Regime Change

In the old days, when governments in other countries started putting people to death and rolling their tanks into other people's back gardens, we went to war, and perpetually bombed the arse out of their country till they thought better of it and died. These days, when people start putting people to death and looking like they might quite like to just nip next door and loot some oil, a couple of priceless artworks and maybe a recipe for a really good pizza, we don't go to war, we instigate what's called Regime Change.

Essentially, regime change means "we know it's not your fault, o people of the nation, and we're sure you'd love a bit of freedom and a Big Mac if only you had the opportunity, so we're just gonna come in and shoot your leaders in the head, if that's OK with you...and in fact, if it isn't. Sure, some of you will still get killed, but at least it'll be in the name of Freedom...and probably Halliburton, but we won't talk about that..."

Today has been a day for declaring regime change in Disappearing Land. Pretty much because the regime that was in place up to now had ceased to function effectively...if at all.

Does this mean the re-instatement of our dissident regime, the Commissariat of the Perspex Boxes?

Not really, no. The disintegration of the current regime though comes because, pretty much, there has been no regime in place since about March. There have been false starts, brief spurts of enthusiasm followed by slumps of  lethargy. The idea is to put in place a better, more logical system. More exercise, less food - the equation is actually fairly simple.

Started as I mean to go on today - walked ten miles before work. Can't do that tomorrow, as there are proto-blisters bitching on both feet, which need to be cajoled and bought off with niceness until they shut up and disappear (in case anyone's still following the regime change allegory, the proto-blisters would probably be the electorate). But I'll do something each day this week - tomorrow, maybe a double: swim and gym in the morning. I'm also planning to hit the bike again devotedly - after evening visiting hours, probably. 

My dad, incidentally - and thanks to everyone who's asked about him or sent wishes his way - is also supposed to be on a new regime, to tackle both his blood sugar and his heart rate, both of which are still elevated. As yet, they seem to be tackling the blood sugar with sliding-scale insulin, but of the fabled heart medicine, and indeed the fabled cardiologist, there has, as yet, been no sign.

But the new regime begins here, for me at least. 

Given everything I ate last week, incidentally, and everything I did and didn't do in terms of exercise, I'm happy enough with this week's weigh-in:

16 stone 4.5 - static on last week's figures. It shouldn't, of course, but as I say, given the way that last week went, that feels rather like a result!

The Screen Wipe

Today started at Ugh o'clock, as is usual for the London UberCommute. Got on a train at 6.35. By 10.53, d was getting antsy.
"Communication blackout," she pointed out by text. I called my mother.
She was already at the hospital. She'd been there since 7.30, having received a call at 6 o'clock to say dad had had a heart rate spike of 140 in the night, followed by an episode of diabetic hypoglycaemia, and a tumble out of bed. Talk about being outdone by your parents! I'll never bitch about the early start again!

Panicked for a while as I headed in absolutely the wrong blood direction on a train. Didn't particularly calm down till I got to work, by which time, the picture for dad was starting to look a bit brighter too. Sat at my desk.

"Right, well...you can do one of two things," I told myself and my computer screen (one of the joys of having the office to yourself is that you can witter all you like and no-one gives a fuck!).
"You can mope and ache and get nothing done and wallow in fear and consequences and woe is us..." I said.
"Or you can be a Man. A Man like dad is..." A strong man, a man who believes in getting the job done and doing everything he can. A man who never wants to anything with half a heart.
"Right," I said again. "Bollocks.
And with that, I gave my brain a mental screen wipe. Yes, I've been worried about him. Yes, I'm gonna see him tomorrow, and investigate what happened and where we go from here. But today - I did the job. Worked my ass off, and am sitting now in Starbucks with minutes to go before I catch my train back to the land where I can do...at least a little something...to help make his day the tiniest glimmer better than it would be if I didn't. It's a change of attitude I intend to carry forward into the Disappearing too. Don't actually, on reflection, think I need a whole new blog. Just a screen wipe of all the toing and froing, and a return to practical progress. So that's tomorrow. Let's grab the bugger by the throat again and employ every cliche of self-destiny we can, and get the job done.

