See, the thing has twelve resistance settings, 1 being awfully lightweight and 12 being, I don’t even want to think about 12.

Sunday night, when I first got on the thing, I spent a lot of time at 2, with a little time at 3 and a minute spent at 4.

Monday night was less 2, lots of 3, a little 4.

Tuesday night, I managed to split the time between 21 minutes of 3 and 9 minutes of 4, with no 2.

Wednesday night was 13 minutes of 3, 15 minutes of 4, 2 minutes of 5.

Tonight was 8 minutes of 3, 14 minutes of 4, 6 minutes of 5.

I’m not seeing any real movement on the scale, and I don’t think I should expect to in the next week, but I think I’m on the right track as far as getting my metabolism going again.

For the record, back in early 2006 when I was biking a lot, I think I got to the point where I was doing mostly 5, with occasional flurries into the 6 and 7 range.  So I still have a little ways to go there, but… not too far, really.

If I select “Mosaic.wav – めがねでねっ！” in my PSP’s “Music” folder and let it play sequentially from there, I get a half-hour of Mosaic.wav, Hamada Shouko, SweetS, and Round Table Featuring Nino, with my half-hour bike workout ending just as Groovin’ Magic is starting to come to the end.

It’s a pretty damn energetic set of artists.

By which I mean, if the aggressively-girlish-voices-at-high-volume genre of music is your thing, this is the sort of thing you would like, if you don’t get diabetes first, which is definitely a possibility.

Biking every night, even for only a half hour, is probably a little aggressive, but here’s the thing:

1) I’m officially not letting myself drive to work – it’s only a mile! until I see the scale say, at most, 188.8 in the morning.  I need to lose 2.2 pounds for this.

2) It’s coming up on Oregon’s official “cold and wet” season, which is different from our other three seasons in that it’s slightly colder and slightly wetter.

3) The combination of (1 & 2) is awfully motivating.

But, it is awfully convenient, even when it’s saying things I’d rather not hear.

As an example, I’m 6’1″.  If I’m 189 pounds or over, I’m overweight.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing numbers in the 191-192 range in the morning.  It’s been a little too consistent to blame it on a temporary fluctuation, and I haven’t been able to get back to normal just by being careful about what I’m eating.

From previous experience, I need to kick my metabolism back into gear, and once it’s going again I’ll be able to manage my weight just by moderating food intake.  Unfortunately, that’s the part that means I need to actually do some work. 

So, last night, I queued up a half hour of Caramelldansen remixes on my mp3 player and got on the sole exercise bike in our apartment complex’s exercise room, fully expecting to wake up in agony this morning.

And, yes, there is some agony.

The thing I can’t quite explain is why it’s my arms that are killing me, while my legs are just fine.

1) How’d you do it?

2) Why did you do it?

My answer to the first one is usually “Eat lots of fruit and yogurt, don’t go to restaurants, and completely eliminate Italian, Mexican, Indian, and Chinese food from your diet.”

Which is a simplified version of “destroy everything that makes life worth living”, I admit.

The second question is, I think, what people really want to know the answer to.  Most of us, at one time or another, want to lose some weight, but that’s not much motivation in and of itself.  You need that mental hook that gives you the rationale to behave in what is, literally, self-destructive behavior.  You need a “Why” to make it work.

My typical answer to that is: “I went to Japan for the first time”, which is actually a pretty good lie.  It’s a nation of stairs – escalators and elevators are rare, tiny, hot and crowded things.  Pulling yourself up and down that many stairs gives you a really good reason to want to have less of yourself around, and you’re surrounded by skinny people so you don’t have the excuse you have in America, which is “Well, I’m overweight, but look at HIM, at least I’m not THAT bad.”

The truth is that the process started a little earlier.  I was working on a small development / testing team, and the QA lead liked going for walks in the afternoon.  So, every day, he would invite the team for a walk, and since eventually I realized that taking an afternoon walk was better than working, I started accepting the invitations.

And those afternoon walks, honestly, are the things that made it so I survived that first trip to the Land-Of-Stairs and came back with the epiphany that made it possible to stick with it.

