Losing a part of me

Category: Travel

  • Day 1004

    You know you spend a lot of time traveling when the officer at US Customs and Border Protection’s secondary screening office greets you by name… before he is handed your passport. Because I am in the middle of the Green Card application process, every time I cross into the United States I am scrutinized to make sure I am not planning on staying. This trip was no different, and the nice officer put me at the front of the line and had me out of there in minutes. I was able to relax at the Admiral’s Club Lounge and enjoyed a reasonably (not entirely) healthy breakfast. The days of my worrying that I must have forgotten something are long behind me, and in a few minutes I will head down to the terminal to board my flight.

    By the way… I did forget something. I meant to bring a few meal replacement shakes with me, and I forgot to pack them. I am not worried because I brought plenty of protein bars for Leslie, so I might eat a few of them.

    It is so exciting that we are lets than five hours we will be together again. I am so looking forward to seeing her, my stepson, and of course the gorgeous Duchess of Mischief! Of course, when I dropped her off at Susan’s apartment last night it seemed that Princess Sophie knew that I was leaving again… I had forgotten to bring her bowl so I ran home to grab it, and when I returned she refused to come to me and looked at me with a glare that told me that she was not pleased with me. Sigh.

    The last couple of days have been unseasonably beautiful and warm in the Greater Toronto Area, and that is predicted to continue through Tuesday before the Canadian seasons return. That will have no affect on me until I return though, with the Texas autumn set to keep me warm during the days and cool but comfortable in the evenings.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1003

    I got a lot done yesterday and today in advance of my trip, culminating with reserving my Uber (which will pick me up at 3:45am) and taking Princess Sophie to our neighbour Sue, where she will spend the next fortnight. Of course, I took her for one final walk before dropping her off. It is now 7:30pm, and after I pack up my carry-on bag (which will include my laptop) I am going to shower and shave, and then I will likely have a cigar on the balcony… only because I know I will not be able to sleep yet.

    I was hoping to arrive in Texas under that terrible weight-loss mark, but it was not to be. This morning I had regained the miniscule amount that I had dropped yesterday. Hmph. Honestly I do not think I ate poorly yesterday, but you cannot argue with numbers.

    I will likely write tomorrow’s entry from the airport over breakfast, which seems to be my habit for early morning flights.

    Have a great evening folks!

  • Day 1002

    Lodge hurt my diet… but not terribly. I actually dropped a very small amount of weight this morning, but just imagine how much more it could have been if the lodge that we visited last night did not serve the meal after lodge (at 10:30pm), and if they had not served pulled pork (leaving me to eat a roll and then a piece of cake). Still, I did not do too badly.

    In thirty-six hours I am flying to Texas, and I am counting down the minutes.

    Have a great evening folks!

  • Day 995

    My weight did not drop from yesterday to this morning… nor did it go up. It is disgustingly up from before my trip, but at least it did not go higher today. This evening, we begin the fast of Yom Kippur… the Day of Atonement. I hope that a day without eating will help.

  • Day 993

    I know that when I step onto the bathroom scale tomorrow morning it is going to be bad. I am dreading what the number says, but all I can do is plan to eat better and smarter once I am home. In the meantime I have one more day on the road to face, and I will do my best to eat better.

    I already wrote that I ate bagels and cream cheese for breakfast yesterday. For lunch I ate a small hamburger with some nachos and guacamole. Throughout the afternoon I snacked on an assortment of nuts and dried fruits from a melange that my client and her daughter were having, but I do not think I did too badly with those.

    Dinner. Sigh. I ate better than I had the previous evening, but that is not difficult. My host wanted to eat at Olive Garden. I ordered the soup and salad and breadsticks. I ate an entire bowl of the salad (huge bowl, but not awful), two bowls of minestrone soup, and two breadsticks. I suppose I did not actually do too bad, but I made the mistake of not asking for them to go light on the dressing.

    This morning my host went out to get bagels again. had they not got them with lox (smoked salmon) and cream cheese then I could have resisted. As it stands I am pleased with myself for not eating more than one of them… and for eating slightly less cheese for having shared it with the dog.

    This morning I have a couple of hours of work to do before heading to the airport. The airport in Portland is not huge, but as with every other North American airport will have myriad ways for me to falter in my eating. I just have to be careful. My connection in Philadelphia is extremely short and I am not going to have the time to eat anything… unless I miss the connection which is a real possibility. I am crossing my fingers that I do not.

