The Wednesday Disappointment

Yep - told you so.
Before going to Nottigham, unofficial weigh-ins had me down to 18st 7, Post-Nottingham, today's official weigh-in saw me at 18st 8.75 - a measly 0.75 pounds lighter than last Tuesday, despite a healthy beginning of the week. Was rather gutted at the time - got on and off the Nazi Scales a few times, yelling "This is bullshit!", "You've gotta be kidding me?!" and as the stubborn bastards refused to register any differences, occasionally "Change, you vicious bastards!"

But they didn't. So that's the official result of the week of morning-gymming followed by an overnight away trip. Went down to Starbucks today to drown if not exactly my sorrow, then at least my fury.

Doesn't seem to have worked. Still seething. But hey dilly ho and all that. Tomorrow, we begin the gym sessions again (Ma having cried off a walking alternative, due to the likelihood of rain. In wales.)

So technically going in the right direction, just going in it at a pathetic, moderately patronising speed.  If I keep this rate up, I'll be at my ideal weight, possibly just before I die, aged 98.

Ach, to hell with it. To the bike!

The Back Front Door

d and I have a disagreement. 

It’s not a world-shaking, hair-pulling thing, but it’s most distinctly a disagreement.

We disagree about where the front and back of things are.

I know, you wouldn’t think such a thing was susceptible to debate, would you, but I promise you it is. In particular, we disagree about what constitutes the front and back of our flat.

d, for her part, maintains that the flat “faces forward”, which means it faces the River Taff, so the wall of our living room which overlooks that waterway is the “front wall”.

I, for my part, and with what is probably a male dose of linear thinking, insist that the “front wall” is the one in we find the front door. I am strengthened in my position by the fact that, as our place is a flat, it has no back door. I would boldly claim it has no back door because if it did, it would drop us from the first floor onto the road alongside the Taff.

Has there been a shifting, a softening, a movement of either of our positions on this question today?
There has, as far as I’m aware, not.

I mention this because today the confusion has played a part in my day.

In Nottingham, I was in a conference on self-driving cars all day (annnnnnnnd why not? I support anything that threatens to put Jeremy Clarkson out of business). At lunchtime, I was due to ride around a bit of Nottingham in one of them. The conference was held in an ultra-modern building that looked as though it had been constructed of all the Lego bricks left over after you’ve made what you really wanted to make. It had a front entrance, and a back entrance. They looked almost identical. At lunchtime I duly went to the closest exit, and waited a while for my turn in the Knight Rider dream-fulfiller. The car never turned up, and eventually, later in the afternoon, I learned that it had been at the other entrance waiting for me.

Having a tight turnaround to get the last train out of Nottingham that would get me home tonight, I pre-booked a cab to take me from Legoland to the train station. Having learned from my lunchtime humiliation, I went to the other entrance to wait for it. I noted with grim satisfaction that it plainly said it was the “Main Entrance” – in other words, the one with the front door in it (I’m not sayin’…I’m just sayin’…)

Then I had a text from the taxi firm, saying my cab was waiting for me. I blinked. It wasn’t.

“Sonofabitch rotatable buildings,” I muttered, heading towards the “automatic doors”. I smashed my nose into the glass.

“Bastard!” I said. A cursory examination proved that the doors were only automatic if you had a code-key to get in – or were coming from the inside, out. “Stupid, inside-out, back-to-front bastards!”

Fortunately, some academic types were heading home from a hard day’s brainwork, and the doors popped open, sweet as you please. I nearly ran them down, running from one end of the building to the other and practically flinging my bags at the cabbie, a docile, smiling man who seemed perpetually amused at the world and its madness.

Long story short, if you have one train, and only one, that will take you out of town and home to the bosom of your family – don’t try and get to it through a city centre at rush hour. Long story short, I just about managed to plant ass on seat before Nottingham started moving and the Cardiff train strained its steel sinews to get me the hell out of Dodge.

