We'll put it together and we'll get it all done. Some day we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun

Today marks the one year anniversary of me running on the treadmill. I knew once I spent over $2,000 on a treadmill that I would have to use it.

I remember the first day I got onto the treadmill. I was scared to hurt my calf muscle more, which had been torn on June 11, 2005. And I was scared of hurting my knees, as I had so much excess weight on me that I know the pressure of running a lot can hurt the knees, but that is why I got the reflex deck.

On Monday October 31, 2005, I started walking at 3 mph on my NordicTrack 7600 R with the Reflex Deck. I thought “I can do this,” so I then went a little faster, 3.5 mph. I remember getting up to 4 mph and jogging, sweating and huffing and puffing like I’d run a marathon. Then, thinking I was going for broke, I hit it up to 5 mph and ran for about 3 minutes at that speed, sure that at any moment my heart, which was beating so fast, was going to explode in my chest.

At the time, I was able to walk/jog/run for 18 minutes: I would do a few minutes at 3 mph, a few minutes at 4 mph, a few minutes at 5 mph, then go back to 4 mph for a few minutes, down to 3 mph for a few minutes, then repeat.

When I completed my 18 minutes, I was drenched in sweat and could barely stand up, had to lunge off the treadmill to my computer desk chair. I remember my lungs burning, and gulping air even several minutes after I finished running. I remember my leg muscles too week to hold me up, at least in the short term after I got off the treadmill. I remember sitting in that chair for about 30 minutes, completely drenched in sweat (I had a towel over the chair, so it wasn’t that disgusting) and feeling sick. Maybe not sick, but dizzy, couldn’t focus for the longest time.

Once my head cleared and I didn’t think I would dry heave (I hadn’t eaten in many hours, so I there was no food to bring up) all I kept thinking was “How in the HELL am I going to do this FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE?????

Yes, even then, I knew that once I truly started this whole exercise thing, it wasn’t going to be for a few months and if I shed any weight I’d stop. This was going to have to be a lifetime endeavor. My father was really fat in his lifetime, just an enormous belly. And my oldest brother has had weight problems, yo-yo’ing up and down like I have done throughout my adulthood. And I just didn’t want to do that anymore.

So here I am, one year later, and I run 3.1 miles in 30 minutes, running as fast as 8 mph for half a mile towards the end of my run. I get off the treadmill, spend about 3-4 minutes catching my breath, jump in the shower, and then get doing my regular things in the evening after work (cleaning, laundry, dishes, sometimes shopping). I don’t even sweat as much as I did when I started. I’m not saying it is easy to run now, but if someone had told me one year ago that I would be able to jump on a treadmill, run for 30 minutes over 3 miles total and be able to be productive afterwards, not just lay around recovering, I would have thought that the person who told me that was wrong. I would have argued that that person was dead wrong.

And I know that I can do this, at least 3 times a week, for the rest of my life – and I am fine with that thought. It actually brings a smile to my face thinking of it. I just have to make sure I have enough DVD’s to watch while running, and I know I can do it. So Happy Anniversary to me and my treadmill…and my legs that are getting stronger, and to my lungs that can breathe easier, and to my heart that is healthier. And next year, if it all works out, let’s hope I am celebrating my lowered cholesterol.

Until then, I am just going to keep running. And running. And running. And after that, I will just keep running. And running. And running. And that is cool.

Nothing has changed it's still the same; I've got nothing to say but it's O.K.

This is a new beginning for me. I’ve had some struggles recently with my calorie intake, but I am going to get a handle on it now and move forward. That is my goal. I ran 5 days last week, so that is good. At least I have made good on that part of my healthy life.

Only 17 more days until I leave for United Kingdom for the holidays. I have a bit more planning to do to get everything we want to do down, but I think it is working out great. Lynne & I fly into Heathrow on Friday, then the weekend is kind of up in the air with hopefully English Countryside stuff (perhaps a castle or two.) We are planning on staying in a hotel in London Sunday evening, then on Monday is all London, ending at the Ceremony of the Keys at the Tower of London at night. Lynne & I are flying to Edinburgh for 2 days in the middle of the week, leaving Gary to work at his job (the reason he is in London, so he should do some work that week). We come back Wednesday night, and Thursday, which is Thanksgiving in USA, my plan is to work at making a mini-Thanksgiving dinner for at least the 3 of us (Gary has a co-worker there with his wife, so we might try to do a 5 person dinner – we shall see.) Friday is all day in London, with a tour of the Parliament Building arranged by a friend. Saturday will be breakfast and then the flight back to USA.

So now is the time when I start worrying about making sure work is ready for me to be gone for over a week. I get kind of stressed out the weeks before a vacation as I want to get my work updated so that I am not a burden to my co-worker’s. I do wish that I could just let it all go and not worry about it, as it would make my time leading up to the vacation a lot more fun.

Tomorrow is a big day for me, so I will hopefully have more time to devote to that entry.

Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down

Mondays are always the easiest for me these days, both in terms of running and eating 1600 calories. I remember early on that I was having troubles on Mondays, and that is why I decided to skip one weekday running to make sure I can run on Saturdays.

But now that I keep splurging on the weekends, eating 1600 calories and running 30 minutes is easy on Mondays. No cramps, no feelings of weakness, no real hunger pangs. When I am finished running on Mondays, I don’t have that starvation feeling that I get sometimes (I usually eat lunch at noon during the week, and don’t finish running until 6:30-ish pm.) I feel good. I feel accomplished. I fell healthy after sweating it all out on the treadmill.

But recently, when Tuesdays hit, and I want to eat it all. I want to have that pastry at breakfast. I want to have that bag of chips with lunch. I want to eat tons of ice cream after dinner. And I don’t know why, what has changed, why I haven’t been able to get back onto the path I was on earlier this year. I know I am in better shape that I’ve been in the past, and I know that I am now healthier, but I want to get healthier, I want to lose 15 more pounds, I want to not have to worry constantly about losing the extra 5 lbs I put on over a weekend.

As a matter of fact, I don’t want to have to worry about a weekend at all. I want to eat regularly, not weigh everything I eat, not write down everything I have eaten every day, not run to the internet to figure out the calorie count of everything I have eaten.

I want to be a real boy! I want to live like a real boy one day, and eat like a real boy one day.

Although I have no problem with the idea of running on a regular basis for the long haul. I enjoy it enough that it isn’t a problem, though maybe after a few years I will be able to run 3 times a week instead of 5 times a week.

So, in conclusion, yesterday was fantastic…today, not going so easy. How am I supposed to last all week eating well when Day 2 is giving me problems. And let's hope I don't get cramps tonight while running.

Driving in your car, I never never want to go home

I was almost the victim of a hit & run on Friday. I say almost because I had to semi-chase the woman down who hit my car.

It was an annoying and rainy morning Friday, and I was driving up a hill in Oakland, taking my grandfather to the VA Hospital. At the top of the hill is a traffic light with two lanes for only about 4-5 car lengths, and there is an extended green light for people turning left. Obviously, cars in the left lane can only turn left, and cars in the right lane can go straight through the light or turn right.

The problem with this road is that it is narrow before it opens into the two lanes at the top, but people decide well before the two lanes to create a second lane and drive very close to you, basically squeezing two cars into a space only meant for one car. I understand this, and there is a chance I have done this myself in the past. The extended green light only allows a few cars through, and if you want to turn left at the top of the hill, but you are stuck back further, you end up having to wait a light cycle or two extra, even when the left turn lane has only one or two cars or is even empty because you have to wait to actually get into the left turn lane.

So on Friday, I’m in the right lane about ten cars back from the light, where there is only one lane, and the car pulls out behind me and starts to come up on the left. I notice she is close, and then her passenger side mirror hits my driver side mirror and lops it off, my mirror just dangling by the electrical cables. I pull on my parking break, but then realize that she just kept driving up to the left turn lane with her turn signal on.

I do recognize that there is no where to stop, but this robs me of the ability to talk to the people behind me and get witness statements and didn’t get the chance to take a picture showing exactly where this happened. I know it was rush hour and this would have slowed down the traffic coming up that road, which is a main road into the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, where University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are located, where many of our top hospitals and physician offices are located.

I pull out and go behind her, honking my horn. She ignores me, as far as I can tell. So I turn left and follow her, we pass up a parking lot on the left. I honk again as we get up to the next light. After I fake dial so she can see me, she pulls over to the right and after a hesitation, she pulls into the hotel parking lot. She took my name and phone number, and I took her name & phone number, her passenger’s name and phone number, her NY Driver’s License #, the license plate #, the car insurance policy # and the owner of the car (who was the father of the passenger.) I made a claim with the insurance company (we have the same insurance carrier) and this should be resolved quickly.

But part of me feels I should have just got her license plate # and called the police; let them deal with all that crap. I really hate getting this involved, and would rather in the future just not get my car hit by someone else. And I just know that the two college girls in the car are going to lie to the insurance company and I will get screwed in the deal. I don’t know how, but it will all happen.

And so, I used that as an excuse to eat horribly all weekend. I couldn’t even start to write down everything I ate, but it started on Friday with me getting liquored up and eating several plates of fries with Holly, who is back from Peru so I got to hear all the cool stories of Mount Machu Picchu, Lake Titikaka and the Inca ruins there ( I am so jealous that I didn’t go), and went on to yesterdays kielbasa and sauerkraut fest at my grandfather’s house with two of my brothers and my 2 year old nephew.

I ran on Thursday & Saturday, but didn’t on Friday since I was waiting around for the insurance company to call. At least that is my excuse. The good news is that this morning I was at 222 lbs, whereas many of my weekends eating binges have ended with me at 225 or a bit above.

Why can’t I put together a couple of good weeks here leading up to my trip to London? I just can’t seem to get into the same commitment that I had earlier this year. I need to find this again, as I feel I have more to go to get healthier for my future.

