. We drove for 6 hours last night after I had already driven home from work, and got to Spokane only a bit before midnight. I am very happy to see that the scale was not way up after all that time on the road yesterday.

This was a very nice week for us. It is hard to put into words the special joy that having our niece with us has brought to our home. After raising two sons, to have a young lady with us has been a real contrast with what we are familiar with. Jamie added a very special something to our daily routine, and Dotti and I will certainly miss her now that we have returned her to Spokane.

Here is how the week went. . .

Saturday - Saturday was such a fun day for me that I wrote up a few things about the day right afterwards, and so this day's entry will definitely be the longest of the week. It was only right that it be a great day, since it marked the halfway point to Christmas. J

After staying up until 1:30AM, I got up at 6:55 in the morning for my weigh-in of 186.5 pounds. I quickly put my numbers up for my weekly update, and then woke Jamie up, because we were scheduled for a morning walk on the beach. Dotti was in need of some sleep, and she wanted to give Jamie and I some time together one-on-one, since she had been able to visit with her all week while I was at work. We got out the door around 8AM and headed for the beach.

We ended up doing most of the beach leg of Dotti and my Lincoln City Hike in 2003. The weather was awesome for a walk, and that was a happy surprise, since the weather report called for drizzling rain. The sky was mostly blue, and there was a nice sea breeze coming in.

We walked up the beach, with Jamie looking for shells and checking out all the hermit crabs, starfish, and other sea related life forms along the way.

At one point there was a small stream we had to ford, and we walked upstream a ways in order to find a good spot. On the other side there was a kite festival setting up already. There was an amazing assortment of kites already in the air. (We didn’t find out until later that this wasn’t just a Saturday spontaneous gathering, but an official kite festival.)

We continued on down the beach and reached the rocks, located 2.5 miles down the beach, that Dotti and I had found so teaming with life before, and it was no less so on this day. There were muscles, starfish and many other forms of sea life clinging to the rocks, which were exposed by the low tide. Jamie even spotted a couple of small fish that had been trapped in a small pond that was created by the receding ocean.

It was time to turn around and head back. We had covered most of the beach along Lincoln City, and Jamie was getting hungry.

On the return trip, when we reached the kites, their number had grown by leaps and bounds! There were more kites than I had ever seen all in the air at the same time. One of the big ones that we saw on our way out, a full-sized circular parachute kite, had been taken down, but in its place were 10 other types of kites nearly as big, and scores of kits that were smaller. There was a tandem kite, with 12 separate segments flying as though independently, but each flying in locked synchronization with the other segments, as the all whipped this way and that in the stiff breeze. There was a huge yellow cartoon character high in the air, whose name Jamie told me was “Sponge Bob.” A giant panda bear was flying right next to him, and the whole atmosphere was one of a huge party, complete with loud music. We left the kite festival behind us—with its huge arch of string, held up by what looked like a hundred small kite like pieces, each one grabbing a piece of the sea breeze as it was rushing by—and headed back to the asphalt ramp and our motel.

We got back at 10:30, and Dotti was wide awake and smiling. While we were gone, she had gotten our binoculars out, and had been trying to see us down the beach. Unfortunately, the beach took a turn to the left, cutting behind our motel just before the kite festival, and the building blocked the view. Only a small number of the kites were visible, flying above the roofline of our motel, and none of the beach after that was in view from our balcony. We told her about the walk and I transferred the pictures I had taken on the walk to my laptop, and we all quickly ran through them before heading out for our day's planned and unplanned activities.

Trying to get out of Lincoln City was challenging, because the kite festival was in full swing, and traffic was unbelievable. We at first thought that there was an accident ahead of us, but we found that things lightened up a lot once we got past the place where Jamie and I had encountered all the kites on the beach. There was a very large parking lot right there and a great many cars were heading into it. (In the picture you can see the kites in the background, but the large parking lot I refered to was to the left of the picture. According to the sign, the stream that Jamie and I crossed earlier was billed as "D" River, the worlds shortest.)

Finally leaving Lincoln City, we were heading for the Aquarium in Newport, but as we were passing through Depot Bay, Dotti spied some shops that we have stopped at in the past, and we all thought it would be fun to hit the shops on the way out, because they might be closed on the way back. We spent some fun time walking around the numerous establishments, buying some tee-shirts and other goodies, like the owners were hoping that we would. There was one shop where the lady proprietor was really pushing and obnoxious. We were not motivated at all to buy anything in her store, but most of the shopkeepers were really pleasant, and fun to talk with.

We finally were ready to get on the way again, and we stuffed our newly acquired treasures into our compartment in the back of the van and headed out for the Aquarium.

