A FEW MORE THINGS
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WEEK 424
Week Ending July 1, 2009
Weight Watchers Goal
(the top of my normal weight range)
200.0 pounds
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Week 424 Update
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| Weigh-In Date: | 07/01/2009 |
| Weight: | 209.5 |
| Body Mass Index: | 26.19 |
| Average Daily Points: | 36.51 |
| Average Weight for week: | 210.29 |
| Miles Walked for week: | 0.00 |
| Miles Walked in 2009: | 83.25 |
| Pounds +/- for this week: | +0.5 |
| Pounds lost total: | 30.0 |
| Pounds From Personal Goal (185 lbs) | +24.5 |
Week's Data
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
Saturday |
Sunday |
Monday |
Tuesday |
06/24/09 |
06/25/09 |
06/26/09 |
06/27/09 |
06/28/09 |
06/29/09 |
06/30/09 |
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209.0 lbs
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211.5 lbs
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209.5 lbs
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212.0 lbs
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209.5 lbs
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210.0 lbs
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210.0 lbs
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27.5 pts
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32.5 pts
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41.0 pts
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33.5 pts
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32.0 pts
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41.5 pts
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34.0 pts
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CONTROL PANEL
GRAPH |
FUTURE
GRAPH |
60-DAY
GRAPH |
90-DAY
GRAPH |
1-YEAR
GRAPH |
650-DAY
GRAPH |
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It was 6:00 AM when I stepped up on Mr. Scale and he said, "209.5 pounds!"
Well, it was bound to happen; I was over my points, and I had a gain for the week. My average points for the week came to 36.57 per day. That of course is not a total blowout, but it shows a lack focus that can be disastrous. My average weight for this week was 210.29, and that is up slightly from 210.14 last week. What it boils down to is that I had a pretty solid maintain, with slight lean towards gaining rather than losing.
It was not a good week, but not a horrible one. What it does is leave me in a position where I can either launch another good run at my goal, or jump off for another gaining spree. It is up to me.
My Weight Commander Control Panel Graph has a bright red reminder that I just blew it. My solid squares, which show my running average weight, started going the other way: UPWARDS! Not good. But it isn't just a couple of days going wrong; the last 11 solid squares have all been about the same, running along pretty much on a level straight line. For 11 days, I haven't been losing weight, I have been just treading water where I am.
The left side of the Control Panel indicates that I have had a loss for 3 of the 4 past weeks, but I had a gain this week. The 4 weeks taken as a whole are good, but the trend has been towards smaller and smaller losses each week, until this week I had a gain.
The right side of the Control Panel is in one way better than last week, in that I am closer to my weight one year ago this week, even with the half pound gain. However, that says more about what was going on a year ago than what is going on today I fear. Still, I weigh less than I did 30 days ago by 5.5 pounds, and less that I did 60 days ago by that same 5.5 pounds. Even better, I weigh 10.5 pounds less than I did 90 days ago. I am only 2 pounds over what I weighed a year ago.
So, the wheels have not completely come off my wagon just yet. In fact, I am in a good position to make positive things happen quickly. I just have to do it!
Just in case I missed the big red warning on my Control Panel, my Weight Commander Future Graph has turned around and now projects my weight as being up 90 days from now instead of down at or under my goal weight. Still it is a very small gain of only 1 pound over 3 months, so that is pretty much a maintaining line. But it is a wake up call. Either I get my act together or I will be going up and up again.
My Weight Commander 60-Day Graph could be viewed as still having a general losing trend, but it has clearly leveled off a lot the past couple of weeks. If I want to see some more positive indications here, I have to start doing better on my eating.
My Weight Commander 90-Day Graph, shows that I am much better off today than I was 90 days ago! So, while I need to focus more on my Journey, I have some positive things to feel motivated about as well. If my next 90 days are as good as my last 90 days, I will be at my goal weight, inside my Normal Weight Range. So, the opportunity is there, and the track record to show that I can do it. I just need to do what I know I need to do.
My Weight Commander 1-Year Graph shows that I am set up for a very good 1-year difference in weight, if I can start losing again now, because I was trending upwards 1 year ago, and I am only 2 pounds over my weight last year at this time. If I go back to losing again, I will be able to get all 4 of the history numbers on the right side of my Control Panel to read lower than my "Today" number, and I can keep them there if I stay on program as I should. It's up to me.