    Dinner will be at home! I am not picking HRF Princess Sophie up until tomorrow evening so I will not be forced to walk. I will try to get some walking in at the airport once I am through the security checkpoint.

    Tomorrow things will be back to normal! Phew. I used to love traveling for work. Now? Well, maybe less so.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 992

    When I travel for work it is hard to eat well, especially when you must eat where you are taken. Lunch was a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup at LaGuardia. Dinner last night was a Chinese buffet where my options were either deep fried or very unkosher. I opted of course for the former. I do not think I overate, but I am sure I gained weight nonetheless.

    Breakfast this morning was either cake or bagels. While the cake looked delicious, I opted for the smarter choice… a lesser of two evils, but I’ll take the win.

    What will the rest of the day bring? I don’t know… but I will try to be reasonable in my choices… at least as reasonable as I can.

    I will fly home tomorrow knowing that my weight will be up a bit… but not as much as it might have been.

    After a disastrous night Sunday, I slept like a log last night. Phew!

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 990

    It was definitely an exhausting week. I am glad that these last couple of nights I have been able to sleep well. After sleep scores of 24 Monday, 69 Tuesday, 50 Wednesday, 21 on Friday, and not getting enough sleep Thursday to even register as sleep… Saturday morning my score was 83 and this morning it was 86. I finally caught up on my rest! My body battery was up as high as 74 this morning, which is certainly the highest it has been (by over 25 points) all week. Of course, knowing that I am waking up at 4:00am tomorrow to fly off to Maine I am sure it will be lousy again, but what can you do?

    From a terrible high Thursday of 302.2 lbs. both Saturday and Thursday, I am relieved that my weight dropped below that dreaded mark yesterday (299.6) and further down this morning to 299.0 lbs. even. I still feel disgustingly fat, but I have to stay below 300!

    I had a decent breakfast and lunch today and am planning on having a reasonable dinner this evening… and will be in bed earlier than usual so that I can get a decent night sleep before driving to the airport in the morning. Yes, I will be away for a short enough period that it will be cheaper for me to park at the airport than it would be to take an Uber. If I shower and shave (and pack) this evening, then if I am in bed by 10pm I will get six hours of sleep. Unfortunately (for the company but fortunate for my tight schedule) HRF Princess Sophie said goodbye when she gladly hopped into my buddy Rob’s car this afternoon, so I will sleep alone, but will not have to walk her this evening. I will miss her but it’s a short trip.

    It is time for dinner so I should get to it so that I won’t eat too close to bed time. Have a great evening folks!

  • Day 969

    After what I ate yesterday, I was not expecting to see a drop on the bathroom scale this morning… certainly not a drop of 1.8 lbs., but then I do have to remember that Thursday evening I gorged on bread and cookies, and Friday evening ended with a slice of pie and a large scoop of ice cream… all after having had a shawarma wrap for lunch. I am glad that my weight is back down to 285… 2.6 lbs. heavier than my best weight of the month, but 7.8 lbs. lighter than my worst.

    I did not sleep well last night. I woke up around 1:30am to my dog barking at someone in the hall, which is a rare occurrence here. It left me with a headache that would plague me the rest of the night, and I mostly tossed and turned. The end result was a sleep score of 63. Boo. As expected, I did not come close to my steps goal… but I still exceeded 8,200. I’ll take it for an off day!

    Yesterday actually went pretty much as I had planned. We ate breakfast out, we had a small bite of leftover spanakopita for lunch, and for an early dinner we headed to the pub on the corner, where I ordered my usual fish and chips. The only aberration to my eating yesterday was that we got home from our evening plans and were a bit puckish, and so we finished off the rest of the pie. I had done the smart thing yesterday afternoon when I gave the rest of the ice cream away to a neighbour, otherwise we would have eaten that as well.

    I hate the fact that Leslie is leaving today. I made her a lovely French toast for breakfast, and we will likely do a late lunch… but all of that is hiding the fact that in the mid-afternoon I have to drive her to the airport. I love when we are together, and I hate when we have to part. Fortunately, I did do what I had said yesterday… I booked my next trip to see her in Dallas. We will be apart this time for 35 days, which is a long time… but at least it is a known quantity; when she left here in July, we did not have a date for our next meeting, and it ended up being two months. At least I have the countdown set this time.