When we arrived, Dotti thought it would be great to get a picture of Jamie and her sitting on a large rock out in front of the admission gate. When they sat down, they found out that it was not a stone at all, but a bronze piece of artwork, shaped to resemble a stone with fossils embedded into it. The bronze had been sitting in the sun all day, and although the air temperature was in the low 60s, the bronze was very warm. Both of them found it quite uncomfortable to sit on for any time at all. When I tested it out afterwards, I found that they were right, it was hot! My hand couldn’t stay on the surface for more than a second of two before feeling like I would sustain a burn, and even with my jeans between my body and the “stone” it felt very uncomfortable.

We went through and saw nearly all of the exhibits and animals in the two hours that we had left before it closed. We saw fish ranging from sharks to goldfish.

There was a fossilized turtles skull that was dated as being alive 75 million years ago, 10 million years before the dinosaurs were wiped out. The skull was huge, measuring 2.5 feet across at least, and over a foot thick. It was not complete on the backside, so I have no way of knowing how long it was, but it would have been over 3 feet, I am sure. And that was just the head. I can’t imagine what the monstrous shell would have looked like.

Outside the buildings, there were exotic sea birds in a caged exhibit, who could look up and see the less exotic sea birds flying free overhead, since Newport is a sea town. There were seals, sea lions, and some happy looking otters, swimming, sunning, and taking it easy. One seal looked like it might be a movie star posing for pictures. The nose was in the air, as he sat on a rock, and he just held his position for long stretches of time. In the surrounding water beneath his stone, others were swimming around in a circuitous route back and forth.

Inside the building once more, we walked through a very interesting set of tanks. They each contained sea water, but they were filled with separate forms of sea life, taken from different areas of the ocean. There were coastal inlet creatures, and ones taken from areas a little more seaward. Finally they had the open sea exhibit, filled mostly with sharks. Each tank had a passageway constructed where we could walk right through the middle of it, with a transparent arch above and to the sides, and transparent portals in the floor to look through. Fish were swimming over the top of us, under our feet and to both sides of us. It felt like we were walking through the sea without getting wet. Very cool!

Right at the end of the final passage through the tanks, there was a display of a giant shark’s jaw and teeth, open wide. We each posed behind it, and looked out its mouth into the camera. It would be a very unhappy situation indeed running into the owner or such a mouth while swimming in the ocean!

On the way back to the motel, we stopped at Wall Mart, so Dotti and I could buy some swimming suits, because we had forgotten to bring ours, and Jamie wanted to go swimming after dinner. We then made it back to Lincoln City and found that the kite fair had died down some, but there were still a lot of kites in the air.

Dotti cooked up some steaks for us on her electric grill, and we had some potatoes, hominy, and dinner rolls. I was happily filled up, by the time we went swimming.

Dotti loves the water. She used to love to dive, and she won a ribbon at a competition when she was in her teens for diving. She always has a lot of fun whenever we go swimming. So, she was sharing her enthusiasm with Jamie, who also likes the water. We had the pool all to ourselves, and we put our good fortune to good advantage as we swam, splashed, did handstands, and just enjoyed ourselves. It didn’t seem like we had been there long at all before it was time to head back the room, because it was approaching the time the pool closed.

The outside air had chilled us a bit on our way down, and the indoor pool water was just above the temperature of being “too cold.” As long as we were moving around swimming, it felt okay. But if we stopped moving and just floated for a while it did start to feel chilly. So, when we got under the hot shower at the poolside, to rinse off, it felt heavenly! Unfortunately, we were not yet finished with feeling cold. Oh, no. The worst was yet to come.

In order to get into the pool area, we had to give up our room key, in order to get a pool key. The wind had been cold as we walked down to the pool, but on the way back, it was really chilling. We had dried off as much as we possibly could before heading out into it, but it was not all that effective. We first had to get over to the office to get our key back, and then we had to go back outside into the cold, in order to get back to our room.

When the door was opened and we all poured into the warmer room, the first thing that Jamie said was, “Can I turn on the fireplace?” I replied with a smile, “I insist!” That fire felt so good!

Soon we were all warmed up, and settling in for a relaxing evening. As Dotti and Jamie started playing cards I turned on my computer and started to work on my weekly update write-up when all at once we heard fireworks going off. We went out on the balcony and sure enough someone was setting off quite a display of fireworks over the ocean water just to the north of us. They looked great against the black sky. And they didn’t quit going off until after I was sound asleep, because I still could hear them, as I was lying there drifting away into dreamland.

