Flux

My life definitely seems to be in flux this year.  Lots of big changes.

Everyone in my house is on a diet.  Well, o.k. the cats are on weight loss maintenance since they achieved their weight loss goals last year.  However, Pugly was told by the vet that he has to lose 4 lbs — 1/6th of his body weight!  How do you explain to a Pug, who thinks he’s starving 24/7 on any given normal day, that he has to cut back on his in-between meal snacking and meal portions?

Meanwhile, I’m doing Weight Watchers@Work with 23 other hapless souls.  Since I managed to lose 55+ lbs on WW back in 2002/2003 rather successfully by applying strict OCD methods, I figured I can manage to lose the 45+ I regained living in Maine.  Actually, I’m trying to do it without the OCD part as that was a bit scary — no weighing myself 3 times a day for instance.  I’ve lost 6.2 lbs in 8 weeks so far, which is pretty healthy and I’m mostly feeling good about the choices I’m making about what I eat.  It’s much easier to follow the program during the work week however with all the cult members around.  That’s exactly what we’re like with our bags of baby carrots and our navel oranges and our discussions of Points and Lean Cuisine — which I don’t eat, by the way.  It’s very hard to find a variety of vegetarian frozen dinners that aren’t over -salted to cover the lack of flavor and under-sized.

So that’s body.

My house is going through a lot of changes too.  The roof suffered some damage from the Winter weather thanks to all of those back to back storms this past year.  Ice dams also did some inside damage.  So, I’ve just hired a contractor to do $5,000 worth of work.  It was really hard signing those papers.  However, the main house will be getting a new roof, there will be a steel door between the dining room and the garage, there will be drywall repair in the bathroom, kitchen and living room, and all three of those rooms are getting painted new colors and even the kitchen cabinets are getting repainted so no more awful green — and green is one of my favorite colors but that was just ugly.  I’m going for toffee orange in the kitchen and living room since they have an opening to each other and Cayman blue in the bathroom.

I’ve also finally bought a nice plain dining room table but no chairs.  I plan to strip the awful color on the front stoop and just stain it a natural weather-resistant wood color and I’ve been working in my garden, planting flowers and wildflower seeds.  It doesn’t look like much yet, but I have a botanical dream.

The biggest change is going to be the switch from oil heating.  I was getting physically ill at the thought of next year’s heating bills.  Last year’s bills of $600 a month were just horrible and that was before this latest daily increase in oil prices.  Then I got my letter telling me that I needed to lock in my discount rate for next year — the one I get as an employee for my work through my oil company — $4.59/gallon, a full 30¢/gallon cheaper than everyone else.  My brain might have actually melted.  For the year 2007, I used about 850 gallons of heating oil and my usage for the first 4 months of 2008 went up about 30-40% due to the harsh Winter.  Despite having been a math minor, the daughter of a CPA, and an IT professional, my brain simply couldn’t even begin to do the math; it simply couldn’t face it.

But I got to thinking about my options and I remembered hearing about Les Otten on NPR and the local news.  Otten is this crazy guy who was trying to get the state legislature to give tax credits to people who bought furnaces that burned wood pellets.  Well, I know a couple of people who recently bought wood pellet stoves but I’d never heard of a wood pellet furnace so I looked it up and it turns out that it’s a European thing.  Mr. Otten is bringing the first 100 wood pellet furnaces to Maine this summer and promising to have them installed by Winter.  He’s hoping to convert 10% of the Maine homes currently burning oil (that’s 44,000 residences) to wood pellets in 5 years.

Four out of five homes in Maine are heated with petroleum products, the highest share in the country.

By switching to wood pellets, Otten calculates, the average Maine home could be warmed for half the current cost of oil. If 44,000 homes made the switch, residents could save $78 million a year on heating bills, based on current costs. [Home Heating: Otten bets Mainers Will Warm to Wood Pellets]

So, I checked out his company’s website: Maine Energy Systems.

And let’s face it, the first thing I checked out was the cost and most particularly, the cost comparison between wood pellets and heating oil.  Let’s assume I use 900 gallons of oil and I’ve locked in my discount rate at $4.59/gal; that’s $4,131 for a year.  Apparently the equivalent amount of wood pellets would be 6.73 tons and MES’ rate is $250/ton, so that comes out to $1,684.  That’s a huge difference — $2,447 annual savings.  (O.K. I’ll be financing the new furnace but still.)

I love that the whole thing is automatic.  It just has to be cleaned once a year.  Plus, it’s environmentally friendly.  Most wood pellets are made from by-products of other wood manufacturing processes and the ash create makes excellent compost.  Plus, oil is not a replenishable resource and wood is, though it should be harvested wisely.

Anyway, I put my deposit down and now I’m waiting for that contractor to come out, have a look see at my current furnace with its big rusty hole and its current set up, and discuss the refitting so I can be one of Mr. Otten’s pioneers.

And now that my checking account is tied up for the rest of the year, I believe I’ll be sitting at home admiring the construction on my house and my wildflowers and my pitiful food portions and trying not to do anything else that’s going to cost anything.

Thirteen Ways To Lose A Pound A Week, 11th

In honor of the first week-aversary of starting my new “diet” - er - weight loss plan -er - healthy eating lifestyle or whatever the politically correct term is this year and in memory of the one pound I lost and hopefully will never find again, I’ve decided to do this week’s Thursday Thirteen on ways to shed a pound a week.

