furniture remover

This weekend I need to further the thing with sorting out and boxes and stuff.

I'd have done it last weekend if I wasn't so tired, but the next phase is re-arranging the furniture to take advantage of the space I've gained through moving the boxes into the shed. This weekend is an ideal time to do it, because it's a scheduled cleaning weekend anyway, so when I move the furniture I can have a bit of a clean and it's just a more complex routine, if you will.

I've been wearing short-sleeved shirts for most of this week, even though the weather doesn't really justify it. I think it's something of a last hurrah to summer before I pack the shirts away again and get out the long sleeve shirts. And who knows, this time next year, I may have lost so much weight that the shirts look silly on me and I have to get some more.

I'm getting way ahead of myself, obviously, but I'm slightly worried about that aspect. It's not going to stop me, but because I am so big I am worried I'm going to have to buy a lot of clothes to match the slimming process.

There's also a Grand Prix this weekend, although I believe it's the Italian, which is Monza. Monza's often a bit of a dull. It's a very high speed circuit and doesn't have very many corners, which makes it difficult to overtake. In order to control the speed a bit they've also put chicanes in over the years and chicanes also kill overtaking.

Still, this year has been so good that even some of the usually dull races have been interesting, so you never know.

my name was earl

Over the last week, as part of my efforts to watch stuff I've got on DVD, I've been watching My Name is Earl episodes.

I really liked the first season of Earl and the second season is okay. The whole long-term arc of Joy stealing the truck didn't quite work, but it was still firmly focused on the list.

However, season three seems to be where it all went a bit wonky. The first part of season three takes place in prison, and it's really hard for Earl to really cross a lot of things off his list when he's in prison. I also seem to recall, though I've not go that far with the DVDs that later on he ends up in the comma, and if it's hard to cross stuff off when you're in prison, it's almost impossible when you're in a coma.

And that's where it went wrong, I think - Earl is about the list, not being in prison and comma dreams. I can kinda understand it, because when you have a list to tick off that tends to set a finite length to your series. The problem of course is that the show was cancelled after the fourth series, so rather than have a plan of "we'll finish the list by the end of this season" and wrapping it up nicely, it ends without ending.

Maybe I'll warm to it a bit more this second time around.

Also, I forgot to mention yesterday about the diet side of my slimming programme.

What I've been trying to do is stay below an absolute limit of 2,000 calories a day. In practice, I'm generally a couple of hundred below that in terms of counting. I'm also pretty sure that I'm over-counting, so perhaps I'm somewhere down around 1,600 calories a day on a good day or around 1,800 on a 'bad' day.

I'm actually deliberately over-counting, partly in order to be safe, but also because if I think I've hit 1,800 then that acts as a good break. An example of the over counting is that I count my daily yoghurt (very good for digestion - everyone should eat yoghurt, but you don't need to bother with those fancy pseudoscience yoghurts, good old fashioned normal yoghurt is where it's at) as 150 calories, where a labelling inspection suggests that, depending on variety, it's actually around 113-121.

This over counting/rounding up also has the advantage of making the maths a lot easier. It's a lot easier to add things up if everything is 150, 250 or 600 calories, etc.

Also, I've discovered a bit of a weird phenomenon now that I've reintroduced bread to my lunch. Basically, when it gets to evening I'm virtually not hungry. I often just have an apple, my juice (I'm fining it's really tough hitting the five a day thing on the diet) and my yoghurt and that's basically it. I tend to spread these out rather than having them all in one go, but generally I won't get peckish until just before bed and it's odd, but I quite like going to bed on an empty stomach now.

It's all a bit odd really - when I kicked this off, I was really struggling with a rumbling belly making me feel bad and occupying all of my attention, but now I almost quite like a bit of hunger. It almost makes the food taste better.

The only thing I am still struggling with is that I enjoy having a really full belly. To me, feeling stuffed after a meal has always been a part of enjoying a meal and that's the hardest thing to resist. I don't think I've ever in my whole life left an empty plate (assuming I like the food) and I know that's what normal people do - have leftovers because they're full. Well, I've never full enough to do that.

good news, everybody!

So there was no DVD rental this last weekend either. It sometimes works out that way, and to be frank I don't think I would have had time to watch it anyway.

I thought therefore I'd talk a bit about the weight and walking thing (that makes a change, huh?).

First off - the best bit. I lost another 2 pounds!

Unlike last week when I was pretty convinced I'd gained, I had thought I would loose some, although I wasn't sure it would be 2 pounds again. To put that two pounds into context, a bag of sugar weighs a smidge over 2 pounds. If you pick up a bag of sugar, it's not so heavy that you're straining, but it's a weighty thing, so you get a good feel for how much that represents.

Also, as noted last week, each pound of fat holds around 3,500 calories and that would broadly appear to track with my pedometer readings and my diet/calorie count.

I'm still not up to the mythical 10,000 steps-a-day, but hen I have the advantage (1) of being fat, which actually helps on that front. Each step for me is like a normal person carrying a big heavy rucksack with them, so if I was doing 10,00 that would actually be more like - I dunno - 12,500 for a normal person.

