I planned to do measurements again in four weeks, so here they are:

• Chest: 44½"
• Bicep: 14"
• Stomach: 45¾"
• Waist: 40½"
• Hips: 43¾"
• Thigh: 19" - 26½"
• Neck: 18¼"

Most of those are within ½" of last time, except for a 1½" drop in hips and thighs. Also, for some reason we're measuring the effect of my diet on @dragonjaze's stomach, which was up ¼". I don't remember whether we did this before or after dinner last time, and it was immediately after dinner tonight, so her ¼" is as insignificant as my ½"s.

I wish this went fast enough that I could skip getting 40" pants for my birthday and go straight to 38", but I suspect it won't.

The scale chimed in with the number 243.0 this morning, so that's another pound. That's just barely enough to keep me going. I'm getting frustrated with the food choices, but if I can keep up a pound a week I'll manage for a while longer. Also the blood sugar numbers have been better this past week, with a run of eleven straight readings (two/day before meals) under 100.

Did my familial duties today, visiting my dad for Father's Day (I was on-call last weekend) and dropping by my mother's house to do a little more emptying of my room. This led to two more meals out, one at a restaurant near my dad not of my choosing. (Not to say I objected, but I passed on my chance to choose.) I had a Julienne salad for lunch, with nutrition information unknown. After some time in my old bedroom I stopped for dinner at McDonald's, getting the aforementioned Bacon Ranch salad.

This follows two other eating-out incidents. Thursday I went to KFC just to get away from the house after an on-call week. Also, I had a package to pick up at the post office in the vicinity. I had two pieces of grilled chicken and a side of green beans, dutifully ignoring the biscuit. Yesterday I went in to work, so I had dinner at Wendy's. Again, it was the previously identified Cobb salad. They did give me the avocado ranch dressing, and I couldn't resist using both packets. I wish McDonald's had a decent dressing.

Oddly, I faced not getting my first choice twice recently. The KFC by me doesn't carry the grilled Double Down, which is perfect Atkins food (4 carbs) except for adding glue between the thought of that system and the thought of fat people eating disgusting food. Today's restaurant didn't have (as in stopped serving, without removing it from the menu) the stuffed chicken breast that I wanted.

I also erred in forgetting my glucose meter at home, so it's the first day I missed a before-meal reading I'm supposed to have. As a point of interest, I'm going to take a 2-hr. post-meal reading in a few minutes. The last couple days have had good numbers.

In a pathetic attempt to not have this seriously be a five paragraph blog entry about what I've eaten for three days — see the disclaimer to the left, but I'm even disgusting myself — I'll note that I'm up because I have a bit of work to contribute at midnight, finishing up my day of duties. Tomorrow might just be a lot of video games. This week I got my Windows partition running well enough through VirtualBox to run Civ3. (Yes, the 2001 release. It's what I have, and it's a good match for my 5+ year old computer even when not virtualized.) Goodbye, real world!

244.2 on the scale. Blood sugar not looking so good most of last week, although yesterday wasn't bad.

This is almost three months old, because the source doesn't have RSS feeds on his site and I'm not signed up for the email list. At the end of March, Bernie Taupin finally answered the FAQ about the status of Farm Dogs, the band he formed in the late '90s. The answer, as you might expect, was that they're a thing of the past.

The confusion came from having farmdogs.com proclaim ever since late 1998, IIRC, that the band was spending time on other projects and might get back together "next year". That message sat unchanged for almost ten years until the domain registration expired. So now we can close that book: "Farm Dogs was a precious moment in my life that produced some fine music and provided the participants with some fun times. [...] The two Farm Dogs albums are capsules of a wonderful time in my life and the guys I made them with will always have my respect."

Thanks to the Internet, you can easily find used copies of Last Stand in Open Country and Immigrant Sons.

When @dragonjaze got home she wanted to see how Cosmo fit through the hole, so she took out the bricks and waited ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4quC_LUNliM

You can see our terrier mix poke his head through, which is all that fit. He was thoroughly upset about that. Kota throws tantrums if he's separated from his mommy and brother if he knows they're together.

Also, @dragonjaze pointed out that the hole was always there, but there was always a big bush directly behind it which she just took out this past weekend. A couple minutes with stakes and fencing, same as she has put up around the flower beds, and it's fixed.

Cosmo is a pretty big Pomeranian. I think he's around 13 lbs. Of course, his breed grows such thick fur that you can't even tell how much dog there really is. In the summer he gets shaved down. I don't know how much this helps him stay cool, because five inches of fur insulates you from the sun as much as it does from cold and dogs don't sweat to cool themselves via exposed skin, but it makes every human looking at him feel less suffocated.

The problem with a shaved down Pomeranian is that he becomes a much smaller Pomeranian. And he has tasted freedom before.

Back on 5/31 the gate to the backyard wasn't latched and the dogs got out. They made their way home with some herding help from a neighbor. She did get my number off one of their tags and called, but coincidentally I had lost my phone under the bed the night before and hadn't found it yet. It just so happened that she was following them back up our street when I realized they were missing and went looking for them.

