where did they come from?

Well that was a bit of a blow.

I've been prepping stuff for e-bay auctions all this week and one of the big ones was going to be my collection of discworld books. I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sell them, but it's worth putting them up there.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to sell hardly any of the stuff I'm going to put up, but once it's been up there for a bit and no-one has bought any of it I can feel okay about taking it all down the tip.

Anyway, what I generally do is prep the text of the auctions along with the pictures before I put them up, and since there's going to be so many, I've been trying to get a head start, where I would normally do them on the same day. And I've made a bit of an unfortunate discovery.

I've discovered that there are two discworld novels I've not read.

Now I knew there were discworld related books I'd not read - there are some books aimed at children, for example, and there's lots of spin-offs, like the science of discworld books and stuff - but I've not read those as I'm not hugely interested. However, these are both proper discworld novels.

The two in question are The Last Continent and Carpe Jugulum. It would appear that both of these books were released (presumably this means in hardback) in 1998, so somehow I've completely missed those two books. I'm actually at a bit of a loss to explain how I've missed them, to be honest, but it gives me a bit of a problem.

See, it doesn't make much sense to sell the books unless it's a pretty much complete collection. Plus, I'm obviously going to get those books anyway and there's also the issue that I've still not read Unseen Academicals, which is the newest book, so I should read that too.

All of which is great from one perspective - yay, more discworld books to read - but annoying because at the pace I read it'll be a couple of months before I've read these new books, even if I start immediately. And that means I can't clear stuff as quickly as I'd hoped.

This process is also being hampered by the fact that the bloody shed hasn't been cleared. I mean, why drag me in and go "You've got to put your stuff into the shed immediately, because it could explode in some horrible fireball of death any time!" until you've actually cleared the space in the shed? All it does is massively inconvenience me, because I don't know when I'm going to have to do all the moving.

Plus, I put a bunch of boxes right next to the door in anticipation, which means they're right in the way and I don't know if I should move them out of the way (I keep banging into them). I bet if I do move them, I'll immediately get the knock at the door to tell me the shed's cleared.

a weird effect

Despite being a bank holiday weekend, I didn't watch any films.

Part of the problem was that I was without a rental DVD, but also, as discussed, I had the sudden problem of box sorting and moving to cope with, so I didn't have as much free time as I'd thought.

Which isn't to say I didn't watch anything - I actually watched loads. First off there was the Grand Prix of course, but I also finished off the first season of Code Geass, which was spectacularly good. I also even started watching the second season of My Name Is Earl.

I'd forgotten that Earl was so good in those first two seasons. My memory is that seasons 3 and 4 really seemed to loose their way, so it was a pleasant surprise to find season 2 was really good. Well, it starts good - I watched it on TV, but I've not got very far with the DVDs so it may be that it tails off - I can't remember.

Anyway, the real point of this post was to make up for the lack of a review by talking a little about the whole weight thing yet again.

I know, it's kinda boring already, but I thought I'd mention some of the weirder things.

First off, I keep having bouts of feeling really amazing. In the very first week I was really tired all the time. I put this down to the combination of suddenly exercising where I'd done nothing before, but also I was having real problems sleeping.

Well, the sleeping seems to have sorted itself, so that may be the reason, but I've generally been feeling really good and some days I feel amazing. I'm used to feeling awful - most days before I started this I would feel down and tired all the time. Even if I'd had loads of sleep, I'd still feel knackered. But now, even on the days I'm not super high I still feel pretty good.

I can only really put it down the exercise. Id' heard that this happened, but it's weird when you think about it - you feel like you've got more energy even though you're actually burning off more calories.

I also read something about how the whole weight loss thing works and suddenly I sort of understand it better than I did before.

Basically, one pound of body fat equates to about 3,500 calories.

Now, for an adult man, the recommended calorie intake is 2,500 calories. So, if you go on a diet that's 500 calories a day less, then 7 * 500 = 3,500 calories, so you would expect to loose 1 pound a week.

Simple.

And what's more, if you add exercise in as well and burn, say, another 500 calories a day then that's another pound a week.

Although that is where it gets more complicated - how much exercise (walking in my case, obviously) you have to do in order to burn that 500 calories seems to be the source of much debate.

more loss (thank god)

I was terribly afraid that when I weighed myself on Sunday I would discover I had gained weight.

My fear was born of several issues.

First off, when I did my first official weigh-in, I was shocked to find I'd apparently "lost" 5 pounds. However, this 5 pound loss was compared to the impromptu and not to be taken seriously measurement I did when I first got the scales.

