Weeks 6 and 7: Scales of Injustice

I didn't add to this collection last week because I took most of the week off from everything but cardio. My trainer was in Mejico for her 20th anniversary and, for the first time since beginning this effort, I had no weight workouts scheduled for an entire week. I determined to fashion one from a combination of what we'd been doing and what I remembered of circuit training from Old Days, and got one in late last week in addition to five days out of seven on the elliptical.

Ultimately, I heard the scale calling me again, and I gave in to that call, but to some rather shocking news once I did: it told me that compared to my starting weight (known around these parts as n,), I was down a good 15 pounds from where it was when I first started checking it barely three weeks before.  But then, just to tease me some more, I adjusted my feet on the bathroom-floored scale and n-15 instantly turned into n-30, before bouncing up and down through a variety of three-digit numbers making no sense whatsoever.

Eleanor!, I eventually asked. Is that digital scale known for being especially wonky?

The reply came: You have to put it on the hardwood floor in the hallway, or the bathroom floor tiles screw it up.

After all that, the number came out as n-3 from where I'd more-or-less begun, a pound or so below where I'd been the last time I checked.

 Baby steps, Ray.

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Today, then, resulted in a similar one: after some similar jockeying for position on various floors, and after three fairly intense workouts plus four half-hour-plusses of cardio (but also after an even more intense workweek including a rare Saturday court appearance earlier today, more than our usual share of take-out food ,and WAY more than my recent amount of stress-snacking), we stand at n-5 ish- either two pounds, or a pound-and-a-half (the .5's are confusing me) down from where things really turned out to be last weekend. 

As a modest moving target of a goal, I'm determined to get myself to a point where there is less of me than there are two of my trainer's. She's also blogging her progress on a regular basis, and her current weight is a reasonable one to aim for twice of (although, curse her, she's way more likely to be dropping more and faster than I will). We also have only one remaining session before a roughly two-week break in the routine; I will keep up the cardio, and try fashioning some carryover workouts while we're off, but I fully expect n to be standing for news (bad) before we resume a different weekly routine after Labor Day.

That may not resemble the Labors of Hercules, but I'll settle for any strength inspiration I can find right about now.

Good eeeee-vening

And it was- at least compared to how much we stressed during the day.

I had a rare Saturday court appearance. When it ended two hours after we started, we were no closer to resolving the client's problems than we were when we began the journey at roughly 7 the previous morning. I got some much-needed rest after that, and am progressing with some more technical aspects of the case (and a few of the many other cases I'd set aside to focus on this particularly pressing one).

Eleanor, meanwhile, spent five hours outdoors doing some maintenance work at a one-time customer's house (the "one-time" being when she designed and installed outdoor lighting systems on a semi-fulltime basis). She got home not long after I'd recovered from my morning, and I knew there warn't nobody in this house that was gonna cook tonight; so, Chicken Delight not being an option, we settled on ordering out Indian from a longtime favorite of ours in Northtown Plaza.

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Between ordering and pickup, I got in some much-needed cardio (more details on the fitness blog over dere), and my new reading material for the elliptical was a nonfiction piece I heard about on NPR earlier in the week: Passing Strange, the story of an interracial couple from the turn of the 20th century in which the husband was indeed "passing"- but not from black to white but the other way around. As with so many things, it took under three chapters for a Buffalo connection to develop: early in Clarence King's late 19th-century progressive education, he was enrolled in a prepatory school in Connecticut which was run by a "former professor of natural philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania [who] held liberal views about the relationship between science and religion and a keen interest in geology."

His name? Doctor Roswell Park. Locals will instantly recognize that as the name eventually given to the cancer center in our downtown that he went on to found; Wikipedia's entry on him  focuses more on his role in the death of President McKinley some years after that.

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During and after the meal, we watched a film Eleanor had Netflixed: 25th Hour, a Spike Lee Joint with Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brian Cox and Rosario Dawson. It was Lee's post-9/11 panegyric to his city, which, unlike Woody Allen's Manhattan, had both beautiful images of their shared city but also more than its share of criticism of aspects of it:

"Charles Lloyd and Lucinda Williams - There's a Place in My Heart" (Watch on YouTube)

I really doubt he missed a single one of the Naked City's eight million stories; each and every resident got singled out for just as much abuse. Still, it didn't diminish from the beauty or intensity of the piece, and we really enjoyed watching it.