Still Alive

G'day Fatheads.

I know it's been quite awhile, but I have valid excuses!  I've been on travel assignment for the Company for the last 75 or so days, basically.  I was gone for 29 days, then I was on the road for vacation for about 5 days, and then I was gone 2 days later for another 29 days on the road for the Company.  Plus side: I've got top-tier status on most of my travel accounts.  Minus side: I had the company feed me whatever my fat little heart desired.

I was up in the Seattle area for the travel, and I tried to get out for day hikes (that is Mt. Pilchuck), but I was mostly working 7 days a week, with many of those days being 12 hours long.  I mostly ate as I ought, but I certainly had some misbehavior happening, especially for the last week and a half of this past trip.

Weight:   300.4 lbs
Body Fat: 41.5%
Water:    44.8%

So I'm up many pounds from my last weigh-in.  Around 18-20 lbs, and I am very disappointed in myself.  I really considered putting this off for a day or two, but I've never found there's any point in delaying pain.

I really need to develop a schedule that works for me and a healthy diet.  I'm switching to a (nominal) 8-hour split shift (between 1st and 2nd) in the near future (scheduled either 10am or 12pm to 6:30pm or 8:30pm), but that will actually be probable minimum 10-hour days at 6 per week, eventually getting closer to 12/7s, as our workload ramps up.

I'm going on vacation again in another week, but I'm going to try and drop some weight before I do.  While I'm on vacation, I'm probably going to destroy whatever progress I make in the next week, but at least this will put a dent in whatever gain I might make.

Cogito Ergo Doleo, Fatheads, and thanks for the continued support.

Wasted Weekend

So, I've got the Super Bowl on in the background here, because I'm busy as hell getting my place cleaned up and my bags packed so that I can get on the road tomorrow morning.  I'm going on an extended trip for training for work, and that means things like massive amounts of dining out as well as extended travel.
 
I forgot to take pictures of the bag as I was packing, but maybe I'll take them when I get into the hotel tomorrow.  I packed dinner and lunches for about half the days I"ll be there, and I can pick up substitutes when I get out there for what I couldn't pack.  Thankfully, I'll have a rental and some basic fridge/microwave facilities available to me in my hotel room, so keeping groceries won't be a big deal.

Oh, and I also packed my scale, so Fatness updates will resume either Tuesday or Wednesday, probably.

Unfortunately, I'm an idiot and booked a 6am flight tomorrow... so I'm basically not sleeping tonight, hence putting off all my packing/cleaning until the middle of the Super Bowl.



Fucking Packers, the Steelers had better start fucking playing in this game, because there's very little worse than a Green Bay win.  Possibly Stalin.  Stalin might be worse than Green Bay winning.

For today only, Go Steelers, Fatheads!

Still Alive

Alright, me droogs, I think I owe you an after-action report.  Clearly, I've been off the wires for a bit, and I owe an explanation.  The epic road trip had to come to an end, because I ran out of the cash moneys, so it finished up in Indianapolis for the 4th of July weekend, with pitstops in New Albany, IN at the New Albanian Brewery and the Creation Museum on the Kentucky side of Cincinnati (which probably deserves its own entire post later).  The New Albanian Brewery had good beer, and the Creation Museum was home to the worst science I've ever seen.  I will definitely get a writeup of that together at some point.

The Fourth was pretty excellent, as it was spent with good friends, booze and explosives.  I was drinking and blowing shit up for the rest of the day after this was taken, so I have no pictures of the actual explosions, but friends do, and I may post them at a later date.  For now, enjoy the pile of explosives that was completely used that day and night.  4 cakes, 3 300-shot saturn rockets, a boatload of mortars (with custom launch rack), boxes of firecrackers, novelties, roman candles and bottle rockets.  We celebrated the fuck out of this country.

Of course, this leaves the bulk of the last week being spent back in PA unpacking and decompressing.  As of today, I'm back on Nutrisystem and prepared to begin regular blogging again.  No weigh in this morning, as I got up rather late, but I ate a Nutrisystem lunch, snack and dinner.  I've continued applying for jobs and am hopeful that someone will someday want me to engineer for them again.

