Week 350 Update It was 6:55 a.m. when I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said, "200.0 pounds!"

I get the general feeling that I am struggling a bit with my journey, but the numbers seem to say that I am still doing pretty well.

Looking at the Weight Commander graph for this week, after the black boxes hit the top of my limit, they drifted downward in a sort of stair step. The white squares bounce around this way and that, but the trend appears to be downward. That intuitively seems very odd. I have been eating at restaurants and coming up with high point days too often, and yet I appear to be working downwards on the scale. That is why I weigh every day, because other wise I would assume thing are different than they actually are.

The Weight Commander future graph is more surprising still. It shows me falling to around 189 in April. So, I must be doing something right, even when it feels like I am falling on my face too many times.

The continuing saga…

As you may recall, we left off last week with our making ready to go down to southern Oregon and look at the property we were planning to buy. We have never been buyers before, always renting, or living in base housing in the Navy, when that was available. (On Midway Island that was all that was available, since the whole Island was a Navy base.) This was going to be something brand new for us.

On the negative side of buying, we are essentially debt free. We own our cars outright. They are not fancy expensive cars, we bought them both used, but they are in good shape and serviceable. They are comfortable and do the job for us. We don't have a mortgage to pay, and our credit cards are virtually empty of debt. We don't have wealth, but we don't owe anybody anything either. We like it that way. No monthly payments to a bank.

In spite of this, we were going to bite the bullet and take on a mortgage for a 65 acre parcel of land and a triple wide modular home. Every day up until Saturday (the 19th) I was on the phone trying to tie up loose ends and to make sure nothing dropped through the cracks. We had satellite internet access ready to be installed on Friday the 25th, and a mortgage broker working to get us a good rate on a loan. We were working on getting the water system fully up to standards, and looking over our current house and deciding what we might take down with us in our van for our first load to the new home.

I spent the morning on Saturday getting the newsletter ready to go. Dotti had finished her part of it late Friday night and it was sitting on my keyboard in her jump drive when I woke up in the morning. I ran it through my checklist of items: check the graphic links, check the hyperlinks, spell check, grammar check, do a word for word read through checking for readability and any typos that didn't get hit by the spell checker, etc. I then sent it out on our short test list to make sure it came up okay in an email reader, and then just after noon I hit the send the button and off it went to 58,071 mail boxes where I just know each and everyone was eagerly waiting for its arrival. Well, hopefully they didn't just delete it anyway.

In the afternoon, I tried to get as much stuff done as I could to break free for a couple of days as we went on our first visit to our new home as potential buyers. Now, we had been there a number of times before, but never with any intention of living there. So, we didn't really have a clear picture of what we might be getting ourselves into. So, it was a bit of an adventure going down on this trip.

Dotti had the van all loaded and ready to go on Saturday night. (Normally our system of packing is where I bring the stuff out to the car and she arranges it. She has a good eye for putting a lot of stuff into a small space. I think she learned that from having to put our stuff into such small apartments at various times over the years. )

Sunday we made a last minute check of things, to make sure we didn't forget anything important, and off we went, heading south on I-5. We made a stop at Eugene, the halfway point, and had lunch. I had 25.5 points worth of food at McDonalds. It is the downside of fast food that in order to get enough to satisfy your hunger, you have to eat too many points. Even trying to watch out a bit, the points run up in a hurry. This helped to run up a total of 63.5 points for the day.

I have found during this exercise in home buying that stress has made my eating habits change for the worse. I don't make time for good meals and I end up overeating. I have managed to mix in some lower point days to bring the average down to a more reasonable point, but those high point days are not a good thing. Sooner or later they will take over, and the low point days will disappear, if I don't make a very strong effort to make sure that it doesn't happen.

Finally we reached the property. Mom was to meet us there with the key to the house so we could get in and unload our stuff. We turned off the highway and onto the dirt and gravel road that led to our driveway. Just a few yards up the road our dirt and gravel driveway cut sharply to the left and suddenly we were climbing steeply. Up, up, and around a corner and more climbing was still required. I had forgotten how high up the house was situated. Still climbing we came finally to the exit loop of the drive.

Dotti looked up about then, and 15 or 20 feet above us, looking down from the front yard of the house, stood three silent deer. I stopped while Dotti grabbed her camera and started shooting pictures. She was in seventh heaven! We were being quiet so as to not scare the deer when Mom arrived behind us and honked her horn. It showed that we hadn't of needed to be quiet because the horn did nothing to spook the deer. We drove up to the house and the deer were still there, although they left soon after that.

Mom gave us the key to the house, but she had to get back to her place because her water pump had a problem and needed to be primed and she had to meet a neighbor there who would help her out. (He is a handyman, with 6 kids, whom his wife homeschools, and who worked at the academy across the river from the property back when LeRoy went to high school. LeRoy and he always got along well, and I think he is a really nice guy too.)

