219.4 this morning ... not sure if it's a good reading since I've been sick, but I'll record it with the rest. I'm doing better today than yesterday. I have moved from the nasal stage of a cold to the coughing stage. Nyquil and a full night of sleep last night helped. I might not be getting another night of sleep for a while, though, with work being what it is, but that's just this week.

I had (and have) a sore throat all night, which led to me dreaming about hosting a party at which @dragonjaze and I miscoordinated our implanting forks in the meals. I prepared Spork Nuggets, which are chicken fingers formed around a plastic spork. You serve them as hors d'oeuvres, and then everyone has their utensil for the next course. She mixed in flatware with the mashed potatoes, so when I ate some, I almost choked on a fork and the prongs hurt my throat.

In my dream, it was what you did at all the cool parties, of which we hosted many.

I have no sugar-free cough drops, so I fear I may be well off my diet today.

Gail Borden is closed next Sunday and Monday, so I picked up the first season of Fringe and have nine days to work on it. Looks like it was a popular strategy based on the amount of media missing from the TV section. They had 3 Dr. Who DVDs left out of a couple dozen.

Got the dishwasher repaired with @dragonjaze's help. Or she did with my help. Or she did with my observation.

She is still playing lots of Civ 3, so I dug out an even older game (Tony LaRussa Baseball 3) to keep myself occupied. VirtualBox isn't providing a compatible SoundBlaster interface for it, but that's OK. I downloaded DOSBox but didn't feel like getting too far into setting it up just for that.

I need to publish a positive experience with Amazon's customer service. I accidentally did a one-click purchase of an MP3 that I didn't realize wasn't free. I immediately began looking for the way to contact them (way too hard) and they did take care of it. While I did delete my saved payment information, I'm glad I don't have to take my business elsewhere. I already can barely use eBay, since I refuse to use PayPal any more, and after those two the markets for used goods are far more fragmented.

There is a reason I don't mention much about work here, but it's busy. Just busy in different directions than I'm used to, so I don't have canned solutions ready. I don't mind it, but it's going to take a majority of my time for the next three weeks. Next weekend should be an exception, but the following weekend will be packed.

@extrapremium just got her apartment repaired after the earthquake in time to be hit by the hurricane. I hope to hear from her tomorrow. Meanwhile the Chicago region's weather has been unnaturally fantastic for weeks, making a mere two days of upcoming 90ish forecasts look painful instead of completely normal.

Well, four weeks anyway. Here's the latest from yesterday:

• Chest: 41¾"
• Bicep: 14½"
• Stomach: 42½"
• Waist: 39¾"
• Hips: 41¾"
• Thigh: 19⅜-25"
• Neck: 18"
• Weight: 221.4#

Not a lot of changes.

A coincidence of circumstances has me working until about 2:00 AM, then immediately getting ready to go into the office. This means any reading I get off the scale won't mean much, so I'm skipping this week's publication.
Meanwhile, I have entered everything into an Android application called Libra, which draws a nice little regression line for me, although it's a linear regression. While the UI needs a bit of work, it's fairly nice and I recommend it, at least the free version.

@extrapremium's cat (one of them) died overnight. Sadly, this has been expected for months. Almost five months to the day, in fact, since she was brought to the doctor with her chest filling up with fluid. She got all the treatment money could [reasonably] buy, but her prognosis was always roughly about this long.

The way the weekend was going, with Lita not eating since Wednesday, @extrapremium already took the day off for one last trip to the vet. If the cat knew, I'd like to think she decided to resign last night, and spare my friend the final decision. She was a sweet cat.

I'm glad @extrapremium has at least some local support where she lives. I need to go hug Mildred.

Wish I had been invited, but I was on-call and busy anyway. Fog must have partied hard ...

(Yes, their water bowl is full, but that would mean doing what she's supposed to ...)

Brave comments about average workload aside, I'm at the "only 48 hours into this on-call week? Really?" stage. I'm getting used to a vibrate-only Blackberry during the day, but it didn't work at night, when I needed to be awakened by email. Normally I'd just hit the Loud profile and feel relatively free to doze off. On a related note, the couch positioning downstairs works nicely.