In Disappearing terms, not a particularly good day – had breakfast, a handful of bits and picks at lunchtime, and at Cardiff, this evening, waiting for the last train up the Valley, I succumbed and had a Double Rodeo burger at Burger King. Have no idea what this last overnight of the year (Woohoo!) will have done to tomorrow’s weigh-in. I was fairly optimistic for at least having lost my weekly two pounds before I went to Nottingham. Now, I’m not sure. On the other hand, it has been the last of the normality-destroying overnights, of which regular readers may know there have been six in the last few months. This allows for the making of plans, the building of routines, from here on out. I’m still in a good mental place, in terms of discipline, so let’s see what tomorrow holds, and then push forward into the week. (Shrugs). Seems all that can be done.

The Northern Exodus

As I write this, I'm sitting with some colleagues, in the weirdest sort of lobby restaurant in my experience of 42 years, in armchairs, trying not to let loose the spirit that wants to bop a couple of them in the head with a dessert spoon, as they eat desserts. While, for some reason apparently connected to a Welsh professor of marine agriculture (undersea potatoes anyone?), swapping and raising a range of fish puns.

This is Nottingham. Good city, to be fair, but will be glad to come back from it.
Oddly enough, on the train on the way up, I texted one of my editors, Gail, to ask her how the day was treating her.
"Am on a train up to Birmingham," she said, in a tone that said she'd rather be travelling barefoot into Hell to have dinner with Robert Maxwell.
"Oh that's weird - so am I," I said, "only I'm going all the way up to up to Nottingham."
Later, I popped into Facebook, and saw that one of the best of the Karens who make my live an altogether Kareny place, said she was in Birmingham. So suddenly, it's as though independently, and without prior arrangement, a few sections of my life have buggered off from Wales overnight and headed up to the northern territories.
Not remotely relevant, but moderately odd, I thought.

Today has been spent in a range of Starbucks, from my normal Cardiff one, through to the one very helpfully and thoughtfully placed within stumbling distance from Nottingham train station (thanks for that, Nottingham, much appreciated), and as you find me, I'm about to nip out for another couple of quick ones in the one cunningly placed on campus at the university at which I am conferencing tomorrow, which closes in about an hour...
...about 40 minutes...
Bugger - must dash. There's a decaff with my name on it, dammit. Didn't gym this morning, incidentally. There's a gym here, but I almost consciously rejected d's suggestion that I take some gym kit with me. Idiot boy...

Right - to the Decaff Cave, Batman...

The Nottingham Conundrum

Hmm.
I am perplexed.
Find me a per and I'll plex it like it's never been plexed before.

Today's been relatively ordinary - breakfast was coffee, lunch was the rest of yesterday's homemade pizza, there has been 500 calories of biking and much water, and shortly it'll be dinner time - as far as I know, it's chicken and potatoes and broccoli, oh my!

But then there's tomorrow.
Tomorrow, as I mentioned yesterday, I bugger off to Nottingham for - please, any available gods or demons! - the final overnight conference I have to attend this year without d. Turns out my train to Nottingham's not till early afternoon, which gives me plenty of time, in theory and what some people call reality, to get another two-hour gym session in when I wake up in the morning.
So there's my perplexity:
To gym or not to gym, that is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the sweats and grunting of the Dalek Gym-Bikes,
Or to take off, ignore the call of muscle, and buy a Starbucks, or six.

I honestly don't know. I know what I should do, which of course is to go the gym - I'm going to be without any more exercise for two days, possibly three. But inclination drives me...
...Well, let's be honest here, deadlines drive me to think perhaps option 2 is the more likely one, and actually the better one in my current situation.

Sigh - let's see what happens tomorrow. Dinner's coming...

The Additional Nose

I appear to be growing a second nose.

