Today was kind of a cheat day, as we were returning from Parksville and snacked on some Miss Vickies potato chips while waiting for the ferry. They were yummy and I’ll regret it tomorrow.
I have no weight-related news to report again, as my morning was once again scale-free at the house in Parksville. I suspect tomorrow will see me having to restart the trek back to 170 and below anew.
UPDATE: For fun (?) I weighed myself after dinner, which I never do because that is when I will be my most weightful. Yes, that is now a word. The result?
173.3 pounds, up 3.3 pounds since Friday. Zounds! But my body fat percentage dropped a full half percent. Yay! But Fitbit now considers me slightly overweight again. Boo.
This was a full day spent house-sitting in Parksville, over on smoke-filled Vancouver Island. To be fair, everywhere is smoke-filled right now, due to fire all up and down the west coast of the U.S.
I did not snack as such, sticking only to the three meals, but the meals were not exactly calorie-light:
Breakfast: Sausage McMuffin with Egg and hash brown
Lunch: Chow mien with lemon honey ginger chicken
Dinner: Tropical Hawaiian pizza from Panago
Plus a small cup of chocolate mousse for dessert after dinner. This was probably a combined 50,000 calories. It just means I’ll have to dedicate myself that much more on return to the mainland!
No weight report today as the Parksville abode does not have a scale. I’ll just assume (hope) I am under, say, 174 pounds. Maybe.
Today, as we were heading out to the ferry to Vancouver Island for a weekend of house sitting, I had a few cheese strips, but I was otherwise good.
Weight-wise I edged up a bit to 170 pounds even, but that could easily be due to water or other random body things, not because I’m secretly scarfing giant bags of pork rinds.
The snacking today was a few small cubes of cheese and a piece of toast with (no sugar added) jam, so I wasn’t scarfing bags of donuts.
And I did a full walk/run workout, even though it was a rather unseasonably warm 31ºC out.
But the best news came early in the day when I stepped on the scale and saw I had lost 1.4 pounds, dropping to 169.6 pounds, the first dip below 170 this year if you don’t count flu-related weight loss (which I don’t, because that never stays off unless you find some way to perpetually have the flu, which is probably not the greatest idea).
I may very well be up again tomorrow, but I have now tasted life below 170 and I shall taste it some more.
For the first time since March 17th, I went into the office today. Theoretically I was the only one there, though a few others showed up or passed through, along with one cleaner and a couple of the guys delivering stuff.
Work itself was a bit odd, just because of the way the campus is set up to allow for safe movement in these kooky pandemic times. Buildings felt more like security checkpoints, with only one point of entrance in most cases, and said entrance staffed by, well, security. The vending machines, currently the only source of edibles, were poorly stocked or broken and I gave up on them. My coworker took mercy on me and bought me a steeped tea from the Tim Hortons a few blocks over.
Speaking of Tims, this lets me segue to my main topic of this post: My first long commute since the virus hit. This is something I had been quietly dreading for months and I was bracing for the SkyTrain to be packed and awful.
To my surprise (but not as far as delight), the trains were substantially less busy than normal. I often don’t get a seat when leaving Sapperton station, but today it was not an issue. The Canada Line was a little worse, only because it runs those runty two-car trains (great planning there), but even if wasn’t anywhere close to capacity.
So in terms of crowding, it was actually okay. I never had anyone sit beside me across five trains and on the three that have single seats, I was able to nab one.
Translink has a mandatory mask policy, but enforcement is soft, as in, there is basically no enforcement as far as I can see. They just kind of hope everyone will wear masks. And nearly everyone did. In all, I saw five people not wearing masks, two on the way in and three on the way back:
Three (all young men) were drinking coffee from Tim Hortons, so I now view them as unintentional contributors to the pandemic.
A fourth was a young woman who ate a pizza slice from Broadway to Joyce stations. Once she was done, she did not put on a mask. I stared at her the entire time she was eating. She never noticed.
The fifth person was another young man, a hulking Aryan type with close-cropped blond hair and tattoos all over everything. When he boarded the train, he threw his pack onto a seat, then plopped down beside it, staring intently into his phone. He had a demeanor of someone just begging to be asked why he wasn’t wearing a mask, so he could explain in a loud voice and through the use of colorful metaphors. No one asked.
I wore a mask and because it isn’t designed for glasses, it fogged up regularly, which was not great. Riding in the newer air-conditioned cars helped, riding in one of the ancient 300 year old cars did not.