Some like it hot so let's turn up the heat 'til we fry

I got me a new heat pump, and it is working fine. At least for one night it seemed to work great, though it was a warm evening, so not a true test. This weekend it will get into the 40’s, so that will be more of a test.

I had to let the installers in yesterday in the morning, and then I left for work. I was a little nervous about letting them have free rein of my house, but what was I going to do? Continue being cold in my house? Try to force the installation until Friday when I don’t work? No, it wouldn’t do well to keep putting it off, so I let the two delicious looking men into my house (and hoped for some cheesy 70’s gay porn moment, but, alas, they clearly weren’t interested) and left for work.

When I got home after work, there was one ominous sign: the garage door wouldn’t open all the way. As a matter of fact, it would go up only about 4 inches and stop. So I had to go up the steps to my front door, and go downstairs to see what was happening. It seems Hot Installer #1 was putting in the electrical cable, he put it too low going around my garage door and then left too much slack, so that it was actually catching on the garage door and stopping it from opening. I had to get to the local hardware store, get a bracket, some screws and some anchors (the ceiling of my garage is plaster), come home, drill, hammer and screw the anchor & bracket into the ceiling holding the electrical cable away from the garage door, and voila! Garage door opens and doesn’t threaten to take out my electrical cable allowing my heat pump to keep…pumping. Heat, that is.

So I tell all this to explain why I didn’t run last night. I was too tired, I was too hungry, I was too busy, I was too…something other than running. Part of me wanted to run, part of me wanted to jump on the treadmill and go and go and go (for 30 minutes, at least) but I just didn’t. I ate well, though I did have a few more calories (1749) than I usually do, but I just couldn’t jump on the treadmill. And now I have to run today, tomorrow and Saturday just to make sure I make it 5 times this week. And it seems I am doing this just to maintain my current weight, as I haven’t lost any real weight since May.

But I got heat, so I won’t die of hypothermia this winter. Let’s hops I have the energy to run again tonight, and tomorrow, and Saturday…and the rest of my life.

You've been racing through my mind, you're picking up in speed

Asbestos isn’t as bad as people think. Or at least I hope not, and I will know in 20 years if it is killing.

I was told by the HVAC guy to have the asbestos that covered part of my duct work removed prior to the installation of my heat pump. If I didn’t remove it, the installers wouldn’t do the installation.

The salesman from the installer told me he knows a guy who could remove the asbestos for about $800. I’m already paying over $5000 for the heat pump, where does he think I am getting another $800? I was sure I could do it myself with all the proper equipment, i.e. mask, rubber gloves, water filled squirt bottle, non metallic scrub brush, flat metal scraper-thing. It took a while, and it is quite annoying to squeeze in behind my current furnace, but I did it. I think I got it all out at least.

Now let’s hope that I didn’t breathe in anything that could get stuck in my lungs and kill me.

I will say that losing that weight has paid off just by being able to squeeze behind the furnace. I do not think I’d have been able to do that with an extra 40+ pounds on me. And I did all of this with no dinner in me and after I ran for 30 minutes, so I was sweating profusely.

You’d think that the smell would be enough to keep my cats, Jeb & Bert, away, but no. As usual, my cats were there to supervise the entire operation. That is what my two cats do, supervise everything. Doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, updating my blog, they are there to supervise. Most times, they actually don’t even want petted when I’m doing something, don't meow for anything or try to rub up against my leg. They actually get annoyed when I close a door to keep them out of a place. They cry and scratch the door until I open it. They used to supervise me running on the treadmill, but now I just shoo them out the door, close it and I don’t hear them over the racket of the running and whatever DVD I’m watching.

Speaking of my running, I was certain I’d have problems running yesterday. I hadn’t run since Saturday afternoon, and I hadn’t had a lot of calories before I started last night. Usually, I have about 900 calories during the workday, then get home and run. By the time I’d gotten home last night, I’d had less than 800 calories. I’ve had some energy issues in the past when I’ve tried to run on less calories, but not yesterday. Ran the longest distance yet, 3.12 miles in 30 minutes. Personal best, dude!

I think I’d clearly eaten too much on Sunday. I wasn’t really that hungry until late last night, and ended up having just less than 1400 calories total for the day. And I’m not overtly hungry today (though I did forget my soup for lunch, but I’ve got enough food, was just in the mood for soup.) I know I’ve talked in the past of cutting down calories to 1400/day, but overall, I think I will stick with what I got, just about 10 g less fat/day.

I just won't pig out on Sundays again. At least not until I am in London (or whatever city we go to for our first weekend in Europe in November.)

I'm dizzy from the shopping malls

Well, not a bad weekend at all, considering I live in the Ice Castle now. I ran on Wednesday through Saturday, 3.1 miles at 30 minutes. Whatever was affecting me on Tuesday wasn’t bothering me the rest of the week. Yeah me!

Did good on food for the most part through Thursday. Wednesday, I probably had close to 2200 calories, got back on track Thursday, and wasn’t awful until yesterday. When I decided to have all the bad food items – hot dog, hamburger and fries and pizza. I didn’t try to be bad, I’m just drawn that way.