My
Weight Commander 650-Day Graph gives a longer range view and shows that I have had two significant upward exertions out of my Normal Range, but a lot of the time earlier on, I was either in or near my Normal Weight Range. When I pay attention, things go well. When I don't, the scale takes off on me.
Thursday was a major milestone for the year:
We're halfway to Christmas! Yes!
Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells …
Dotti and I realized that we had better hurry if we didn't want to have to pay another month's rent on our storage shed in Vancouver, and so we made a run down this week to pick up the final batch of our stuff we had stored in our old hometown.
Dotti made the reservations for us, and kept it at a nice reasonable pace, so we didn't have to kill ourselves to hurry up and meet deadlines, while still getting out before July 1. We drove down Saturday and checked-in in the evening.
We weren't sure how we would feel on Sunday, but we ended up not going shopping or anything in Portland. We just relaxed and did some work in the room. We had lunch at Red Robin and then grabbed a Subway sandwich for dinner to take with us back to the room.
A few days ago I came across a book called, The Singularity is Near in Barnes & Noble. The dust jacket description of the book's contents sounded very interesting, and when I thumbed through the book and did some spot checks of material here and there, it was even more interesting. Better still, the original price of $29.95 for the large hardcover book was marked down to $6.95. With nearly 500 pages of material before hitting the "Notes" section, and a total of 653 pages including the notes and index sections, it had plenty of material in it. And the topic of discussion is one that has been on my mind for a long time: the future of technology and mankind.
The more I have dug into this book the more it has fascinated me. I have seen much of the advance in the area of electronics in my line of work, being an electronics technician and technical instructor since 1973, and in the computer world, which I have been very much involved with in various areas, from programming, to CAT scans, ion implantation control systems, robotics, and web page design, etc. I knew that things were blowing up into unbelievable advancement, but even I wasn't thinking as big as Ray Kurzweil is.
It is hard to know whether to be horrified or simply awestruck with where things are heading, but if the predictions in this book come to pass, the next 50 years will make the technology presented in Jurassic Park look like an exercise in basic finger painting in comparison. Being eaten by a dinosaur that you have been foolish enough to grow from an egg, with DNA you produced yourself, seems nearly a normal day at the office compared with being swallowed up by thinking machines thousands, millions, billions or even trillions times more intelligent than humans, and having your local area of the universe turned into mechanized machine nirvana, sans human control, or possibly even human presence.
Can you imagine buying software to run on your laptop that is more intelligent than a human being in every way? The author of this book can and does, and he even predicts the year it will happen—not centuries, but mere decades from now—and he has a long track record of making technological predictions surprisingly, even shockingly accurate.
Over the past couple of years I have bandied back and forth through email with others ideas similar to some of the stuff in this book, but it was mere possibilities we were discussing, not near certainties. The fact is that computers will soon have the horsepower to do this. (Today IBM has already created a supercomputer that hits the lower estimated requirement of computational power to simulate human intelligence. The top end estimate is only a few years away from being reached. Once the hardware is in place, the software will be the next step, and the author predicts that will be about 10 years behind the hardware.) The really scary part is that once computers get that smart, they will just blow by and continue to explode with increased computing power and intelligence. What then? Indeed, what then?
I have seen the year 2050 come up a number of times of late. The Peak Oil crowd predict that we will run out or very low on oil by 2050. In addition to some other ill winds predicted for that time, this book predicts that before 2050 we will switch on what he calls the "Singularity" where machines and humanity will merge into something together that will surpass humanity of today by light-years. The author of The Singularity Is Near sounds excited about this happening, but there are other genius level folks out there who are not so overjoyed at the prospect, including high tech guru Bill Joy, one of the creators of Java, and a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
Anyway, I spent a portion of Sunday, deep inside The Singularity Is Near, captivated by what I was reading. Can things just keep expanding technologically without crossing a threshold somewhere that changes everything forever? It gives one pause.
Monday we finally set to work on getting our stuff out of storage. We went to Budget and rented a truck and tow trailer for our car, so Dotti could ride in the truck with me on the way back, and wouldn't have to drive. The people at the rental office were really nice and the guy told me a lot of little nice to know things about the trailer and truck. Following his advice made the whole process much easier than trying to figure it all out on the fly.
We went directly to the storage shed after getting the truck and I removed the towing trailer and left it in the alley between the storage sheds and pulled the truck forward, so I could bring out the ramp for loading.
