Category: General

Busy with work and wedding stuff.

Back in October, a homicidal maniac decided to rain down fire on a concert. Fifty-eight died and over five hundred injured.

Being the litigious society we are, victims sued MGM, which owns the Mandalay Bay hotel, for failing to take appropriate action to stop this homicidal maniac. MGM, not wanting to pay out what would probably end up being tens of millions of dollars decides to sue the victims right back. Except, instead of money, MGM is suing to invalidate any liability under a law passed in the wake of 9/11.

It’s all a cluster-fuck. Of course, the press is excoriating MGM. Just another episode of lawfare.

Disclaimer – I am not currently a Toastmasters member. This will most likely change before the end of this year. Many of these observations are from an outsider observing a major event for a specific group with its own lingo and speak.

So, how did I end up attending a conference? The Girlfriend is an officer in the district, and since we only see each other on the weekends at the moment, she asked if I’d be interested. Plus, I can always use advice on polishing my “stage” persona and writing.

Toastmasters, just like any organization, has its own lingo. Since this was a big conference for the organization, it’s to be expected that they would use their acronyms and phrases fast and furious. Sometimes I could pick up through context. Others I just needed to ask The Girlfriend.

The workshops were hit and miss (mostly miss), but I did pick up some ideas for improvement on my speaking. Most of my public speaking is providing training or performance reporting, so it was nice seeing other types of speeches.

The contests were entertaining, although one part was more entertaining for me than the conference. Toastmaster protocol is when a contestant is introduced it is “Contestant, Speech Title, pause, Speech Title, Contestant.” And every time they did that, I flashed back to Hot Fuzz and the clerk at the grocery store.

Overall, I enjoyed myself and will probably enjoy it more next year when I attend as a Toastmaster and not just as a guest.

A year ago, I decided to try and lose weight. Again. This wasn’t the first time that I’ve done a diet, only to fall off the wagon a few months later. Still, I was tired of having my clothes feeling tight, not being able to get anything from anyplace but a big and tall shop, and I was worried about my health. Penn Jillette stated on his podcast that he realized he was having to take so many drugs to compensate for the fact he was overweight. That hit home with me. I didn’t want to have all the health problems with my family history if I could help it.

Somehow – somehow – I have managed to keep the willpower to stay on track for a full year. Everything I’ve read led me to the most basic rule of weight loss – “Consume less calories than your body burns.” So, I fired up a calorie counting app I’d used before and started my budget. This time I followed some rules.

1. Track everything. Even on days when I knew I was going over, I still put everything in my food log.

2. Manage budget on a weekly basis. I strove to keep under every day, but my main goal was to be under my calorie budget for the week. If I knew I was going to have a party or a team lunch, I made sure to “save up” extra calories earlier in the week.

3. Weigh myself once a week. – Before I’d weighed myself daily, but there’s too much fluctuation on a daily basis. It’s discouraging. Weekly weigh-ins gave me a better idea of how I was actually doing.

4. Enlist help. – The Brother was nice enough to help me with this, which was a good thing because he’s the one I do my grocery shopping with. Having someone asking me if I really wanted that package of cookies or chips helped when I was sitting on the fence.

5. Accept defeats. – There have been weeks when the scale went up instead of down. I needed to understand that those were tactical defeats, not strategic ones. Losing a battle does not lose the war.

6. Have short and long term goals. – My first short term goal was just to hit 300 lbs. That took seven months to hit, but it was a lot easier to work to that then the 200 lbs. long term goal. I need both to keep my motivation up.

7. Celebrate wins. – When I hit one of my short-term goals, I have a “bye” week. It’s a week I can eat as I want without worrying about calories. I still track everything I eat during those weeks.

8. When in doubt, say no. – This was one of the harder lessons, as I love to eat. If I had a doubt whether I should eat something or not, I had to make my default setting as “no.”

9. Understand that this is a way of life. – This lesson came much later from an episode of Squirrel Report. If I want to keep the weight off, I’m going to be counting calories for the rest of my life. Even when I hit my long term goal, I will still need to count calories.

So, how effective has this been for me?

Starting weight: 355 lbs.
Current weight: 261 lbs.

Starting pant size: 56
Current pant size: 44

1. Physical therapy is much easier to deal with when liberal amounts of Sabaton are applied.
2. Facebook thinks I’m politically “very conservative.” This may come as a shock to some of my conservative friends who think I’m too liberal.
3. I don’t know why my iTunes refuses to go past step 5 on syncing my phone. And google has not been much help either.
4. Reading a bunch of resumes makes me glad that I don’t have a job that requires me to do that on a regular basis.
5. That point of just finished being sick is almost as bad as being sick. I feel so much better that I think I should be able to do everything I was doing before, but not back to full strength, so I can’t.
6. Trying to put something on my blog every day makes me appreciate the folks who manage to do that and keep a regular full time job that isn’t blogging.
7. As much as I enjoy working from home, there are times that having my home workstation so close to my personal system provides too much temptation. Particularly when I finally figured out something for the story I’m working on.