That's the headline of today, basically. Been quite a chilled out kind of day - no gym this morning either, stayed in bed till about 8.30, being a shameless heathen (it's the best kind, trust me). When conscious, I tried to ring some people, as we came home last night to find that as part of the renovation of our apartment block, some friends of humanity had removed our satellite dish, meaning we have no TV - not even terrestrial. Turns out the people who did that don't work on Saturdays though. d went to get her hair cut, coloured and straightened. I brought coffee, and when she got done, some four hours later (she has a lot of hair, I don't know what to tell you), we went for toasties.
"Wow...that thing is really Rudolph-bright," she mentioned, gazing in a sort of hypnotised wonder at the humungopimple colonising my nose. It's one of those things that rather draws the eye, or indeed the attention if you happen to know someone has one.
"I know," I said, contemplating adopting a hump and a limp to go with it and collect my whole Notre Dame set.
This evening, got back on the bike and burned a gentle 500 calories on my relatively lollopy old friend of a bike, and now, having had homemade pizza of unparalleled quality, we're preparing to sit down and crack open one of our DVD collections. I daresay we'll turn out the lights, and I daresay d would still be able to read a book by the light of my new-growing nose.

Oh, some heads-up (noses down). I'm away in pigging Nottingham Monday and Tuesday (I've nothing against Nottingham - Nottingham actually manages to both rock and kick ass simultaneously. It's just a bloody long way from home), which means this week's weigh-in will actually be on Wednesday morning.

It also means of course that resumption of my unff o'clock gymming sessions probably won't in all realism begin again till Thursday (home London-late on Tuesday night - buggered if I'll have the ambition to get back in the gym Wednesday morning).

Right - enjoy your weekend, Disappearers. I'm gonna settle down for movie night with my wife and my brand new additional nose.

The Caesarian Triumph

For those that recall my question of a few days ago - about whether I could do a solid working week of my two-hour gym sessions...the answer would apparently be notsomuch.
Was woken up this morning by kind words in a soft voice, telling me not to get up and do this thing. In my still sleep-drugged state, I agreed with it, seeing daylight at around 7.30.
Went and had a Starbucks day, downloading a pdf of calorific and nutritional information for every conceivable thing to eat or drink in the place. I'm not entirely sure the values on the pdf are right, because they don't seem to correspond to values on the walls of the shop itself - but apparently, my large de-caff skinny lattes cost me only 178 calories a pop - which is good to know if you're trying to spend the day there and not go madly overboard with milk and cream and weak-ass coffee.

Came home after an unexpectedly satisfying day of work and - as I promised - I got on the bike and started pedalling my ass off.

Now, far be it for me to cast aspersions, but my trusty old bastard-evil bike, bless it, is no Dalek Bike. I managed to rack up 600 sweaty calories - say three de-caffs - while reading, of all things, Julius Caesar in Suetonius's 12 Caesars. One down...Eleven to go.

Eating late tonight as a result of the Caesarian bikefest though - nearly 11 as I write this, and just about to sit down to dinner. Will see how that affects things going forward.

The Sleep Deprivation Tango

OK, this has to stop. 4.5 hours of sleep two nights ago, 5.5 hours of couch-snoring last night, meant when I woke up this morning and d said "It's six o'clock, Gym Bunny," my immediate response was to curl up into a foetal ball and whimper.

But five minutes later, I got off my couch, got dressed and buggered off to the gym. I will be honest though - this morning's Dalek Biking session was rather more gentle - and therefore rather more prolonged - than the previous couple of mornings'.

Breakfast was the same. Lunchtime saw me at a funeral, and as I sit here, haven't had dinner as yet.

Have dug out and begun to use my blood testing kit again, incidentally - (apply serious, determined face here). Seems only sensible to keep a track of my blood sugars, so at least I can know when and by how much I'm out of balance on the Disappearing journey. Haven't yet set in stone the times to test, so the first few results are rather random - 9.0 two nights ago after a rice and chicken meal, 6.3 last night before dinner at 9, and 10.1 this morning after my two hours in the gym and a porridge and frappe breakfast (yes, yes, I know, I'm getting ready to ditch the frappe...)

