Week 63 Update

This morning was just like the last several morning here in Eugene: overcast, and the temperature was 46°. I stepped up on Mr. Scale at 5:30AM, and he said, "184.5 pounds!"

Tuesday night Dotti and I headed down to Eugene, for one my business trips to the land of the 60s. (Old hippies never die, they just move to Eugene. :) ) In spite of the trip, I did not see any great jumps on the scale, and focused on keeping my points down as required to bring my weight back down from last week’s 186.5 weigh-in. I could tell that my body was responding about Tuesday, and I started bringing my points back up again into the 40s on Wednesday, but there were no really high excursions because the scale was staying fairly steady.

One interesting thing that happened was when I was loading up the car, I was commenting to Dotti that I thought she had loaded our large suitcase (about 30” x 20” x 12”) up a bit too much. It seemed overly heavy for lugging down the stairs. When we got to the motel room, I used Mr. Scale to see how much the suitcase weighed. First I weighed with me holding the suitcase and then with me not holding the suitcase. Subtracting I came up with about 55 pounds. Dotti had not put in too much heavy stuff. If it were in a smaller container, it would have been no big deal to carry obviously, but in that large package it was clumsy moving around, especially down the stairs. The reason that this event is of interest is that it highlights what carrying 55 pounds felt like, without really knowing how much it was at the time. I thought it was quite a load to be moving around. The fact that I had been lugging around that much extra weight for a long time was not lost on me. When I set the suitcase down, it felt good, and for the same reason, I am feeling much better these days now that my extra 55 pounds of fat are gone.

I did better on water this week. Each day I had at least 9 cups. That is my goal.

For points I dropped my average points per day another point this week from 38.86 to 37.86. That allowed my weight to drop back down two pounds to 184.5. I feel more comfortable at that weight than I do at 186.5 where I am on the edge of going over my target range upper limit.

Dotti and I have been having fun this week. We went and played miniature golf yesterday, and have been doing some shopping and site seeing around the Eugene area. It has been a very pleasant trip so far.

For exercise, since we got to Eugene, I have not been doing much other than walking around stores, etc. I got a couple of walks in before we left, but I am going to have to work on getting in some walks while we are down here.

On Saturday, I decided to slow my pace a bit and go for 4 miles instead of 3. It worked out pretty well. I was not too tired at the end. On Sunday I took a rest. Then Monday, I went out for a walk at lunch. It was one of the hotter days in the Portland area, and even at lunch it was well into the 80s. So, I just took it slow and easy, and only walked 2.0 miles. I felt fine at the end and felt I had gone just about the right pace and distance. The rest of the week, with the trip to Eugene, I found reasons (or excuses rather) to not get my walk in.

Walking this week:

Day.......... Date....Miles...Time .....Minutes/Mile ...Aerobic Pts
Saturday ...7/20 ...4.00 .....56:39 ........14:10 ..........11.94
Monday .....7/22. ..2.00 .....33:03 ........16.32 ..........4.26

This Week In Books

I am making progress on The Unfrozen by Ernst Dreyfuss (Tower Books, 1970) but it is difficult to keep from laughing at many parts of it. The “hero” of the story is a guy who is dating a catholic girl and she ends up pregnant. She wants to get married and he hesitates. She runs out of the room in tears, and the next time he sees her she is being wheeled into the emergency room, where he just happens to be a practicing physician. She has a brain injury that is irreparable. So, since she is brain dead, the other doctors want to cut her up for spare parts. “No, no,” says the hero, and pulls out the dog tags she is wearing around her neck for all to see. He also shows them a matching set around his own neck. Yep, these two are planning to be frozen and wait for a cure in the future, should they died today. He packs her in ice and then freezes himself right beside her, because he finally figured out that he really did want to marry her. So, 800 years or so later they are awakened, or as the title says, “Unfrozen.” (I guess “The Thawed” didn’t pack enough punch. :) )

Anyway, they find themselves in space in these transparent space stations, where all the people are neutered at birth and they think that these retrograde humans from 800 years in the past are simply “pigs” for the way they live. They want to sterilize, or more correctly de-sex the couple, and terminate the pregnancy. Naturally the two of them did not find this prospect terribly attractive. They find their way to earth, through an agreement with the head guy to try and mine coal, which the people of this era convert to food, and they are running out of.

Earth was knocked into a new orbit hundreds of years before, and it was now orbiting at 120 million miles from the sun, and its surface temp was over 100 degrees below zero. There was one outpost that the future society kept on earth, and it was used only for taking scientific readings to monitor the surface of earth. No one ever left the outpost to walk around on the surface of the planet.