I'm probably not going to weigh in for a few days, as I don't want to shock myself too much with whatever damage I've done, boozing and eating takeout for about 2 weeks, but I'm fully back on the diet, and will resume the blogging of it tomorrow.  I also intend to resume working out tomorrow or Wednesday, as it has been some time since I have, and fear the result of my laziness.

That is all!

Yesterday's Meals and Today's Breakfast

So yesterday was a bit of a failure.  I got on the road around noon, after getting the new tires, and grabbed a Whopper meal from Burger King for lunch.  There are a dozen excuses for this, most of which involve the fact that I was now a full day behind schedule and hadn't had morning time to prep lunch, but it's still a failure.

I spent most of the day on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is an extension of the scenic drive from Shenandoah National Park through Virginia and North Carolina.

Needless to say, it was very pretty.  There aren't as many scenic overlooks that you can just pull off for and snap shots of as there were on the Skyline Drive, but there were a much higher concentration of ones where you could take a 30-45 minute hike to get to one.  Unfortunately, I was pretty far behind schedule (I was supposed to get on the road much earlier in the morning) and I did not have time to take any of the hikes.  I think I might have to come back and do them when I return to this part of the country, because they all seemed very nice.

As I said, I was way behind schedule yesterday, so I made the decision to get off the Blue Ridge Pkwy once I entered North Carolina.  I wish I'd taken pictures of the state crossover, which was just a small wood sign in the middle of nowhere, but that brings me to the other reason I decided to get off the parkway: I was losing the light.  Yes, I was almost stuck driving around on a winding mountain road in the middle of the evening.  Fortunately, I was able to leave before I lost the light, and jogged down the state to get on the interstate system, where I found a very late dinner of McDonalds (quarterpounder meal, I'm a bad person) and a KOA campground for the night.

I spent the evening, and got up this morning and grabbed a shower.  Oh, Glorious Shower Day!  I was hoping to drop a deuce, since I haven't since starting the trip, but it appears my colon's on lock-down.  I then proceeded back to my car, where I sweated into my nice clean clothes while refilling my water can and moving things around for better access.  I grabbed a piece of wheat bread (carbohydrate) that I ate while I took care of things, and then sat down to the remainder of breakfast.

I had Nutricinnamon Squares Cereal with a juice box (fruit) and 8 oz of additional nonfat milk (dairy).  I have a carton of eggs in the cooler, but I'm starting to reconsider them and instead just always having milk as my morning dairy instead of protein.  Cooking is annoying.

I'm back on schedule today, and lunch is already warming in the sun on the back deck of the car, so now, it's time to book it.

(Sorry I forgot to get weighed this morning, I'm working on my morning routine.)

Charlottesville Tire Issues

This was written yesterday while I was at the tire joint, I apologize for not posting it, but I didn't want to while I was still in Charlottesville, and I didn't have the opportunity to post it last night.

So I rolled into town last night, and headed to the local Sam’s Club.  Unfortunately, it was too late to see their tire guys, but I figured I’d check my membership status/renew it while I was there, and find out when the tire department opened.  I met a very nice woman at the member’s services counter, who told me that my membership had expired and I needed to renew it.  I figured that I’d be spending some serious time with Walmart and Sam’s over the road trip, so I might as well spring for the 40 bucks to re-up it.  She told me that the tire center opened at 7am, knowing that I have a non-business membership, although it is a 7-year membership.

So I bedded down in the Sam’s parking lot for the evening, secure in the knowledge that I would awake, get some fresh tires, and be back on the road.  Unfortunately, it was not to be.

I entered the Sam’s, and headed to the tire desk, where a rather disgruntled employee grumbled at me about not having a business membership.  I explained my circumstances, that I was basically living out of the damned car, and that I’d been in the store the previous day, and was told to come in at 7am.  To be fair, I don’t think I got so far as to tell him about coming into the store yesterday, because he cut me off.  He put my keys on the wall, and I sat down to wait.