I called a nephew to go to lunch. He was working both of his jobs, so he couldn’t go, so I went shopping myself, and had a hot dog and drink at store food court (an enormous Hebrew National dog, not some little thing.) Then my nephew called me while I was shopping and said the movie theater told him not to come in to work (we work at the same movie theater, though they haven’t needed me for a while – box office receipts are down everywhere) so he wanted to go to lunch. We went to Buffalo Wild Wings and I had a black & blue burger with buffalo chips.

So I am stuffed to the neck with food at this point, and I call my grandfather to see what he wants for dinner while we watch the Steelers game (I have always watched the Steelers games with my grandfather.) He is in the mood for pizza with hot sausage, so I pick one up. And I eat a lot of it while watching my team wiped up the field with the KC Chiefs.

By the time I got home, I was so stuffed I felt sick, and I couldn’t even eat my usual ice cream sandwich that I usually have at the end of the day.

In a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, it is noted that daily weighing of yourself is critical to maintaining of the weight loss. The study noted that people who weigh themselves daily were 82 % less likely to regain lost weight. And I can understand why, as I feel like I have a better grasp on my weight since I’ve been weighing myself every day. It is interesting that I fought getting that scale just because I didn’t want to weigh myself every day, and yet it should work out for me.

Of course, then it hit me that, no matter what I’ve done since May 25 in terms of running or weighing myself, I’ve basically only maintained my weight (and I still stand by my statement that my stomach is bigger now than it was on May 25) but I haven’t lost any of it.

Mr. Cab Driver fuck you I'm a survivor

I was reading up on things from the internet on this whole Foley scandal, and I had no intention of mentioning anything here about it. This is a personal blog about exercise, one queer man’s attempt at getting healthy. Let Ann Cuntlier rail about how the Democrats are hypocrites, while ignoring the hypocrisy that she spews on a daily basis. I know that already, and I pragmatically believe that all politicians are whores of one sort or another.

Let Sean Hannity pejoratively push the Foley discussion towards the 1983 sex scandal where then congressman Gerry Studds admitted to having consensual sex with a 17 year old male Congressional Page in 1973 (nineteen hundred and freakin’ seventy three, people) and Barney Frank’s assistant (I heard FUX News regularly refer to Steve Gobie as Barney’s boyfriend, and yet there is no real record of him being anything other than an assistant, maybe fuck-buddy at the worst.) running an alleged male prostitution ring out of Barney’s apartment (it turned out that Mr. Gobie was lying – but no one today is mentioning that part.) Barney turned himself in when he learned what Mr. Gobie was telling people, and what did the Congress reprimand him for when they found no wrong doing? Fixing parking tickets for Mr. Gobie.

Oh, and the page sex scandal from the 1983, I find it interesting that AT THE SAME FUCKING TIME that Studds was being reprimanded by the Congress, Republican Congressman Dan Crane from Illinois, was being reprimanded for having sex with a 17 year old female Congressional Page. I don’t hear Hannity or Limbaugh or Savage (Michael the wing-nut, not Dan the sex columnist) mentioning Dan Crane. I did hear them complain quite a lot that Studds was allowed to run as a Democrat in the subsequent elections, and he did and he won. Dan Crane ran for election after his scandal as a Republican…and lost. But they don’t bring up that bit, do they? No, they go on and on about how sick and perverted the Democrats are because of their sex scandals.

But I wasn’t really going to say anything about that. I don’t care enough right now. I am focusing my energy (and a little bit of my own money) on getting rid if the awful Senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I would say his name, but I fear that he is so evil, so vile, so repulsive, that just by saying his name, babies might get sick, flowers will die and the elderly will start going into a panic, so if you don’t know who I am talking about, look it up on Wikipedia. Either under Pennsylvania Senators up for reelection in 2006, or just look under EVIL! His picture has to be there.

Then I read an article by B. O. Bennett. Mr. Bennett helped to set back the gay civil rights movement by decades (and yes, believe that it is a civil rights movement, no matter what the right wing wants to you to think. The right to marry, serve your country, work where you want to without fear of losing your job because of how you were born is all about civil rights.) by working diligently for Bob Dornan. Mr. Dornan was, for a long time to me, enemy #1. One of his famous saying was “Don't use the word 'gay' unless it's an acronym for 'Got Aids Yet?" Mr. Bennett worked for Dornan for many years, helped him with all his hate, and then, once he was done with politics in 1994, that is when Mr. Bennett decided to come out of the closet.

And then he wanted all the rights that many of us fought for just because he came out of the closet. He and his partner want to marry. Well, where the fuck was he from 70’s and into the late 80’s when Dornan and his like were supporting as well as crafting their anti-gay hate legislation? Oh yeah, he was helping him write it. He was supporting every little hateful thing Dornan could bring up (Dornan also famously was referred to a specific group as “lesbian spear chucker”, showing that he was a homophobe and a probable racist.)

