Fitness Prognostication

The final weigh-in for the fitness challenge at work is on Friday. Will I win? I don't know, let's see what the magic eight ball says:

I'll let you know if it's right.

Fitness Challenge Update #9

I missed my update last week folks, sorry about that. I just spaced it.

Last week was a hard week, what with my son's birthday and Mother's Day all in the same week. I didn't lose any weight. In fact I think I gained a pound.

This week, however, went better. I tried really hard to stick to my good eating. For a while I've been hovering very close to 250 lbs., and I've been so desperate to finally dip beneath that mark. On Friday, at last, I did it. Saturday, I was still below. Sunday as well, and my final weigh-in for this week on Monday, I was still at 249. Huzzah!

So, my weight loss continues okay. There's only a week and a half left of the contest. The last weigh-in is on Friday, June 1st. I really want to make it to 245 before that day arrives, but it's hard to stay motivated. I've managed to take a pretty healthy lead on all the other people in the contest. The guys who used to talk trash with me back when we started, have all given up on trying to catch me. They're all planning for the next round, when we all start at zero again, and maybe this time they'll win.

Without anyone breathing down my neck, I feel complacent, and comfortable enough that I'll cheat on my nutrition more than I should. Losing that last four pounds should be possible, but I'm worried that I'll slack off too much and not make it.

Doesn't really matter in the end, though, because I'm not going back to eating the way I used to. When the contest ends, I think I'll let myself have one big splurge, maybe an all-you-can-eat pizza or something, and then I'll be right back there with my nose to the grindstone, grinding away my nose (what a strange expression, huh? Why would you put your nose on a grindstone?)

As far as my health issue that I've been having goes, it still plagues me. I've been asking around to see if others know a doctor that would be worth seeing. And pretty soon, two months will have passed. That's when the doctor wanted me to re-test that C-Reactive Protein level to see if it's come down or not. Still in a holding pattern as far as that goes. I take two extra-strength Tylenol in the morning and two more at night, and that keeps the pain and exhaustion at bay, but it's not going away. I've tried skipping the Tylenols here and there just to see. It remains. Eventually, something will have to be done about it.

Irises

I'm sure posts like these are boring to some, (heck, if I hadn't written them, I might find them boring too) but there are some people out there who seem to find them worthwhile. Folks like Mandy Crum and Bosley Gravel liked them enough to comment about them in the past, so here's another flower post.

These are our irises (do you say it iris-is or iris-sees, I wonder?). They're new this year. My wife was at a friend's house, and she admired her neighbor's irises, and the woman sent her home with a bunch of plants she dug up on the spot for her. Interesting that stuff sometimes, eh?

They're very interesting flowers, purple with the yellow in the middle, and that caterpillar looking thing sticking out of the middle of it.

They took to our yard well, so it looks like we'll have a lot of irises for the years to come. We can probably look forward to many happy returns.

Fitness Challenge Update #8

Another week, another post about losing weight. Although these updates have become an update about completely different things now.

We'll start with the weight. I got on the scale each day this week (because, although I know I shouldn't, I can't help it, call it OCD), and things changed drastically day by day. Tuesday morning: 253 (Woohoo!). Wednesday 254.8 (Aww). Thursday 256 (Dammit!). Friday 251.8 (Woah! Really?). Saturday 251.6 (Still?). Sunday 251.0 (Yes! This is real!). And this morning, despite eating pizza (Pizza!) for dinner on Sunday, I still weighed 251.6. That's what? Five pounds down from last week? That's really good. I didn't expect to reach this level until perhaps two weeks from now. So, I'm pretty stoked. I wanted to be able to get to 245 before the June 1st deadline of the contest, and now it's starting to seem like a possibility.

What could stand in the way of that is my overall health. I got the chest X-ray results back last week. The doctor said my heart is normal, not enlarged. So, Dilated Cardiomyopathy is not what I have after all.

They did say that I have a granuloma in my left lung, however. Granulomas, according to Wikipedia, is when there is some foreign contaminant in your body that your immune system can't eliminate, so it instead walls it off completely, quarantining it instead. People get granulomas in their lungs when they have tuberculosis fairly often, so I was ordered to get a TB test. As I suspected, due to the lack of coughing and the like, the TB test came up negative. The doctor thinks that what is actually walled off in there is something called Valley Fever, which is common to people who have spent time in Central Valley, California, where my home town of Sacramento is. It's a fungal thing, and my immune system has sealed it off. The doctor says it will always be there. Just in case, I'm supposed to get another X-ray in six months, to be sure it's not growing, because then it might be something else.

So, what the crap do I have? Who friggin' knows. The doctor I've been seeing seems to have lost sight of the end goal here, like he's been distracted by the test results. I went in to see the doctor in the first place because my legs suddenly became insufferably painful and fatigued. I was working out five days a week, and suddenly, I couldn't even work out one day a week.

We did some blood tests, and the one for C-Reactive Protein came up really high. That got us on the trail of Cardiomyopathy. Which got us on the trail of a granuloma. Now that they're all eliminated, he seems to think we're done. BUT I'M STILL IN PAIN ALL THE TIME!!! We're not done, Mr. Doctor. What's next?

Well, he says we should run the C-Reactive Protein test again in two months to see if it's come down or not. But the CRP is not why we started this whole thing!

This ordeal makes me think of my mother's experience with the medical profession. She had various health problems, and went in to see doctors enough that they thought she was some kind of kook. They ignored her, wrote her complaints of as psychosomatic bullshit, and she died of cancer that tore her insides apart when I was fourteen years old.

Needless to say, I don't want to be like my mom. I don't want to suffer my way to an early death while being ignored or mistreated by doctors. I worry about my liver. I'm getting by right now by taking two extra-strength Tylenols in the morning and two more at night. But how long can my liver keep processing that stuff without damage? And even with that, I still don't feel good enough to exercise, so I can't get more healthy.

What suggestions do those of you in the readership have for me? I'm pretty irritated, but I'm at a loss. Do I go see a different doctor? Wait the two months while taking Tylenol every day? Take my own life now to save me the trouble? I'm open for suggestions.

Junior Seau

Rish does this kind of post all the time about actors and directors and the like when they die. I figured I'd take a page from his book.

It just recently crossed the wires that Junior Seau is dead.

I know, most of you all who read this are going, "Who?" or, "A football player? Why the hell would I care?"

I guess that's valid, since Rish and I don't discuss this kind of thing on the show much. It's not a geek subject, it's a jock subject. So, you don't have to read on if you don't want to (as if you needed me to tell you that).

I'm just a little disturbed by Seau's death. For one, the guy was an amazing football player. He was great as both a leader and a linebacker. He never got the ring that every football player is in search of, despite making it to the Super Bowl twice, once with the Chargers and once with the Patriots. He lost them both. One at the start of his career and one at the end. Perfect bookends of "not quite" for the poor guy.

Apparently, they are investigating Seau's death as a suicide, self-inflicted gunshot to the chest. Many people are already saying that it probably has something to do with him hitting his head against things for a living for so many years. We know so little about how the brain really works, and I wonder if we knew better, would anyone play football at all?

I don't know. I love football as much as, if not more than, I love movies and books. I loved my few years playing football in high school and college, and I spend every Sunday in the fall and winter watching guys who do it way better than I ever did on TV. I'd hate to see it ever go away, but I also hate to see someone like Junior Seau's life ending at 43 because he can't take living with the brain trauma he's sustained.

A life is worth more than a game, I guess.

New Dark Knight Rises Trailer

Have you seen this yet? What do you think?