Waiting there, I realized that the prick was going to stonewall me, and refuse to look at my tires until the proper time.  Thus invigorated with piss and vinegar, I took my keys off the board, told the guy in the shop to tell his boss to close my ticket, and headed to the next tire shop that was nearby.

I was given very friendly service and help at the University Tire and Auto Center (http://www.universitytireandauto.com/).  They did a good, quick job balancing my new tires and taking care of my alignment.  I would heartily recommend them to you if you ever need work done while you’re in the region.

First Day's Journey

So, it's been an exciting day.  I bought a inter-department national parks pass, which gives me access (for a year) to all national parks and recreation areas, I toured most of a very scenic national park in Virginia, and I changed a flat tire.

Yes, the first marvelous day of journeying was marked by a flat tire.  Fortunately, a generous benefactor has decided to gift me some dough for a set of new tires, as it's looking like I'll need to get them replaced tomorrow. (1 tire's bad, you need 2, and they sell you the 4th for free, and they're all old, so you should just suck it up and buy them etc. etc.)  Happy day after Father's Day!

But, there is some good news in it all; I stayed on my diet.  For lunch, before leaving home, I had my last frozen meal for awhile, the Steak & Cheese Melt.  I will miss you, microwaves and freezers.

For snack, I had one of these South Beach diet bars that I picked up that are equivalent to a Nutrisystem snack.  Sorry, no new pictures tonight because dealing with sorting everything on the camera is a bit much for me, at the moment.

Dinner consisted of some cauliflower (vegetable), a bag of BBQ Soy Chips and 2 South Beach bars (about equivalent to a Nutrisystem Dinner.  This was shortly after the tire change, when I was dealing with the fact that I was about 50 miles from anywhere and I was completely out of cell range, so I had to pick a destination from good old analog maps and assume there'd be an appropriate store there.

Here's some fun: I hadn't bought bug spray, because I figured I'd pick some up at the first park store I stopped at.  Turns out, I hit that flat well before that ever came to be.  While I was changing the flat, around 45-50 cars passed me, and one stopped pretty early on (early enough that I hadn't fully appreciated my bugspray error) and offered to help.  As changing a tire is a manly thing meant to be done by one person, I, of course, refused assistance and proceeded to jack up the car.  as I got to the point where I thought I could take the tire off, I began intermittently trying to wave down a car to borrow some bug spray.

Now, keep in mind, my trunk was full of shit, and it all had to go on the road behind the car and in the back seat to get to the spare tire.  So it was clear that I was a person in some distress, and I wasn't just frantically waving my arms 'hello'.  many people sped up at the sight, and the one or two who started to slow immediately accelerated away when I started to walk towards them.  I had one that stayed still long enough for me to reach the passenger window, only to realize that they were two old people staring at me with abject terror, who had merely been waiting for a the people coming the other way to pass.  Those bastards nearly took my foot.

As I was putting the first nuts on the spare, a nice gentleman with his family stopped when I flagged them down.  I'm terrible with accents, and I thought the gentleman sounded middle-eastern, but I couldn't be certain.  The driver and another man, who I'd assume was either his father or his wife's father, exited the car, and gladly lent me a bottle of bug juice to spray myself.  While I was juicing, I earned curious looks from the kids in the back of the minivan, clearly fascinated by the fat, sweaty man with all the junk strewn by the side of the road.  The gentleman went so far as to give me a bug spray wipe in a foil packet, in case I needed some more bugspray later.  This is the cheesiest story I have ever told, but it really did make me feel better about humanity.  I wish I'd gotten the gentleman's name, but I'll put up a more detailed (location-wise) account of this when I get a chance in the near future, in the hopes of making contact with him.

I finished tightening the bolts on the spare, hopped in the car, and drove off for dinner and my evening resting stop, to wait for the store to open at 7am so I can get me some tires (or maybe just get this one repaired).  Now, I'm going to try and get comfortable in the driver's seat, turn off the car, and go to sleep.

aaand now a cop's staring at me, signing off and blogging more tomorrow.