In the mid-80’s, when I was 17, I told my grandmother I was gay. When I went to a Christian college in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I told people I was gay. I didn’t jump out of the closet, but I was slowly coming out. All my professors knew I was gay because I’d told them. Most all of my friends knew I was gay, because I told them. One of the deans of the college knew I was gay because I told him (and he was gay as well, so that one kind of nullifies itself.)

When I graduated college and went to work at one of the Big 8 Accounting firms (yes, I am old enough to have worked at an accounting firms – I think there are 4 big ones left now) I hid it. But when I started dating Joe and he was political, even being interviewed on a local news channel as a gay man who served in the military during the whole storm Clinton got into when he tried to lift the ban on gays in the military, I realized it would be important for me to be out of the closet. A close friend who worked at the firm advised me against it, but I was standing up for myself. So I brought Joe to a work event. And 6 weeks later, they’d found some lame-ass reason to fire me, but made me sign a paper saying they’d pay me severance and not contest unemployment if I promised not to sue.

And where was Mr. Bennett? He was secretly sleeping with men while dating a general’s daughter in the hopes to make it look like he was straight. He tried to run for Congress as a republican but didn’t make it. As a member of Congress, I’m sure THAT is when he would have come out and done some good. Just like Steve Gunderson, who was out when he was first elected…oh wait, Gunderson was closeted as well when he was first elected.

As a matter of fact, Steve likes to say that he was the first openly gay republican member of Congress who was reelected as an openly gay man. He was reelected ONCE as an openly gay man, in 1994, after 7 previous elections as simply “Steve” the republican. He wasn’t known as a gay man for 7 of the 8 elections that he won. He won in 1994 more out of the inertia that is incumbency in US politics than anything he stood for at the time. He decided not to run again. He was probably just exhausted from running for Congress so many times, that to stay on as a gay man for a few more terms, maybe doing some real good (to give him credit, he was the only republican to vote against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, though his vote was clearly made after he had decided not to run again) was just too exhausting to even think about.

And, in case Mr. Gunderson wants to be more self righteous about it all, he was pushed out of the closet, on the floor of the Congress, by everyone's favorite homophobe, Bob Dornan.

In my job after I left the accounting firm, I was too afraid to jump back out of the closet. So I hid it. I hid it when I heard an assistant manager at my company refer to one of my fellow coworkers who was gay as a “Butt Pirate.” I kept my mouth shut when the manager made the comment about Elton John “He sings pretty good for a faggot,” and then laughed, showing a lack of tolerance as well as poor grammar.

After two years, I couldn’t take it anymore. In my job interview for my current job in 1996, I told them flat out “As a gay man, I need to know what protection you provide for gays and lesbians in your company.” And to his credit, the manager who was interviewing me was more than happy to show me that the company did have an extensive policy to protect their workers, all 28,000 of them from every walk of life. And if you want to talk about old and conservative, the company I work for is one of the oldest stock insurance companies in the United States, with roots back to 1792. And I have been allowed to give presentations in front of the division president about being gay and the troubles with working in corporate America as a gay man. And he applauded me.

So what did Mr. Bennett do after he stopped working for hate monger Dornan? He went on to a cushy job with Southern California Edison, and now is a “public affairs consultant” in Long Beach. And NOW he wants everyone to know he is gay, and NOW he is trying to get gays the right to marry. And NOW he wants him and his boyfriend to be able to just be a normal couple, because in 2003 his boyfriend had a stroke and he wasn’t allowed to ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital, because he didn’t have the same civil liberties as his hetero counterparts (his partner came out of it and is now in better health.) Had he been working on these civil liberties starting in 1973, when he got to our nations capital, instead of hiding behind his right wing benefactors, maybe he could have ridden with his partner.

I have had a rainbow flag at my desk since Pride 1997. It is usually the first thing that goes up when I move desks. By example, I have had 3 people at my work in the past 10 years tell me that I changed their personal views on homosexuals. Just by being out, just by working next to or near them day in and day out for years, I was able to make a small change in the world. And 2 of these 3 people are parents, so they will effect on their spouses and their children and maybe on their parents as well. Maybe they will have the possibility to change a friend’s point of view. Maybe they will be a bit more supportive and tolerant at their churches if they meet a gay person. But if they only change themselves, that is 3 people that I changed because I was out of the closet. What if I’d hid?

I am not brave. I am not courageous. I am a simple man, one who realized through proper upbringing, that I needed to be truthful to myself and others around me. Any modicum of change I've helped has been derived just by being me, not by being active politically, and not by being a homosexual. People I worked with saw a regular guy, who wasn't ashamed to talk about being homosexual, didn't hide from it and was upfront with anyone. I understand that there are times you can't be upfront and honest with employers, but I do believe you can ALWAYS be honest with friends.

Oh, and in 2000, Bennett met with W, one of the famous gay republicans Austin 12, and still voted for him. Still voted for a man who has shown through action that he hates gays. A man whose entire political party hates homosexuals and has used them as scapegoats since the early 70’s. A man who will allow gay baiting at any time to avoid real issues. And why does Mr. Bennett say that he is still a republican? Mr. Bennett wrote in an article published just 4 days ago, that he remains a republican because “…terror abroad trumps deeply held personal issues I can still fight and win at home.”

