The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Blog

  • 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.

  • 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*

    weight-2009_0224bp-2009_0224

  • 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.

  • 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.

    weight-2009_0210bbp-2009_0210b

  • Strip Polka — another silly Facebook meme

    OK, this is another silly Facebook object trouve meme. Let’s see how this turns out.

    INSTRUCTIONS::
    1. Put your iPod or other music player on shuffle.
    2. For each question, press the “next” button to get your answer.
    3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS! (or stupid)
    4. Tag friends who might enjoy doing this as well as the person you got this from

    My list is below the fold; my conclusions are given right here: This is dumb. Although it’s supposed to yield deep insights or at least some humor, it really just generates noise. There is a disturbing trend in today’s society tho believe in the innate wisdom of randomness, as if throwing a patische of things together somehow tells us something important. That can happen but it rarely does.

    More significantly, perhaps, the originator of this meme misunderstood iPods nearly as much as Apple does. I have 26 GB of songs. Most of them were on albums with other songs I like. Some were on albums I decided I didn’t like after hearing. Probably most have been listened to one or two times. Heck, some of them are just physics demonstrations. Picking songs at random from that collection is no more likely to reveal something interesting about me as, well, pulling Scrabble tiles from a bag is to reveal the Question to life, the universe, and everything.

    I can see two ways to improve this and give it a fighting chance of being interesting. First, the songs should be picked from a Party Shuffle of songs you actually, you know, listen to. Second, I think it would be better to pull maybe 20 songs into a playlist but then choose which song matched which question. Utter randomness is, by definition, without meaning. But allow me to mediate consciously, and I just might reveal something.
    (more…)

  • A Picture Worth 800 Billion Dollars

    In case somehow you think all the talk of “an economy in free fall” is somehow just hyperbole:

    An economy in free fall: Weve already lost far more jobs than typical and the bottom is not in sight.
    An economy in free fall: We've already lost far more jobs than typical and the bottom is not in sight.

    This graphic, printed at Swampland, makes clear: We are already in deep trouble. The current stimulus bill is, in anything, too small. Under circumstances like these, rapid and massive spending by the government is the only thing that has ever been shown to have an ameliorative impact.

  • Burning Down the House

    Listening to the Republican leadership on how to fix the economy is like listening to the arsonist on how to put out the fire.

    Somehow the debate on the stimulus package has shifted to the Republicans and their criticisms.  Legitimate analyses are always welcome, of course, and when grown-ups want to help make a bill better, it’s a wonderful thing.  But we don’t have grown-ups running the Republican party any more.  These guys have had nearly fourteen years to try their one-size-fits-all “solution” — tax cuts and deregulation — and their experiment has landed us on the precipice of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression (and we’re not done yet).

    The economy is in free-fall and the President is trying to buy us a parachute, but these yahoos can only scream “If we just flap our arms harder, everything will be OK” while nitpicking the brand of rope the President chose for the shroud strands.  In some sense, you can see why:  For most of them, they have their own golden parachutes that will ensure that, when we hit rock bottom, they aren’t mangled like the rest of us.  And since their descent is safe, why help out anyone else?

    We are teeteering on the edge of a deflationary spiral, the single most destructive circumstance known to economics.  We’re already mired deep in a liquidity trap.  Our infrastructure is aging and inadequate, and our competitiors are breathing down our necks.

    The next time someone tells you that “government spending doesn’t create a single job or grow the economy”, ask them if they’ll email that you … over the Internet, funded and nurtured by the federal government long before anyone figured out how to make money off of it.  Ask them if they’ll ship it to you, via a truck running over the same Interstate that likely makes their comfy surburban lifestyle available.  Maybe they’ll type it up using the energy that comes from governmental hydro projects.

    Anyone spending money creates jobs.  Under many circumstances, the market is clearly superior.  Under some others, government is.  And under most, it’s still an open question.

    Could we please stop listening to the arsonists?

  • The (non) Importance of Caring

    A former student of mine at some point had a facebook status that read,

    Why should I study something I don’t care about?  Why should teachers teach something they don’t care about?

    Actually, to be 100% accurate, the student’s status said that this was in someone else‘s status.  But still…

    “Why should I study something I don’t care about?” is a question that sounds more reasonable than it actually is.  Where you are at 17 — or at 5, or at 38 — is not who you will be your whole life.  Sometimes, indeed often, you don’t have the experience or wisdom to know what’s important.  (This is a generic “you”, not a some-particular-student “you”.)  And sometimes, to get to the good stuff, there really is other stuff you have to go through or learn.  That’s a part of life.  I’d even argue it’s not a bad part of life.  Things you learn should be meaningful, and that meaning should be clear.  But you aren’t done, yet, and what you care about is simply not the whole total of what’s worth knowing or doing.  It isn’t for anybody.

    I guess fundamentally I disagree strongly with the proposition that “what I care about” is synonymous with “what is important”.  There’s an arrogance in that which is every bit as haughty and unjustified as the “We’re the teachers so we decide what is important” tack.  It’s so inward-focused it’s very nearly solispistic.

    To be fair, I am somewhat assigning motivations on the assumption that the point of asking “Why should I study something I don’t care about?” is to offer as an answer “You shouldn’t”.  If the question is a legitimate call for information, it’s perfectly valid.  Students should demand to know why they are studying what they are asked to study, how it moves them along toward their goals or what it achieves.  Teachers should continually ask (themselves and others) why they cover what they do.  So as long as the questioner is intellectually honest enough to be open to the possibility that there could be things worth studying even if the questioner doesn’t particularly care about them — as long as that’s true, it’s a good question.

  • Week 9 in the program

    The truly observant will notice that somehow I skipped from Week 7 to Week 9. I’m not a time traveler… I had miscounted earlier. *sigh*

    Weight this week | Change since last week | Total change
    318.8 | -6.6 | -49.6
    Blood Pressure | Systolic | Diastolic
    * | 120 | 70

    I fell just short of the magic number, 50 lbs total weight loss.  That would put me halfway to my first goal.  Oh, well, I’ll take a 6 lb/wk loss rate.  My blood pressure is now in the normal range and seems stable, which is nice.

    People at PWMC were nicely supportive.  I’m going to say something all other dieters are going to hate, but this actually hasn’t been too hard.  I think the HMR system is uniquely suited to my own quirks.  For example, I don’t missing cooking at all, and despite being a continual grazer, I don’t actually miss food all that much.  A lot of the weekly class revolves around strategies for variety, which leaves me cold.  I’m OK with eating the same 4 or 5 things day in and day out.  I like not having to work at it.

    That said, there are still challenges.  When I’m in school and on schedule, everything’s easy, but weekends and snow days still throw me for a loop.  I’m not sure how well I’ll handle my upcoming conference and trip to Chicago.  But most days, this is remarkably easy.  Still, a long long way to go remains, and then I face the challenge of maintenance.

    weight-2009_0203bp-2009_0203

  • 25 Things

    There is a viral meme going around Facebook about listing 25 random things about yourself. It’s not accurate, since people spend some time crafting the 25 things (so they’re not really random … it’s not like people write 500 things and do a Monte Carlo selection or anything). Anyone, I got tagged by Annie and gamely set out to make my list, which is reproduced below the fold.
    (more…)