    While she is leaving later today, it is still a lovely day in Burlington. As she packs and gets ready, I am going to go to the café to pick up our traditional lattés. It is, after all, Sunday morning… and a latte and cigar is the order of the day.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 946

    My weight this morning was neither down nor up from yesterday. I know that I will not lose weight every day, and as long as the trend continues downward then I’m on the right track. Not that this morning’s breakfast at JJ’s was smart, but at least it was early in the day, and if I can get through the rest of the day carb-free then I can stay on track.

    (Spoiler alert: I had a tumultuous day and did end up preparing chicken and salad for dinner… with a small, lone challah roll.)

    I am sitting at the US/Canada border waiting to ask the Immigration officer a few questions. It was a long way to go for a few questions that normally will take no longer than 10-15 minutes to ask and answer… but from what I can tell from looking online there is no phone number I can call for this. I hope that it won’t take more than an hour or two of waiting. Of course, I won’t be publishing the entry until later in the day because there is no Internet access here… in fact, there is no cellular signal whatsoever, most likely by design.

    I had thought to myself as I drove down that once I was done, I might go into Niagara Falls, NY to have lunch; I then thought better of it because I would not likely find anything healthy, and having had a late breakfast it won’t be necessary. At least some days I can think about my weight loss without getting sidetracked by whatever enticements might lie in my path.

    It is now 9:00pm, and I was about to press Publish on the blog when I realized I should say that while I wrote that the day was tumultuous, it was not a bad day… just a long and busy one.

    It is time to light the candles. Have a great day folks!

  • Day 835

    I woke up this morning with a bit of sadness in my heart, but not because the bathroom scale showed my weight up by .2 lb.. I was sad because after breakfast I would be packing my carry-on bag and then Leslie and her son would be driving me to the airport, which is where I am currently sitting waiting for my flight.

    It has been a wonderful three weeks with my wife, despite the stress caused by the invasive species criminal tw@t who invaded her home and planted her flag, knowing the laws in Texas would protect her until we got a court order to have her removed. I teach my students that social engineers prey on three emotions to succeed: sympathy/our desire to be good, pressure/urgency, and fear/threats. This loser used all three of these tactics on Leslie, and when I finally got involved, she was already onto the threats/fear stage… and figured that the tactics that worked against my wife (and which would work against most people) would work against me. Boy, did she misread her audience on that one. Some people do not scare easily… others just don’t scare. I fit into that last category.

    With all that, it was a stressful couple of weeks… but happy times too. My wife and I had not been having the best time for the last few months, and we’re happily reconciled. Now if we could only live in the same country, that would be great.

    With the exception of one really bad night, I have had an excellent sleep score for the last ten days. Well, that is my word… Garmin considers anything above 80 to be good, and only scores over 90 are rated as excellent. As someone who has traditionally had trouble sleeping the night, I am going to consider every score above 75 to be excellent… so the last ten days have been great. Yes, there were a couple of really hard nights, but I made up for them when I could.

    I am thrilled that I got out for two good walk/jog outings while I was in Dallas, and hope that I will be able to continue that when I get back to Canada. Yes, there will be rainy days when I might opt to use the treadmill, but knowing that spring is here and the cold and snow and ice are behind us is a great motivator to get out and to get moving again! With that said, I need to cancel my gym membership. Crap.

    My weight is up from my best weight of the trip, but it is still down from the day before I left Canada. Now that I will be home and not worried about eating out, I should be able to get back in control of my weight loss. I have had a lot of emotional stresses in my life these last six months, and the numbers on the bathroom scale reflect that. Now it is time for me to pick myself up by my bootstraps and to get back to my best weight ever. That will take a few months I am sure, but it will happen.

    I have an hour and a half before my flight leaves, and I am sitting in the same French café that I ate at the first time I flew out of Dallas. Despite having an omelette for breakfast this morning, I ordered a muffin with my coffee. I do not know if they are serving food on the airplane or not (yes, I know I would have to pay for it) so I will pick up a snack to eat en route, just in case. When I get home I will check my food stocks, and then I will go to the supermarket to pick up whatever I might be missing. Also, I have to make sure everything is just right for Her Royal Floofness to return to her palace – she has spent three weeks away, and she will expect a royal welcome! I will see to it that there are plenty of treats and scritchies and lovies for her when she gets home!

    Okay, I suppose I will sign off and get ready to fly. I will check out the duty free shop and see if there is a bottle that I really need. I will then find my gate and sit there to wait for boarding, at which point I will try to sleep a little bit.

    Have a great day folks!