The Commode

I had a very nice little scale that I bought a few years back while experimenting with carrots and the color orange. The scale was for weighing me, not the carrots. I wasn’t experimenting to lose or gain weight, but I was interested in my weight as a side effect. I have to say that I like the scale quite a bit. It was probably as accurate as any other consumer scale, and the solid glass top was visually nice and nice to step on (assuming your feet weren’t wet, in which case it was pretty much a death trap). But what I liked most about it is the backlit display. You stepped on it, and the LCD was clearly visible in everything from the noon day sun to the pitch black of my soul (which is about the same as my house with the power out). Apparently I’m the only person on Earth that liked this subtle combination of features because I was unable to find it in any other scales recently, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

At the beginning of this year (January 3rd) I began dieting using the low-carb method. It’s not specifically Atkins or South Beach, or some such, it’s just the general guidelines as described by the venerable Wikipedia, and various other internet sources. Last year I spent ten months faithfully working out at least three times per week for at least an hour to two hours each time. One hour of cardio plus various cabled weights. (I did miss a few scattered weeks due to work and vacation, but it was pretty negligible.) I was eating relatively healthy, and trying to maintain a high amount of fiber (due to an unnatural fear of colon cancer). Other than a little more muscle, a little better endurance, and about ten extra pounds, I didn’t lose any weight. I more or less spent the year at around 260 lbs (118Kg), which is at least 60 pounds more than I should be. I’m “blessed” with a really long body, so I carry the weight better than others would, but it still makes me pretty fat.

After 10 months, I was hit with a veritable perfect storm of factors that broke my work out schedule, namely: getting sick for over a month, working excessive hours, being unexpectedly dumped by the girlfriend I was preparing to propose to, and the realization that working out was apparently a waste of time anyway. That said, it was convenient as it gave me time to fully indulge in terrible delicacies involved in Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations, indulgences and added probably close to ten pounds in those two months. I decided that after such a spectacular failure for the year, more drastic measures were going to be needed. These probably would have included various diet drugs of dubious legal standing, except that paranoid of anything more complex than an Ibuprofen. So, some proven dieting methods (potentially damaged heart and liver be damned) and a regular exercise. Incidentally, after an hour of cardio I can’t actually do any weights now as I’m almost on the verge of illness.

Looking back, I probably should have been more careful about recording my starting weight, but suffice it to say it was most likely somewhere between 260 and 270 pounds. I didn’t recall ever changing the the battery in the scale, so when it started saying “Lo” intermittently, I changed out the 9-volt battery. It still did it randomly, so I just thought it was one of those mysterious random errors electronics devices are so oft perplexing society with. (I’m looking at you “PC LOAD LETTER“.) On February 1st, I woke up and measured my weight with my lovable scale. This was carefully calculated as I’d made a sizable defecation the night before, I know that right in the morning your body is rather low on water. This was perfect for the deceptively lowest possible weight I could pull off. I came in at an amazing 244 pounds. Awesome. That would be somewhere between 16 and 26 pounds in January. Granted a lot of that would be water, but it’s still good for the ego.

Somehow one of my roommates last year spilled something such that a bunch of gunk got on the bottom of the scale. I didn’t notice for some time and it had already dried. After my supreme February victory over several pounds, I decided I should finally get around to cleaning the scale I was spending so much time looking at. A word to the wise, if you are cleaning an electronic scale, use a damp rag, not running water. Water got all over inside of the scale and it ceased to work. I let it sit outside of a few days, but the measurements it was giving were varying by 10 more more pounds. So, I opened it up to better dry it and discovered that it has a second round lithium battery that is was it used to measure weight (the 9-volt apparently only being used for the backlight), which is what “Lo” was apparently attempting to refer me to. Poor thing probably felt like Harold Crick’s watch. This battery was obviously leaking, and corrosion was rampant in this area, probably worsened by it’s recent flooding. Replacing the battery and cleaning the contacts did not help. And I also discovered that a low battery can cause a scale to register a lower weight than it should. Crap.

Thus began my pursuit of a new scale, which combined the features I liked most about my current scale. Being unable to find one, I went to the manufacturer of my broken scale in the hope that they still produced it and I could simply purchase another. This was not the case. However, I did fall in love with this little number, the Tanita BC573. It’s a new model, so undoubtedly uses that latest in 2003 cheap consumer weight measuring electronics. Very exciting to be on the cutting edge. It also has those clear electrodes on the glass that let them try to measure body fat, water, and other things in your body. I’ve read the manual twice, and there unfortunately doesn’t appear to be a way to deliver an electric shock to unsuspecting individuals, however I will be investigating such modifications in the future with an engineer friend of mine. I’ve never been very interested in measuring all of the extra stuff, but I figure I’d better make sure I’m losing body fat and not just muscle.