A week later it happened again. The issue was that the latch to the gate was just a hook and eye setup on the inside. @dragonjaze likes to leave and enter the house via the front door to work in the back yard, so the gate doesn't get latched. Sometimes friction holds it closed, sometimes it doesn't. After the first time it probably doesn't work too well against dogs that know it opens and know how to push things. So after the second time, one week apart, we got (i.e. @dragonjaze installed) a better latch that works automatically and from both sides — via a string on one side.

Knowing that was there and working, I was rather surprised when the doorbell rang with the dogs outside. I answered the door to find ... Cosmo! And the boys he gathered to do the bell ringing for him. I had just looked out at them five minutes earlier, so it's almost like he got out just because he could and then went to the front door specifically to surprise me.

This is what I found at the corner of the back porch:

That's plenty big enough for him without his full coat. I temporarily put some bricks there, but having gotten out that way before, he might just push them out of the way.

I don't remember if that hole for the downspout has always been that big or if it had any recent help.

Probably a simple couple stakes with netting is enough of a permanent solution as far as the dogs go. I'll have to keep an eye on it in case any other animals have been using it. We had a pair of raccoons on the neighboring roof a few days ago, who might have seen the garden and drooled ....

Wednesday morning, so here I go with the scales, already¹:

245.8

That's up 0.8# from last week. I don't know why. I guess I'll stick with the plan and see what results I get next week. If they're still bad, I'll have to start the troubleshooting steps in the book. Blood sugar numbers have been good, but that's not enough to keep me motivated for too long. I won't know how good until my doctor sees them at the end of the month. I forgot what number she gave as my target. Plus, even those have been on an upward trend for a few days, after being particularly low Sunday.

¹ I watched one of the 2008² Futurama movies a few nights ago, so I'm channeling my inner Zoidberg. We all have one, yes?

² In this case, Bender's Game, which was an actual 2008 DVD release, although I was referring to all 4 2007-2009 movies the same way I speak of the "2009" Dr. Who specials.

Weather like this is why I want my next PC to be a laptop.

I've looked at my access logs and seen that people are still trying to hit my 2006 book review blog, so I pulled it up from my files and uploaded it as it was. The style won't match anything since this was published through Blogger. If I revive it, I might go to the effort of importing the content into another format.

I was invited to dinner with some of the family Friday night, but I didn't know where we'd be going in time to do any research, so I did the best I could. We went to Applebees and I chose the grilled shrimp & spinach salad. It looked reasonable, and even the full size portion I got didn't look out of line.

I finally got a chance to check it yesterday and was initially stunned to see it rating 63g of carbs, but that's with dressing. I didn't see any dressing on mine, and apparently the dressing is a 350 kcal, 43 carb bomb because the salad is otherwise a more reasonable 10 net carbs. I did pick out a small amount of lo mein I noticed, but all the other ingredients were good. And it was a good salad, too.

For my own reference, so I can close a few browser tabs, here are calculations from other chains' sites:

McDonald's: the Premium Bacon Ranch Salad with Grilled Chicken is 9 net carbs as long as you ignore the dressing packet, which would be another 9. 2 of those are from the chicken. The Ceaser Salad is the same, and its dressing is a halfway reasonable 4 carbs, which is one per tablespoon since it's a 2 oz. packet. (Data from their PDF.)

Wendy's: a BLT Cobb salad with ranch dressing, but with only one of the two packets, is 7½ net carbs. Looks like 7 if they have Avocado Ranch dressing.

Chipotle: I haven't had a chance to try this, but a salad with extra lettuce, half a serving of black beans, chicken, medium salsa, cheese, and sour cream adds up to 13. 6 are from the beans, which are a no-go for induction anyway. Dropping the lettuce but taking the full scoop of beans makes it a weird burrito bowl adding up to 17.

Should have written this yesterday, rather than write about food on a morning when @dragonjaze mentioned making breakfast. I don't want to eat my own breakfast before hers, but I was up at 0645 and we'll probably eat closer to 1100.

Up late tuning HTML/CSS for this site as if anyone ever sees it.

Did the final episode have Richard snap and pull a Glock on Hyacinth, or was that just my dream last night?

Just finished a Thunderbird extension. The only issue is the description doesn't show up in the Add-ons Manager when it's enabled in 7.0a1, but does when it's disabled. This may be their problem and not mine.

@extrapremium was complaining that my emails displayed white on grey for her. That's how I have my desktop theme set, but not something I'm supposed to be transmitting. After finding that Mozilla's stubbornness regarding body bgcolor and text attributes is an eight year old bug, I wrote an extension to strip them from outgoing emails if they match the user's defaults.

If interested: uncolorizer.xpi (no instructions: I assume you know what to do with the file; no UI: enable it or don't)

So, instead of being good and mowing the lawn in the 90° heat before the storm arrived, I had a geeky night of fun.

