Week 348 Update



It was 5:54 a.m. when I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said, "200.5 pounds!"

Oops, I was up out of my limit. Fortunately it was only by half a pound. I was hanging around that area all week and my average weight was 200.29. Of course I was eating 49.71 points-per-day, which is too high. That would explain it.

Part of my problem was that Dotti brought home some Kudo bars. They were 2 points, and very tasty. Unfortunately, we both were having trouble with eating them with control. In fact Dotti asked me to take them to my study to get them out of her sight. As it turned out that was not the right place for them either. I had consumed 48 points worth of them before I finally dumped the rest of them down the garbage disposal. (Forty-eight points comes out to 6.8 points-per-day, and that would have moved my daily average back down well below 46 where it belongs.

I also ate at Taco Bell a couple of times this week and that usually pushes my points up a bit. That isn't a bad problem, but I have to be careful on days where I do that, or I can go over on my points.

I only walked once this week, and that is not enough. I was hoping that 2008 would be better for my walking but so far it is not. Note to self: you must walk more!

The Weight Commander graph shows that I am bouncing around like a cork on the ocean. The important thing is the level of the water, and my "sea level" appears to be right about 200 pounds. If could have viewed this data from where I was at the start of 2001 I would have said, "That is wonderful!"

I always considered 200 pounds to be a good place to be as my upper limit. I struggled for years trying to get or stay below 200 pounds. In the Navy I was very active and I still had to struggle to stay below 200 for most of my last 6 years. My first enlistment was different. I really didn't struggle very much. (Boot camp had made me skinny, and my activity level was high enough to keep my weight down. Also, my reaction to depression is usually to lose my appetite rather than eating more. I had gone through a divorce, lost my son as a result, and saw him very little. I had the joy of meeting Dotti but then followed that with six months of school and then 12 months of duty mostly away from her. On Midway there were no personal cars and we had to walk or ride our bikes everywhere we went, even shopping. I was younger and my metabolism was running on high I think.)

Once I got out of the Navy in 1988, I have struggled off and on ever since. The best I could do would be to push my weight down into the 190s and then, just as if I were trying to hold a floatation device underwater, it would finally pop back up well over 200. So, I am struggling over pebbles when the boulder is already out of the way. I am within a couple of pounds of where I was 90 days ago, and don't see any reason why I will not still be within a couple of pounds of that weight 90 days from now. I am within 3 pounds of my actual target weight, and that is not too bad. I will take it with thanks.

Now the future graph is a bit more disturbing. Telling me that I am going to be climbing up to 213 pounds by the start of April is not something I want to hear. That makes me sit up and take notice! My trend is generally upward apparently and I can't let that continue. The really big advantage of the Weight Commander is this trend projection graph, because it like a smoke alarm that warns you in time to react without being consumed by a disaster. It is an early detection system that works well. Every week when I check this, I know if I am on track or losing my way. This week I lost my way, but I know that right now, and don't have to wait until I actually do move up to 213 pounds before I take corrective action.

It has been busy for us lately, and here are a few of the things that made it so:

The previous week we had been fighting with our message board server. It was going down and coming back up, and then going down again. Our service provider worked hard on getting it up and running solidly, and finally were successful. January is our busiest month by far! So, we have to have our servers running at their best for the entire month.

On Thursday January 3rd, Dotti's Weight Loss Zone web page was really loading slowly during the peak hours. We only had 32,000 visitors, and probably lost a lot more because of the loading times. The page would time out and not load at all, or take 10 seconds to show any life if it did load. Very bad! Friday wasn't any better. So, I set the service provider to work on that problem on Friday the 3rd. We couldn't go through the whole month like that!

Dotti and I worked on trying to strip down the page to the bare essentials in graphics etc. to make sure that the bandwidth load would be minimal, but it didn't help much. The provider wrote back and said that they had optimized the server, with no details as to what they did. I told them that we could be seeing numbers as high as 50,000 visitors in one day and the server should be able to handle that load. They sounded like they had things well in hand.

Saturday, the 5th or message board server went down again. We were feeling pretty bad about then. Here things were gearing up for "full tilt boogie" and everything was limping. Just as I was going to bed on Saturday night, the message board came back up. The maintenance guy wrote back and said that he had found a process overloading the server (we had been hit by a hacker earlier but that was problem was shut off immediately) and terminated that process, since it wasn't critical to the message board operation. The board came back up and all seemed will on that front.

Sunday, 6 January, our server provider wrote to tell me that he had set up a monitor on the DWLZ.com server to track whatever happened on it, so we could make sure that it worked up to its correct potential all day long, including during the peak "rush hour traffic." We didn't want our server acting like the Portland freeways at 5 pm, and "becoming a parking lot." I was happy to see that they were taking a very active role in making things right. (The maintenance staff is superb at that company, as long as they can be contacted and get directed at a problem. They have solved some incredibly difficult problems for us and given us many extra benefits beyond what we have paid for. So, a bump here and there can be forgiven when as Ben Franklin pointed out, "All's well that ends well.")

Dotti finished up her part on Dotti's Newsletter late on Sunday, so I could start working on it Monday morning.

On Monday, the DWLZ server performed wonderfully! We had 40,393 visitors and the page loaded instantly on high speed access, and took about 3 or 4 seconds to get going on dial up. It as if there were only a very light load on the server, even though it was working hard. This was like driving a Corvette on a Montana freeway with no speed limit, compared with a Model A Ford stuck on I-5 in a Friday afternoon road jam.