So, here we were, Dotti and I alone at the new house and we set to unloading the van. It was getting cold outside and we turned up the heat in the house. The van was pretty well loaded to capacity and we had removed all the seats from the back too. I brought the stuff out of the van and up into the house, while Dotti set to moving it around to the correct location.

Dotti and I were chatting back and forth as I was making my trips into the house and at one point we laughed when she said, "I hope I don't open the oven and find a raccoon in there like they did in, what was that movie?"

"Snowball express?"

"Yes, that was it. I would hate have that happen."

It was only moments later when she called out to me to come look at what she had found. In the top drawer beside the kitchen sink, sitting atop a very dirty looking silverware tray, and surrounded by a great many mouse droppings was a huge rodent's nest, with a hole in the top just about mouse sized. The nest was about half the size of a regulation football, and appeared to be built out of some material that resembled something you would find in the lint trap of a clothes-dryer. Who knows what it really was made of? I wish I had taken a picture before I took care of it for Dotti. I just took the whole drawer outside and then pulled the silverware tray out and smacked it upside down on a 2 x 6 frame around a garden patch. Fortunately the resident wasn't at home when we found it.

Well the house hadn't been lived in for a couple of months, so that wasn't horribly shocking, but the timing was good, with the Snowball Express discussion.

When I finished up, I told Dotti that I wanted to take a look around on the hill behind us to see what the property actually looked like.

I knew of one negative aspect of the property that we were going to have to deal with: the dirt bank. In order to fit the modular home on the site, they had to widen the flat area by cutting away the bank. When Mom and Dad lived here, it was just a single wide trailor that they had moved up, and the bank was still vegetated, with a gradule slope down the hill to their drive way. But there was no room for a big unit like is there now. (I took this picture of the bank back on Christmas Day in 2005, when a drain pipe had backed up and a flood was in the making at the property. The renters called up as we were celebrating Christmas morning and we had to drop and run up to see what could be done. Mom knew a local guy with a backhoe who graciously came up and cut the trench you see on the right. Later a large drain pipe was laid so this wouldn't happen again.)You can see that Mom's husband never did anything to slow erostion of the bank, and with the amount of rain that Oregon gets, that was unfortunate. Still, with some grass and other plants in place, the errosion could be drastically slowed. One of our first priorities was going to be to take care of that!

So, we left the stuff on the floor, still unpacked and set off. I took my camera, and Dotti took her binoculars. The first thing we noticed was that, although there were 65 acres to the property, there was only about maybe a half acre that was level. The entire property was located on the side of a steep hill. As we move up the hill it became clear that this was a great plot of timber, but it was no place to hike or build anything on, without doing some very expensive landscaping. Cutting terraces into the side of the mountain was the only way to get any flat ground, and that is not cheap. Expanding the house was not an option because there was no room to expand on. It was a postage stamp sized living spot in a sea of trees rising on a very steep slope. None of the things that we had discussed doing with the property was going to be able to be done without spending huge amounts of money, which we don't have.

The view of the valley was blocked by the tops of the trees below where we stood, and that was true at every point along the way. If you were a nudist, you could run around all 65 acres of the property and no one could ever see you, but you would be cut to ribbons trying to work though the undergrowth, poison oak, and blackberry bushes that are jamming your path.

The view from the top of the bank, right in front of where Dotti was standing in the previous photo.

When the thermometer falls below 30° we start to shiver. But the sun was shining brightly and that made for some gorgeous views on the way home. The sky was bright blue and that made a great background for this shot of a bird that Dotti took!

The road back to civization from Mom's place was nicely decorated in a white frosty coat. It seemed every way we turned to look there was another new scene of sunlight reflecting off of, or merely shining through ice crystals.

Once again, on the way home we stopped at the halfway point: Eugene, and we ate at McDonalds once more. It was in the afternoon, and so the 25.5 points only contributed to a small misdemeanor for the day of 49.5 total points.

At home we had the unpleasant task of unloading the van and putting things back where they belonged before. We were thankful that it was only one van-full of stuff and not more that we had to deal with.

Dotti set to work on an organizational project. When she gets stressed and tired, she organizes rooms of the house. Me, I want to relax and do nothing until the stress passes. But if we were just the same, it wouldn't be this much fun being married.

The time since we returned is a bit of a blur. Dotti has been in to see the doctor for joint pain, and we had groceries to buy and of course a ton of email to catch up on, and other items that backed up while we were gone. Yesterday I was finally able to catch up on the last two week's journal and today I think I will get it done on time.

I certainly hope that next week will at least be less stressful than this week has been, but only time will tell.

6 years, 260 days on my journey; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-
6 '3" 239.5/200.0/197.5±2.5/BMI:25.00/WK- 350

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

---

BACK TO WEEK THREE HUNDRED FORTY-NINE       On To WEEK THREE HUNDRED FIFTY-ONE