The rest of the day has seen me dancing the sleep deprivation tango - Came home form the gym and thought "Hmm - achy shoulder muscles. Don't shower - have a bath. A nice soak..."
I was bollock naked and had one foot in the bath when a bloke in a hi-vis jacket and a hard hat walked across the top third of the bathroom window, preparing to add external wall insulation to the flats. I...may....just possibly...have squealed like a cheerleader. Brazening it out though, I sank quickly beneath the bubbles. I'd been there about ten minutes when my tablet, on which I'd been reading a novel till my eyelids started drooping, exploded into sound, and my day-job boss popped up on the screen, asking if I could join the rest of the office staff for a quick Skype meeting. Once I'd defibrilated to get my heart going again, I gratefully acknowledged that the "video call" option wasn't engaged.
"Err...give me ten minutes," I said, de-foaming in a hurry.

It's been that sort of day. Tonight, there WILL be sleep.
The question of whether there will be gym in the morning remains as yet undecided. Have avoided going down to Starbucks all week, but today the drilling has begun again in earnest, this time on the side of the flat where my office is housed, so I feel a Starbucks day coming on. Whether I do the gym first, or come home and bike at home, which remains of course and option, I don't know yet.

Exciting being me sometimes, isn't it?

The Inspirational Truth

Had a rather bizarre thing happen to me late last night. A pal of mine popped up on Facebook to say she enjoyed yesterday's entry, and that I was, in some bizarre way, inspiring.

I'm not all sure I'm evolved enough to sensitively deal with the responsibility of being inspiring to anyone, but hey, come one, come all - if you chuckle, or nod, or even bother to read, I'm happy. If you find inspiration, well blow me down, that puts a stiffening in a chap's sinews, and summons up his blood something good and proper.

So it was with a degree more vim, vigour and what PG Wodehouse described as "all round...thingness" that I approached the gym at Seriously? o'clock this morning. Sans induction, I got straight on a Dalek Bike and pedalled. Did my 500 calories, then did rather a broader variety of machine work than yesterday - largely, if I'm honest, because the lean-forward machine was always occupied. Clearly, people have heard about it, and it's the diva of the new equipment, unprepared to be left alone for a moment. I knew I was never going to get a look in when I saw someone had dumped their training belt by the side of it.

Well, I wasn't going to argue with anyone who owned a training belt - would you?

I have discovered one thing to be true today. I may have the man-breasts of a balding, aging Weeble, but I have the shoulder strength of a new-born gazelle. Hmm - things upon which much work must be expended, clearly.

Back to the gym in the morning. There's a faint creeping sense coming over me that this is actually fun.
Clearly, for the sake of humanity I should probably be euthanised at this point, before lycra once again makes an appearance in my life. But nevertheless, it is true to say that I feel better - which probably, robbed of all inspirational hoo-ha and flim-flam, means more self-righteous - for having done a couple of days of this. Let's see if I can last the week out, shall we?

The Dalek Bikes, The Unbearable Density of McDonalds Porridge and The Art of Still Being Alive

OK, so I did it.
Got up at 6 when the alarm went off, hit it fairly hard until it squeaked, and got my ass and the significant rest of me over to the gym.
"You'll have to be re-inducted," they said - which to me sounds like something a Doctor Who villain might say. Apparently, the gym has just recently had a complete equipment re-fit - some of the stuff that was there before has been upgraded, and some of it shipped entirely out in favour of newer, funkier stuff that does the same job or something similar, with less metal and more pull-cords. Anyhow, the re-induction was some form-filling, and some oohing and aahing and oh-right-I-seeing with a Liverpudlian women whose name now escapes me, but almost certainly wasn't Bernadette.

So I didn't get on the exercise bike till 7.15. The new exercise bikes at the gym are rather sleeker, and computer-processed and altogether rather more bastardly than the old ones, which now, in my memory, feel like big old lollopy dogs compared to what I find myself compelled to think of as the Dalek Bikes. They demanded information before you could deign to ride them - age, sex, height, weight, chosen workout profile...Answer! Answer! ANSWER!!!
See? Dalek Bikes. Had to look up a pounds to kilos conversion on my phone before I could give them what they wanted, then began pedalling, to the initial sounds of Alice Cooper in my one working ear. The thing about the old lollopy bikes was that if you set them on a program, they'd follow it and it had a certain logic - you'd go up in gradations, and down in gradations. So imagine my rather breathless consternation when the Dalek Bike went from Level 9 effort straight to Level 19!

