Week 223 Update

It was 06:55 this morning when I stepped on Mr. Scale, for the one thousand five hundred sixty-second day in a row, and this time he said, "187.0 pounds!" The average for all 1,562 of those daily weigh-ins comes to 188.1 pounds, so it looks like a trend is developing. J

Saturday - Last Saturday I weighed in at 186.0 pounds. Dotti and I used the day to get ready for our trip on Sunday. I ended up eating 47.0 points for the day.

Sunday -Sunday morning I jumped up at 05:00, weighed in at 186.5 pounds and then got Dotti up so we could get on the road. I grabbed a bite to eat before we left. The car was all packed the night before, and so we were on the road before 6 AM.

We ate at Subway for lunch on the road, and then about 10.5 hours after we started, at around 5:30 PM (Pocatello is in the Mountain Time Zone, one hour ahead of our normal Pacific Time) we were checking into our hotel. It will be the last time that we use that facility I fear. When we got to our room, the high speed wireless didn’t work. We checked with the front desk, but we were informed that all they could do for us was give us a CD with some software on it. However, their only copy was "out" at the moment and we would have to wait for that. In the meantime, we decided to go to dinner.

The guy at the front desk was much more familiar with restaurants, than he was with computer wireless networks. He was happy to direct us to a Mexican restaurant that turned out to be pretty good. My meal came to 31.0 points, but it was delicious.

Meanwhile back at our computers…once we had the software in hand and installed it we were no better off than we were before. We might as well of been asking for information on nuclear physics or the latest techniques on brain surgery, the way the guy at the desk looked at us when we were asking for help on getting their system to work for us. I finally called up their technical support line that came with the software, and the guy helped me manually set up some network parameters and I was able to connect to their network, but there was still nothing coming from the Internet. The guy I was talking with said he would call hotel and have them reset their system. (Which naturally didn’t go any good, because we had already asked them do that earlier.) We finally just called it a day.

I had ended up eating 74.0 points during the day.

Monday - In the morning, our scale worked okay ( I weighed 188.5 pounds), but our Internet access was still nonfunctional. We figured that we had given them enough time to fix the problem. We had rented the room with the understanding that it came with high-speed Internet access, as promised. So, Dotti called around and found us a room at another hotel that had wired high-speed access! Much more dependable, and there was a room available immediately, and it was located right next door. Very cool. We moved over and soon, after checking to make sure our Internet connection was up and running, we were out shopping.

We sacrificed our Sunday at home for this trip, in order to make sure that we had plenty of time to make the trip, even in the event that we had some unforeseen problem along the way. Monday was my official travel day, for this trip, and so we traveled to the mall. J Pocatello is not a big city, and so there is not a lot to do, but the mall is nice, and we enjoyed walking around it. We picked up a couple of ping-pong paddles while we were there and when we got back to the hotel, we went into the recreation area and played several games of ping-pong. It was a lot of fun.

We had lunch at our hotel and, along with the good meal, they played classical music, at a very pleasant low level of volume, in the dinning area. I always consider it a sign of class when a restaurant plays high quality music like that! (I often find myself leaving Subway, and moving to my car to eat, because the employees have the "music" cranked up to levels so high I can’t ignore it. Unfortunately Red Robin is often even worse.)

In the evening, we had a light meal in the room and put our Internet access to work. I had eaten 62.5 points by the end of the day. I was pushing it, since I was already up on the scale a bit.

Tuesday -Tuesday morning I weighed 189.0 pounds at 05:30 when I got up. It was Day One of the Preventive Maintenance activity that I was there for; and that always means a busy day! We start off at 07:00, an hour earlier than a normal workday, and always run up to at least until 17:00 in the evening. I worked up quite a sweat scrubbing phosphorous deposits off the aluminum housing walls. When I didn’t having things quite wet enough with deionized water, smoke, and sparks would suddenly appear, reminding me that phosphorous has pyrogenic properties that I have to hold in check.

Once the housing walls were scrubbed down to bare metal, it was time to take all the assemblies that had been removed from the housing down to the cleaning room to scrub them as well. As it turned out this time, the guy that I worked with found some CDs for the player in the room, and a couple of them were very good. We listened to classical guitar for a while and then he found a CD of Mozart’s violin concertos! I really enjoyed listening to them. I normally much prefer that radios and players be off when I am working in an area, because it is seldom that anyone will play music that I care to listen to. In fact, I consider it basic common courtesy to not inflict my chosen music onto others, and for them to not inflict theirs upon me. However, when everyone in the area is in happy agreement with the music, it is not a real problem usually.

We went to Wingers for lunch and I had a hamburger and fries. (20 pts.)

Meanwhile, back at work, once we got the parts cleaned and started putting the machine back together, we ran into a couple of problems that slowed us down, and we didn’t get everything done that we would have liked. One major project got pushed to the next day. However, we did get the machine back in an airtight condition and started pumping it down before leaving for the day.

When I got "home," I was very tired, but Dotti was ready to play some more ping-pong. J So, we played a few games. The table was located right next to the pool, and so we had the sounds of people having a good time splashing around in the water accompanying our game, and adding a party-like atmosphere. Swimming suits and towels, kids happy yells, and couples walking by hand in hand surrounded our area, and added to our already enjoyable experience. My only problem was that I was almost too tired to bend over and pick up the ball when it hit the floor, but spending the time with Dotti was such fun that even that was easily dealt with.

After a light meal in the room, I ended the day with 37.0 points, and with no problem at all, I went right to sleep.

Wednesday - Wednesday I woke up, as I did every day while we were in Pocatello, before the alarm could go off. (I don’t actually know if the alarm worked or not, because I always shut it off before it was supposed to sound. J) I got up at 06:30 and weighed 187.5. I was happy to see that the number had dropped a pound and a half.