Monday was my son Glenn's 36th birthday. Part of my memory says that there is no way that much time has passed. The feelings of holding him in my arms, and looking at those perfect little fingers and toes, and that nasty red mark on his forehead where the forceps had been used, are fresh as if it happened only yesterday. And yet he has a son of his own, is nearing retirement from the US Navy. They say life is too short, and it is times like this when you realize how fast it really goes by. Happy Birthday Glenn!!!

I started working on the newsletter early, moving the text over into the newsletter format. In the middle of that we had to take a break…

Monday Dotti and I went in to our dentist's office and while I had a quick check of my denture plate, Dotti got some new teeth put in, and her smile is now very close to the way it was when I first met her. All the damage done by our last dentist has been repaired and she is back on track with her lovely smile restored. She is smiling a lot more as a result!

While they were working on Dotti's teeth, I went back home and continued working on formatting the newsletter. I had to write up a couple of things and make some changes in the ads, etc. I took another break to run down and pick Dotti up. She had to drop off a prescription after the dental work and then we went back home. I continued working the newsletter and she went and took care of picking up the prescription and running some other errands.

I finally got the newsletter formatted, spell checked, grammar checked, and word for word proofread, sent out a couple of practice mailing to our short list (mainly just us to several email accounts to make sure the newsletter looks good there as well as in a browser) and finally hit the send button on the big mailing at 5:20 pm. I was very tired at that point, and it felt like it had been a very long day. The list size was 56,242 subscribers at mailing time.

Tuesday we had 48,447 visitors with over 128 thousand page views. Things were rocking at max loading and the server was performing perfectly! It was clear that they had fixed the bottleneck and all was well again.

Michael Marder is now focusing more on his online version of the Weight Commander, and so Tuesday we modified our links to assist him in that endeavor. The man is incredibly talented, and has created a PHP online Weight Commander that is great! In addition to the features you have come to expect with Weight Commander, it has the added advantage of being able to be run with a MAC, is available from any computer you are on, as long as it has Internet access, and doesn't require you to download software and go through installation. Michael is constantly working on adding features and improving the program online, so you will be more impressed tomorrow than you are today, and today it is already awesome! Way to go Michael!

Wednesday we had over 40,000 visitors again at DWLZ.com and the page continued to load very fast! We were breathing a little easier by now. But we were not ready to let things settle into a routine.

Dotti and I decided to buy the home that my mom was selling in southern Oregon. The price seemed reasonable and it would help my Mom out with her financial load. We were not clear on what all was on the property, but we did feel that with 65 acres and a home on it, it should be okay. It is located about 7 miles from Mom, and right across from my old high school. We were suddenly very excited and life became very hectic in the Coon household.

We had never purchased a home before. We are renters and always have been. So, what to do? We talked with a mortgage banker, and the real estate broker who was handling the property. We contacted a satellite Internet company to check feasibility of putting in high speed access. (That was something that was not optional for us.) We knew the property was 17 miles from Canyonville, which is a tiny little town, that is only on the map these days because of the Seven Feathers Casino built on its outskirts. But Costco is only an hour or so away, and Roseburg and Medford are both about that far as well. We would have to plan our shopping better and no more walking to Borders or Starbucks, but it could be interesting. Part of the property even butted up against the South Umpqua River. We started to gear up our excitement. This might be cool!

Thursday we got word back that the property had a clear line of site with the satellite and high speed access was no problem. Things looked like a go for us.

The web page had 46,971 visitors and continued to load very fast. That was a good thing!

A tornado touched down in Vancouver, Washington on Thursday. Dotti and I were planning a walk to Red Robin when Dotti caught the story on her car radio as she was driving home from the store. We were debating whether it was prudent to walk in the heavy weather, but it looked like the heavy stuff had already passed us by, and the tornado had hit well north of us. So, we set off on our walk. Everything was fine for us on the walk in both directions. We even stopped at Borders for a little reading break before heading home.

Friday I got in contact with a mortgage banker and set things in motion to get our loan. He said our credit was excellent and sounded very positive. He had a couple of loans on the table ahead of ours so he couldn't get to it on Friday, but first thing on Monday he said he would be "all over it." (We had met this guy when Mom was up here because he had worked with her on one of her mortgages. He has a ponytail, and is not your typical conservative banker type.)

So, we would be waiting on the money side of things until next week. In the meantime the Real Estate broker faxed us papers to read and sign, and he was going to go over them with us on Sunday on the phone. We could fill it all out and fax it back to him, so it would be waiting in the office Monday morning. Then the banker called back in the afternoon wanting information and documents. Dotti dug out her records for what he needed and faxed them to him. He called and talked with our accountant to check our income and other stuff.

It is odd really the different way that banks treat mortgages compared with credit cards. They will hand out credit card loans like candy, with no collateral at all in place to back the loans, but with a mortgage, where the property is worth more than the loan value, they tear your financial life apart, inspect all the pieces and probe into every little cranny of your financial life before saying yes or no. And I am talking about an equal sized loan in both cases. The USA recently had a very serious problem with ill advised mortgages going bad and rocking the housing world. But if something with collateral backing can go so bad, what about the even bigger problem of over-extended credit card debt that is not protected by collateral at all? What if… Well that is too ugly to consider, so we will just close our eyes and whistle as we pass that graveyard.

6 years, 246 days on my journey; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-
6 '3" 239.5/200.5/197.5±2.5/BMI:25.06/WK- 348

Starting weight: 239.5       Target Weight Range: 195 lbs to 200 lbs