Dinhternet

Time for another Hacker’s Diet update.

Keep going! 7.8 lbs to go!

Weekly loss: 2.9 lbs. — Daily deficit: 1429 calo­ries.
You will reach your goal of 155 lbs on 2009-04-29. (247 days early!)

So far, I’ve lost 37.6 lbs of mea­sured weight (3.1 lbs in the last week) and 32.3 lbs of “real weight” (3.1 lbs in the last week). When I was doing the fam­ily chal­lenge, I had lost 19 pounds.

The 100 Push-ups and 200 Sit-ups Pro­grams are get­ting tougher. I can still squeeze out the sit-ups, but I’ve been fail­ing on the push-ups, and have had to fin­ish sets on my knees. Appar­ently I’m get­ting more peo­ple into the pro­grams, though, so that’s cool.

I also men­tioned the Col­orado Exper­i­ment and Cross­Fit to Joe M and Eddie C, and Joe M in par­tic­u­lar seemed very inter­ested. Michow, of course, was inter­est­ing in see­ing us fail at these pro­grams. I don’t have the equip­ment to do these pro­grams, though, and I don’t feel like spend­ing money on a gym mem­ber­ship until I get bet­ter pay­ing job and more free time.

As you can see, I’m within a week or so of get­ting my mea­sured weight to my goal. Start­ing maybe a week or two ago, I could finally see a dif­fer­ence when I looked in the mir­ror. Feels like the real me is get­ting revealed under all the crap I’ve piled on. In fact, since things are going so well, I’m think­ing over low­er­ing my goal. But I’ll wait to hit my cur­rent goal first before mak­ing any final decisions.

As usual, thanks to every­one for your compliments!

Wow, I got a lot of hits yes­ter­day. Maybe I should post links within notes on Face­book more often.

Any­way, here’s one of the “lost” sto­ries I was going to link to in my 25 Things post…

I’m gen­er­ally a hor­ri­ble liar. I tend to have a hard time con­trol my facial expres­sions (that research was the basis for a new show that’s pretty good), which always give me away.

How­ever, when I was on a home stay in Japan, my host’s class played a game where we were split into teams and a per­son from each team had to eat one of three iden­ti­cal look­ing pieces of sushi/onigiri. The fill­ing of two of them would be nor­mal, but the fill­ing on the final one would be a big chunk of some­thing “spe­cial” like natto or wasabi. Turns out I was pretty good at that for some rea­son, and my team won the game.

Flash for­ward to the “Sum­mer of Toy.” It was sum­mer break after Toy class had crossed, and Joe M, Eddie C, and I were drink­ing every night. The game plan was basi­cally that we would alter­nate nights between Joe M’s place and ours, and call up every­one we could think of each night. Since we were drink­ing every night, we couldn’t afford new alco­hol every night, so every so often, we would have a “Scraps Night” where we just try­ing to fin­ish all the rem­nant han­dles we had lying around.

One Scraps Night, it was towards the end of the night, and we had killed every­thing we had left play­ing 7–11-Double. (That game nights the alco­hol go fast!) We had absolutely noth­ing left except for Bac­ardi 151. No one, of course, wanted to do (poten­tially back-to-back on end) shots of 151, so we looked around for mix­ers. Unfor­tu­nately, we were basi­cally out of all non-alcoholic drinks, too. Joe M sac­ri­ficed some of his work­out Gatorade for the cause.

I for­got who was rolling, but I got picked to drink the mix of 151 and orange Gatorade. It was, of course, not the great­est feel­ing in the world. Every­one in the room was watch­ing, and I would like to think that I kept a straight face. I want to think that I had every­one fooled. Until some­one asked how it tasted. I tried to say, “It’s great,” but my voice cracked.

… then every­one knew. Except maybe Clay­ton L. He wanted to go next.

So this week­end, I went up to Reno and North Lake Tahoe with Will N, Eddie C, Michow, Chris H, and Andrew P. Will N won the trip from his work, so it was basi­cally all paid for. The drive there was pretty fun. It was late and light on traf­fic, so Eddie and I cruised along nicely. Sadly, it was in auto­matic Civics.

The stay at Cir­cus Cir­cus was fun. I didn’t actu­ally play cards, but did make some money on the penny slots, besides get­ting cheap drinks. I also won at Uno when we went back to the room for the night. In the morn­ing, we hit up the buf­fet, and I didn’t con­trol myself as well as I should have.

The drive to North Lake Tahoe was even more fun. My tachome­ter actu­ally hit 6,000 rpm, which I had not done before. The hotel was really nice, but there wasn’t as much to do there. Well, we didn’t know there was, any­way, because we got there at dusk, and didn’t real­ize we were lit­er­ally across the street from lake front beaches. Hit the Big Water Grill, which was really bougie. Unfor­tu­nately, my dietary restric­tions meant I could only have a salad, which actu­ally worked out well for me, con­sid­er­ing the lunch I had.

That night, we chilled at the hotel hot tub and played a lot of “would you rather.” Watched movies and had cheap wine in the room after we got kicked out of the pool area, and then woke up for a lit­tle more slots and pin­ball action. We fol­lowed the lake shore for an amaz­ing drive home, and then chilled in Davis to watch the big game. Made a buck off Andrew P bet­ting on the Steelers.

Over­all, Will N made big money, as well as Minh T. I’m up for the week­end, but only by a cou­ple of bucks. Makes me won­der, though… You know the expres­sion “Lucky in cards, unlucky in love” ? Some­times it’s put the other way around. But the point being, in years past, it did not hold true for me, because I always lost money at New Years, and was still unlucky in love. But this year, I’m (slightly) lucky in “cards,” so does that mean the expres­sion will finally be true for me? Or will it be untrue in the oppo­site man­ner that it usu­ally is?