After the hectic pace on Saturday, the con wound down somewhat before concluding on Sunday. I attended a panel on Galileo, another one on world building, and one on World Domination. Then I attended the dead dog filk and went home. Along the way I finally met up with someone I’d been on the lookout for all con.
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Blog
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Lunacon 2009 (4): Sunday
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Lunacon 2009 (3): Saturday
Today was the busiest of the convention. I gave blood; saw Mercedes Lackey and others hold forth on building fantasy worlds; participated in a discussion on financial crises in sci fi; participated (sort of) in the Masquerade after all; caught about half of a surprisingly good 1940 adventure film; and caught all of a not-at-all surprisingly bad 1979 space adventure film.
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Lunacon 2009 (2): Friday late night
One of the fun things about cons is that they go on and on into the late night (at least by my standards). I went to a couple of late-evening sessions last night: “Strangers Have the Best Candy” and “Adult Filking”.
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Lunacon 2009 (1): Friday
Well, Lunacon is officially underway. So far I’ve tried out a new card game (Fluxx) and attended one session (“Those Terrible Middle Ages”). I’ve also discovered that I can walk out my room (418), down two corridors, around a bend, and directly onto the 7th floor. It’s no accident they call the Hilton Rye Town “the hotel that Escher built”.
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Lunacon 2009 (0): Arrival
Well, here I am at the Hilton Rye Town for my third Lunacon. Apparently during the past year the Lunacon people changed their versioning system from counting from the first Lunacon (making this the 52nd) to simply attaching the year. I sort of miss the old way.
I’m actually quite a bit early, as registration doesn’t even start until 5 PM tomorrow afternoon. In principle this means I could have probably skipped being here tonight and just come up tomorrow, and from a fiscal perspective I probably should have. But I hate travel and like having the time to recoup. Also I keep telling myself I will use this time to read and to write and generally attend to the personal activities I’ve been neglecting so far this year. We’ll see.
Friday is a somewhat light day, as is Sunday, but Saturday is chock full of things and in fact (as usual) I have far too many things to attend that all occur at the same time. I’ll probably end up just going to whatever is closest to where I am at the time-changes. 🙂
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Week 15 in the Program
There’s no Week 14 not because I’m a time traveler who skipped forward 7 days but because I went off to Chicago and didn’t get around to an update. 🙂
Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change 300.0 | -2.6 | -68.4 The past couple of weeks have been good ones. I’m actually a little surprised at that, because being in Chicago meant having an entirely different schedule. I wasn’t sure I could get my physical activity in and I distrust my estimate for “casual PA”. But in fact even off-schedule I did lose over two pounds.
I haven’t published my blood pressure for a while because I haven’t to see the doctor in a few weeks, which is a good thing. But I’ve been off the ramipril for two weeks now and feel no different. In fact I am once again heart-med free. (I still take urso forte, which is a gallstone preventative.) Being close to 70 lbs total loss is a great feeling, too, and has started me thinking on choosing a goal weight. For the moment, I’m going to head for 100 lbs, and then see how things are going. I think, ideally, I’d like to lose 150 pounds, but that might be an unreasonable expectation to set and I don’t want to obsess on it right now.
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Week 13 in the Program
Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change 307.0 | -3.6 | -61.4 Blood Pressure | Systolic | Diastolic * | 112 | 74 My weight loss is a little less than last week but certainly satisfactory at nearly 4 lbs. I suspect that rate isn’t entirely sustainable but I’ll take what I can and I’m relatively proud of that. In other good news, my cardiologist took me off the rampiril so I am now heart-med free (yay!) though I still take urso forte for gallstone prevention.
No grand experiments in food preparation this week. I’ve been putting a little Da Vinci’s Blueberry syrup into the HMR-70 Vanilla shake as a pudding and it’s not bad. Between that and the benefit bars, I’ve discovered a soft spot for blueberries, which I never knew I had. Da Vinci’s Root Beer syrup enhances a HMR-800 nicely — I’m going to try a “root beer pudding” at some point, too. I am still too scarred by last week’s curry-cake debacle to try actual baking, though, at least for a while.
Updated pictures will be added soon. I can’t make them on my laptop at school.
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Week 12 in the Program
Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change 310.6 | -6.6 | -57.8 Blood Pressure | Systolic | Diastolic * | 112 | 86 It seems I’m back on track. I primarily credit the recalibration of my physical activity, which means I’m doing more. I’ve been forcing myself to go a little longer hungry, too, though not too much. I’ll admit that the past two weeks had been pretty disappointing and it’s nice to be on a good trend again. My doctor told me that my 13-week weight loss exceeds the average by 20 pounds, which was nice to hear.
I proved last night that I remain not a cook, mangling a recipe for “curry cakes” so badly that I had to throw out the cookie sheet. Oops. Although I’ll keep experimenting, for now I am just a Lego chef. *sigh*
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Week 11 in the Program
Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change 317.2 | -0.8 | -51.2 Blood Pressure | Systolic | Diastolic * | n/a | n/a Not a terribly uplifting week, not that I expected one. Coming off being sick and then flying out to Chicago threw off my stride. In particular, I had long ago decided that — with this being not only my first Valentine with Annie but indeed my first ever with a girlfriend — I was going to enjoy myself that day and blow the diet. I did, by eating a to-die-for chicken parm at a great little hole-in-the-wall Italian place called La Cantina. Combining the out-of-box meal with the disruption to my workout schedule led to a negligible weight loss for the second week in a row. Yet I don’t feel a single iota of guilt.
Compounding that, I’m almost certainly overestimating the physical activity calories I’m getting from walking. Now that I’ve shed 50 lbs, I don’t get as much bang for the buck, or rather, calorie for the minute. So I have to adjust that, too, which in turn means either a higher-intensity workout or more sessions in a week (probably the latter).
Hopefully this will get me back on track.
Since the weight was mostly unchanged and they didn’t take my blood pressure this week, I didn’t produce new graphs.
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Week 10 in the Program
Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change 318.0 | -0.8 | -50.4 Blood Pressure | Systolic | Diastolic * | 112 | 84 Well, this is the week I plateaued. I can feel a little proud because I broke the 50-lb barrier (barely!) but it is by far the worst week I’ve had in the program. Without making excuses, I think it owes to the end-of-the-world cold I had from Tuesday night through, well, today. It made me really reluctant to get out and do physical activity (I fell maybe 300 calories short of my usual) and it led me to eat far too many of the BenefitBars. My main excuse (besides self-indulgence) is that virtually none of the HMR food is solid, and when I have a throat full of gunk, it’s nice to have something to scrape it clean.
Being on residential duty didn’t help, either, because it bolluxed my schedule and my eating times. This isn’t to say that I couldn’t have done better, but I didn’t come through. Next time on duty I’m going to have to pay more attention. But at least I stayed “within the box” the whole week, which is some element of discipline.
Looking over my numbers, I realize that my blood pressure has settled down but still fluctuates — and I have no idea why the two don’t track. Sometimes systolic is up and diastolic is down; sometimes the reverse. I’ll need to get a model for that or it’ll bug me.