Up The Down Escalator

You ever done that thing where you stand at the bottom of a downward-moving escalator and try and walk up it?
That's life at the moment - everything seems like an enormous, ridiculous, utterly draining waste of time...

Still, gotta laugh, haven't you?

Work - about which I'm genuinely not complaining, honest - is wave after wave of words. Dad's health feels like running to stand still and be carried irrevocably backwards. And my Disappearing...
It's been one of those weeks where nothing has been doable - between deadlines and visiting, I've done practically no exercise, and with eating out quite a bit after visiting hours, my calorie intake's been high. So this is not going to be a good week's weigh-in.

Oh in addition, there have been news stories today proclaiming that it's 30 years since the launch of the Commodore 64, and 25 years since the launch of the Lost Boys, so I couldn't feel older if my life depended on it.

So let's face a fact here - this is not gonna be me jumping up and down and happy dancing come Tuesday.
My life feels out of control in a number of directions. Hasn't really been in control since March. I remember writing the blurb for my September walk donation page. I was about 15 stone at that point, and I wrote "God knows where I'll be on this journey by September..." For the mathematics fans out there, if I'd stuck to my two-pounds-per-week rate, I'd be 13 stone round about now. In all likelihood, I'll be back up to 16 stone 7 pounds on Tuesday. Three and a half stone behind schedule.

All comes down to discipline of course - my discipline remains broken. I've had good weeks, solidly disciplined weeks. But I have the distinct feeling that to make real progress, what I need to do is shut this down.

The Disappearing Man, phase 1 took me from 20 stone 7 pounds to 14 stone 9 pounds, and then back up to (probably - let's see on Tuesday) 16 stone 7 pounds.  I have a feeling that what's necessary is a brand new beginning - new blog, new rules, new discipline, new...everything. Disappearing discipline, financial discipline, all kinds of discipline. I'm going to take tomorrow to see what my brain tells me...and then maybe come Tuesday, we might begin Disappearing 2.

Meep Meep!

You ever watch a Road Runner cartoon, where Wile. E. Coyote (is he related to Wil. I. Am, by the way? Just a thought) set a trap with an ACME anvil, and then would end up running off the edge of a cliff, and would have time to look down and realise his fate, then would plummet with cartoon over-compensation to the ground, landing with just his head above ground. Then, from nowhere, there'd be a whistling sound and he'd look up, and see the inevitable anvil hurtling down to embed itself - Ker-chunk! - in his head, and there'd be that look of "Why me?" on his long, goofy face. And once he'd plummeted to the ground, and taken an anvil to the head, and couldn't move a muscle, that evil, gloating bastard of a Road Runner would speed up, come to a dead stop, waggle its tongue at the helpless, semi-conscious coyote, go "Meep Meep!" and fuck off to pastures new.

This has been a Wile. E. Coyote kinda day.

Dad was great when we saw him yesterday - engaged, with a good colour, eating and drinking and following conversations. There was even some of his old dry grin.

Ma got there this afternoon for the 3 o'clock visiting session, only to be told something had happened in the night. Dad's heart rate had spiked to 199 bpm.

Lemme just put that into some kinda context. I'm 40. I've undertaken a year and a half of weight loss. I have biked, and run, and rowed, and swum, and spun dammit. I've never achieved a heart rate of 199 bpm. He was a 69 year old man, laying in a bed, clocking those kinds of numbers.

