Progress Report

Here’s a piece of free advice. If you are having the bathroom remodeled and the floor is torn out, don’t try to use that bathroom in the middle of the night. That’s what I found out. If it weren’t for my catlike reflexes, I would have fallen through to the basement. As it was, I barely managed to get on the one piece of plywood on the joists without impaling myself on a wrecking bar. I have a few scrapes and bruises but am otherwise none the worse for wear and doubtless a wiser man for the experience. The demolition and infrastructure aspects of this phase are taking longer than expected because the floor joists and beams have to be replaced. It turns out that they were rotten and sagging, and I prefer that my new bathroom not collapse into the cellar.

I finally broke through my weight loss plateau and am down to 236 pounds buck naked at home in the morning and 245 clothed and shod on the scale at the gym. I can’t account for the difference since I know my gym clothes and shoes probably don’t weigh nine pounds. I choose to regard my home scale as accurate. I am gradually increasing the weight on all the exercises in my circuit training routine, and I am gradually getting faster on the treadmill. I’m still pitifully out of shape even after 12 weeks of working out, but I can really feel the difference. I reckon that I have been able to fight off the nasty bug everyone’s been getting thanks to my improved condition.

I am getting the braces on my upper teeth off tomorrow morning, and I’m really looking forward to getting all this hardware out of my mouth. The lower braces may come off next month. The procedure has been a success, and I now have a normal bite and don’t bang my front teeth together. I can masticate a lot better, too. This should help me keep my incisors longer. I should have done this long ago instead of just living with the malocclusion.

I increased my Zoloft dosage by 50%. This has taken care of my anxiety and compulsive behaviors, and I have the added benefit of having my sex drive disappear altogether! Having just celebrated a 23rd wedding anniversary, I don’t really need a libido at this point in my life. Seriously, are middle-aged women really all that happy about Viagra? Just when the fat slob stops bugging her so much for his semiannual intercourse, along comes a pill that makes him as randy as a rooster. Come to think of it, if someone opposes homosexuality, what better way to reduce the amount of homosexual sex going on than to encourage homosexuals to marry?

I am still on my mainstream media news fast except for Keith Olbermann’s show. That is one quality news program. Olbermann and Jon Stewart are the best journalists on TV right now. The best pundit is Stephen Colbert. I missed the season opener of Battlestar Galactica, but it looked as if it was turning into an interstellar version of Melrose Place.

I have decided to give up on Lost. I think the writers are just making it up as they go along. There is more recap than show, and the flashbacks don’t add anything to the story. I watch too much TV as it is.

On the literary front, I'm still reading the "Red Queen" by Matt Ridley. I finally finished "Rough Crossings", the book about American slaves who defected to the British during the War for Independence and were emancipated. A lot of them ended up in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and then migrated to Sierra Leone. They were hosed every inch of the way, but at least they were free. I have started a biography of Mao, and it turns out that he was not even cute when he was little. So far, I'm only up to his early 20s when he was a minor Communist functionary. I just found out that there is a new novel in the Sharpe series by Bernard Cornwell, and I may have to drop everything and get it right away.