Water Weight

So, to answer some questions: no, yes, too much, don't know yet, and thank you.

Seriously. My car is permanently disabled. Well, it's still running, but it's not fixable for less than $1,500 and for a car we only paid a grand for in the first place, it's not worth the investment, especially since the transmission isn't the only thing wrong with it. Thanks for all your concern and commentary. Our plan now is to run it into the ground and see how much money we have managed to save up by the time it goes kaput.

It must be nice, I think, to be in a job where you get paid just to diagnose a problem. Doctors get office visit fees, whether you end up treating the problem or not. Garages get fees for hooking up a computer and driving the car around the block. (I ended up shelling out well over $100 just to find out that the car's not worth fixing...) I give advice to a lot of people. I need to start charging for it, even if (especially if!) they don't follow it.

Sunday, I went for a distance building walk. Toby joined me again. Ug. I do like him, most of the time, but really, spending 7 hours of my weekend with him is starting to be a bit much. Also, he has a revolting habit of chewing with his mouth open, which makes lunch time a trial. Maybe I can find some way to tell him nicely next week that I'd prefer to walk on my own once in a while. I like having company, sometimes. It does make the walk go by faster, and at the same time, I don't want to "wimp out" in front of someone else. On the other hand, it seems like I never get to spend any time... alone. I'm either the go-to guru on food and diet; or I'm "wife" or "mommy" or the romance expert (I cannot tell you how many people come to me for dating/relationship advice... numbers that large don't make sense. I further cannot count the number of people who actually listen to me about it... numbers don't come that small.)

It was a nice enough day for a walk, and we walked most of the way to Leslie's house and then back. Leslie wasn't home, she had plans... So we stopped at the BP station about a mile from her house, had lunch, and then headed back. According to my pedometer, we walked 16.8 miles in about six and a half hours. That's not very speedy, honestly; about 2.5 miles an hour, but we did stop for breaks and...

Well, then it rained.

At first, the rain was nice; kinda light and scattered and cooling.

And then... it rained harder.

And harder.

I couldn't have been any more wet if you'd tossed me in a lake.

Water, by the way, is really, really heavy.

My shoes were completely soaked, enough so that it no longer was worth the effort to try and walk around the 3 inch deep puddles. Water poured through my baseball cap, down the back of my neck, and into my shirt. It was raining so hard, literally, I couldn't see more than fifty feet in front of us (and only that far until my glasses started fogging up... after that, I could barely see at all...).

We walked the last two miles in that downpour.

And soaking wet clothes are really heavy. Between pushing through puddles and how sticky I became (well, the legs of my shorts were drenched and they rubbed together and wow, that slowed me down a lot...) we lost a great deal of ground.

Just as we were getting to my apartment, it stopped raining.

Typical.

"Well, at least it stopped," Toby said.

"Yeah, so instead of looking like troopers," I rolled my eyes, "we just look stupid."

As a note, my weigh in was the suck this week. After losing 4 pounds last week, I was back up .6 this week. My weight loss for this year is the suck. I have ~8.4 pounds left to lose, and at the rate I'm losing, it's going to be 2010 before I'm not paying for meetings anymore.

Sigh.

(And yes, while you're wondering, Thomas lost another 2 pounds this week. Yes, by all means, kill him.)

Burning through my Good Karma

Well, this week has barely started and already I'm neck deep in "owing someone a favor."

See, this is the thing... my car is not being happy with the world. Sometimes it doesn't shift. Not all the time, just sometimes. (It's an automatic, not a stick...) The tach thing will rev up and up and nada. No shifting. Now, sometimes when this happens, it'll sort itself out in a few minutes, and sometimes it has to be manually downshifted, and it'll sort itself out, and sometimes you have to turn the car off and back on and it'll be fine. Until it happens the next time.

