Week 349 Update


It was 6:29 a.m. when I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said, "198.5 pounds!"

I have to put that weigh-in number into the "go figure" category. Friday I had a big breakfast at the hotel we stayed at, running up 21.5 points, and then I had another 21.0 points for dinner at Taco Bell. I almost always go up on the scale after eating Taco Bell for dinner the night before. All week long I was up around the top of my range or above it. But here I get a loss of a pound and a half from Friday, and a 2 pound loss for the week.

I actually ate fewer total points this week than I did last week, but I was still too high. I had one day where I ate 81.0 points. And that day was a bad one on my choices of food as well. Breakfast was my best meal, but I had hot cocoa with whipped cream, and ordered a lot more than I ate fortunately. Still it came to 19.5 points for the meal. For "lunch" I had a container of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. It was low fat and not real ice cream, but it was still 14.0 points of nothing but dessert. For dinner it was just as bad, when I went through an entire bag of Fritos for 35 points while Dotti and I sat in bed and watched a movie on the laptop: Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. (The movie seemed related to what was going on in our lives and so we thought it would be fun to watch it. ) Add to all that "good food" a white chocolate Santa Claus that we bought in town and I really deserved to suffer on the scale.

With all the busy things going on, I am not paying close enough attention to what I am doing.

Looking at the Weight Commander graph shows me jumping all over the place on the scale this week, and that is how I was eating as well. The black squares, which show my trend, are still holding around the top of my upper limit. So, I am not really in trouble yet, but I really do need to get things under better control.


The Weight Commander Future graph is even more surprising, because it shows me doing a lot better than it did last week. If you recall, I was going to be up around 213 by that prediction. Now at least it is only about 202.5. Still, I do need to get that graph moving towards a number inside my target range.

We were still actively monitoring the status of the DWLZ server and the message board server. Saturday the number of DWLZ visitors fell off to 28,323. This always happens on the weekend. Page views fell from 130,125 on Friday, to 86,281. While there is a decrease on the weekend, and that is always the case, this is still January, and even our weekend numbers are higher than our best weekday numbers in July. We normally have between 22,000 and 23,000 visitors on average throughout the year. January is super, but December is terrible. (This actually reflects the results that far too many people have during the year. In January many people work hard at losing weight and actually do it, while in December many people wish to just live in denial and enjoy all of the food.) In fact the two months—standing side by side on the calendar but so different in how people approach them—combine to average just about the same number of visitors per day as come for the rest of the year. It is like taking an empty bucket and a full bucket and ending up with two half-full buckets in the end.

What is the upside of all of this January activity is that some people do not quit! They start off in January on a lifetime journey instead of a diet. They lose weight and continue the journey right into maintenance, and hold the course. That is what Dotti wanted to help people to do by creating Dotti's Weight Loss Zone. When one person does that, it makes all of the work worthwhile. To all those who read this, I hope each and every one of you will fall into this category and be successful in your lifelong journey to better health and a trim well conditioned body. You can do it!

It appears that our server provider nailed the problem we were having because the page has been loading quickly ever since they worked on it. That is a very good thing!

Sunday night we did get a call from the Real Estate guy, just like he promised, and we went over the paperwork he had sent up on Friday, while we used the speaker phone on our end. We filled in the blanks and signed the appropriate locations and move on until we reached the end. Then Dotti faxed the papers back down to him.

One of the things I was researching about here was acquiring a generator for the house we were moving to. Being out in "the boonies," power failures happen far more than they do in Vancouver. It looked like it was going to be fairly pricey to get the system I would want, so it may have to wait a bit before we jump on that.

One thing we are not going to wait on is installing Air Conditioning, tapping into the forced heating air ducts. Even if it were only for our computers, we would have to have A/C. And I don't respond too well to heat myself these day. This pricey too, so that is another reason the generator will have to wait a bit.

What of living in the woods? Would it be for us? Dotti and I have gone through a lot of different living conditions over the years. We had to sift bugs out of our flour, and set traps for the many rats, which we could see through the glass window in our back door, playing in our enclosed patio at Midway, and ride our bicycles to go shopping because no cars were allowed on the island for residents. We have lived in Spokane and Vancouver in Washington State, and in Oregon we have lived in Portland and Milo (briefly). We lived in Lemoore, California where fog was so thick you couldn't' see the white line on the highway even if you were creeping along and stuck your head out the side window and looked down. We have lived in the shadow of the brown dirty Franklin Mountains in El Paso Texas, the wash of the Chesapeake Bay of Norfolk, and on the North Shore of Boston Harbor. We lived for a short time in Cleveland, and even Augusta, Georgia. If we acclimate properly, this change might turn out to be a little paradise for us.

The weather is not too dissimilar from our Vancouver weather. As you can see from the graphs, we get a bit more rain in Vancouver and the summer heat is slightly shorter in Vancouver but for the most part I will expect the changes in climate to be fairly unnoticed. (The graphs came from Underground Weather, and I highly recommend that site for all your weather information needs. I very seldom find it necessary to go to any other site to research weather data. Also, FYI: I used Roseburg's graph because it is as close as I could get to the property we are looking at, and its weather is pretty close to the same.)

Vancouver Climate	Roseburg Climate