It would be true to say that by the half-hour stage on a Dalek Bike, I was thinking about quitting. Well, needless to say I wasn't just thinking about it - in my head, I had run away to a tropical island with quitting and was plying it with fruit-flavoured local hooch. I was drooling into quitting's ear, telling it about how cool and froody the world was before the Dalek Bikes came to exterminate me.

Which was when quitting slapped me round the face and stormed off in a huff, proclaiming it wasn't that kind of possibility. I was left alone and sweaty and desolate, with only my mate Sian on text saying "Keep at it!" like a kind of mentalist chipmunk cheerleader, the nicely odd sound of Bill Bailey's Leg of Time (Metal Version in my earpiece, searing pain in just about every bit of me, and bastard-stubbornness.

Bastard-stubbornness and I are old friends. I've absolutely no doubt that as I grow older, bastard-stubbornness will mature into flagrant self-righteousness and moaning on about the government and the shit that's on the telly - in fact, I know it will, because the process has been ongoing for about the last eight years - but every now and again, bastard-stubbornness shows up in my everyday make-up like a deeply closeted drill sergeant, all mustard-coloured moustache and perfectly pressed beret.

This morning, bastard-stubbornness demanded of me whether I was the kind of hopeless blubber-sack he thought I was, or whether I had any goddamned spine at all. I wanted to punch the bugger, but that's the problem with abstract concepts - they live inside your head, so you end up punching yourself in the face, and then being taken to a nice white room for a lie down and a chat with the three-dimensional people.
If I had a backbone, he said - and I did, I could feel it screaming - then I'd finish the hour I had said to everyone I was going to do, and THEN get on the muscle machines. Bill Bailey moved on to Apocalyptic News, I straightened up and kept pedalling. Not only did I finish the hour, I did an extra fifteen minutes so I could notch up 500 calories (I know, I know, it's not much for an hour's pain and bastard-stubbornness, but I'm led to believe that every little helps, alright?). Then, I hit the muscle machines.

They hit back. Did some back work, some shoulder work, some pectoral work, and the stupidest sit-ups in history. They can't really be considered sit-ups. The sit-up machine was one of those that had bitten the dust when the Dalek Bikes invaded the gym. What replaced it is just weird - it's an arrangement where the straps of a rucksack are attached to a shitload of weights. You stand, strap on the rucksack-straps...and then you lean forward. the weights are lifted (if you're doing it right, and don't throw a back-bend in to impress your fellow gym-goers), by the crunch of your abs, so it does the same job as a sit-up machine, but let me tell you - if you say "Yeah man, did 20 sit-ups", you feel righteous and virtuous and like you deserve the finest pig-based breakfast on the planet. If you say "Yeah man...I did 20 lean-forwards" you feel fucking stupid, and vaguely ashamed, and like Oliver Twist after he asked for more gruel. So I think it's best to say I did 20 vertical sit-ups (Ooh yeah, that sounds hard and cool)...and then I fucked very definitely off, still a bit John Wayned from straddling the Dalek Bike for over an hour.