So: “Why did you do it?”

Answer: “Well, it was better than working.”

I don’t think this is going to make it into any self-help books any time soon.

At any rate, the whole point behind this long and painful story is to lead in to another painful story:

One of the guys who used to come on these team “meetings” is leaving town.

He’s the guy that tended to be the guy that would turn the walks from flat-ground strolls into up-hill hikes.  He was also the guy in the best shape of all of us, which I think should have been a clue.

We had a send-off for him last night.

He’s packed his entire life into 15 Rubbermaid containers in a 4′ x 8′ trailer and he’s moving to Florida to go to school.

He’d planned to take a lot more with him – he had arrangements made for a big truck, the whole works, but then he found out that school started a month before he thought it would and he had to move NOW to get there in time and if he wanted the big truck NOW it would cost something like $5000.

When you’re faced with that, apparently it’s a strong motivator to decide what things you have are really important to you.

That made me realize that the same questions apply to un-cluttering your life as apply to losing weight.  “How” and “Why?”

I don’t think I’ll ever have a “Why?” that can be answered with “I need to fit my entire life into THIS trailer”, but if I can find a good enough Why, I might actually get organized one of these days. 

You may or may not be familiar with the film “Trekkies”, and if you are not, I must recommend it as an enjoyable, if cautionary, tale. All you really need to know is that it’s a series of interviews with Star Trek fans, and at one point they interview a memorabilia collector who says (paraphrasing here) that what he really wants to do some day is build a really big shelf, a shelf big enough to display everything he owns.

It is perhaps unfair that I have, in the past, made fun of this man for having the construction of a shelf as his life’s goal.

I have, for several months now, been in pursuit of a similar goal. A shelf of my own, as it were. This has been a quite frustrating thing because, while I knew more or less exactly what I wanted – sturdy, wire shelving – I didn’t quite know where to buy the stuff. I tried Staples and Office Depot and they were unhelpful, I even went so far as to call restaurant supply stores since I knew what I wanted was used quite a bit in kitchens, I was generally frustrated at every turn. I found lots of places to order it online, but this stuff isn’t lightweight by any means – I wanted to be able to go into a store and buy it and it vexed me mightily that I was unable to do so.

Then I found the Container Store. And they had shelving, great stocks of it. And I felt as though a months-long quest was finally coming to an end.

That was on June 30th. We were going to leave for Alaska on July 7th. Buying and assembling shelving would have a) cut severely into our trip budget and b) taken way too much time. I had to put it aside.

July 14th we returned from Alaska, getting up at 4AM for a 6AM flight out of Juneau, returning home to beautiful northern Oregon at approximately 2PM.

By 4PM I was at the Container Store.

Today I sit proudly surrounded by a Shelf of My Own. I have loads of display space that is, as you will see, still largely unused, but I will be excavating many Cool Things from boxes and bins sooon.

Total:

2 “starter sets.” (4 x upright, 4 18″ x 48″ shelf)

6 18″ x 24″ shelves.

2 shelf liners. (1 x 24″, 1 x 48″)

2 packages floor protectors.

4 packages hanging hook thingies.

One massive pressboard entertainment center broken down and thrown away.

End result:

Left side and Middle: Laserdisc player, VHS deck, PC for capturing video, PC for downloading stuff, NAS, external drives, scanner, my main PC, a Dreamcast, monitor, etc:

Right side: CD player, MD deck, CRT monitor, Composite/S-Video to VGA adapter, switchboxes, receiver, consoles PS2 and older (newer consoles are in the living room)

It is… Glorious.

“Let’s Learn Japanese” Progress Tracker: 16/52

But I did finish Ikaruga. Granted, I finished it by playing it until the “pity the shooter-impaired person” mode kicked in and the game switched into unlimited continues mode…

The best I was able to manage with NINE continues, which is the last stop before “Free Play” was this: I was able to see, and even damage a bit, the fourth end of level boss. There are five levels. The last level is almost all bosses. If you want no know what TRUE pity is: the only way I beat one of those was that eventually they give up and go away and hand you over to the next boss.