As you can see the sky was clear and it was getting hotter every minute, as it was approaching noon. I was hoping that no one would come along and force me to move that trailer during the time we were working. It was on Monday, which is normally a quieter day than the weekend would be, and I was lucky this time, and was able to leave the trailer there the whole time until the truck was loaded.
 If you are a regular reader of my journal you will remember when I was making runs over here at Christmas in the snow dropping off the last remaining items from our house for safe keeping. Here is what that same alley looked like on Christmas day in 2008. Snow was hanging from the roof, and stacked up against the doors, and still falling from the sky. What a difference 6 months makes!
 I was just able to get the door closed on Christmas day after putting the last load into the shed. Dotti and I had made one run up to this shed since Christmas, when we had to swap our snow tires for our regular tires on our cars. Those yellow bags you see on the left were our regular tires. We had removed 4 of those and they were in Spokane, after making the trip from Tiller, but there were 4 studded snow tires still in the shed this time. The big load of stuff was behind what you see here anyway, as we had shelves along the walls and a bunch of boxes of books, and other goodies.
 We are just about to open up the shed, since the trailer is off the truck, and I am about to open up the truck and pull out the loading ramp. Let the fun begin!
It took us a couple of hours to get the truck loaded and everything tied down for the trip up to Spokane. I started the day with a long-sleeved shirt on and was down to my tee-shirt by the end. If we had much more to do, the tee-shirt would have been off as well, because I was getting really hot by that time.
Once we got the truck loaded and closed back up, Dotti directed me as I backed up to match the trailer hitch up with the trailer. She got me there exactly and when I lowered the tongue jack down the hitch mated perfectly and I hooked everything back up and we were ready to go back to the hotel, for nice relaxing evening.
The next morning I put the car up on the trailer and then we loaded up the car and truck for the drive.
Here Dotti is putting some things into the car and I took a picture with her up on the trailer.
On the road, when we stopped at a rest area, we pulled in by the semi-trucks, and it made us feel smaller than when we were driving on the road.
The last time we did this, we rented a tow-dolly for the car, where just the front wheels were up and being towed and the rear tires still rode along on the road. We tried to do the same thing this time, but they upgraded us for no extra charge to a full trailer because they didn't have the tow-trailer when we arrived.
This worked out better, because all of the lockdown equipment held steady throughout the drive. I didn't have to cinch down the wheels every so often or adjust anything. With the tow-dolly, I found that the wheel lockdowns would loosen a bit at first, due to the wheel shifting and vibrating from the stresses on it. In this case, there were no changing stresses on the wheels. They didn't have to turn, and they were not being pulled on by the action of towing. All of the stresses were applied to the trailer itself and the car just had to remain stationary on its perch. It worked great!
 Dotti took my picture by the truck at a rest area in the Columbia River Gorge. (You can tell we are still mostly on the western end of the Gorge, because there are pine trees in the background. It turns to pure brown after you pass into the eastern end of the Gorge.)
When we arrived home, I had time to get the car down off the trailer, disconnect the trailer, and back the truck up to the garage, after moving the cars out of the way, in order to get ready for unloading. I then had just started unloading the cars and truck cab before our son LeRoy showed up to help us unload, after his day at work. It was really nice of him to help! He did a huge amount of the work of unloading, including hauling my book boxes downstairs for me, and shoving the snow tires up onto the overhead rack in the garage. He is a very strong man, and he works hard when he sets his hand to a task. He had plans for the evening, and so he came, helped us finish unloading and then was on his way, all in about an hour. THANK YOU SON!
It was great finally getting our stuff up here in Spokane. That had been hanging over our heads as a task that needed doing, and we weren't looking forward to having to do it. Now the stuff is up here, but we once again have our garage cluttered up with stuff that has to be moved. (With the snowy cold kind of winters that Spokane gets, we are going to have the garage clear enough to put a car into before winter, I guarantee it! )
While all this was going on, my mom was getting back home on Monday from a month-long visit with her sister in California. I talked with her on the phone when her plane landed in Medford, and her ride had already arrived, and they were waiting for her luggage to arrive from the plane. We'll see how things go from here. It has been a nice worry-free month for us.
Another week is completed, and I know what I need to do if I want to have success this week on the scale. It is up to me to follow through on it.
8 years, 50 days on my journey; a lifetime to follow.
-Al-
6'3" 239.5/209.5/185.0±2.5/BMI:26.19/WK-424
Starting weight: 239.5
Target Weight Range: 185.0±2.5 pounds
BACK TO WEEK 423 On To WEEK 425
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