I thought of the weigh-in that awaited me, and the potential of making my own cereal for breakfast - and instead stumbled across the road, pre-weigh-in, for breakfast at McDonalds. I was half-good; I ordered the plain gruel, with a calorific value of 285. Annnnd then I blew it by adding a coffee frappe, calorific value about 300. I remember being about 85 calories over my Dalek Bike allowance on that breakfast anyhow. So on the one hand that was a wasted hour that, come the end of my life, I shall heartily resent, but on the other hand, and looking at it with my Positivity Specs on, it was practically a free breakfast and it filled me up till way past lunchtime.
I went back to work, but something had clearly occurred to other people that hadn't occurred to me since the half-hour stage. I had an email, a couple of missed calls and a voicemail from d, and a text from Sian, all pretty much saying the same thing - "Oh god, are you dead?!"
I assured them both that I really wasn't. In fact I was so much the opposite of dead that I intended to do the same thing tomorrow (without the re-induction to slow me down).

d asked about the weigh-in.
"Ah, well," I said, "I was up a pound and a half, to 18st 9.5, but I weighed in after breakfast, so..."
"What did you have?" she asked.
"A McDonalds porridge," I told her. There was mirth on the other end of the line.
"Wow..." she said, "the rationalisation math of the Disappearing Man..."
"Hey!" I said, "you don't know how dense that stuff is! There are physicists looking for Dark Matter to explain the disproportionate weight of the universe, you know. I don't reckon it's dark matter at all, so much as Grey Matter. Never underestimate the potential weight of a serving of McDonalds porridge!"
"Yes dear," she spluttered, before bursting into laughter again.
"See how y'are," I muttered.

Anyhow, day 1 of the two-hour plan, achieved, thanks to Bill Bailey, Sian and bastard-stubbornness. Bring on day 2...

The Badness Cliff

It could be said - and indeed has been said - that in the last few days, I've rather thrown myself off the badness cliff. Had desserts, eaten late, eaten carb, exercised very little.

Tomorrow, technically, is the start of this new "two hour plan" idea of mine.

Needless to say it could be said - and indeed has been said - that this is pure unadulterated folly. Both d and Ma have mentioned this once or twice during the course of this last couple of days.

The truth is they're probably absolutely right of course. Went walking with Ma this morning and did my "10,000 steps" - as required by the Gestapo Phone. Had pie and chips for lunch though, and rice and chicken and home made bread for dinner tonight.
There's every likelihood that a) I won't get up in the morning at the sort of time I need to in order to complete my two hours, b) if I get to the gym, I won't complete two hours - one on the bike, one on the machines, and c) if I do manage to do the two hours, I'll run away and hide and never do such a damn fool thing again.
All I can do - all I've ever been able to do - is throw my intention at the cliff face of badness and hope to erode that bugger a couple of pounds per week.
So let's see what happens, shall we?

The Phenomenal Badness And The Two Hour Plan

OK, so let's reflect here. Tuesday, I managed, against all the odds, to lose a mysterious pound, and made a kind of silent vow that I meant to share with you, but never did, to really knuckle down and capitalise on the loss this week.

Since Tuesday?
Utter shite. Indian meal, Jamie's Italian yesterday, including half a dessert plank (Not to self - never, ever eat anything off a plank again. Most especially not desserts. The plank is for the whack upside the head it gives you when the sugar hits). Exercise? A couple of longish but nothing-special walks with Ma. The exercise bike I lovingly, dutifully cleared of office-based detritus a couple of days ago - is just looking at me now, going "J'accuse!" and singing mournful Cliff Richard parodies about how "it's not funny, how we don't ride any more..." and Neil Diamond parodies about how "you don't bring me arse-sweat...you don't curse my makers...you don't wear my gears out...any....morrrrrre...."

It's really terribly distracting.

Even now, I'm looking at my List of Shit To do, on which is clearly written the word "Bike", and looking at the time, and thinking "Iiiiii don't think so."

So, all in all - not so much capitalising on the lost pound. More sort of bankrupting it.

Oh and then of course yesterday I had to lay on the floor for about a quarter of an hour.
I went to Starbucks for the day yesterday, walked in the door, sat down, opened up the laptop and thought "Ohhhh, that's not right..."
Yes - your friend and mine, Random Bastard Tachycardia. Made me all swoony and for a moment there, I thought I was going to crash my enormous swede of a head into the keyboard of the laptop and dribble into its innards. But I didn't - I lay on the floor with my feet on the chairs and did my breathing exercises till a couple of the Starbuckers came running with ice water and a free first decaff of the day.
Some people - in fact, most everyone - said I should probably not stay there, but turn round and come home. But goddammit, that's just how big my balls are, ladies and gentlemen - had a tachycardic episode, stayed in a coffee shop for the next seven hours and went for a big Italian meal. Oh yes indeed...