I can’t decide how the combo of cap, mask and giant headphones makes me look. Like I’m taking part in some kind of bad cosplay, perhaps. Also, I find a certain irony in the GNC slogan “Live well” being on a mask I’m wearing because we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Even better (worse), GNC is permanently shutting down because of the pandemic.
In all, the commute was not as bad as I had expected, but seeing so many people wearing masks provided another tangible piece of evidence that we have slipped past whatever we considered normal times into where we are now.
Also, though I didn’t need a pandemic to remind me, that twice-a-day hour plus commute? It still really sucks. I like having those two hours back. I sleep more, I exercise more and feel better. And even not counting the commute, I was struck by how awful the office was. The air quality is terrible–my eyes felt itchy and it was cool to the point of nearly being cold, my chair is not comfortable, I have a mushy keyboard, the lighting is harsh, the monitors are kind of lousy. Really, my home setup is superior in every way. I honestly would be happy to never step foot into another office ever again.
I’ll see what can be done to make that impossible dream happen.
In the meantime, I’ll look for better masks and hope that future commutes don’t turn into COVID nightmare sardine cans.
Absolutely no cheating today. I was, in fact, a bit peckish by the time dinner came around. We had take-out (bad) but it was chicken and a salad (good). I didn’t do my post-work exercise because I actually went into the office today and had the subsequent Very Long Commute™, but I did clock almost a 3 km walk around the Langara Golf Course trail, as lumpy and root-filled as ever.
My weight stayed the same, a bit surprising perhaps, given I weighed myself much earlier in the morning than usual, coming in once again at 171 pounds even.
A few plain tortilla chips (maybe six?) and some salsa, and a small piece of toast and some jam. Other than that, stuck to the meals and came in under my calorie goal. I’m actually a tiny bit hungry now.
Weight was unchanged, staying at 171. It was a weird and sort of awful day and I feel light-headed from, I think, the nasal spray I use when my allergies get so bad I can’t breathe through my nose anymore.
But at least the entire world isn’t literally on fire.
Stranger still, I not only was not up in weight this morning, I was down 1.7 pounds, putting me even lower than before yesterday’s 1.6 point gain. This may be the biggest 24 hour gain/drop ever. It’s weird, but I’ll take it. I weighed exactly 171 pounds, so I’m now just over one pound away from dipping below 170 (not counting flu-related weight loss) for the first time in 2020.
Given that it is 2020, it’s also possible I may gain five pounds overnight.
I had breakfast, dinner and two leftover slices of pizza for lunch.
I also did a 5K run at Burnaby Lake, my total distance for the day as I write this is 22.75 km.
The one down note was my weight, which was not down but up. Up 1.6 pounds, to be exact, to 172.7 pounds. Boo. This is not unexpected, though, as I ate a truckload of pizza and drank a ton of fizzy (but calorie-free) beverages after because pizza makes me very, very thirsty.
I may actually be up tomorrow for the same reason, as I have drank my approximate body weight again today due to the leftover pizza, and the long workout. But you never know, because bodies are weird and mysterious things.
It’s apparently an effect of the COVID-19 virus’s effect on the body, which may be the cause of victims’ lungs filling up with gel-like fluid, “covid toes” and more. The good news is this research will help make treatment of COVID-19 symptoms more effective. Although the various sympyoms and side effects of the virus are frightening to read about, this is really a story of hope and how something as simple as Vitamin D may help those affected by the virus.
(This story was linked in Dave Pell’s daily Next Draft newsletter, which is great (if often depressing) source of news on the pandemic and other stories.)
I only had a slice of toast for lunch and some pizza (mmm, pizza) for dinner, so technically no cheating.
Bad news: I also didn’t exercise today because Nic and I went to a bird sanctuary in Delta to check out…birds. Then we watched Hamilton (not at the sanctuary).
But I did complete all of the activity rings on my watch, so that’s good.
In better news, my weight was down to 171.1 pounds this morning. So for today at least I was gloriously less in weight than I was on January 1st of this year, when I came in at 171.5 pounds. I am cautiously optimistic that I can finally get down below 170 before the end of the month.
Actually, let’s not. The reality is I cheated a bit today. It was Friday, I was stressed out and had some snacks I shouldn’t have. I felt bad. I was bad. But I also had another good workout, so that absolves me a little.
I expect the weekend, oddly enough, to be better.
My weight was down 0.6 pounds, so I almost erased yesterday’s gain. Given my water consumption today, I won’t be surprised to see it go back up tomorrow, but bodies are weird, so you never know.
I did come under my calorie goal unless I ate an entire pie and blanked it from my mind after, so that also helps overcome the cheating.