Many of you don’t know this but in another alias, I used to be a weight loss guru; so while I may have put on a few pounds, I actually do know what I’m talking about and I do know how to misplace the unwanted weight. I dedicated plenty of time and money educating myself on the very intricate details and the practical knowledge of it all. Listen to me, my friends, and I will show you the way.

First thing you should know is that a pound is the equivalent of 3500 calories; so you just have to cut 500 calories a day to lose a pound a week. Medical professionals recommend that you lose no more than ½ to 2 pounds a week for a healthy weight loss program. Any quicker than that and you risk doing damage to important body things you might want later.

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And No One Died

It never feels like the right time to start a diet. There’s always something going on that it seems wiser to wait until after before getting started on the obsessive deprivation — I mean, healthy portion control. Sometimes, there’s just so much going on that you just have to dive in and hope for the best. One year, I started Weight Watchers the Saturday before Thanksgiving and managed to lose weight too.

This has been an extremely stressful work week for me. More stressful than usual. It’s just been one of those weeks where everything seemed to be happening at once. I had several projects that were “going live” as we say in the IT world and one project that should have been in testing mode, but there’s been nothing but problems with the connections and the people I have to work with on the Vendor side. Sometimes, I am so surprised at the new levels of moronic stupidity I encounter with Vendor Interface people. These are people who represent themselves as having experience interfacing their applications with other applications at hospitals nationwide and most of them are older than me, so I assume they’re more experienced and yet, I always feel as if I’m dealing with someone who has the same knowledge about interfaces as my mother, who I suspect is slightly computer-phobic.

But I digress.

My Diet2Go food arrived Wednesday night, so I “officially” started my “diet” on Thursday. Of course, that was the most chaotic and stressful day of the work week, filled with co-worker thoughtlessness, Vendor stupidity, inexplicable co-worker moronic stunts, a go-live gone really wrong,and a day gone on too long. The fact is that even one of my co-workers commented to me that he was surprised I hadn’t blown a gasket at some point.

The thing is I didn’t realize until the next day that it never even occurred to me to head over to the vending machine or to the desk of the woman selling candy for her kids’ football and cheerleading programs. I didn’t stop by my favorite pastry shop for a diversion. I actually ate only the food I’d planned to eat, no binging. I even cut my caffeine down to 12oz.

So, I’m thinking for the first day, it wast a success.

And no one died.

Feeling Frumpily Grumpy

I had a bit of a meltdown yesterday afternoon when my mother phoned. She practically started the conversation with “You know what you should do; you should take some classes at night at the local university.” Well, I’d pretty much had it with everyone in my life telling me what I should be doing with my time. For two weeks, all I’ve heard from doctors, therapists and parents is what I should be doing and I’m 36 years old and I’m feeling stressed out and overwhelmed and I feel like I’m barely treading water as it is. I can’t figure out how to do it all and afford it all and then have time to relax, which apparently I’m also supposed to be able to do.

I really would like my therapist and my doctors and my parents and my boss to all get together and figure out my schedule so I can go to work, go to therapy, exercise plus do aqua aerobics, go to doctors’ appointments, take night classes in something they approve of, clean my house, run errands including going to the dump, take care of the extra stuff that needs to be done with the house, keep up with the surprise things that come up, pay my bills, get 8 or more restful hours of sleep a night, and make new friends.

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Big Butts & Accomplishments

I guess you could tell I’ve been a little out of sorts for the last week. I’ve actually been mulling over some grumpiness since my last therapy visit on the 4th. I went to my session feeling kind of proud of myself for everything I’d accomplished since the last session about a month before when I’d basically decided that I wasn’t going to let my depression “define” me. I had come to the conclusion around that time that my depression was reinforcing itself and I wanted to put a stop to that.

And I feel as if I’ve come a long way…or at least a way. I’ve been making a constant effort to clean my house, something that never seems to be done and never seems to be close to done and seems to be more like one step forward two steps back. (I still can’t figure out how my living room got so messy since I was only awake in it for about 2 hours yesterday and don’t recall doing anything in those 2 hours. It was clean on Sunday. And how does one person make so many dirty dishes and so much dirty clothes?)

And I had signed up for a couple of classes/lectures — one on Seasonal Affective Disorder and a six-week thing for people with chronic illnesses. I was very excited about the prospect of getting Pugly into the next training class and eventually agility training.

Really, except for my frustration with the fibro pain and my problems with communication with my GP and the Rheumatologist, I was in a fairly good mood overall as far as the direction I was heading. I thought I was making good progress and I was ready for my pat on the back and some support and sympathy for the communication issues.

Clearly, that’s not what happened.

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She Knows Better

Back in 1998^*, before all of the bad stuff started coming out about Metabolife, back when all of the DJs on the radio were singing its miracle weight loss praises and I was pretty desperate, I tried it for a few months. You know, in those days, they were basically saying that you could eat what you wanted as long as you took Metabolife and you would lose weight and it was perfectly safe and it had been lab tested and blah blah blah. None of the stuff about how the owner of the company had been in prison for selling drugs before had come out yet and none of the questionable information about how the “tests” had only been for like a day or two had been revealed. There hadn’t been any news reports about people going to the hospital with high blood pressure and heart problems and other fun stuff.

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