So I Have A Plan.
A Two Hour Plan.

Haven't set foot inside the gym in quite a while now. As of Tuesday, when all this Easter hullabaloo is done and dusted for another year, I'm going to there early. Two hours (and possibly a bit, for showering) before I have to start actual work. I'm going to do an hour on one of their bikes. Then I'm going to do an hour on the various muscle machines - what comedian Denis Leary calls the "arm machines, and leg machines" and in my case the sit-up crunchy machines. Two hours, before the day begins, that's it. Then the day can unfold as normal, I'll have got some cardiovascular stuff under my belt, and done a bit of reminding my muscles that they're there as well. This flabby, flappy old cobblers has got to stop.

The Unbelievable Pound

So - got on the Nazi Scales yesterday, having done no pre-weigh-in exercise and having been, shall we say, unmoved by the necessity of the morning, to find I was down a pound on last week - 18st 8 lbs. Not sure what happened there, but going to run with it - without of course actually running in any way, shape or form. Been chained to the desk pretty much today. Wasn't terribly good yesterday - Had an Indian meal for dinner, which was loooovely, but not particularly wise. Tomorrow, back ot a bit of walking, and hopefully enough of a deadline-break to get back on the damn bike.

Here's hoping anyway...

The Gestapo Phone

Argh - continuing mad mentalness prevents me from a) blogging every night as planned, and b) getting back on the rediscovered bike as much as I'd like. However, did begin walking again this week, though in a somewhat cavalier and dilletante fashion.

Have a new phone that threatens to take over every aspect of my life. Need to find a way to do edits on the thing and then basically I don't need The Real World at all. Most particularly, being Samsung, it's pre-installed with a kind of eugenically-influenced exercise programme of which the Nazi Scales could only be proud. I only figured out today how the bloody thing works - it can track how many steps you've walked, how far you've run, what workouts you've performed and what, precisely you've shoved down your neck. It can then compare your achievements against daily targets to reach an annual goal. Get this - it told me how many pounds I needed to lose in the next year to be on the outside borders of my target weight for my age, height, gender etc, and then, after quite a circuitous journey of some three miles, told me I was about 4000 steps short of my daily target. It tells me I should be eating a little over 3000 calories a day, and burning off around 800. I'm in half a mind to elope with it, and half a mind to punch it very hard and very firm in its shiny little screen and stick its stylus where the sun doesn't shine. Anyhow, I don't intend to consume anything like 3000 calories today, and so far haven't - Sloppy Joes for dinner, true, but...hell, there's veg and protein in there, right? And clearly haven't burned off my regulation 800 calories, so the Gestapo Phone, as I have  a mind to call it, can kiss my stinky trainers for the day. Far too busy to entirely give my life over to its diktats just yet.

Maybe Wednesday...

The Nazi Pleasantry

Well, that was a surprise.

Yes, went walking this morning, but nowhere near my sometimes-six-miles, just a bit of an uphill meander, really, heading to our local Costa, where, pre-weigh-in, I had two large-ass Costa coffees (and anyone who's been in there recently knows they're getting enTIRELY out of hand, size-wise - they're basically buckets.

Came home and dragged out the Nazi Scales. Oh, should say, last night's main meal - pasta. With Bread. So big old carbfest, relatively late in the evening, so doing everything conceivable that one shouldn't do the day before a weigh-in if one wants ones Nazis to be nice to one.

