I’m back! Did you miss me?

I’m guessing no one even noticed I was offline about 90% of the time over the past 8 days. My children and I traveled to my mother’s house while the wife was out of town. Mom doesn’t have an internet connection at her house currently, although I could occasionally but not reliably leech from neighbors wireless networks while there. Aside from over-eating a few times, thereby slowing up my progress on losing (a target of) 60 pounds, it was a very good week. If you care about my wonderful time away from home, continue reading below the pretty ‘more’ link. I assure you it is more tedious and dull than my normal writings – you’d be best served by skipping to the next post…

I set up most of the posts for the past week plus some to the site in advance of leaving, then made about 10 more on Tuesday when I spent most of the day at a bread shop that offered free wireless. That was step one of over-eating while away. I feel guilty just sitting in the shop using bandwidth, so I had my meals there. Of course, it’s tough picking low-calorie meals from the menu of a bread and bakery shop. So I ate too much for breakfast when you count the smoothie I added to the bagel. And lunch was just over-the-top for me, with a high-calorie sandwich, an apple, and some extra bread on the side. I tried to compensate by eating very lightly at dinner, but the higher calorie burn for the day was established, and I was too hungry to just skip one of my evening meals (typically I’m having 5-6 meal breaks per day at 200-300 calories per sitting, hitting about 1800 calories a day) as I had thought to do.

Strike 2 on eating came near the end of the week when I had dinner with the (not-so-) secret love of my life and the Blahg’s very own Princess Di. In addition to loaded mashed potatoes, I helped in the eating of an ice-cream pie and a hot-fudge brownie desert. I didn’t eat to the point of being stuffed, but oh my I did have too much sweet post-dinner goodness. Then on Friday, I ate a couple of orange rolls my mother made for breakfast. I was good food-wise the rest of the day, but each roll was around my normal breakfast instake of calories.

Somehow, though, even with the over-eating, I got down to 250 pounds over the week – a weight I’ve not seen since crossing it on the upswing about 3 years ago. That puts me at nearly 4 pounds lost per week since I started 4 weeks back worrying about how hefty I’ve gotten. And I’m back on the controlled intake setup I’ve had success with, so I hope to continue 2-4 pounds per week in the near future.

Poor love of my life seems to have a marriage worse than mine. Naturally, I could live in my misery when I assumed she was happy, what with being one of those folks not really happy being fully happy. Seeing her unhappy makes me want to be with her more than I used to, but as Princess Di pointed out to me – her family seems to only be happy when miserable, which means I probably couldn’t do anything to make her happy any way. And besides, even when my marriage sucks (and to be honest, sometimes it isn’t that bad), I’m unlikely to leave my wife. So outside of any chance at an affair, I’ll never get to see if I can make her happy or not.

Getting back to work generally sucks, of course. After a week off, and with time spent with my closest friends and with family, it really bites. I have gotten caught up on some reading and workspace cleaning, but otherwise I haven’t accomplished much back at work now. Since I got a few really cool books (cool for a geeky ub3r-d0rk like me, that is) recently, so I’m glad to have lots of time for reading right now. But I still hate being away from my kids every night I have to work.

[tags]Useless details on my life[/tags]