Week 66 Update

I woke Mr. Scale up a bit early this morning, and in spite of it being only 4:30 AM, he said, "184.5 pounds!"

I had to work a bit to recover from Wednesday, when a trip to the restaurant sent my points way up for a day. Even the scale took a two pound jump on Thursday, but even so I was still in my goal range of ± 2.0 pounds, but just barely. So, I worked my points down for the next couple of days and pulled the scale back to normal.

The temperature around our area is not uniform this morning. In Portland it is 64°, while in Vancouver it is 61° at the airport. Our thermometer reads 59°. All week long it has been fighting to get down into the 50s at night without its normal success. Of course the 100° temperatures midweek might have had something to do with that. :eek (The one nice thing about it was that the humidity dropped to 15% at the same time the temperature rose to 100°.) Tomorrow we are finally predicted to have a high that stays in the 70s! We are about a month away from the seasonal drop in the temperature that should hold good until spring. I am ready for it!

This week started off with a lot of stress for me. On Saturday, Dotti was just starting to pull out of the physical depression caused by her surgery. She was finally able to leave the house for the first time, while using the help of 2 canes to walk. Her pain medication was also making it hard for her to sleep. By Monday, she was up and around much better, but I was emotionally tired after the weekend, and I was hoping for a nice quiet week. Instead I find that on Friday (when I was off taking care of Dotti) the pager schedule was put out and I suddenly am scheduled for pager coverage this week. :-( Unfortunately, several other guys were out for the week, and so it moved me up in the schedule, since I was the only one available.)

There was a nagging problem at my customer site as well on Monday. It had been going on for the entire time I was in Eugene and through the time I was off for Dotti's surgery. People had been working on it, but the problem just did not go away. So, that added to the tension I was feeling. By the afternoon, I had made some adjustments to the machine, and the problem appeared to be fixed, but it would take several days before everyone was convinced the problem was finally put to bed. And while this problem was being worked on, there were other issues that had been put on the back burner until they could be dealt with. So, that kept me busy for the remainder of the week. (At least the nagging, long-term problem appears to be fixed!)

As the week progressed, Dotti was getting much better. By Wednesday, when we went out for dinner, she had her cane with her, but it was only lightly touching down, and she was walking a pace that was very close to normal for her. That is was very good to see!!! Monday, she goes to the doctor to get her stitches out and we will see how things go from there. Her knee still hurts a bit, but she is off the pain meds. She is getting close to reaching the point where she was before the surgery as far as the pain goes. Hopefully, soon she will improve past that point and return all the way to 100%. It won't be long and she will be out on the track walking with me again!

One day this week, I tried reading to Dotti from an electronics book just to get her to sleep. It worked. :^) However she was only asleep for about 15 minutes before she woke back up and was walking around the apartment again. Then, a day or two after stopping the pain medication, Dotti suddenly was able to sleep again. She had gone days where she couldn't get to sleep before 3:00 AM, and then woke up at 6:00 AM for the day. She couldn't nap, either. I was glad to see her finally get 9 hours sleep on Thursday night! She slept well again last night (and is still sleeping this morning).

My points per day dropped by about 2.5 points this week, even with the 65.0 points on Wednesday. And naturally, my weight increased half a pound. :^) Actually, I weighed early this morning, so if I had waited until 5:30 or 6:00 AM I may have been a bit lower. All and all, I am happy with the way the week went.

Looking at my Maintenance Graph (which I increased in size this week to hold one full year of data) I see that my weigh-in weight has not gone over the top of my 185.0 ± 2.0 pounds range, since Christmas, and I have been completely inside that range, both high and low since the end of April. It's been almost 8 months since I left the losing mode, and began the maintenance mode in earnest. It's hard to believe that much time has gone by already. When Christmas rolls around again, I will have been in Maintenance Mode for a whole year. Last year I lost weight all during the holidays, and this year I will be striving not to lose my direction, and to stay in my Personal Goal Range in the face of those interesting eating challenges coming up.

While I was fairly active at work, I did not exercise this week. I can see this is going to be an ongoing struggle to get my exercise in.

This Week In Books

This week I listened to a tape with a lecture on it on Monday driving to work, and the rest of the week I either listened to Stand Up, a Jethro Tull tape, or talk radio.

I did read a bit in The Portable Nietzsche but I did not make a lot of progress in it yet. However, it inspired me to get going once more on Bertrand Russell's book A History of Western Philosophy. On Monday at lunch, I jumped ahead and read the portion of the book covering Nietzsche. It was an interesting section. Russell, who clearly did not like what Nietzsche had to say in general, said, "Suppose we wish – as I certainly do – to find arguments against Nietzsche's ethics and politics, what arguments can we find?" He goes on call Nietzsche's philosophy, "unpleasant but internally consistent." He mentioned that Egypt ran for millennia using a similar ethic to Nietzsche's, and nearly all governments of large states, prior to the American and French revolutions did as well, but Russell hoped that such success of Nietzsche's ideals would not be the course of the future, but remain only the past. It definitely has me interested in continuing The Portable Nietzsche.

The rest of the week on my lunches, I returned to Russell's section on Plato, and finally finished it on Friday. While Russell did not hold the same animosity towards Plato that he held for Nietzsche, he did not call Plato's philosophy "internally consistent." Instead, he pointed out several flaws in Plato's reasoning, which in turn were handed down for centuries to other philosophers. I found this discussion to be very interesting.

One of the problems that philosophers face is the difficulty of proving anything to be true. Do you trust your own perceptions? Are yours the same as someone else's? Are they even the same as your own from day to day, and year to year? Descartes came down to the statement, "I think, therefore I am." However, what does that prove? If a valid assertion, he merely proves that, to himself, he exists, because he is capable of thought, but of what general use is it? Does that assertion prove that Descartes exists, or existed, to anyone other than Descartes? You claim to think, but can your claim be validated to someone else, and differentiate from, for example a dream of this second individual, in which you claim to think? Of course it cannot.

The philosopher, just like the mathematician, must start with assumptions; non-provable axioms. Descartes was trying to shove the assumptions back as far as he could, but it is impossible to do away with them altogether. It is very interesting watching the great minds grapple with this problem, and others. They struggle with not only the problems presented by this universe, but also with each other, as they poke holes in each other's arguments or supply counter arguments and assertions. They vary their initial assumptions and come up with completely different logical conclusions. In ancient Greece there were those who asserted that there is no change in the universe, and other that claimed all is change. I guess that pretty much say it all as to the range of possibilities that exists in the world of philosophy.

I have been making some progress this week in the evenings with The Case of the Sunbather's Diary, another Perry Mason novel. It makes for nice light reading to get myself relaxed and ready to sleep. I very seldom have any trouble falling right off to sleep after reading for a while.

1 year, 97 days OP, a lifetime to follow!

-Al-

6'3" 239.5/184.5/185±2/BMI:23.0/WK-66
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story