And why was Mr. Bennett writing his article? Because he thinks this whole Foley scandal is going to make it more difficult to be gay in the Republican Party.

He makes me sick. He makes me want to wretch in anger and loathing. I have written this to say one thing:

Fuck you, Mr. Bennett. Don't get me wrong, I hope you do get your same sex partner benefits. And I hope you live in a community where your job and housing is protected. And I hope that all the queer bashers that get to hear their Republican congressman call Barney Frank “Barney Fag” so they think that they can justify their hatred stay away from you and your family and loved ones. But fuck you, Mr. Bennett, for helping be a thorn in my side, and not just for making my being openly gay so much harder because you had no guts when you were younger, but for continuing to support the republicans out of some stupid, baseless thought that republicans are the only political party that can save us from Terrorists. FUCK YOU MR. BENNETT, you lame asshole, for not having the intestinal fortitude to be helpful 33 years ago, and fuck you for continuing to support these hateful bastards, even after years of abject proof that the Republican party wants your support and will never, ever support you.

Oh, and Happy Coming Out Day today!

I'm crazy flowing over with ideas

I couldn’t run yesterday. And I don’t mean some psychological trauma was holding me back. I ran for 4 minutes and had an extremely painful cramp in my side, so I stopped, stretched, jumped back on and 3 minutes later, more cramps. I got to 1.5 miles and I had to stop completely. I realized that running was just going to make my abdomen hurt more and more.

Coupled with the slight tweak of the ankle and the general muscle ache of my thighs from softball this past weekend, I decided that 1.5 miles was enough. I am hoping my body will allow me to run the full 3 miles today. I feel a lot better when I run the full 3 miles a day, which is to say that I was in a shit-ass mood last night after I couldn’t finish the 3 miles.

I am sure I have talked about this in a previous post, but I know that, though I weigh what I did the night before I went to Amsterdam, my stomach is bigger than it was that night.

This morning I was at 218 lbs. The morning I left for Amsterdam I was 218 lbs. Why is my stomach bigger now (there is a slight bulge at the sternum that wasn’t there when I left for Amsterdam)? I am eating roughly the same amount of calories, and I am actually running more now.

If I had to guess, I will say that a slightly higher fat content and “faster” food in my diet has as much to do with it as anything else. Even though I eat around 1600 calories per day, it isn’t all the fresh vegetables and fruits that it was in March, April & May. I looked back and was having roughly 25-30 grams of fat per day in that time frame, and now I am regularly having 35-40 grams of fat. It is a lot of frozen lunches and “lean pockets” than it is fresh asparagus and broccoli and cauliflower. Plus, there have been a lot of “Lost Weekend” types since Amsterdam where I’ve eaten whatever I want, and “whatever I want” has usually included a lot of fast food and deep fried foods.

I am going to have to work a lot harder to get all of this done the way I want to by next spring. I want to be in even better shape by next softball season, with some muscle building thrown in (of the Bowflex variety, not true “weight lifting”) to be a better hitter and to burn more fat.

Say, don't you remember? I'm your pal. Buddy can you spare a dime?

Anybody got spare cash? Maybe a little bit you can send my way? Any donations are accepted.

On top of everything else going on in my life, I now have to spend $5200 on a new Heat Pump. Now, in reality, I don’t need to spend this money. I could fix the gas lines for just under $2000 and keep paying the gas company. Or I can put that money into a new Heat Pump. A very high efficiency Heat Pump. That will “pay for itself in 5 years” according the HVAC guy.

Owning a home sucks. I don’t know where I am getting all this money. I know where some of it is coming from and that scares me, but I feel at times like I am hemorrhaging money left and leveraging my future constantly.

Yeah, this is coming from someone who has flown to Amsterdam, Rome & Edmonton this year and going to London in 6 weeks and will be in Thailand in February/March next year. But you see, this was all planned before the gas pipes decided to leak. And I decided to “invest” in my home (the word the HVAC guy used, instead of “spend”) the money now.

I still think the best “investment” I made was the treadmill & the food scale. Without either of those, I wouldn’t be half the man that I am now (well, maybe 5/6th of the man I used to be after 40 some pounds.)

Oddly enough, I seem to have twisted my right ankle ever so slightly playing softball, but it doesn’t bother me while running on the treadmill, only when walking around. So I need to be careful when I’m walking around. Maybe after I run tonight I’ll just sit around doing nothing, no laundry, no dishes, just sit. In my heat-less existence.

I realize I have left it too late, and so it's true, pride comes before a fall

Oh the pain. Oh the agony. Oh the humiliation.

We lost. In 2 fucking games. And I was on the team with what is the worst sportsman in the world, Catman. I know, hyperbole is great in theory, but if you even played any sport with Catman, you would know that he is poison on team chemistry and morale. Which is a shame as he actually is an excellent player, but sadly just not a good team player.