Good news: WOW sent a manager (not sure whether to put that in quotes) out to fix my cable, and he did. He ran a new drop from the pole and got several times more signal through. I still have to put the tap back outside to reconnect the porch, but the DVR is reporting a signal strength that is slightly too high now, so that should work out just fine. The last guy also seemed quite competent, quickly confirmed my findings that there was simply not enough signal coming in to the house (i.e. their side of the demarc box), and said he would place a call for a line tech to come out within 48 hours. The only problem with that was that it didn't happen, and when I did call back in it appeared whoever entered his results reversed his intent. So

The cable modem is connected to their network, and to nothing on my end. I have an idea of how I can use two consumer-grade connections redundantly, but it will take time to work on. Fiddling with that sort of thing is less fun when you're so dependent on the Internet for work.

Bad news: yesterday my work Blackberry's loudspeaker stopped working. That's the speaker on the side that handles all alerts, ringers, and half of the speakerphone. I did everything I know — a fair amount, including loading several OSs — in software to fix it and couldn't get it back. I'll have to get it replaced next week. It happened, naturally, at the very beginning of my on-call week. I set up my profile to have different vibration lengths for emails, calendar reminders, and calls, and I should survive if I keep wearing pants with a belt to clip it to. Plus I can wear my headset while I'm awake and hear ringing that way.

I'm tempted to not call it in until 8/22 when there's a chance I could get a 9930 out of it, but it's more likely I'll get a refurbished 9630 or 9650 anyway. My old office manager used my line's upgrade eligibility on a Curve in January, which I told him to sho... um, keep in his spare stock cabinet.

This remainder of this on-call week should be pleasantly busy. Tonight's work may go all night, but at least it's not urgent. Then there's late night work tomorrow night, Saturday night, and all-night work Sunday night. I've had worse (last month included) so however bad that sounds, it's really average.

I just realized this last night. Mildred is a character in an opera! That's why she sings about all the events in her life, and works on projecting her voice. After 18 years, she's gotten pretty good at it too. I can't hear the music, but it's a cat opera, so the bird cages are the orchestra pit.

This conjecture will be supported if Dinah yowls near the end.

P.S. 227.0.

I didn't know Pandora servers needed bathroom breaks.

Starting on much-delayed work space rearrangement. The bulk of this means desk cleaning, so I can eventually move it. I'm procrastinating on that by looking up whether I can use the ubiquitous office supply store online coupons for store pickup orders and get the filing cabinet and printer paper I want today, vs. free delivery next week.

Wed. morning weight: 229.0.

I do not believe I have ever seen my weight at 22x. I suspect that it was once in that range, since I know I was born weighing less, although I lack the basis to prove my weight is a continuous function and thus subject to the intermediate value theorem. However, I never measured it as such. Presumably I had learned about Heisenberg and was going through a phase where I was more concerned about my location.

Really, though, I went from around 190 leaving high school to the 260s, stopping at 270, around the age of 26. In between I had no interest in the number. Particularly after a couple years in college I was making money, in need of new clothes, buying them myself, and simply getting the sizes I needed. And, of course, eating badly. So I grew without really thinking about it. When I lost weight several years ago I got from around 260 to about 230, then held steady there for a while before it crept back up. So breaking the 230 barrier means something.

Including this relatively good week, I calculated that I'm averaging a 0.99% weekly loss. This curve will put me at 195¼ in week 25, 16 weeks from now, which is roughly Thanksgiving. (No, exactly Thanksgiving, counting from today.) I rather expect to have the holidays — if not a celebratory slice of pizza — offset my efforts for a couple months and still be at 195 in mid-January. Then it's time to finally get out of phase one and transition to ongoing weight loss eating. My goal is set at 180, which I think my doctor picked as the border between being merely overweight and obesity, or something like that. I remember the upper end of my government-approved weight range is about 165, depending on how straight I stand up for the height measurement, so overshooting wouldn't exactly hurt.

My blood sugar has crept up again, though, with six of the last seven mornings in the 100s. It's unaffected by the times I eat, too, which Dr. S. has nagged about. I wonder how that will impact my future diet, even if I could keep my weight under control while being more liberal. Well, at least metformin is cheap.

When you check on the dogs seven minutes after letting them out, and see that they pushed open the gate, and go looking for them out front, but after a couple minutes of not seeing them anywhere on the street you think to check the back yard to be sure, and you find them laying in the shade because it's too hot to go exploring, then you know it's hot.