What did these scientifically advanced people use as their scientific post of observation? Adolf Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. The two main characters were sleeping in Eva Braum’s bed during their stay. This is too funny. On all the earth, 800 years in the future this is the best that can be come up with by an advanced scientific society for an observation outpost? Anyway, these two geniuses from the 20th century, even though they were told the exact situation on earth before they went there, once they saw it for themselves, decided to end it all. How? By running outside into the –120 or –150 degree winter wonderland, and dying in an embrace. Now, class, what is wrong with this idea, and what is the name of this book?

Reading this story, I feel like I am at one of those old drive-in movies shows during the seventies, where the movies were terrible, but at the same time Dotti and I had a good laugh over it. I wonder what absurdity Mr. Dreyfuss will try and lay on me next. :) Naturally the advanced society once again unfreezes the would be suicides, and their story continues. How it will end remains to be seen. It is probably the humorous aspect of the story line that keeps me going past all the silly political clichés of 1970, and the strange twists of reason that pop up. Whenever we stop at a store where Dotti needs to run in and do some shopping, I grab the book and read a couple more chapters. I am most of the way through it, and will probably finish it this coming week.

I finished the Perry Mason book, The Case of the Velvet Claws. It was a pretty wild ride, with Mason turning on his client and getting her arrested for murder, because she was trying to get him implicated in the crime. Then, once he got her safely out the way in jail, he set about getting her acquitted, and of course finding the real murderer. According to the book’s dust jacket, it was the first Perry Mason novel, and you can tell that Erle Stanley Gardner put a lot of work into making it complex and exciting.

I picked up a couple of books this week at Border’s Books, and have started reading them. The first is Cataclysms on the Columbia by John Eliot Allen, Marjorie Burns, and Sam C. Sargent, published by Timber Press in 1986. The book is subtitled A Layman’s Guide to the Features Produced by the Catastrophic Bretz Floods in the Pacific Northwest. I got about halfway through the book the first night. This included the narrative portion, as well as the scientific discussion of what was involved in the “Bretz Floods” (aka “The Spokane Floods”), and the efforts it took by Bretz to convince the geological world that there had been a cataclysm that was unprecedented anywhere else in the world. The remainder of the book goes through the path of the floods piece by piece, showing photos and maps, with descriptions. I look forward to finishing that section of the book.

The Bretz Floods consisted of the release of about 400 cubic miles of water in about a week’s time. For a short period of time the water flowed at a rate of over 9 cubic miles an our from the ancient, glacier-created “Lake Missoula.” The water poured over what is now Spokane, Washington, covering the area with 500 feet of water. It then proceeded to rip across eastern Washington creating the coulees and scablands that are impossible to miss for anyone driving through that area. The water tore through the Columbia River Gorge ripping out the walls, and leaving streams that had once flowed gently down to the Columbia river, hanging hundreds of feet in the air, now forced to drop their water down the cliffs created by the “washout.” The water moved through at 500 to 700 feet high, and sped along at nearly 60 miles per hour. Its effects are clearly visible in the Columbia Gorge, especially on the east end where vegetation is nearly nonexistent. When it hit the Portland/Vancouver basin, it filled the Willamette Valley clear to Eugene, most places reaching 400 feet in depth, and it created a lake that stretched from Rocky Butte in Portland, almost all the way to Albany, Oregon, that was 200 feet deep, and larger than the San Francisco Bay. The huge lake created wave marks on the mountainsides around it that are still visible today.

There is much more to the story, but I can’t cover it all here. The whole topic is absolutely intriguing to me because Dotti and I drive most of the very route that the Bretz floods (and the process happened more than once, creating many similar floods, perhaps as many as 50 of them!) took, when we drive up to Spokane. We can’t help but see the layers of ancient lava, that was exposed by the water’s ripping action, in the sides of the Columbia Gorge as we drive along mile after mile. The volcanic rock, layered in-between other deposits, stands out quite clearly. The deep canyons cut in the Columbia Plateau in eastern Washington are no less demanding of our attention. The amount of water it took to do these things is impossible for me to imagine. Hundreds of cubic miles of water is just too large a volume to picture. Just seeing what it did is hard enough to take in.

The second book I purchased this week is called, A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar. Since the story is about a mathematician, it has to be good. :) I spent quite some time reading through its intro and the start of the actual book, right in Borders before I bought it. I just wanted to make sure that it was not just a rehash of what was in the movie. But it clearly is not. I think it is going to be well worth the time that it will take to read it.

1 year, 76 days OP, a lifetime to follow!

-Al-

6'3" 239.5/186.5/185±2/BMI:23.3/WK-62
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story