Oddly enough, no-one seems concerned about this except us. They didn't bring in cardiology, they didn't call any of us, nothing.
Now, today, he's back to being drained and exhausted, and he can't eat or drink anything, because he's both nauseated and barely conscious for two sentences.
"Why did no-one call us?" we asked the nurses on the desk.
"Ohhh...we sorted it. His heart's down to 114 now," they said. Average heart rate - 80 bpm...you can do the math on that, right? We looked down to see the cliff had ended three seconds before.
"Why did no-one from coronary care come and see him?"
They shrugged.
We plummeted to the ground and weighted for the inevitable anvil.
"Can we get a doctor to check him over?" we asked.
"Doctor's just gone off shift," they said. "If we think he needs seeing to, we'll put him right...honest."
Meep...freakin'...Meep!

Whumpf!

I don't cook.

This should be understood from the outset. I have cooked in the past, but it's not a thing I do well or with any panache, and it's therefore not something I do for myself.
In the wonderful, bad old days when I was a student, our kitchen blew up on the third day, and I survived an entire year of college on delivery pizza and ice-cream bars.
Given my druthers, I'd live on stuff on toast and ice-cream or cereal.

But this lunchtime I wanted to do something that was non-toast-based. I dug out some small pizzas from our behemoth freezer. Then I approached the cooker. Seemed perfectly straightforward. Turn a dial, insert pizza, wait till cooked, remove.

I'm basically a caveman, but I figured I could cope with that. I turned on the over, cranked the dial, turned away to make myself a coffee, and heard a quiet "Whumpf" behind me.
I turned back, only to see a big, bright mushroom cloud reaching up to the top of the oven and rolling around the interior. I turned it off, pulled out the baking tray...my pizzas had been replaced by a couple of blackened, charred discs of carbonised dust. For a second, I thought about using them to do a moody black and white portrait of my wife for the office wall, but in the end I decided...
"Fuck it, it's food."

Or rather, of course, "eat it, it's food".

"You used the oven?"
The incredulity in d's voice bored on panic.
"Yeah...tell me, who fitted the thermonuclear device?"
"Oh that," she said. "Yeah, that can be tricky. Let me guess...you put the pizzas in the top part of the bottom over, rather than the bottom part of the top oven, right?"
"There's a top oven?" I asked.
"Yyyeah it's that thing that looks like a salamander."
"A lizard?"
"No, ya dink. A salamander...it's what you British weirdos call a grill."
"Oh, that. That's an oven too?"
"Yes. Look, you're missing the point..."
"Err yeah, top of the 'bottom' oven then..."
"Yyyyeah, thought so. For some reason the top of the bottom oven is about 3000 Kelvins hotter than the middle of the bottom oven. And for reasons I'm not entirely sure about, the bottom of the bottom oven is pretty close to Absolute Zero."
"Really?"
"Yeah...I think it probably exists in a slightly different space-time continuum or something."
I should never have let her watch the last season of Doctor Who.
"Is that right?" I asked. "So we've got a neutron bomb in the bottom oven. Any other kitchen secrets I should know? Does the toaster work by telepathy? Is the refrigerator bigger on the inside? If I turn on the food processor, will a tiny three dimensional princess pop up and go "Help me Tony-wan...?"
"This is why you don't cook, isn't it?"
"No dear, it really isn't..."

Another not-terribly-good day, Disappearing-wise. Combination of tight deadlines and...well, fundamental laziness, probably, but let's not underplay the importance of tight deadlines, dammit! May, just conceivably, bike later, one we've been hospital visiting and out for a meal with some family who are down from Esher to see my dad tonight.

Still got four days before I have to weigh again...Hmm...Something should be done...Whether it will or not rather depends on the deadlines getting looser. So this is me...buggering off back to do some more editing before visiting time. Catch ya tomorrow, fans and groupies!

50 Shades of Green

"Take your hat!"
I looked at the sky. It was bright and blue, with fluffy sheep-clouds scudding across it.
"Nah, it'll be fine baby," I said, stomping off down the Taff Trail at 7.30 this morning.

I got about a mile down the trail when the heavens opened.
"Bugger this for a game of soldiers," I muttered, and ran back. Of course, the good thing about that is that I ran about a mile back.