We had the whole 1 pitch rule, so if you take a pitch and it is a ball, you walk. Well, we had a guy on the mound for our second game, and in the first inning, he walked two people…and Catman started yelling at our manager to pull him. What you want in a 1 pitch tournament is for your pitcher to be able to shake off a bad few pitches easily, and when you have a man in the outfield screaming “Get Jerry ready, bring him in,” it has got to be frustrating.

Then, in the last inning of our second game, I’m in right center and Jeff is in left center and a ball is hit dead center field. He and I converge, and I feel I’ve got a bead on the ball, then I hear Jeff say “I got it,” so I bring my glove down at the last minute, and I guess it distracted Jeff just enough and it doinked off his glove. It happens, and I didn’t blame Jeff as I was close to him for distraction (and I outweigh Jeff by 75 pounds, so if we’d collided, he would have taken to worst of it). After it happened, Catman has to yell at me, something like “Come on Mike, he called you off.” And I just had had enough and start yelling back at him.

I hate when I do that, when I start yelling back at the poor sportsman, but it becomes frustrating when one person thinks they know everything, and has to tell the rest of the team about it regularly. So I told him to play all of the positions if he thinks he is capable of it, and if not to shut up. I might have thrown in an f-bomb or two. Jeff laughed at me, so hopefully people took it better than I think it may have sounded. I usually feel like a raving lunatic when I scream like that, but it is very cathartic at the moment you do it.

A good thing about the tournament was that it turned into a beautiful day, sunny and mid 70’s. Great for playing softball, but I would have loved to have 2 days of it. And it made for a nicer ride home. And sadly, an earlier ride home than I’d hoped for when we went to the tournament, but it’s all good.

As for my calorie intake…let’s just say that I am back on track as of this morning. I weighed in at 225 lbs, but that can be shed down to probably 217 but Thursday. The bigger issue is that I need to get a plan going and stick to it. I have to be more disciplined for the next 6 weeks, as I go to London in mid-November, and I want to be comfortable on the plane ride and more comfortable looking in the mirror (damn that body dysmorphic disorder!!). And then I have to start getting ready for my annual physician visit in February or March.

I'm another day late and one year older. It's failure by design

Not having a great weekend. It was supposed to be a weekend full of fun & gay softball. Lots of hot softball games during the day, hot gay softball players at night.

I was supposed to leave for DC area early afternoon on Thursday, but work kept me in Pittsburgh later than I wanted, so I wasn't able to run before I left. Kyle & I got into Gaithersburg about 8:30 pm.

I did get up Friday morning at 5:30 and drive Carl to the airport (he is in Vegas for…well, what happens in Vegas, you know) came back and ran for 3.1 miles. His treadmill is the same make & model as mine (and about 18 months older than mine), but his seems a bit smoother. I don't know how or why, but it is a smooth run, very nice. And when I'm running on his, I'm watching a 55" plasma television. When I run at home, I'm watching a 13" cathode ray tube with bad sound. Either way, it was good to run.

It started raining Thursday night and it hasn't stopped since then. I was up & ready to go to the softball field at 6 am this morning, but they called off the day due to rain. So Kyle & I have been pissing around Gaithersburg, MD all day, doing some shopping, eating Thai food, getting my car lubed up (one thing I couldn't get done on Thursday since I worked later than usual) and then watched the Yankees go down in flames! It is frustrating not to play softball, but it is good to see the Yankees lose!

I didn't run today. I wanted to run today, but I didn't. I think since I didn't plan on it, as I was going to play a minimum of 4 softball games, I just didn't run. And my food intake...let's just say it has been bad since Taco Smell on Thursday (those Steak Gorditas are fucking fantastic!).

We are going to play softball tomorrow, as the rain will stop, but it won't be as fun. We get 30 minute games, and the round robin games for tournament positioning are eliminated. We all go up to the plate with a 3-2 count and get one pitch (foul ball is a strike out). We play at 9 am, and we could be eliminated before noon. This happened last year with the rain, and it angers me.

I love softball, I really enjoy tournament softball, but I hate getting all ready and sitting around, only to get 4-6 pitches on Sunday and then drive 3 1/2 hours back home. I think some place else warmer in October (Atlanta?) should host a tournament over Columbus Day weekend. Or maybe they need to make a dome here in the greater DC area! Yeah, that's gonna happen!!

Wish me luck tomorrow.

Everywhere I look there's something to learn, a sliver of truth from every bridge we burn

I don’t care who reads this blog. I think at times it is quite possibly the most boring online journal ever created. At other times, I think I have some interesting stuff to say. Mostly, it is about me and my exercise, weight loss and generally how I am doing all of that along with some observations about my life and things going on around me.

I know there are no pictures, no charts, no graphs, nothing colorful to really grab the eye. But it is at least grammatically correct most of the times with very, very few misspellings.

