Category: daily tedium

When oh when will the burping end? I can’t stand it anymore. It’s insane. I don’t eat as much anymore, and I drink a lot of water. I can burp like the kids on South Park and my little brother, Tim (hi, Tim!). I can do the alphabet and rustle birds from their perches. I can rattle windows and break champagne glasses. I can do the first half of the Gettysburg Address. My stomach hurts. If I weren’t laughing so hard at my own effervescence I would be doubled over in pain. This definitely goes on the list of things to address with the doctor on Monday (boy, i hope my appointment’s on Monday and not tomorrow… should have called). In other news, I can almost guarantee I’ll be at 276 tomorrow, which means I get to use my groovy employee discount and save almost sixty bucks on my new color Sidekick.

278.5 – That’s 47.5 pounds I’ve lost since December when I started all this. That’s also three pounds in two days (for some reason I gained half a pound and was a 280.5)!! Only two and a half pounds to go and I’ll have lost fifty. That’s half a Calista Flockhart!! Or, as Mike lovingly pointed out earlier, that’s almost 6 human heads. When I hit the magic number (hopefully Saturday), I’m going to get myself a reward of some kind. I really want a new color Sidekick with the unlimited data plan. That would be \$5.98 a pound. I think I’m worth at least that.

It’s been awhile since I posted my weight in bold. Did you notice? I did. I had a little setback and fell off the skinny wagon. I got all the way back up to 293 before catching myself (thanks to a new-hole-ripping by my doctor). I blame it partly on my knee and partly on work-stress – oh, and partly on me being hungry all the time. But, I’m back on the wagon, thanks to the previously mentioned hole-ripping from the good doctor. I’m back on the skinny wagon and am down to my lowest weight of the trip: 282.5, that’s a pound and half lower than my previous low: 284. That brings the grand total of fat lost from this frame to: 43.5 pounds. That’s like taking a Max-sized chunk out of my body.

How did I do it? The first thirty-five pounds came off through diet and a little exercize. I stopped drinking soda altogether, stopped eating my traditional bagel and cream cheese for breakfast, started eating salads for lunch, stopped snacking, and held myself to one serving at dinner. It was actually not that hard to keep up for the first four months or so. Then, as soon as the stress at work began, I started slipping. I didn’t go back to chugging Code Red and eating bagels, but I ate more. I snacked more. I ate more at dinner, and I stopped eating salads for lunch. I figured I “owed” it to myself. The pounds creeped back on, and I got angry with myself. Did I stop? No, the anger only made me hungrier – so I ate. I went back to the doctor and my blood pressure was back up. He prescribed more drugs, and well, here I am – duly humbled and taking more drugs.

For a couple days, I felt like a complete failure. After hurting my knee working out, and then the doctor, I was a wreck: depressed, insomniac, tired. Not only did I hurt myself trying to be good (working out), but I couldn’t keep the weight off. Now, the doctor had given me the ultimate insult – he prescribed an appetite suppressant. I actually cried on the way back from the appointment.

Now? I’m not so bad. I’m not a failure. Overeating is a disease, just like alchoholism. It’s an addiction like heroin. It’s hard to break, and next to impossible to overcome forever. So, I need a little medicinal help. I admit it. I’m not strong enough to conquer the entire mountain by myself. I did a damn good job losing thirty-five pounds on my own, finding my own bad habits, fixing them, and not cheating for a good four months. Now, I need help to go the rest of the way to 200. Eighty-two and a half pounds is a lot to lose without help. I’m already at a disadvantage with one twice-operated on knee and a weird ankle that’s never been quite right since that horrible sprain ten years ago. I’ll take whatever help I can get.

It’s been the kind of day where the only response I can come up with to almost any inquiry is “You suck!!”, and that’s editted for content. “Suck” goes first; and the first letter changes to another letter between E and G.

I did get to start on Michelle’s redesign, but she hasn’t seen it yet, or given her thumbs up to the direction yet, so you can’t see it. Once she does, I’ll post a link. I’m really happy with parts of it. It’s unlike anything I think I’ve done before. It’s a little self-indulgent while still keeping to the direction I think I said I was going to take. It kind of reminds me of an old Sci-Fi comics cover in the color scheme and font, and an old Sears catalog all at the same time. Not quite sure what to call it… but you’ll see it soon enough.

And now, not only do I have Michelle and Marty’s sites to do, I may be designing a new logo and website for a girls’ hockey team! Scary, huh?

It’s an honor to be linked to by anyone clever enough to come up with this domain name.