Morning blood sugar readings have been high the last couple days. I've been below the upper bound of 130 since Saturday, but aside from a 99 Monday morning their drop has leveled off. They're actually worse than when I'm mildly bad and have a late desert (of more meat or something — no slip-ups yet) a couple hours after dinner, before bed. My doctor's instructions on portion control and snack elimination contradict her permission to do Atkins. Trying to do both just makes me hungry.

My evening numbers have continued to improve, however, with four straight days ≤ 110. My attempt to leave a gap between the last installment of lunch and dinner may be helping here.

Oh, the big number that we've all been waiting for? Remembering that the first week's loss isn't that interesting since diets are often diuretic. (Although, I feel better hydrated than before since I've been trying to come close to or exceed the water guidelines.) The second week's loss is more interesting. With that reminder:

245.0. Down 5#.

I'm sort of bulk posting so I can have material to see while I work on CSS, templates, and code (oh my! CSS, templates, and code!) for the site.

I have a portion of the infrastructure set up to develop and test this site in a non-public fashion, but since I haven't passed out the URL to anyone yet, I'm just working live ...

Went to a bar to see a band last night.

(People that know me are already floored. That's pretty much all they need to know. No, I didn't have anything other than Diet Coke. It might have been more fun if I did, but beer is high-carb any time and definitely out where I am in my diet. I didn't look to see if they even had any decent ales anyway.)

@dragonjaze works with the bass player, so when one of his bands had a date only a few miles from us, we went so she could say she had seen him play. I went because, you know, after three years being the built-in date for such things is part of the job.

The band was ... let's not be deliberately insulting, and start by saying it was mostly not my kind of music. They basically covered '80s rock with two guitars and drums. I look at them as being four guys having fun on weekends, at which they were successful. Picture middle-aged men jumping around while playing in front of 30 people, and a half-dozen middle-aged women dancing five feet in front of them, and you've got it. Musical artistry was not a requirement.

The were playing an upstairs room in a small village's corner pub. Acoustics were non-existent. The music was there to be loud and vaguely recognizable. They butchered some hits, but none that didn't have it coming.

I had fun watching people using this as their excuse to dance. Mostly women, sometimes with embarrassed but dutiful husbands. @dragonjaze remained seated but otherwise participated. We stayed for one set that started at 9:30 (a.k.a. bedtime) and left before 11:00, while the fun was forecast to continue until about 1:30. No thanks.

Related thought: at what age can straight men sit around a table with wine and retain the respect of their self-stereotype? I'll say 55 is old enough, 25 isn't, and I'm trying to box it in a little more than that. Um, research reasons.

So my doctor said that with everything saying my heart was perfectly healthy, the next thing to do was to lose weight. She wants me to target 180, which remains overweight by the book yet is almost inconceivable to me. I'll have to see how things look if I get close to that. The good news, for me, is that she turned out to be an enthusiastic supporter of Atkins. I got a little lucky in that respect, but also take minor credit for picking someone with a slightly interesting background rather than the first generic doctor that could see me.

I did Atkins successfully for about a month in 2002 or 2003 — can't remember which. I was in the Induction phase that whole time, because after two weeks I was more interested in continuing to lose weight at the speed I saw than in getting more variety in my diet. I was losing about a pound a day. Then I went in to the office on a Saturday morning when I expected to be done by noon. Work turned out to take longer than that, and by mid-afternoon I was starving for anything I could obtain. Naturally, nothing handy was low-carb, so I was off the diet. In his books, Dr. Atkins described exactly what to do in that situation.

It took 8-9 years for me to get back to it, but I'm here now. This time, I have a different promise to myself. I won't guarantee I won't be bad again. Instead, I guarantee I will log it in this space.

I started on 6/1. The previous night I got some measurements:

• Chest: 44"
• Bicep: 14½"
• Stomach: 46¼"
• Waist: 41¼"
• Hips: 45¼"
• Thigh: 20½" - 28"
• Neck: 18¼"

The morning of 6/1 my official starting weight was 250.4#. (I get weights after waking, before breakfast, wearing whatever I wore in bed. They're reasonably consistent.) My weigh-in on 5/26 with the doctor was at 256#. (Better scale, but wearing seasonal clothes.) For additional reference, since I don't have any pictures, my height is 68½" or 68¾".

So far I have resisted the urge to use the scale again, which is what you're supposed to do although I didn't last time. I'll get weights weekly and measurements monthly. She has me getting blood sugar measurements twice daily. Those might be too boring even for this blog.

I'm going to have some posts here that are just quick updates on measurements, etc. For that reason I will use the category feature of Zinnia, which isn't something I like to overuse. If you are following along for the occasional bit of daily wit, you may want to follow the feed for the "inanity" category only. Boring health updates will be under "health", which will be included in the overall feed. This post is in both.

I didn't get around to writing all this until 6/5, so I'm past the worst detox stage of Induction. Still working on breaking the habit of eating every 2-3 hours, but when I do, it's allowable stuff. More updates soon.