Losing a part of me

I feel significantly lighter today than I have in a very long time I say this for two reasons. The first is that one of the times I stepped onto my bathroom scale this morning I was at my lowest weight yet… more than two pounds lower than yesterday (when the scale was equally unreliable, but the weigh-ins were on the same spot on the floor)! That is a good indicator that my completely successful day yesterday (with regard to food intake) works. In other words, when I stick to that program religiously (three meal replacements and one meal) I can continue to lose weight. I know at some point in the future I am going to have to reduce the size of my meal, but for now I am happy that I can get back to this routine.

I said I felt lighter for two reasons. I had nearly a thousand ‘friends’ on Facebook. Yesterday afternoon I culled that list. It is now down to 245 friends. I have also left two community pages that I created (one for a friend who dumped me as a friend, one for a business I stopped owning seven years ago) and left almost seventy-five groups (many of which were either cigar groups or fan pages). I am still a member of twenty-five groups, and I own two others, but this culling should really cut down on my Facebook noise. Already this morning I noticed as I scrolled through my feed that the content was much more relevant to what I want to see, and a lot less cluttered with crap. There are a few people who I thought about culling but did not – specifically, a couple of people who tend to be extremely right-wing and like to share their vitriol and conspiracy crap a lot… one of them is a cigar buddy, another is a work colleague. I decided to leave them both on my list… for now

My back is aching again today. I suspect the muscular recovery from my workout the other day is still going on, which is fine… Muscle aches like these are the penance I must pay for having let myself go for so long, and now wanting to be in shape. It is a fair price to pay. My knee is still painful in the night when I am lying down; I will try to remember to discuss that with my doctor on Wednesday.

Speaking of Wednesday. Normally I would sit down at my keyboard after coming in from my walk with Princess Sophie and start writing my daily entry immediately. As I started this morning, I was interrupted by a slew of emails from one of the companies for which I did a demo teach in December. The entire Account Creation process is more cumbersome than you might think, especially when they are a company that assigns each instructor an email account. I suppose that means this is one of the organizations for whom I will not be sharing my personal contact information with my students, which is fine. Going through all of their material, I was concerned because it looked like they assigned several classes to me, one of which begins tomorrow, another begins (and ends) last month. We got that cleared up when she told me that they only assign me to the classes so that I can have access to the requisite training material. Phew! This was the org for whom I did a great delivery but screwed up one technical item which their technical guy called me on. I wasn’t sure if they were going to fail me for that, but it seems that they are happy with my delivery ability. Yay! This all has to do with Wednesday how, you ask? They originally scheduled me to sit their Welcome Session next week, but the time conflicts with another delivery that I am doing for someone else. They rescheduled it for this Wednesday, which works for me.

As Princess Sophie and I walked this morning I realized that my pants – the new Size-40 pants that I just bought – might be a little loose. Initially I thought how great it would be if I would fit into a Size-38 so quickly… but realized that as I lose weight, some things will fit and feel different. The larger I was, the tighter I would have to wear my pants… my belt would often feel like a tourniquet around my waist. I am now wearing a Size 40 pants with a Size 40 belt (on the last hole); as I lose more weight, before I start buying new pants, first I will move to the second and then third hole on the belt. Once I realize that my pants really would fall off without the belt, that is when I will buy new pants. No matter, it is nice to feel less constricted.

My goal for today is to stay on course. I am waiting for confirmation from my Master and friend to see if he is coming over this afternoon for computer help (and to catch up); as much as I love him, he is notoriously unreliable with time, and has what I have often referred to as a casual relationship with time. I told him when we were speaking last night point blank that when he tells me he is coming over, a 30-minute window is acceptable, but a 2-hour window is not. Say you are coming at 2:00pm and show up twenty minutes later, great. However, it is unreasonable for him to expect me to cancel any plans for the entire day (or afternoon) waiting for him to maybe show up… eventually. Yes, I understand that he has things to do and that he is running around, and it is not his fault… but I also have things to do, and when he tells me he will come at 2pm it has in the past meant that my entire afternoon is shot because he will show up… eventually. I have known about this casual relationship with time since the first time we invited him for dinner… Theresa and I prepared everything, and I put the salmon on the grill at 6:00pm, to be timed perfectly with his promised 6:15pm expected arrival time (and in compliance with his request that we not serve meat). At 8:45pm it was without a doubt the driest salmon I have ever tasted in my life. In the meantime, I have done enough work setting up accounts on this new training provider, so I think I will get lunch ready.

Have a great day folks!