Normally, the second day of a PM is an easy one, and we often finish up on that day. Not this time. We had to do a major procedure in the front end of the machine, and it took about 6 hours, much longer than we had anticipated. When we broke for lunch, they decided to remain onsite and eat at the cafeteria, in order to speed things up. Unfortunately I hadn’t brought any money along, so I just skipped lunch, because I hate to borrow money, and the way the scale had been the day before, I could afford to skip a meal anyway.

When we finished for the day, there still remained a few things to do, so Day Three was going to require my presence, meaning that we would be getting a late start at best on our drive home.

When I got back to the room, I was very hungry. We decided to go to the Mexican food restaurant that we had gone to on Sunday. I ended up eating 36.5 points for that meal. By the end of the day I had eaten 49.5 points.

Thursday - Thursday morning I was awake at 06:00, and I weighed 187.0 pounds. I still didn’t know if I would be getting finished in time for us to head back home that day or if we would have to stay another night. However, I decided I would be optimistic and make sure that if things went well, I would have all of my stuff packed up and ready to throw in the car. So, I spent the extra time I had to pack up my computers and my books, etc., before heading out for work.

When I arrived, I found that one of the other guys had had a personal problem and had already headed back home. That made my presence even more necessary. It was unclear right up until the last minute whether or not we would be stuck there for another day, or would be able to leave. There were a few nagging issues that had to be put to bed before we could call the whole thing "done." Things seemed to drag for a while, as some other items held us up, but finally we were able to get on the remaining issues and knock them out.

Check out time for the hotel was 12 noon, and it was after 11:30 AM before I was finally able to get out the door and head for the hotel. Fortunately, the hotel was only 5 minutes away, and Dotti had everything ready to go into the car when I arrived. We checked out, and grabbed a quick fast food bite to eat (24.0 points) on the way out of town, and were heading west before 12:30 (Mountain Time).

On the way out to Pocatello, Idaho, I had finished up listening to the unabridged audio book, The Da Vinci Code, for the second time. It made the last few hours of the trip go by quickly. So, when we were in Idaho, I picked up Dan Brown’s earlier book: Angels & Demons to listen to on the way back. It has 15 CDs and I got through 3 of them on the way back, in between other events along the way. I have enjoyed the scientific side of the story so far (there are a couple of errors in it but no novel is perfect ), and I will have to wait and see about the rest as the story unfolds. (I get a feeling of redundancy in the way the two books started out but the differences have been enough to not make that point too distracting.) Dan Brown has a thing for "secret societies."

We timed it "just perfectly" on both the start of our trip and the end of it, where the sun was right in our eyes for sunrise (heading east) and sunset (returning west). I was so glad to finally see the sun dip below the Cascade Mountain range as we were heading through the Columbia River Gorge just after 8:00 last night. My eyes were really feeling strained looking into a scene with a double sun: the original, and its reflection in the Columbia River.

As we crossed the Columbia River, right at the end of our trip, Interstate 205 was jammed up like rush hour, even though it was 9:45PM. I feared an accident, but it turned out to be road construction, and they had all the 4 lanes of traffic filtering down into one single lane, so the blacktopping crew could work on the other three lanes. Once we got past the crew the traffic dumped out into 4 nearly empty lanes and things moved very smoothly the rest of the way.

After over 650 miles of driving, and 88.5 points of eating for me, we pulled into our driveway at home just before 10 PM (Pacific Time), tired and ready to call it a day. We pulled the car into the garage, and saved the unpacking for next day.

Friday - Friday, even though I had the day off, I woke up at 05:30. Go figure. Maybe the fact that it was 06:30 Pocatello time had something to do with it. I weighed 186.0 pounds, which was a little better than some of the numbers I had been seeing this week.

Dotti and I had a nice day relaxing. She picked up an electronic keyboard for me for my birthday, and I just love it! It is a full, piano-sized keyboard, but with all the electronic goodies that make electronic keyboards so cool. Thank you Dotti!

We stopped by Taco Bell for lunch, and I had two tostados (10.0 pts.) and a bean burrito (7.5 pts.). They were good! In the evening we had a nice meal at home, and by day’s end, I had eaten 42.5 points, which led to my weigh-in this morning of 187.0 pounds.

How did this week go?

Eating – What a jump! I went from 40.21 points-per-day last week to 57.29 points-per-day this week. That is a total of 119 points (about 1.7 pounds worth of food) more for the week. My food intake often goes up on trips, and this was no exception. Since I was able to pull the scale back by my weekly weigh-in, it worked out okay, but I was definitely on the high side this week.

Weight – this was not a stellar week for me. I was worried about getting up over 190 pounds for a daily weigh-in, which I have never done since hitting my target range (183-187 pounds) back in December of 2001. Normally, on the road, my weight tends to drop, even if my points go up quite a bit. This time, it was more of a struggle to keep things in check. My average weight for the week was 187.36, which is outside of my target range. So, while I sneaked by on my weekly weigh-in (and I am happy for that!), I am not pleased with the overall numbers I saw this week on the scale. Hopefully this upcoming week will be better.

Water – I did pretty well on water this week. I averaged 49.14 ounces (6.1 cups) per day, and that is within my goal range of 6-8 cups. I missed hitting my goal on two days, but overall I am pleased with how my water consumption worked out.

Exercise – disaster. I played some ping-pong, and I was very active at work for a couple of days, but I didn’t get in any walking at all. I hope to start getting back on track this week, starting today.

It wasn’t a great week, but at least I weighed-in inside my target range, and I drank my water for the week. I’ll call it good, and hopefully get ready for a better week coming up.

4 years, 101 days OP; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

6 '3" 239.5/187.0/180±2/BMI:23.37/WK-223

GRAPHS:

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

2004 Walking Data