I had pretty well used up my energy reserve by the time we got back from swimming. We had some hot cocoa, and it was delicious but it was after 10PM, as I was starting to work on my computer, and my eyes were starting to sag almost instantly. I could see that I was not going to last much longer. So, the ladies moved over into Jamie’s separate bedroom, and played cards there, while I climbed into bed and soon was fast asleep.

Sunday - I woke up just after 5 AM and I weighed 187.0 pounds. We were still at Lincoln City on the Oregon coast. Dotti and Jamie had been up later than I, so they continued sleeping after I woke up nearly until check out time. We just barely got packed up and checked out before the cut off time. Soon we were on the road back home.

I had eaten about 16.5 points before we left the room, with breakfast and lunch included. Before we reached home we stopped at Taco Bell, and then we also went through the drive through at McDonalds for an ice cream cone. What I had added up to 25.0 points.

After getting home and unpacked we settled in for the night, and ended up watching the BBC's version of David Copperfield, which is Dotti's and my favorite version of that Dickens story. I finished up having eaten 57.5 points.

Monday - I got up at my normal 05:30 and weighed 185.5 pounds. It was back to work for me, and while my eating was back to normal, or actually a bit low, I didn't do any walking for the second day in a row.

At work, I went to another customer site than my normal, and I helped out on a Preventive Maintenance activity. We tore the machine apart, cleaned it and the removed modules, and then reassembled it. We finished up a bit late, but we got everything done that we had hoped to.

In the evening we watched the movie "Oliver" with Jamie. It doesn't tell the Oliver Twist story as completely as some of the other movies based on the Dickens classic, but there are some really great songs in it.

At the end of the day I was fairly tired, and I had eaten 39.5 points.

Tuesday - I held steady at 185.5 pounds. I once again skipped walking for the day. At work, the Preventive Maintenance activity continued to its completion. Dotti and Jamie worked hard on building a scrap book of Jamie's trip to visit us. They printed up a bunch of pictures and started cutting them out. I went to bed while they were still working on it. By the end of the day, I had eaten 39.5 points.

Wednesday - I weighed 187.0 pounds. I got to work early and finally felt up to walking. I walked 3.15 miles in the morning before work. I later had to go to the office, but I got a walk in before that, which was 3.17 miles long. After my nearly 2 hour drive home from work, dinner, and then waiting for the sun to go down so the air temperature would drop, Jamie was nice enough to take a late 3.05 mile walk with me around the neighborhood loop that Dotti and I walk quite often. Dotti added a few touches to the scrapbook that she and Jamie were working on, and it was nearly finished.

Thursday - I weighed 185.0 pounds. I was happy to see the scale drop back down to where I wanted it. When I got up, I found the completed scrapbook on the kitchen table, and had a chance to see their handiwork. It came out really good!

I was back at my normal customer site finally but things were pretty slow. I walked 3.15 miles in the morning, and then 3.53 miles at lunch. When I got home, we watched Dotti's favorite movie (My Fair Lady) with Jamie. I ended up eating 38.0 points for the day.

Friday - I weighed 185.5 pounds. I walked 3.0 miles in the morning, and then figured out that I only needed another mile to give me my goal of 25 miles. So, at lunch I walked 1.0 mile and finished off my week of walking.

After work I hurried home, because we were driving up to Spokane. I got home in good time. LeRoy was there when I arrived. We packed up the cars, and soon Dotti and I set off in our car, and LeRoy and Jamie set off in the other car. We caravanned up to Spokane, keeping in touch with the phones as we went along. We arrived just before midnight.

I had a few snacks on the road and when we were all finished with the trip, I had consumed 44.5 points. That set me up for my weigh-in of 185.0 pounds.

How did this week go?

Along with being a fun week, I think it was a good one as well.

My weight never went above 187.0, the top of my target range. My average weight was 185.79, less than a pound over my target weight. I am quite happy with that. J

I only had two days over 46 points this week, and my average was 44.74, which is good!

I had two days where my water was under my minimum goal of 6 cups. My average water per day for the week was 43.43 ounces (5.4 cups) per day, and that was low too. So, I will have to work on that and get my water consumption up.

For exercise, I got my 25 miles in for the week, and I broke 700 miles by the end of June. So, I am in pretty good shape for reach 1,300 miles for the year. I earned 53.82 aerobic points for my walking, which is well over my minimum goal of 30 for the week.

This upcoming week will be in Spokane, and we will have to see how much walking I can get in up there. Dotti and I are both looking forward to our week with Jim and Tammy, and their girls!

4 years, 52 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/185.0/180±2/BMI:23.12/WK-216

GRAPHS:

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

2004 Walking Data