Nevertheless, dragged the Nazis out this morning, and they sat, grumbling and muttering curses up at me. I think I woke them up, and to be fair, who's at their best under those circumstances. Still, got on them.
"18st 9," they said.
"Really?" I asked.
"Really," they said, yawning. "It's not good, you know - you still need to lose four stone before you're anywhere near good."
"Yeah, I know," I agreed. "It's just, also, nowhere near as bad as I was expecting."
"You're freaking welcome," they said. "Now get the hell off us, we were having a nice dream about crushing the lesser, fatter faces underfoot..."
"Charming, I'm sure," I said and returned them to their place of hibernation. So - the spiral of control begins again, but from a much better place - some five pounds at least lighter - than where I genuinely imagined I would be this morning.

And yes, before you ask, of COURSE I'm now calculating what might happen if I don't have breakfast for a few hours and wait for the two big coffees to go through my system, and wake the Nazis up again. Of course I am - you don't get this way without a certain degree of compulsion and a devious, self-deluding, cheating streak in your nature, believe me.

But shouldn't do that. Should be sensible.

Should be...

The Control Spiral

Ohhhhkay - so haven't posted in about a week. Madness - had to shift the office around, putting the exercise bike out of commission, then went to a longish conference, during which it was impossible to do much in the way of exercise. There are two things to say about this, really - just before leaving for the conferences, I got into my size 36 Chinos again, briefly and with a degree of pain, but still...

While I was away though, I had the nasty sensation of feeling like I couldn't escape from my own flesh - I'd catch bits of myself out of what exists of my peripheral vision, catch my reflection in shiny objects and see the wrongness of its shape, the bulging and inflation of what I think of as me. I haven't weighed in a week, but I'm not looking forward to doing so tomorrow. Yesterday d reconnected the bike and I did an hour on it, just because it was there. Today, nope - we did spend a couple of hours building a big chunk of new desk in the office, and that feels almost as universally painful as an hour on the bike, despite probably using far less actual calories. And I'm walking with Ma in the morning. But I still have the nasty sensation that far from being close to the borders of 18, the break in the exercise routine and the limiting of my capacity to be particularly good will see me back at 19, if not significantly over it.

And do, from this vantage point, whatever it is in the morning, we begin again to establish the spiral of control. The routine of work, the discipline of culinary self-control. All of it comes sharply into focus with the news from the Nazi Scaled in significantly less than twelve hours from now.

The Painless Windows

Well - after the absolute agonies of preparing the house for devastation by window-replacement, the actual replacement of the windows was relatively painless. (see what I did there? Painless, paneless...I tell you, this is quality stuff. Clearly wasted on you lot, but still...)

The weigh-in too was painless - mainly because there wasn't one. Have a feeling I packed the Nazi Scales away in a dark, inaccessible cupboard and stacked a Yahtzee board and a dead pot plant on them. In any case, they were unreachable this morning, and remain unreachable tonight.

Big Indian meal tonight - loooovely. Came back and had what can only be described as 'the raging shits' pretty much immediately. No idea what's up with that, as I can usually hold my Indian. Humph.

Anyhow - off to glorious Greenwich in the morning. Less of an inherent trial than my last conference, though notably twice as long.

Chances are high that I'll have put on since last week, a rather ignominious end to March and beginning to April. But all we can do is persevere.
Persevere, persevere, persevere...

Korma Karma

Bugger me.
Tomorrow we have new windows put in.
The weekend and tonight has been spent...
Y'know how some people, if they know they have a cleaner coming, will clean the house within an inch of its life before they get here. S'kinda like that, only not because we're neurotics, but because the window guys need  vast amount of access, and we don't want every single thing in the house covered in brick dust. So technically we have about 12 inches of liveable, sitable, sleepable space in the house right now - and no, we're not done yet. The office is a study in compaction, the living room needs one final Rubiking in the morning. The upstairs is just...(shudders).

And apparently I have to stay here all day while the work goes on.

Tonight, after all the work, we flopped on the chunk of remaining couch with Indian ready meals - Kormas, tikkas etc. Guaranteed, this will have an effect on the weigh-in tomorrow. And it's just the run-up for tomorrow night, when we go out for a proper Indian dinner. Korma's gonna be a Disappearing bitch.

Well...korma, karma, one of the two.