So while perusing through the blogs I regularly read, I came across something written 10/02/2006, and I am annoyed by it. A young closeted British guy, Stuart, was writing about how he needs to get back into shape, so he is “…taking a leaf out of Bobby’s book.” (I am not even going to mention the mixed metaphor there) and the “Bobby’s” is a hyperlink to the web site www.bobbysbody.blogspot.com.

So why am I annoyed? you may ask. Well, part of it is that Stuart and I have corresponded a handful of times in the past, and actually, I have helped with a project that he was doing to show on his web site. He has a sticker campaign, where he got little logo stickers of his website logo and would mail them to anyone who would stick them up, take pictures and send the pictures to him. I not only had two pictures sent to him (one from Pittsburgh, his first international photo, and one from St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome), I also told Carl about the site, he requested stickers and sent two pictures of them to Stuart (one from Amsterdam and one from the "Mason-Dixon Line" sign.) Stuart also has made a comment on my website in March 206, so he has read it and knows it exists. But when he decides to make a reference to a gay blog about losing weight, he decides to reference a different blog, one that wasn’t started until May 25, 2006. WTF?

So that is a slight, very minor annoyance for me. But I think that is OK, this other guy is British as well, so Stuart must be just pimping his fellow countryman’s weblog. That is all cool – I got no real problem with that other than ego. This other site also has pictures, including the ever necessary “before” shots with the writer in Speedos. I won’t do that part (the Speedos part…I do want to put some pictures on here to show some progress, but none of them will be of me in Speedos, and I will await the thanking from all of my readers for that) so maybe that makes his blog more interesting to Stuart. Visuals will always help.

However, after checking out the blog, I am quite annoyed at the world in general, but the Best Gay world in specific. First off, in his profile, he clearly puts the torso of some other super hot, well-built guy that is not him. He does have the real pictures of himself on there, but they aren’t the first thing you see when the page comes up. Worst off all, in his SIXTH post, a mere 2 fucking days after he started the blog, he notes that his site had been profiled by a website called “Best Gay Blogs.” After 2 days? And what does the “Best Gay Blogs” have to say about this 48 hour old blog, you may ask? From their website:

“You won’t find politically correct
stories about activist gay couples who raise children,
but you will find a blogger who admits that he’s
working hard on his body, is really into other guys
who work out and occasionally explores hot spots like
Ibiza.”

And

“The manner, in which it’s written, expressing body image
as almost a hobby, just might make you stop and think
about all the wonderful things you may, or may not, have
been missing by not going to the gym. As this blogger
states:

You're at the beach, or in a club or at gay pride or
in the gym and you see two boys. Who would you love to
be able to talk to first?”

“All the wonderful things you might be missing by not going to the gym.” What is that all shit about? So by going to the gym, you can have more wonderful things? Is that why I’m doing this whole thing?

But the true annoyance for me is that they listed this on “Best Gay Blogs” within 2 days of the first ever entry. There is a possiblity that today, 4 months in the writing, it may be one of the better gay blogs. But how can you possibly even know it if is going to one of the “Best Gay Blogs” within 2 fucking days? And, in that same entry, Bobby himself says that he gets about 100 hits/day on his site. After 2 days and 5 fucking prior entries?

I don’t think that mine is even close to good enough to be list in “Best Gay Blogs,” but when I looked for several of my favorite gay blogs, I didn’t see most of them listed on that site. It makes me think that “Best Gay Blogs” is just a poser site listing low intellect, shallow web sites with no thought for real content or substance.

WTF????!?!?!?!?!

The Walrus was Paul

Wasn't so good over the weekend with my food. It started going downhill on Wednesday, and kept going down through the entire weekend. Some of it was the Pirates game, some of it was just...just eating a lot of food. For no reason.

And I didn't even run that well. I ran on Wednesday, then took of Thursday as I usually do...then didn't run on Friday for no apparent reason. I ran on Saturday, though, so that kind of made me feel better, but not really. It was just wasn't a good weekend overall for me: maybe not a good week overall.

But this is a new week, and I've started off doing well. Below 1600 calories yesterday & today, and ran 3.08 miles each day.

This weekend is the softball tournament in DC. I guess with my bad week last week, I won't be down to 210 like I was hoping, but I should still be able to start the weekend at 216. I will run tomorrow and try to run on Thursday, but Kyle is dropping his car off at his boyfriend's place, and I am picking him and we are going directly to Carl's in Maryland, so I don't know if I will be able to run on Thursday. But I will run on Friday at Carl's (He has the same treadmill as mine; he is the reason I bought mine [and a little secret is that Gary is the reason Carl bought his - it's a long story]), then I will try to at least run 7 minutes in the morning before we head to the softball field for the 8 am start, at least to get a good warm up.

Then it will be a full weekend of softball. At least that is the hope. Last year we were rained out the first day, and they shortened the tournament to one day, Sunday, and it wasn't as fun. I think there is currently rain in the forecast for Saturday, but I hope it will blow over by the morning.

I am extremely busy at work this week and the next few. I hope I don't burn out at work, but I might not be updating as much over the next few weeks. After a long day at work, I don't like the idea of coming home and sitting in front of the computer typing up something boring. We shall see.