I’ll probably write later on how accurate I think all of the numbers are.

So, after finally getting the scale, I was excited to see my weight, which was much less exciting after seeing it. I can say this, it’s February the 20th, and the best unrealistic early morning measurement I’ve been able to get is about 239 lbs. Given that I don’t, in fact, know a number that I could with any certainty say represented my weight at the beginning of the month, it’s difficult to say if I’m still on track. I can say that I’m fairly certain I can’t lose 25 lbs per month without using a sharp instrument to remove all of those extra bits of my body I’m not very attached to (or don’t want to be attached to). Gone are my dreams of getting below 200 lbs in three months.

If anyone is wondering what I do eat, I eat a lot of sugar free Jello, strawberry flavored. My blood isn’t red from iron anymore, it now flows with Red 40.

There are two things I want to mention, and I’ve been waiting a bit to mention why. I’ll get to why I’ve been waiting in a bit, but first I’m going to talk about moving. Specifically, moving other people.  Well, one specific other person, but I think it’s applies directly to other people moving, or at least other people that I move.

Recently my father asked me to help him move an old friend of the family. A rather elderly woman who was moving to an assisted living facility near one of her children. Two of her sons, one daughter in law, and a few grandsons around the age of 20. (It’s not very important, but I do want to mention that the grandsons all looked like body builders. They were huge.) These would have made for a decent moving crew for someone that’d lived in the same house for 40 years, that wasn’t moving everything anyway. And my dad had somehow managed to recruit a number of other folks to help for a couple of hours.  Apparently the family members had shown up the day before to help pack, though I couldn’t see any evidence of packing into boxes.  So the issues:

1. First of all, we weren’t just moving everything.  Some stuff was being left to be thrown away, some stuff was going to given to a neighbor to put in a garage sell, some stuff was being put in the moving truck for the old lady, and some stuff was being in put in the moving truck to be transported to one of the kid’s house. And what was being picked for what was being decided seemingly at random by the daughter in law. Fine. Great. Whatever. Look, if you have ten people standing around with no idea what to move out, and you’re the only person that knows, make it your priority to tell people what needs to be moved. Heck, use colored stickers as indicators, or something, anything. I’m not getting up early on a Saturday so I can spend the whole thing standing around because you can’t get your act together.

2. I don’t know what you call “packing”, but in my experience if you spend a day doing it then you should have a giant stack of boxes that need to be “moved”. I don’t expect to show up and start carefully putting stuff carefully in boxes. It’s not what I do, and I’m pretty sure everyone else showing up is pissed if they have to do it. If you want your precious items packed in such a way that they are not magically turned into a box of tiny shards holding up little metal bits by the time it reaches it’s destination, do it yourself.

3. There were probably 100 drawers in the house, each filled with such an eclectic collection of items that each individual drawer should have been labeled miscellaneous. (There was one drawer with probably sixty or so different packs of cards. I was completely unaware up until discovering this drawer that the little old lady had spent a portion of her life as a card shark. This was the only drawer with an actual theme.)  Some of the stuff in the drawers they wanted to keep, other stuff not so much.  I understand that you may not want to move stuff and then throw some of it away at the other end, but if you have a lot of people that need to leave soon, you don’t have time to sort through a million knick-knacks first.  Just move the dressers and deal with the crap later.

4. If there is some old, cheap kitchen implement in an unopened package that you don’t want, and your mother in law obviously hasn’t needed, and couldn’t use in her new location, then give it to the guy that says he could use it. I want my cheese grater, damn it. I mean, someone could probably have used that kitchen implement. After several hours of volunteer labor, giving someone something nobody wants anyway is sort of a nice gesture. Think of it as a tip. Or insurance against improper packing. That wasn’t a threat, just a suggestion.

I could go on, but I believe I’ve gone on a bit longer than I intended as it is. I’ve considered putting together a guide for people that are asking others to help them move, and this recent experience has strengthened my resolve. People need to know when what they’re doing is just plain dumb, and letting them know how to prepare to move will help me, help the world, help people from doing dumb stuff, at least in moving.

I’ll have to talk about weights in a little bit.