Week 74 Update

"Baby it's Cold Outside," goes the popular winter/Christmas song, and I was thinking that the 36° that the thermometer was displaying at 5:30 AM definitely qualified for me as being "cold outside." (Yep, I've been spoiled since leaving Massachusetts with warmer winters and cooler summers.) When I asked him his opinion on how much I weighed this morning, Mr. Scale said, "185.5 pounds!"

With the cooler temperatures, the leaves are turning color and there is red, yellow, and orange everywhere I look. I just love this time of year!

Saturday, Tracy, Dotti, and I went to downtown Portland, found a place to park and took a walk along the Riverfront Park, beside the Willamette (Wuh-LAM-it – people will snicker if you say WILL-a-mit) River. (To see pictures of the evening [link=www.dwlz.com/dotalphotos/portspirit/PScruise.html]click here[/link].)

On the dinner cruise, I had 46.5 points, which brought my total for the day to 84.0 points, the most I have had on any one day since I started my journey. (I originally thought it was only 82 but I found we were miscounting the points for a treat I had).

The dinner cruise was awesome! It was a lot nicer than the other one we went on in many ways. The boat was larger, and it moved a lot slower. The scenery passed by at a leisurely pace, that was quite pleasant. The piano player was excellent, and the waitresses and waiters all got up together and sang to us at the start and the finish of the cruise. It didn't sound half bad. We felt that the "class level" was much higher on the Portland Spirit, than it had been on the Lewis and Clark cruise. I have to admit that I enjoyed the guide on the L&C cruise, which this one lacked. Also, this one never went north of the downtown area (so it did not go on the Columbia River at all), but it did go farther upriver on the Willamette, and for a while it looked like we might get to see the Willamette Falls, but we turned around before we reached them.

This week found my weight moving around some. I weighed in last week at 183.5, and then by Monday, I had gone up to 186.5: a three-pound jump. I think the afore-mentioned 84.0-point day on Saturday had finally caught up with me. Fortunately I had worked my weight down before the dinner cruise, so the bump up didn't hurt too badly. However, I had one more hurdle to get past this week, and it was a bit disquieting.

On Tuesday, I had to make a drive in the morning to pick up a part from our Eugene Office. The tech on duty there drove up and met me part way up, so I only had to drive 75 miles down, rather than the 120 miles I would have had to go to make it all the way to the office. But, I was still left with a 150 mile round trip run. I found myself to be very hungry during the drive. By the time I had made it to my customer site a little after 10:00 AM I had eaten quite a few snacks and a large part of my lunch already! During the drive I was having thoughts, that fortunately don't come to me often, about stopping and grabbing some fast, and fattening food. I even went through a mental argument with myself about why I was doing the weight loss thing, and if it was really important to me. Strange stuff indeed. I went through a lot of that type of thinking when I quit smoking, but with the weight loss, I have not had to face it as much as I did then. However, I faced it on Tuesday in a big way. It is quite clear that the car is my biggest problem right now in my weight loss journey.

Of course at lunchtime I was still hungry. I ate what was left in my lunch cooler, and then headed off to McDonalds, and grabbed a Butterfinger McFlurry. I normally only have one of those if my weight in the morning is below 185. On Tuesday I weighed 186.0. So, this was outside of my normal behavior. It also pushed my points up to 59.0 that day. My weight the next morning crept up to 186.5. That was still in my goal range, but I was not pleased with myself for stepping outside my normal limits. I pulled my points back in on Wednesday to 35.0, which recovered my weight to 186.0 on Thursday, which made me feel better. On Thursday and Friday I had no problem keeping my points below 43.0, which is my target point goal. This morning, my weight fell back down to 185.5, very close to my target weight.

Maintenance is very interesting.

On Thursday evening, after I got home from work, Dotti and I took our first walk from our new house. We walked a total of 2.25 miles in just over an hour. It was a nice leisurely pace, arm-in-arm. It sure is great being married to my best friend! We have sidewalks all the way from our front door to several stores, including Target, and Hollywood Video. We were thinking about walking clear to Subway, but it was going to be a bit farther than we wanted to go on our first time out. The two and a quarter miles was a very good distance for starters. Hopefully, we can make several of these walks a regular feature of our week.

One of my teeth decided to act up this week. At first I thought that a filling had just fallen out, but apparently some decay had worked its way into my rearmost tooth on the upper left side, causing the filling to dislodge. As it turned out, the decay had not reached the root, and so I asked the dentist to see if he could do the drilling without numbing my tooth. I figured if it got too bad we could stop and he could give me a shot. I hate going for hours after a session at the dentist with numb lips and part of my face acting like I had had a stroke. Anyway, we found that as long as he didn't go at it too aggressively, it didn't hurt. Once he started drilling, he had 90% of the decay removed before it really started to bother me at all. I held on for the last 10%. It really wasn't too bad. My dentist told me that not too many people could do what I did. I think what he meant was most people aren't dumb enough to do what I did. :lol After he was finished, I was glad that I had not gotten numbed up, but during the drilling process, I was not so sure. Dotti thinks I'm crazy. She wants her teeth totally numb when she gets work done on them. :)

Dotti has been dealing with an eye problem since last Friday. She scratched the surface of her lens area, and every time it tried to heal, her eyelid would scrape off the healing cells. As the ophthalmologist described it, it is sort of like ripping off a scab over and over again, never letting a wound heal. After seeing two doctors, they finally put a "ban-aid" contact lens on her, and that protected the healing process from the blinking eyelid. It has worked very well. On Friday she went back to the doctor and he said it was healing very well, but he was going to leave the lens in for a few more days to make sure. Sounds good to me! She was in misery, and now she is doing fine. That is a good thing!!!!

This Week in Books

I finished another Perry Mason novel last night: The Case of the Baited Hook. It had the interesting feature of having the murder mystery being solved before Mason had to appear in court at all. Also, this one had the feature of Burger swearing out a warrant for the arrest of Perry Mason, which was only thwarted when Mason gave the police the solution to the murder.

I am still working on Captain by Rick Shelley during my lunch hours. I am just about at the halfway point. In this one Lon Nolan gets engaged to a beautiful redhead, only to have to go off to war before he can actually marry her. Now he is trying to keep himself alive to make it back to finish what he started.

I finished listening to Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard once again. I have now started once again the C. L. Lewis "Ransom" trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra , and That Hideous Strength. I have already listened to this trilogy a couple of times, but I still enjoy it. In the first book, the hero named "Ransom," is abducted by a couple of ne'er-do-wells, who have built a spaceship, and take him to Mars in order to offer him to the aliens there. When they arrive on Mars, Ransom excapes and gets a chance to become familiar with the several types of Martians living on the planet. It is a fanciful tale but quite interesting.

1 year, 153 days OP, a lifetime to follow!

-Al-

6'3" 239.5/183.5/185±2/BMI:22.9/WK-74
Weight Loss Graph/Maintenance Graph/Success Story