Been busy sitting on my arse for the rest of the day - no biking.
Went up to see dad tonight. He's much better - blood sugar, colour, Potassium level, level of thereness, everything is better. Still has feet like water balloons, but they're not hurting him, so yay.
"Ah!" I said.
"What?" said Ma and d simultaneously.
"I knew I'd seen the green of your kitchen somewhere," I said.
"Where?"
"There...the strip across the doors of the ward, look..."
They looked.
Then they looked back at me. Kinda like I was on mind-altering drugs.
"That's blue!" said d."
"Green!" I insisted...cos it was (Yeah, screw it, I've got a blog, and I'm not afraid to use it - green, green, green, green, green!).
She pointed at Ma's green sweater.
"What colour's this?" she asked.
"Greeeeeen!"
"No dear...this is teal."
"That's what I said," I said. "Green."
"Teal's not green," she claimed.
"Well it's not blue!" I said.
""Yyyyyeah, kind of is. It's blue-green," she asserted.
"GREEEN!"

The next hour was the kind of game you'd play with a two year old. We were pointing at things, naming colours.

It's fair to say that...erm...most of mine were freakin' green! Most of hers, she claims, were blue. Except about half of them were really green!

"Dude, seriously, you need to get to the optician. You've got the green-eyed monster!"
"What the freak ever baby, it's green!"

We both turned to Ma.
"Erm...welcome to gibber," we said, almost in unison. "Green!" I pointed out a tree.
"Yes dear, well done."
"Gibber?"
"Yeah...we kinda do this every night," said d. "Not usually so...erm..."
"Green!"
"Errr...blue, but whatever dude."
"So gibber is...?"
"Lunacy. Nonsense. Silliness. Flapdoodle."
"Green!" I said, pointing at a car coming the other way.
"So you're just being silly?" said Ma, not entirely sure she grasped the concept.
"Yeah," said d. "About half an hour a night, end of the night, we gibber."
"Keeps us laughing together," I added.
"You're bonkers, the pair of you," said Ma.
"Greeeen! Green! Green! Yeah...that's kinda the point," I agreed.

We are, as advertised, completely bonkers. And eight years in, it's working pretty well for us. Let's see if anyone's still using 50 Shades of Grey eight years from now!

The Chips Are Always Tastier On The Other Person's Plate

Message to men everywhere:
If you've ever wondered why the most significant woman in your life says she doesn't want chips (or fries), and then spends half an hour merrily picking them off your plate - two things. Firstly, it is a well-known fact that food taken from someone else's plate has no calories, and secondly, as I discovered tonight, the chips are always tastier on the other person's plate. Even if you've had your own, there's something altogether more delicious about an illicit chip.

It's been a truly...bizarre day.
I've been watching too much Smash, clearly, cos this morning I woke from a dream of a brand new musical. The songs have been bouncing round my head all day.
Been working of course, but Ma wanted a hand to shift some furniture at 11.30. Dad had gone up to hospital to have two units of blood and some steroids. I'd been back home less than five minutes when Ma rang.
"Just heard from the hospital. He's had some sort of...heart...thing."
We went up. What he'd had was tachycardia, apparently brought on by high blood sugar.

That was a slap in the face and a knee in the crotch, frankly. That's exactly what I had a few months before beginning this experiment. His is as a result of the steroids he's been prescribed to battle his leukaemia.

Sigh....and so the sliding puzzle gets a new square added to it.

Needless to say, my day went pretty much to Hell around the locus of all this, so I've broken my non-Monday biking streak. Damn.
Will be walking early tomorrow morning though, so will try and get back on the right side of the exercise-food ratio. Once visiting time was over, Ma and d and I went for a meal, and I ended up stealing chips off d's plate, and y'know what, I'm not about to throw myself in a lake of self-pity or self-loathing over it.That was the day that was, and tomorrow, said he, channelling Scarlett again, is another day. Let's see what it brings.