End of Month 9

Day 0: 303.6
End of Month 9: 230.6
Lost 73.0 lbs

That's an awfully fine way to end Month 9, if I do say so myself.  And since I'm writing this, I do say so.  Those before & after shots are so different that it's incredible.  My fantastic wife thinks that it's time to stop thinking about losing weight and start thinking about moving weight around to where it should be, i.e., muscle rather than that root beer belly.  She's probably right.  She usually is.

Day 272

What I did:

• Played some Magic with my oldest son. He seems to like it. Hard to say with that boy, though.

Day 271

What I did:

• Took a short walk to the local basketball court and shot some hoops with my son's. Nothing strenuous. Just a thing.
• Busted out my old HeroQuest board game and had a nice afternoon with it

Day 270

What I did:

• Played a game, Ultima VII, for a few hours, only to have it freeze. Saving? What's that? Sad panda...

Day 269

What I did:

• Played my new(ish) deck at Commander night. I've decided that I don't really like it... Not sure what to do with that. Probably going to take it apart.

Day 268

What I did:

• Added another pair of letters to my missionary letter blog, Postage from Paraguay.  The letters included the first photos sent home, so I had to figure out how to get those into the PDF file.  It turned out to be as simple as scanning them in and cropping out the non-photo parts.  I'm pretty pleased with the results.

Day 267

What I did:

• Went to the awards banquet at my kids' school.  All three of them were in the top five of their grades for the crazy-big math test.  My younger son (8) was also in the top five of his grade for two different reading tests.

End of Week 38

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 37: 233.2
End of Week 38: 235.4
Lost 68.2 lbs

I gained 2 lbs this week. My level of confused is slightly over 9000. Usually, I can explain why a setback occurs, but not this week. I thought that I behaved myself pretty well. It seems that the numbers disagree.

Day 266

What I did:

• Took my family to play mini golf. I lost. My eight-year-old got a hole-in-one on the loop-the-loop course.

Day 265

What I did:

• Went to church and tried to learn something, but I'm not sure that I was able to. The kids were all very off today.

Day 264

What I did:

• Mowed the lawn: 60 minutes. Fixed the broken sprinkler head: 75 minutes. Blech. Pulling that stupid broken bit of pipe out took waaaaaaay longer than it should have.
• Went to see Tomorrowland. It's been awhile since I had experienced such child-like wonder.

Day 263

What I did:

• Went to work, worked for a while, wanted to go home from work, stayed at work, worked a while longer, still wanted to go home from work, work some more, left from work at the appropriate time. In other words, today was blech.

Day 262

What I did:

• Took a new deck to Commander night. It did what it was supposed to do, but I didn't win any games. The trouble is that I'm not sure that I'm not sure that the game was the kind of game that I want to play. I'll probably give it another run next week to see what I think.

Day 261

What I did:

• Ate a bunch of junk. Well, not junk, but I wasn't careful at all. Well, my meals were done. I was just very free with snacks. Not bad snacks, just too many of them.

Day 260

What I did:

• Wasted an entire morning on a database installation. Not my fault. My computer at work just kinda sucks.

End of Week 37

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 36: 234.2
End of Week 37: 233.2
Lost 70.4 lbs

Only 1 pound this week, but it was enough to put me over the 70-lb mark! I'm really proud of this achievement. My wonderful wife asked me tonight what my goal weight is, and I didn't have an answer. I've never really set a goal. I just knew I was overweight, and I needed to fix that. I guess it's about time to figure out what my goal is.

Day 259

What I did:

• Created a new blog, http://postagefromparaguay.blogspot.com, in which I'm transcribing the letters that I wrote when I was serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's mostly a way for me to read those letters, but I thought that others might be interested, too.

Day 258

What I did:

• Was treated to lunch at Chili's by my fantastic wife. I had the chicken tacos, which were quite yummy. I had all kinds of problems with gravity, though.

Day 257

What I did:

• Had a picnic lunch in the backyard with my kids. I indulged in a PB&J sandwich. It was heavenly.

Day 256

What I did:

• Thought for a while about what to put here, didn't come up with anything, gave up

Day 255

What I did:

• Won two of the three games of Commander that I played tonight. The other one was kind of crazy, but very entertaining. Well, it is, now that I can reflect on it. It was pretty miserable while we were playing.

Day 254

What I did:

• Spun my wheels while the network at work was down. It's hard to work when a lot of your work is on a different computer...

Day 253

What I did:

• Filled out a couple of Mad Libs with my fantastic wife. Unfortunately, they didn't turn out as funny as they could have. Oh, well. We had a nice time together, and that's all that matters.

End of Week 36

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 35: 235.6
Ems of Week 36: 234.2
Lost 69.4 lbs

Did I really just weigh in at about a half-pound away from 70? *checks his math* Why, yes. Yes, I did. Almost 70 lbs. That is not a small number.

Day 252

What I did:

• Received atta-boys from the vice president of development and from the company president for my hard work

Day 251

What I did:

• Kept the kids out of the wonderful wife's hair so she could relax on Mother's Day. We did the big dinner thing last night, so today was pretty quiet.

Day 250

What I did:

• Took my family to see a live play of the Wizard of Oz. It was a good time for all.
• Took the amazing wife to Red Lobster for Mother's Day. She got the "Ultimate Seafood Feast" and surprised me by eating the whole thing.

Day 249

What I did:

• Rescued another developer again. One again, I was recommended to help. It's a good thing that I don't have much going on right now. A bit weird, actually.

Day 248

What I did:

• Had a great time at Commander night. I only won one of the three games that I played, but they were all really fun.

Day 247

What I did:

• Rescued another developer at work. He was struggling with a report. At least two other developers had tried to help him. His manager spoke with one of another manager, who recommended me. An hour later, his report was finished.

Day 246

What I did:

• <Insert clever anecdote about the day here>

End of Week 35

Day 0: 303.6
End of Week 34: 238.6
End of Week 35: 235.6
Lost 68.0 lbs

Three pounds this week? Quite surprised, actually, especially with the end-of-month weigh-in on Friday. Hey, whatever, I'll take it.

Day 245

What I did:

• Drained my hot water heater. Hopefully, that's enough, and we don't have to do any more to it...

Day 244

What I did:

• Played a bunch of Final Fantasy XIV. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Day 243

What I did:

• Got a haircut and an oil change. Yeah, it was an exciting day.

Day 242

What I did:

• Had too many chips with lunch, followed by too much pasta with dinner. That must be why my end-of-month weigh-in was higher than I expected. Or was it? I haven't been very good these last few weeks... Case in point:

End of Month 8

Day 0: 303.6
End of Month 8: 238.0
Lost 65.6 lbs

Whoops, a day late. Oh, well. Only four pounds down this month. Not surprising, really. It would make sense that the loss would slow down after a while. I'm okay with it. I'm still getting closer to my goal of whatever-my-goal-is.