I have finally crossed the forty pound barrier and entered into the single digits above two hundred pounds. When I originally altered my eating habits I was hoping that in a year’s time I would lose fifty pounds and once again be under two hundred. That I am just eight pounds away from that goal after only five months is astonishing to me.
My new goal is somewhere between one-sixty-five and one-seventy-five. The body-mass-index people think I should weigh one-sixty-eight, but to be honest I’ll be thrilled with anything under one-eighty. That’s only twenty-eight pounds away.
While not the best movie I’ve ever seen, Bridget Jone’s Diary was good fun.
Rating: Excellent Saturday night couch fare
Almost without my noticing it, the twenty-third anniversary of the start of my career as a programmer / analyst / architect in the Information Technology industry passed earlier this week. I’m now in the twenty-forth year of employment as a “data processing professional.”
That, and five bucks, will get you a cup of coffee.
The IT industry has never stood still, and in recent years the pace of change has steadily increased. I began my career as a COBOL programmer and quickly added NOMAD/2 (a 4GL) to my resume, along with IMS, and then CICS. The first major paradigm shift was to using Case tools and modeling software to be generated rather than coding it all by hand.
Client-server development with Powersoft followed, along with a stint as a LAN database administrator managing Microsoft and Sybase SQL server databases. Jumping away from procedural to object oriented introduced me to Forte TOOL - still the best development and deployment environment I’ve used. Along with the switch to OO development came adoption of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and more modeling / code generation tools.
Being proprietary Forte was never widely adopted and, with its purchase by Sun Microsystems, the writing was on the wall - time to shift gears again, this time to J2EE development and Java. Already in the Java world I’ve undergone shifts from Struts to Spring MVC, and embraced the adoption of Hibernate Object to Relationship Mapping (ORM) and dependency injection and aspect oriented development with the Spring Framework.
All in a mere twenty-three years. With perhaps twenty or twenty-five years left in my career I can only imagine what this posting will look like in 2026 or 2031.
With an average weekly commute of two hundred miles, not to mention excursions for groceries, dining out, and trips to Illinois, the set of tires I purchased two years ago are worn out. I’m not into the wear indicators, yet, but the wear is uneven enough that the car has started pulling to the left at highway speeds.
Time for new tread.
Calling all the usual suspects yesterday morning I kept getting the same answer: $820. Finally I called Tire Plus, described my need and got the same price quote. When I remarked that his price was no better than his competition, he immediately offered to give me a tire for free if I made an appointment with him to have the tires done.
Sold.
He “lost” $150 in this sale, but gained a customer. Good deal for both of us.
It’s too bad that Jimmy Carter isn’t President today. His opinion on the Korean Stalemate is spot-on. Is anyone Washington listening? Or is this frightening counterpoint actually true?
In the last year of my life:
I have more up days than down now, and my thoughts are primarily focused on the future. I’m aware of the past and of some pieces of flotsam and jetsam bobbing along in my wake, but my direction is forward, onward, upward.
Recently I have been asked by several people close to me, “what are you going to do?” in reference to this first anniversary. I was never able to come up with an answer, either for myself or for them. At least until this past weekend. You see, I always took the question to mean what am I going to do with regards to Michele, and not with regards to me. Finally I realized that, to put it bluntly, Michele is dead, any thing I do should be with regard to me.
This past weekend I did what I wanted; nothing huge or elaborate, just activities that pleased me. Dining out, watching a movie, participating in a martial arts workshop, seeing a piano concert, meeting new people - ordinary things. Things that were life affirming, things that made me feel good inside, things that made me feel alive inside. That they were all shared made them all the better.
I’m alive. Moreover, I feel alive. I’ve found peace and calm within myself, and I am enjoying life. There are challenges to be sure - there always will be challenges. I am ready to face them, ready to venture forth and explore.
It has been one helluva year - in the end, I think, a good year.
