Week 64 Update

It was a nice cool 48 degrees outside at 5:45 AM, 15 minutes before sunrise in Eugene. I stepped up on Mr. Scale and he said, “185.0 pounds!” Right on my target weight.

This is my first weigh-in in August this year. I always look forward to August, not because it is my birthday month (not ANOTHER year older?) but because it puts July behind us. July is my least favorite month because it has long days and hot temperatures. August has the advantage of shorter days, and even though the highs are often just as hot as July’s, the sun goes down earlier and the cooling sets in sooner. That means that by bedtime the air outside is usually cool enough to sleep comfortably.

In Portland, July starts out with days nearly 15.75 hours long, and ends with a day that is nearly 15 hours long. By mid August the days are just over 14 hours long, and by the end of August they are less than 13.5 hours long. Yes! Also the sun rises before 6:00 AM every morning in July, while it gets up later and later in August, nearly waiting until 6:30 AM by the end of the month. But most important to me, for the cooler evenings, the sun sets no later than 8:40 PM at the start of August, and a few minutes before 8:00 PM by its end. For the first two weeks of July it sets right around 9:00 PM and even by the end of July it has only gotten to about 8:45 PM. When the sun sets at 8:00 PM that gives two hours for the temperature to drop before my bedtime, and it usually makes things quite comfortable by that time. In July the sun is still beating down for an extra hour, holding off that nice cool evening until after I should already be asleep.

Returning from that little digression, this week maintaining definitely held my attention. We ate at Denny’s several times, as well as Subway, and several meals in the room that Dotti cooked up. I had one day (Tuesday) where my weight took a quick drop, and I hammered it with a 70.5 point day. (I learned my lesson about dropping weight on the road. I hit it quick now and get it back in line. :) ) That brought my weight back up to 185.0 the next day. Since then, the last 4 days in a row, I have weighed 185.0.

I averaged 9 cups of water a day, and had at least 6 cups each day. So, I did okay on water. On exercise, I did not do so well. I was active, in that I did not sit around as much as I sometimes do. When I was wasn’t working, we were out of the room doing something. Dotti’s knee didn’t allow for heavy walking, but we did quite a bit anyway. She used her cane and it helped a lot. In stores she sometimes used a shopping cart to lean on, instead of her cane. Also we went to the miniature golf course a couple of times again, and played through. It is such a pretty course, with the feel of the Pacific Northwest all about it, with its waterfall, and ponds, bridges, greenery, and tall rocks. It is worth the time just to see the course, and of course spending time with Dotti is always a pleasure no matter what we are doing.

On Wednesday, I took my baseball bat inside the warehouse at the office and spent 15 minutes swinging it, as if I were at a batting cage. (I remembered how tired I was in Spokane after 15 straight minutes of swinging the bat.) It was pretty good exercise. Fortunately, I remembered that I had worked up two nasty half-inch wide blisters on my right hand in Spokane, that were not only created but that completely opened up, while I was in the batting cage. So, this time I wore my batting gloves and my hands felt fine afterwards.

On Friday, I finally took a walk. I walked about 3 miles in under 38 minutes. I walked on the concrete path they have laid out along the Amazon Creek in Eugene. It runs pretty close to our office, and goes on and on. I have no idea how long it is from end to end, or even where the ends are located. I have walked quite a ways in both directions from the office and the path continued to stretch out into the distance at the point I turned around. During the walk, I passed by a couple of bicycle riders and several other people walking, although for most of the walk there was no one else in view. The temperature was nice and cool, and I was very comfortable during the walk. When I got back to my starting point, I was giving some thought to continuing on in the other direction, but decided that 3 miles was enough for that day.

I didn’t do terrible well this week on exercise but at least I got some in.

I jumped my points up to 45.86 points-per-day this week. On the road again, obviously. :) As usual, I use the scale, and to a lesser extent how I feel, to dictate what I will eat for the day. Mr. Scale seem to be able to work with the system so far.

Walking this week:

Day......... Date....Miles...Time .....Minutes/Mile ...Aerobic Pts
Friday ...8/2 ….2.95 ...…37:43 ........12:47 .......….9.90

This Week In Books

I am happy to report, and even happier to be experiencing, the fact that I have finished The Unfrozen by Ernst Dreyfuss (Tower Books, 1970). The science was pretty bad, and the fiction was below par, even for pulp fiction. On top of that, the story was saturated with the philosophy so loved by the followers of “brother” Karl Marx, and put out so profusely in the fiction of the that era. Unfortunately, most of it was done in a far more sophisticated way, and did not get put in the dust bin, like I am sure happened to most copies of The Unfrozen. Right on the last few pages he used two phrases that I hadn’t seen or heard in a while. As the protagonist (he was far too lame to be a “hero” of the story) was intellectually trying to tackle a problem he was said to have allowed his “brain to hang loose.” And on the last page as he was trying to play Freud, or better yet, Dr. Ruth, to the Martians who were dying out by not having enough children, he was creating a method to fix the problem, and he said that the “emphasis would be on love-ins.” Happily I am finished with this less than adequate work, and can move on to something a little less painful to get through.

I also finished Cataclysms on the Columbia by John Eliot Allen, Marjorie Burns, and Sam C. Sargent, published by Timber Press in 1986. The last portion of the book, traced the path of the floods section by section of the entire path. The most interesting parts for me were the Columbia Gorge, and the Willamette Valley, because I have seen many of physical features described in the book for those sections. The very idea of 1000 feet of water moving down a portion of the Columbia Gorge at nearly 60 miles per hour is really hard to picture. Looking up the sides of the Gorge to the points near the top where the lava layers have been scoured into view for miles at a stretch, is humbling, knowing that if I were riding along in my car at the time that flood came crashing through, there probably wouldn’t be enough me left over to identify with a microscope. At the very least, whatever was left over would be buried under 100s of feet of debris.

The very last thing in the book was one of the most outstanding. It pointed out that the 380 cubic miles (try to imagine a cube of water that is 7.25 miles wide, 7.25 miles long, and 7.25 miles tall), which affected over 16,000 square miles of land in its travels, produced 1.9 x 10^26 ergs of energy by dropping 4500 feet in elevation on its way to the sea. By way of comparison, when Krakatoa erupted in 1883, and was heard thousands of miles away with, it “only” released about 1x10^25 ergs of energy. That means one “Bretz” (or Spokane) Flood released ten times more energy than Krakatoa. And when you figure that there were 40 (or more) Bretz Floods (about 50 years apart), the total energy released by them all was a whopping 7.6 x 10^27 ergs, which is more energy than the meteorite strike that is believed to have taken out the dinosaurs. Fortunately for planet earth, the energy was used to cut massive channels, rip open “scablands,” and reshape geographical features of the land of portions of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, and to transport huge ice floated boulders into far away places, rather than to throw debris into the air and change the climate as a meteor strike would do. The book was a fascinating read.

I am looking forward to next tackling A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar, and returning to finish the CALENDAR Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year by David Ewing Duncan. I also have begun reading The Portable Nietzsche edited and translated by Walter Kaufman, a 692 page book that has been very interesting so far. In a letter to his sister, discussing the seeking after truth, as opposed to merely taking as true what is generally acceptable to society in general, Nietzsche wrote, “Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquires? No, only truth-even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly.” I don’t think he would have gotten along well with the PC crowd today. :) This is my first exposure to the philosopher, and so far I have found him refreshing.

So many books and so little time…

1 year, 83 days OP, a lifetime to follow!

-Al-

6'3" 239.5/185.0/185±2/BMI:23.1/WK-64
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story