But, I watched the credits scroll. That fits my criteria of “finished”, and I’m sticking with it.

It boggles my mind that some people can play through this on one credit.

The only shred of dignity I have left is this – the game has several unlockables, and the first you can unlock either by playing for 5 hours or by beating the TRAINING level without continuing.

I unlocked it in under 3 hours played. That is the best I can do.

Also, this morning’s weight : 188.6 – I have officially hit my goal weight, and my BMI of barely-under-25 means that I am, by strict definition, now in the 1/3rd of Americans who is NOT overweight or obese. Now I just have to work on getting what’s left of me into a little better overall shape.

At this point I am tempted to go all fanboyish about how cool the game is, but let’s be honest -  if it’s your kind of game, you played it a year ago, if not two years ago, and I am so late to the party that any further praise is really unnecessary.

One of the small advantages of being late to the party – I was able to buy the Greatest Hits version and save 30 bucks in exchange for putting up with an ugly red banner on the packaging.

I can’t say that I’ve done that often – it’s far more often that I buy a game, shelve it, and then get reminded that I ought to try playing that when I see the $20 version hit the shelf.  Final Fantasy games, in particular – for VIII, I not only bought the game at full price, I bought a new Playstation because I was told that the game wouldn’t run on a modified Playstation… so let’s say, $200 to buy this one game?  And, by the way, I haven’t ever finished it, didn’t even start it after until it had been re-released as a GH title, AND (for double irony!) it runs just fine on the modified Playstation.  I could have saved a couple of bucks there is all I’m saying…

This morning’s weight : 190.8

I went all-online this term because my former employer told me that I would have to do some overseas travel for them and as a result I couldn’t take conventional courses.  Then they laid me off the Friday before the new term started, but I’ve stuck with the online courses anyway – trying to get into anything useful at the last minute would have been impossible, and online courses don’t interfere with my job hunt.

So – English Literature 104 and Technical Writing 227.  It’s a good thing that English Lit is pretty easy, because Technical Writing is a bear – the material is mostly stuff that I’ve picked up over the years anyway, but now I’m learning that there are names for things and that most of the techniques I’ve learned on-the-fly are techniques that have been known for absolutely ages… so I’m getting decent grades thus far, but I have trouble thinking in “correct language”  – I want to say “tricking the boss into thinking that the decision you wanted is one he’s making on his own” and my textbook wants to call that “Reader-oriented persuasion.”

As for literature class, I think that my classmates should be banned from using adjectives, particularly “beautiful”, “moving”, “touching” and anything of the ilk.  From reading the classroom discussion, some of these prats would burst into tears from reading the side of a cereal box.  I’m getting good marks in this course as well, so I think I’m successfully masking my natural cynicism.

This morning’s weight, 192.4, and my 36 waist jeans are comfortable enough that I think I could try on some 34s without too much risk.  I won’t go buying any right now, since it’s not like the 36s are falling off me or anything, but considering I started out at a 44 waist it’s a hell of a nice thing to be thinking.

I speak of course of Beyond Good and Evil, which seems to be one of the top games on anyone’s “If you haven’t played xxx you’re not a real yyy” list.

Not that I’m, you know, succumbing to peer pressure and following the crowd and all that. Because I totally am. Sometimes, the crowd is right.

When I say “the crowd” of course I mean a fairly small crowd. After all, this thing was released and marked down to 20 bucks within the first month. It’s no platinum selling system mover must have title.

This one was only on my shelf for three years or so, played up to the first save point and abandoned. I think I put it in the Xbox when we had some friends over and realized very quickly that (a) it wasn’t really a play-with-others game and (b) the pig was annoying.

3 years later, the pig is still annoying. That aside…

The game itself is a very enjoyable hybrid. You’ve got your Zelda-inspired combat, your stealthy bits, a little bit of hovercraft racing, you’ve got some collecting of items to do and you’ve got an oddly addictive secondary goal of keeping up a photographer job while you try to save the world. How Peter Parkeresque. Should I admit that I died in one of the early boss fights because I was trying to get a picture of the boss in order to get paid for it?