My cable service appointment this morning was schedule for some time between 8:00 am and 11:00 am. Naturally this guaranteed the technician’s arrival to be 11:02 am.
He was able to quickly determine that the signal strength at the jack my modem was plugged into was low. Or high. Or off. Not right in any event. Moving to the outside of the building he found the gang splitter where the incoming line from the cable company was split into eight separate lines, one each, presumably, for eight apartments. Inside my garage stall he located the splitters for my outlets. It seems that the single source line to Chez Mark was further split, not once but twice. A three-way, with one of the resulting lines split again by a four-way splitter. The apartment has four dual outlets for a total of eight jacks, only half of which are hot.
Having the line split so many times degrades the single so he set it a new line for me that comes straight from the main splitter outside to my modem jack - eliminating the two intermediate splits. The new measured signal strength was much better. Higher. Or lower. Whatever.
Only time will tell if this has solved the intermittent gremlin my connection has been having recently, but I think he has solved it.
Several months ago my broadband connection started acting up. After several calls to technical support it was determined that my cable modem had “gone bad.” Since the monthly fee includes the use of one of Time-Warner’s modems I went to the local office and got one.
Everything has worked fine since, until last week. Thursday morning the connection as down, but with no time to investigate I left it for the evening. When I got home it was up and working. Then on Tuesday it went down again. This time my efforts failed to restore it. Unplugging the modem and cable for thirty seconds and then plugging it back in failed to restore a connection.
The call to technical support seemed to indicate that the modem was bad. Again. I was out of town Tuesday evening, and so it was yesterday before I picked up a new modem from the cable store. The new modem worked flawlessly for about ninety minutes.
Calling support was not satisfactory as they now feel it is a problem with the line. I have a service call schedule for Friday morning between 8 am and 11 am. The technician was not amused when I inquired as to where to send my bill for lost time at work.
Needless to say, my broadband connection has worked flawlessly since calling support and getting the appointment for Friday setup.
Nekko continues to look and act like normal this week. The change in her demeanor from just a week ago is tremendous. The trick now is to manage her medications so that she can stay healthy.
Giving her an insulin shot is relatively easy. Last night instead of picking her up to do it I reached down to where she was laying on the floor and petted her for a minute or so, and then gave her the injection. She didn’t even twitch. Far less stress and aggravation for both of us that way.
The pills she needs to take are another matter altogether. On Sunday I was successful in getting all three down her at more or less the right times. After the evening round of pills she stayed as far away from me in the apartment as she could get. Monday morning she didn’t let me get near her, so I wasn’t able to do either the insulin or her pills.
My fear is that suffering the indignity of the pills will drive her away from me all the time. She was never the most social cat, and has always acted a little wary of me. That I now occasionally scoop her up and force her to swallow pills isn’t going to help that dynamic. The consequence of not giving her the heart medicine is a gradual decline in her health and eventually death. Giving her medicine will keep her alive longer, but with an altered relationship between us. I’m hopeful that over time she become less upset at having to take a pill - especially when I am down to the long-term, once a day routine. (At present she is supposed to be getting Amoxicillin twice a day. This will end after 10 days or 20 pills - which ever takes longer.)
I recognize that the staff in a vet’s office don’t have the emotional attachment to my cat that I possess, and therefore it is easier for them to be matter-of-fact about prying her mouth open and giving her a pill. Hopefully I won’t have to resort to developing that kind of detachment in order to be successful with Nekko’s care.
The next time you are in your local grocery store, head on over to the back of the produce section, where they keep the potatoes. Grab, all at once, seven five-pound bags of any kind of potato.
Yes, seven five-pound bags.
That is how much weight I’ve lost since the beginning of June. To say thirty-five pounds seems like a lot. To actually hold it in your hands is an entirely different understanding. Finger strength notwithstanding, trying to carry through the store thirty-five pounds of potatoes is not easy. It’s no wonder that my knees hurt and I was short of breath going up stairs.