Now, I took the car up to the Firestone yesterday (and got a ride back to my house from Leslie...) and this morning they called to say they have no clue, couldn't find the problem, but here's another $350 worth of maintenance they recommend we do to the car in the meanwhile.

"Will that fix my problem?" I ask.

"Um, we couldn't find your problem, so I don't know." This is mechanic-speak for "No, it won't. But we'll get more money out of you!"

So, now I have to go get the car, pay them $75 for being annoying and unhelpful, and then take the car down the street to a transmission-specific shop and pay them another $75 to see if they can make heads or tails out of the issue.

Now, on the plus side, the new guy says it sounds like the sensor to him (based on my description) because if it was the actual transmission, it wouldn't be an intermittant problem... but he's not sure and he still needs to do diagnostics on it...

However, we only have one car, so an additional problem is, when there's a mechanical issue, getting from hither to yon is... a real pain in the ass.

Last week, we took the car in for inspection; or more exactly, I did. And I walked out to get the car the next day...

This week, we've had to bum rides from Leslie and Toby... and I had to get Leslie to cart me around yesterday to get this problem taken care of with our bedsheets. (Which is to say, I accidentally bought the wrong sized pillow cases. Standard pillow cases do not fit on King Sized pillows... ) And then there was an issue because I accidentally left my credit card in my other bag, so we had to go back to my place, pick up the card, then back to the store... what a pain...

Thomas is going to have to walk to work tomorrow, since it's unlikely that we'll get the car back today.

Tomorrow or Thursday (if we don't have the car back by then) I'm going to need to bother one of them for a ride to the grocery store. How exciting. Just what I want to do, my grocery shopping while someone else waits around for me.

95% of the time, I don't care that we only have one car.

This... is the other 5%.

Regardless, I'm sure you all didn't come here to listen to me whine about my car trouble.

Yesterday, I was very stressed out (today, I'm still stressed, but there's a limit to how long I can carry around incredible stressyness, so right now I'm in the "sort of resigned" phase of it...) and when I get really stressed out, I tend to scratch my legs. Don't ask me why, it's just a nervous thing. But since I don't really want big gaping holes in my skin, I decided I'd wear a pair of tights, so that I could keep myself from doing too much damage.

So I put together an outfit that I thought looked okay with tights.

And it really, really did.

I think I looked intensely cute yesterday.

And... those pesky 2.6 pounds that showed up last week decided to go away again. And they took with them another 1.4 pounds as insurance.

So, I ended up with a 4 pound loss yesterday, which moves me over 80 pounds total lost. (81.2 pounds lost, to be exact, but who's counting? Oh, right. I am.)

Big Fat Zero

Well....

This weekend there was a "software" update at Weight Watchers. My leader and receptionists were busy trying to get their computers to actually work... and they weren't working particularly well.

I don't know if this botched up the calibration of the scales or not.

However, last week, the Wii Fit said I was up over the week; not much, just .2, and my losses at my official weigh in ended up being -1.4 pounds. This week, the Fit said I was down 1.4 pounds from last week, and my official weigh in was up 2.6 pounds.

Combined with my gains and losses, that adds up to a big fat zero loss for the last month.

And yes, before my faithful readers plaster the comments: water weight, salt, time of the month, too much exercise (I did walk almost 13 miles on Sunday), I'm sunburned, I didn't overeat but might have undereaten again. I know. Believe me, I'm 18 months into this weight loss journey, and I do know all the various psuedo-reasons that I had an unexpected gain. Plateau... etc. Yep, check check check.

I really, really need a vacation. I'm so tired of everything. I'm tired of my housework; I'm tired of my husband; I'm tired of my child. I'm tired of listening to my friends and their complaints about the stupid places they work. (Silver lining; three of them work at the same place and while I get to hear the same complaints three times in a row, I don't have to try to keep track of more than one set of stupid office policies...)

And after spending a good deal of time yesterday trying to get my points tracker lined up for 19 points, I'm NOT going to change it back to 20.