I've actually been debating whether to put my step count on here or not. See, the problem is I believe the counter is not accurate, but I think it's not accurate because it counts steps when I'm doing things like driving. So, weekdays it's quite a bit over because of driving to work, but weekend there's little to no driving, so it's much more accurate, but I also have more free time, so do more walking.

Now you might think the solution would be to take off the pedo when driving or whatever, but the problem was when I try that forget about it and either leave it at home or in the car and things get really inaccurate.

Also, since I now know these things I can generally compensate and they also give me a flavour of what I'm doing. I basically reckon my actual step count is about 20% less than what this pedometer shows, but even taking that off I'm still on my targets.

I'm also hoping that the extra stuff I'll need to do in lugging all my e-bay wares about will help bump up my exercise over the next couple of weeks. I've got a bit of a hankering to really push the boat out and do loads of walking over the next couple of weeks, although I have fears of more blisters.

I think I'm feeling like that because at the end of the month I've got a holiday and am going to visit my dad - part of me thinks it would be really nice if he notices I'm slightly skinnier. Another part of me thinks if I get my hopes p that he will and he doesn't I'll feel a bit crushed.

Even if he doesn't, it's my plan over the week off to really put in the miles and do a lot of walking. Hopefully when I visit him I'll get a new set of walking boots as there's quite a good shop near him. I can then try and break the new boots in a bit.

a better mood

So I'm feeling a lot better today.

The problems yesterday were a bit of a collective coming together. I think if it had just been one or two I'd have been okay, but all together meant I wasn't impressed.

First off, I was tired.

The tiredness stretched back into the weekend. Basically, as mentioned last week, my landlord wants me to move my stuff into his shed. However, he'd utterly failed to clear the shed and didn't seem to be progressing it at all - I even had to prompt him to actually do anything.

This was particularly annoying because it was them banging on about fire hazards. Anyway, he eventually finished on Saturday and knocked on my door. He then had the cheek - the very temerity - when I said I wouldn't do it then, because it was too late, to basically imply I was dragging my feet. Fucking cheek of the man.

Anyway, I therefore decided I would do it very first thing Sunday morning. It would serve as quite good exercise and needed doing and would also help get him off my back. However, I was a bit shocked at just how much there really was to do.

I've been careful not to overload the boxes as much as I can and had also worked out something of an order to put them in to avoid to many unnecessary problems as I e-bay the stuff, so it was pretty quick and efficient, but man it was hard work.

And to be perfectly frank I'm not actually finished - there's a whole bunch of stuff that really also needs to go out there. However, the problem has been that I've not had any room to manoeuvre. But the point is I moved everything I needed to at that time and it was bloody hard work.

But then, in the afternoon, I had a shed load of stuff to put on e-bay. And I'm not kidding here - I currently have 73 active auctions on e-bay. And that's with me having had 20-odd on from last week.

The 73 is a long way from representing everything I need to e-bay., but it represents probably 90% of the stuff that I can e-bay right away. A lot of the rest of it either needs me to watch/read/play it or actually needs throwing away.

I've actually been a bit surprised that so many of the thing I've put up have been selling. Especially the old comics - I mean, a lot of them are incomplete runs of comics from the best part of 20 years ago, and yet they're selling. Okay, they're not selling for good prices - most are going for 99p, which is on the borderline of being a loss - but they are selling.

Anyway, so all that was why I was tired - I did loads of stuff on Sunday. And that was on top of going for a really long walk on Saturday.

A really long walk that had resulted in a second blister. I don't know why, but when I started with the walking I didn't get any blisters, but then last week I got quite a bad one on my heel.

I decided that I should therefore switch shoes, as the blister might have been due to rubbing. I say might have been because sometimes I get blisters for other reasons, and I actually suspect that's what caused this one. Anyway, it turned out that the shoes I switched to rubbed one of my toes and caused a blister there too.

So yeah, the weekend was a bit rubbish from all those points of view. Especially as the time I spent doing all that crap meant I didn't really get any time to relax or enjoy myself.

So when Monday rolled around I wasn't feeling great due to the above, but I thought work would be relatively smooth.

But it wasn't smooth.

See, I've been rewriting a report that someone else did. The report she produced has good content, but the structure was poor and she has a rather... formal approach to language. In other words, she tends to write these enormous, run on sentences full of overly-syllabic words.

So I'd started rewriting it on Friday, which, by the way, we can't really afford to do as she's blown loads of time already (annoying, much of it on format and format is the thing we need to worry about least at this stage) and got in on Monday to find she's basically read the being-edited version and has sent a whiny, overly-anal e-mail about how we've messed it all up.

This is highly unprofessional behaviour to say the least and also meant the whole process took ages longer than it should, and as noted, we didn't have the time. Plus it put a cloud over the whole thing as it's not nice when you're halfway through a job like that to have the person look over your shoulder and tell you you've made a complete arse of it.

Not least of all when that person has, to be frank, done a piss-poor job in the first place.

So yeah, wasn't really feeling jolly and happy yesterday.

If the person hadn't been working remotely, cross words might have been exchanged.

unf

Not really feeling in the mood today.

Bit of a shit weekend and work is being a bit shit.

Plus (or perhaps, explaining the above a bit) I'm feeling tired and I've got a couple of blisters on my foot.