weight loss 5 Comments

Diet & Fitness Update, Week #9: Two Months

It occurred to me today that I never posted my weigh-and-measure from last week. So, let me throw that up here before I go do my PUSH workout for today.

I decided to count Thursday’s weight and measurements as my Week #9, instead of Saturday, because Thursday the 16th marked exactly two months on my fitness regimen. And here are the results:

Weight: 209.5 »» down three lbs from starting weight
Bust: 45.5″ »» down ½” from starting measurement
Chest (under the b00bs): 38.5″ »» down 1″
Waist: 44.5″ »» down ½”
Hips: 49.5″ »» down ½”
Neck: 14.25″ »» down 3/4″
Upper Arm: 13.5″ »» unchanged
Lower Arm: 10.5″ »» unchanged
Thigh: 26.25″ »» down ¼”
Calf: 15.75″ »» down ¼”

I still think I need to get myself a body fat monitor, though. (Maybe I’ll get one for my birthday…) These numbers still don’t really reflect the changes I’m seeing. These changes are slight, but noticeable to me. For instance, the fat on my abdomen — my gut, as it were — seems to be shrinking. I have a small pouch of empty skin beginning to form. And I’m happy about this. I’m not seeing the results I’d like… but in order to get results, I need to push myself more, and buckle down, and not coast along or do things half-assed.

I received my first PUSH DVD last Monday, and discovered that I may have underestimated myself on my fitness level. I marked myself as a beginner, and thus ended up with a first (and second) workout that involves no resistance at all, not even the resistance bands I received with the disc. The workout is relatively easy, compared to the ways I’d been challenging myself previously, although the upper body workout is challenging for me. I can see where the workout is going, though, and I’m willing to stick with it.

I’m also supposed to do 100 minutes of cardio per week, and I definitely didn’t reach that goal last week. For that matter, I only did the workout itself two of the three times I was supposed to. I’m going to work on improving both of those numbers this week.

I’ve been eating healthy, trying to stay from evening carbs, going a little heavier on the carbs for lunch. It seems to be working to keep me from afternoon hunger, especially if I eat a little smidge of my afternoon snack right when I get back from my after-lunch walk. Fools my mouth into thinking it’s had a snackie, I guess. I’ve also been keeping myself well-watered — in fact, I’m feeling a little odd without a water glass by my side right this moment. I could use a drink.

*goes upstairs and swigs out of the cold-water jug in the fridge*

As for my mood… I oscillate between being excited to lose the weight and get fit, and being depressed that I haven’t seen better results. Holding steady is certainly better than a slow gain, that’s for sure, but still. When it comes down to the moment in the morning when I know I should get out of bed and make some eggie-weggies, and maybe someday jog my ass around the block, I make the wrong decision and turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. Or, when I come home from work, I sit at the computer just a little too long and let myself get hungry before I start my evening workout, and then it’s all over. No workout, and possibly a less-than-stellar super-quick dinner.

I feel sometimes like my health and fitness is in a precarious balance. If I let myself slip, either physically or mentally, it’ll throw everything out of whack. I mean, I know I can always jump right back on, but it’s still frustrating to always need to be on guard. I feel like I’m thinking more about food now that I’m just eating to live than I did when I was living to eat.

But enough of this. My chicken is going to be done baking before my workout is done, at this rate.

I’m really not overly depressed or anything… I’m just… disappointed in myself, I guess. I expected more.

(PS – I read my diary from when I was ten years old last night. For my birthday, I got a purple jumpsuit from my best friend. It was a size 14. It didn’t fit. …Did I mention I was ten years old? And couldn’t fit into a size 14? Yeesh.)

memories 4 Comments

Farewell, Clock Radio (1986 – 2006)

Apparently the lifespan of a digital clock radio is about 20 years, give or take.

I got this alarm clock in 1986, for my tenth birthday. According to my diary from that year, my Aunt Sammie got it for me. I’ve used this alarm clock ever since. I’ve lived in six different cities; in a trailer, two houses, four dorm rooms, and five apartments; and my simulated-wood-grain clock radio has consistently lived on my nightstand.

Over the past few years, the buzzer has slowly faded to a weak-sounding bleating, so I’ve been setting the alarm to radio, instead. Usually, the click of the radio turning on has been enough to waken me, as I’m almost awake by the time my alarm goes off, anyway.

However, on Sunday, I awoke 20 minutes after my alarm was supposed to have woken me. I looked at the clock. It was silent. I hit the button to turn off the alarm, and it made the tell-tale click; it had been on, but with no volume. I was willing to accept that maybe I’d hit the volume knob with my book before I went to bed. Before going to bed last night, I double-checked the volume and went to sleep, confident that my clock radio would wake me in the morning.

This morning, I awoke five minutes before I was supposed to be at work. WTF? I hit the button that either turns off the alarm or displays the time at which the alarm will sound — and it read 5:06pm. Now, I *knew* I hadn’t set my alarm for 5:06pm, and I hadn’t reset the time recently, so it couldn’t have happened by accident.

Time to get a new clock.

After a failed alarm clock hunt at Meijer over my lunch break, I went to Wal-Mart after work and got myself a new-fangled alarm clock. It is now time to plug in the new clock, and retire the old.

Sometimes I’m strangely attached to *things*.

randomness 2 Comments

Maybe This Is Mean…

I noticed that I’ve been having a lot of hits to one of my older entries lately, and that these hits have all been coming from a particular messageboard. As I am unable to sign up on this messageboard, for some reason or another, I can’t see whether or not they’re simply linking to the image there or actually displaying it, using my bandwidth. Either way, I suppose it’s cool that I’m getting traffic… except that my stats also show that they read my page of internet funnies, and promptly leave again.

Thing is, I can’t afford to host several instances of this 1MB animated gif *and* my podcast. Well, maybe I can, but it’s the principle of the thing. So, I renamed the image I’m sure they’re probably linking to. I’ve done this before, repeatedly, as someone on a completely separate poker forum insists on direct linking this image as his avatar.

What’s so mean about this?

I then uploaded goatse under the old filename.

Ain’t I a stinker?

geekspeak 6 Comments

Geekery In Motion

Dear Internet,

Today was a very special day. Today I got paid for being a geek ALL DAY LONG! My boss had asked me and a co-worker of mine to create a request log database, and today was the first full day I got to spend on the project. It didn’t go very well in the morning, since my chosen geekery was Microsoft Access, which I haven’t touched since CS100. I spent the first half of the day figuring out how Access works and deciphering the basic database my co-worker had set up. He couldn’t work on it with me very much, as he was busy with “normal” work.

The second half of the day went better, though. My co-worker and I briefly talked over some of our options, and figured out a few key points about searching tables in Access. After that, I did some cosmetic and security-based tweaks, and learned how to tweak VB code a little. I took a class in Visual Basic back in college, but that was a long time ago, and nothing I did then really applies to Access. Google was my bitch friend, though, and was much more helpful than the Access help file.

Tomorrow, I’m going to learn how to do my very own search in Access, instead of using the default Find/Replace function. Google has already given me some clues, and tomorrow I’ll finish my research and implement a nice FindRecord with an InputBox.

Yay for at-work geekery!

…should I get paid more for doing what I *like* to do? Hmm.