After an extremely productive day (you have no idea – a complete redesign of a major product in less than 48 hours), I expected to come home and want to work. Ummm, nope. I took some pictures of Max playing with my old Duncan Butterfly yo-yo (which will go up tomorrow), showed him some old pictures on the laptop, and then came downstairs, where I’ve been guiding the Aztecs to world dominance in CivIII.

My boss ordered me a copy of Zeldman’s new book, and I thought I’d want to read that tonight. But, no. It’s building armies and workers and negotiating trade for me. I’m so freaking productive it makes me sick.

On another topic, I’ve been reading a lot lately. We subscribe to a ton of magazines: Smithsonian, Utne (free with my Salon subscription – yet more reading), Premiere, and there are a couple others. I always read Smithsonian cover to cover, and here’s why (all from this month’s issue):

• The Nature of Cuba – which is really interesting in contrast to this from Salon

• Mr. Rogers’ Sweater – A sweet eulogy of the last earnest man on television.

• James Turrell’s Light Fantastic – Yet another reason to go back to Arizona. The pictures from this article were just amazing.

And yesterday, I read a great article on mushrooms and how they may be able to help clean up chemical spills, counteract chemical weapons, give us new medicines and generally make life better, a mother’s touching and funny love letter to her son, and David Byrne’s frequently confusing essay on good bad art and bad good art in Utne. Between those two magazines alone, I’m caught up on trivia for at least the next year if not longer.

So, in doing all this reading, and with work as busy as it is, I haven’t been posting as much. I don’t think I mind all that much. I’m going to try to come up with one good post a day, and maybe do a sidebar blog of links and short subjects that I don’t want to spend as much time on. Yeah, I know everyone else is doing it – but it’s a good idea anyway.

Oh so many things to tell you about and no time to do it. In order to be prepared for the hopeful avalanche of content this evening, you should all go watch Revolution OS before tonight so we can discuss it. And you might want to read up on mushrooms, bad bad art and good bad art, earthworms and their effect on small boys, love letters, and what you did this weekend. I will hopefully get around to writing about some or all of these topics this evening. Ok, at least one of them.

1. When in meeting with Senior Vice President, find out that said VP is a VP before the meeting.

2. JerkCity is really funny when you have a headache.

3. It’s really hard to look cool when you have your leg propped up under your desk on an exercize, with an icebag and you’re leaning over trying to type. Oh, and it makes your ass hurt. Try not to do that again.

4. Soul Coughing is so much more than Soundtrack to Mary. More bands should use stand-up bass. It sounds really really good in headphones.

5. Someone needs to make a “Save to Blog” plug-in for jEdit.

6. I don’t know how I lived before I found jEdit’s tag completion. It’s so hard to use anything else now.

7. I need more Advil.

8. Is it wrong to like Smallville? I know deep down that it’s cheesy. I know it’s corny. I can’t help it. I like the show.

9. I need more ThinkGeek shirts. It’s an addiction, really.

10. I must pick things up quickly. I can go back to code I wrote a month ago and see at least three things each time that I could have done better. Either that, or I was really really stupid and I’m just catching up.

11. Doctor’s appointments are good motivation to get back on the FatWagon. I’m down five pounds in the last week and am back down to the weight I was the last time I saw him. The cool part is, I was only ever five pounds over the last time I saw him two months ago. My trainer says this is a good thing, to be able to maintain. Next on the maintain list? Sanity

12. Jen wants a cheeseburger.

13. I think I have frostbite on my knee now. But the inside parts don’t hurt as bad. The outside is all cold-stingy.

My knee hurts still. It’s worse today than it was yesterday. I’m sitting here at work with ice on my knee trying to find a comfortable position to type in. I haven’t found one yet. Maybe if I move it this way… nope… this way? Nope, not that either. Maybe I should give up. Oh wait, I can’t. I have meetings this afternoon I can’t skip. I hope they don’t mind the grumpy tired me, because that’s what they’re getting. There will be no pleasantries when you ask me to squeeze 100 hours worth of work into 32. It can’t happen. Really, it can’t.

I see the doctor on Friday. It’s not an orthopedist, but I’m hoping I can convince him just to order the MRI. I don’t want to schedule yet another doctor’s appointment, wait three more weeks, etc, when I could find out next week if I’m going to have to have surgery again. This is all so damned frustrating. I think you may not hear from me much in the next week or so. I haven’t been sleeping well; work is nuts (rhino-style, not acorns); this whole knee thing is pissing me off. So, anything I have to say would probably be less than edifying, uplifting, interesting or funny in any way.

That, of course, is subject to change. Well, and Jen promised a big long post-Buffy essay that she said I could post here… if she does that, it’ll show up.