Week 38 Update

It was 5:10 AM, and the temperature was at 29º, as I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said, "184.5 pounds." (NS: 181.0) That brought me back up to within one-half pound of my 185.0 pound target goal weight.

It has been wonderful having our son LeRoy home. He bought a car this week, so he won’t be stranded without wheels when he checks in to his new ship. He seems really happy to be back in the States, where most people speak English, and the stores have clothes that fit him. He even located and installed a memory expansion card for Dot’s main computer and it sped the thing up a lot.

I thought I would add one more week to the Points and Pounds graph that I did last week. This week things settled down a bit into more of a groove and I thought the graph would show that. After January 12th, through last week, my points values were moving up and down past the 0 line (29.0 points), and my weight values were staying mostly just below the 0 line (185 pounds) within 1.5 pounds, with a jump up on the 21st of January. This past week, I had only two days where my weight dropped below the -1 line (the 26th and the 30th of January), all the rest of the days I was within one pound of my target weight.

My points were all above the 0 line, moving between +0.5 and +3.5. This leads me to believe that my zero line is incorrectly located at 29 points, for the activity level that I had last week. My average points per day for the week was 31.29, which would put my zero point approximately where the graph is currently labeled as +2.0.

When my weight dropped on the 26th, I immediately moved my points up the scale to 32.5 points. My weight accordingly rose. I dropped my points down to 31.0 the next day, and my weight rose to 185.0. I ate 29.5 on that day, and my weight fell again, so I ate 31.5 pounds. However, my weight dropped another half pound, and so I ate 32.5 points again. My weight moved up to 184.0. And so it goes. This morning my weight was at 184.5, after eating 30.5 points yesterday.

I could very easily eat more than I am eating right now. I am not suffering with hunger pains, but some days I look at my journal with a little disappointment when I see that I am out of points for the day. Then I settle in with my water and make sure I am doing something to keep my mind busy on other things.

This week and books...

This week I did not finish any books. I did make progress on the audio book, The Fellowship of the Ring and am over halfway done with it. It is a very good story, but I really am not enamored with all the verse in it. There have been a couple of places where I was hard put to avoid fast forwarding through a very long poem. But I refrained and listened to the whole thing. Some of the verses are really quite good, and even enjoyable, but sometimes Tolkein gets a bit carried away with them.

In any case, the story itself has been most enjoyable so far. The pressure of the imminent danger is always there, increasing and decreasing with the flow of the story. Sometimes it becomes quite intense and at other times you are given a brief respite, where things seem calm for the moment. But always there is potential doom hanging over the characters’ heads, and the struggle is never far from being upon them.

For my lunchtime reading, I am getting close to the end of The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, an interesting time travel story. It is sometimes rather amusing, but sometimes brilliant, in its guesses about the future. Writing in 1957, Heinlein set the beginning of the story in 1970. The lead character unwillingly takes “the cold sleep” into the year 2000, and then is sent back to 1970 once more. It is a story of revenge, engineering, and science fantasy, and I have enjoyed reading it thus far.

For my bedtime reading I have been working on another older Heinlein book, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It has been okay, but not quite as entertaining so far as The Door into Summer is. However, I am still early on in the book, and I am sure it will pick up as it goes along. Although I lost interest in reading what he wrote about the time he did Stranger in a Strange Land, and Time Enough For Love, because of the philosophical direction that he took at that time, I find that his earlier works are still enjoyable for me.

259 days OP, a lifetime to follow.

-Al-

239.5/184.5/200/BMI:23.0/WK-38
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story