There were of course many possible explanations - I was fully clothed when I first did it and it was at the end of the day, rather than the beginning, being very high up the list. I was also afraid that I'd made an error of some kind, however, I repeated the measurement and got the exact same result. But however much I counselled myself that it wasn't real, I was delighted with this apparent result.

So I was afraid that this time I'd be higher simply because I wasn't really as low as I'd thought I was, if you see what I mean.

The second issue was that I'd not really started the week very well both in terms of diet and exercise. I mean, it wasn't bad in the sense of sitting on my arse all day, eating 3 pies and 5 mars bars and washing it down with a gallon of coke, but certainly I seemed to be eating plenty and not getting hungry and I wasn't hitting my targets for the pedometer.

Not that the pedometer is proving particularly accurate. My best guesstimate is that it's about 10% inaccurate, but the main problem is that it's not consistent in its inaccuracy.

There was one day last week where I know for a fact I did more steps than the day before, because I walked around the field 3 times in the morning, rather than 2. The days were otherwise no different, yet the earlier day it recorded some 400 more steps than the day after.

But the real problem was that on both of those days the steps were well below the targets I've set.

So you see my fear - I wasn't sure about the first measurement, I'd not been as hungry as I had the week before and I'd also not hit my step targets. However, I was genuinely delighted to find I'd lost a further 2 pounds when I measured myself on Sunday!

Until my landlord dropped the bombshell, as discussed yesterday, I was really chuffed with this.

Well, actually I was still pretty chuffed, it's just that my focus was on the problem at hand. I guess the upside, though is that all that box moving and sorting I did was quite knackering. Plus on the bank holiday I did loads of walking (enough to safely put me above the 10,000 steps thing, in fact).

sunday, bleedin sunday

So this last weekend gone was the bank holiday.

I didn't really have a concrete plan of action, but it was my intention to do a bunch of prep work for putting a load of stuff on e-bay. On the Saturday this mainly involved going through boxes and photographing and weighing stuff.

I spent most of the afternoon doing it and was pleased with the progress. Sunday I'd pretty much earmarked for computer cleaning and sorting. My landlord wants to redecorate my room, so I wanted to start the ball rolling of tidying up the computer area, which needs sorting for several reasons.

My dad is also wanting to buy a new monitor, so I've been spending a lot of time looking through computer specialist websites and I kinda ended up getting the old system building bug. See, I'm also keeping track o the progress of the latest version of the Civ franchise - number 5 - and a while back they posted some system requirements stuff.

And, to be frank, the recommended system is a bit of a monster. Also, I'd started playing Anno 1404 again and was getting a motherload of Crashes-to-Desktop while it was saving (which is just about the worst time for it to crash). Although there's no patch to fix the CTD, some of the stuff out there suggests that more videocard RAM had cured the problem for some people.

In other words, there was a sudden impetus for me to update my machine. I mean, I also spent ages designing a dream system, but that would cost about £1,600 - £1,600 I don't have let me hasten to emphasise - so I also looked at tweaking my existing computers to boost performance.

However, an important part of this would be to finally update to Windows 7 and that means I'd need to spend ages doing "system sorting out" stuff, which is what I had planned for the Sunday. Also, it's good to occasionally clean out your PC case as the build up of dust that tends to occur is not good, so I was hoping to do that.

Instead, my landlord dropped a bit of a bombshell.

My landlord actually has a bit of a knack for managing to want to talk to me at the most inconvenient times - just as I'm sitting down to watch the Belgium Grand Prix, there's a knock at the door and they want 'a chat'.

Anyway, to cut a long story, there were 2 issues.

First off, my collection of boxes is now considered a fire hazard (given the damp problems I'd struggle to see a roaring log fire as a fire hazard in my flat, but never mind) so I need to move them all into the shed out the back.

And secondly, their decorator has booked a holiday right when I'm off at the beginning of October, even though they've known the dates for weeks.

This second point was where it got really confusing, because their solution seemed to be that they want to go into my room and start stripping the wallpaper in advance. I realised later that I don't actually understand how this solves the problem, unless they're saying they're going to decorate it themselves.

Even if they are, I'm kinda stunned that they're suggesting the small room I live in will take more than... ooh, two days to decorate (I'm going to be away for a week).

I dunno, but the basic upshot is that I had to spend the rest of Sunday and Monday sorting through all of the boxes - not just the ones that had stuff in I want to sell now. Of course, ultimately, I want to sell, recycle or throw away 90% of what's in the boxes, but I was thinking I'd have a month to do this and even then that I'd have time after the decoration as well.

However, if the boxes now have to go out in the shed that adds all sorts of complications, meaning it all needs doing as soon as is humanely possible.