A moment of bragging (fitness related)

I hit the reset button on my Yourself Fitness workouts on December 26th, 2006. That was the day after Alex got his own XBox and we had one back in the living room. 173 days have passed since that time, and I have worked out 130 out of those 173 days (right about 75%).

I’m pretty damn proud of that.

I have decided that, for the time being, I’m going to do Upper Body Strength workouts on the days that Maya wants me to do Lower Body workouts. Whenever I do a Physical Challenge I always max out the test numbers for Lower and Core body strength, and the fact is that despite the strength of my leg muscles the Lower Body workouts hurt because my knees just aren’t that good. I also get Lower Body workouts as part of my Cardio workout, which happens every day to some extent.

I continue to be dissatisfied with my upper body strength, though, and really want to focus more on that.

So…yeah…umm…that’s about the extent of my exciting post.

Weight Tracking Summary

Your current weight | 270.4 lb
Weight change since your last recorded weight | +0.2 lb
Total weight change to date | -148.8 lb

I’m pretty happy about this. I had a pretty huge loss last week, and the big fear was that I would “bounce back” a bit from that on Thursday. The fact that I only put back on .2 pounds after that makes me happy. I also got on my home scale today for comparison, and was down to 267 there (last time I weighed on that scale I was at 269).

So yeah. Still getting there. Still very happy with the progress I’m making.

Here’s hoping next week is the one where I officially break the plateau!

Never enough time

Just got an email from Amazon.com. “There’s still enough time to order an electronic gift certificate for Dad this Father’s Day.”

No. No there’s not, really.

Miss ya, Dad.

You too, Richard.

Don’t forget your Dad if he’s still with you this Sunday, folks.

Celebrity Justice?

So…there’s part of me that kind of feels bad for Paris Hilton.

I could go into a whole thing about about how being a spoiled rich kid is all she knows.  How we can, in no way, relate to the fact that the things we consider to be everyday things that one has to be able to do to survive (know how to unplug a toilet or cook for ourselves, for example) are things that she has never, ever had to do for herself.  About how, to her, the way you fix something is to call your personal assistant and have them deal with it.  About how she can’t relate to our world any more than we can relate to hers.

But that’s not it.  Fuck all that.  I’m jealous that she has a good life, too, and I like seeing those who have never known what a hard life is really like get theirs just as much as the next middle class schmuck.

No, the reason I kind of feel bad for is because, in some ways, I think she got the shaft in her current ordeal.  See, it’s like this – people get let out of prison early all the time.  Like they said on the news – the LA County Jail is seriously overcrowded.  You know, with people who’ve committed crimes like murder…rape….arson….you know, fun stuff like that.  And I’m sure that, most of the time, the Judges in question aren’t told about it.  Does that make it right?  No, of course not.  Doesn’t change the fact that it happenes, though.

In this case, however, the fact that she was let out was all over the news.  So what normally would have been an unreported non-incident became the story of the day. 

So, to me…it doesn’t look like she got special favors because she’s a celebrity.  Quite the opposite, actually.  What’s really kind of sad is that there seems to be this feeling that “we” (the common people) have finally seen justice done.  That celebrities are going to learn their lesson now.

Guess what, folks?  OJ is still free.  Robert Blake is still free.  Paris doing 45 days in prison isn’t going to change all that.

But hey, who am I kidding?  Despite my high and mighty words here, I still giggled at the pictures of her crying in the cop car.  So I’m just the same as everyone else, in the end.

Weight Tracking Summary

Your current weight | 270.2 lb
Weight change since your last recorded weight | -5.6 lb
Total weight change to date | -149 lb

Seeing the change in my actual measurements last week helped me continue to get 100% back on track with the weight loss program, and boy did it show! It wasn’t easy, though. Getting back on the exercise, in particular, was rough. I was seriously hurting for a few days there, to the point where walking down stairs was a painful act of concentration. I had a physical challenge two days ago, and I was at 269 on the home scale…I didn’t want to get my hopes up for being below 270, but I WAS hoping it was a sign of good things at the scale. So glad I was right.

I noticed when I was leaving that the shorts I’m wearing are really loose. Like, I should be wearing a belt loose.

Oh, darn.

A little historical data on my current weight.

I have lost 18.4 pounds since getting home from Goth Cruise last January.

This is my lowest recorded weight since 02/26/05. I weighed in that day at 272 pounds, and have not been below that number since. I have generally foundered in the mid to upper 270’s the entire time, but I have spent some time in the 280’s as well. If I can continue this trend for just one more week and lose anything more than .2 pounds, I will be breaking a plateau that has lasted for 121 weeks (yes, I could consider hitting the new low breaking the plateau, but the 270’s have become my current El Juapo, and until they die like a dog I will still consider myself at a plateau).

Thank you all for the support you’ve given me through this. It helps. It really does.

Players over Pixels, huh?

You know, I’ve been trashed out by people I’ve met in video games before. It happens. Despite the closeness one can feel in a video game there is something lost when you haven’t really met someone in person, and as such the internet fuckwad theory is always threatening to rear its ugly head. I’ve made a lot of friends playing MMORPG’s – and I’ve pissed a lot of people off too. That happens pretty frequently when you’re wearing the bullseye on your forehead.

But…

When it’s someone you’ve met in person? Someone who, in fact, you met and liked in person and invited to come play with you in the game? Someone who, while maybe not a person you’d consider to be among your nearest and dearest, you easily would have called friend?

It hurts.

The intention was to wound, and it was successful. Good job. Several people were hurt, more than that were really angry, and I suspect at least one person was brought to tears.

Ultimately over differences in belief on how pixels in a video game are distributed.

Amazingly enough, right after this happened someone who IS a friend wrote some really nice things about me. Took away a bit of the sting for sure.

Sigh.

I fail to understand why it’s so hard for some people to just say “You know what? This really isn’t my scene. You guys are great, but I think I want something different out of the game.” Is it really that hard? Amazingly enough, everyone who actually did that remained friendly with us….and hey, we even play the game with them on occasion. Go figure.

Meh.

Nothing quite as silly as realizing you’ve lost sleep two nights in a row over what happened in a video game.

Or that, despite that, you aren’t likely to stop playing any time soon.