The game is also forklift-free, which is important to me. You do bump some boxes around with a hovercraft, but no forks are used in the lifting of any crates.
Well worth the twenty bucks, or whatever it costs now.

After letting those credits scroll and being fairly surprised by the last little plot twist, I dove, maybe a little quickly, into ICO for the PS2. So far I’m loving the atmosphere and hating the camera angles. I’ve played up through the bit with the windmill and it’s driven me to look things up online twice already, which is something I do only when it comes down to that or I put a controller through the window. You may infer from that that it’s a little frustrating.

In other news, I continue to count down to a “healthy” BMI, clocking in at 193.6 this morning. That’s 13 pounds since March 3rd… I should be at goal by mid-May if this keeps up.

Keeping up to date, today’s weight check : 194.4.

My recruiter seems to have found a couple of decent leads to throw a resume at and hope it sticks, and I’m of course sending off all manner of resumes myself, but while I remain out of work the game consoles continue to get a workout.

After Panzer Dragoon Saga, I went through the Saturn shelf a little more, and came up with Tomb Raider, possibly the most popular series nobody believes launched on the Saturn.

I’ve never finished it. I got quite far – looking at the level list on Wikipedia, I think I was about 3 levels from the end when I ran into a boss fight that I just couldn’t seem to beat. All things considered, it seemed like a pretty good choice.

But, one of the flaws with the console versions was the frequent deaths and very infrequent save points, and I don’t know if I’ve the tolerance for that anymore.

Anyway, I own the PC version, something I got in one of those “Mega Hits” collections, and I knew that had save-anywhere functionality, so I put the Saturn version aside and tried to install that. Not so much the worky. A little digging online revealed that, while it can be made to work under Windows XP, or even Vista, it takes a degree of mucking about that I wasn’t willing to do, and even if you got it running it didn’t have as good of music as the console versions. Shameful.

And… apparently they’re doing a remake of the first game ANYWAY, for the 10th 11th anniversary, and it will be a budget title, so why not wait for that?

Instead, I jumped forward two generations and picked Tomb Raider Legend off the shelf.

I played most of Tomb Raider, as I mentioned, and I played enough of Tomb Raider II on the Playstation to get to the point where running out of flares got annoying (very early), but I’d missed III, Chronicles, Angel of Darkness, whatever else was released thereafter. Comments I have heard over the years have indicated that I didn’t miss much.

Tomb Raider Legend, however, I heard good things about, so when we bought our XBox 360, it was one of the four games we picked up with it – Dead Rising, Ridge Racer 6, and Dead of Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 2 were the others, and one of these days I will actually give them some playtime.

It was rather a different game than 1996′s game. Much more shooty, for one. Far fewer animal enemies, and especially NO UNDERWATER ENEMIES. I confess that I have a serious case of the heebie jeebies that comes from fighting stuff underwater – this was a big problem back when I was playing the first game… all those crocodiles, brrr.

I think I can leave aside the oohing and aahing at graphics, etc. It’s a 360 game and in hi-def and stuff, yes, it looks good. I got a kick out of a bit where, just after I’ve finished going “wow!” at a particularly neat bit of scenery, Lara makes a crack about going into the postcard business.

Most of the time I died due to falling off things, and most of those were due to me being a bit of a klutz when it comes to playing 3rd person games. I did die an awful lot, though, and in the Nepal level it managed to get just a bit frustrating, but never enough to make me toss the controller and give up. This represents a difficulty level that anyone who’s actually good at these sorts of games will probably consider childishly easy, but for me, I was happy to be able to see the whole story.

Another one down. With 12 years worth of games to choose from, what comes off the to-play pile next is anyone’s guess.

This needed a PS: The game includes forklift content. Apparently I’m doomed to forklifts. I’m 6 hours into Beyond Good and Evil now without a forklift in sight but I have no faith in that.