So, a Week 2 weight loss of a little under a pound. Disappointing but not disheartening. In my head, I had set an original goal of 30 lbs. over the six month period, so I needed to average about 5 lbs. per month. I'm still well ahead of my first month goal in the first two weeks of The Challenge with a total loss of about 8 pounds, so I'll take it. I also weighed in Friday morning when I was coming off of about four hours of sleep with a belly full of pizza, fries, and beer from a long work week celebration with some co-workers. I'd like to think that had I not indulged the night before, I probably would have been down to around 249. That seems totally reasonable.
Anyway, I decided that overdoing it Thursday night just wasn't enough, so I went about doing what I could to gain some weight this weekend, too. Since the excuse train is running full-throttle, let's throw on another one. My family came up to visit, so I decided I'd cook supper and breakfast for them, and then we went out Saturday night at ate our weight in German meats at Gasthof zur Gemutlichkeit. When a restaurant has been featured on Man vs. Food, it probably isn't the best for the diet plan. It didn't matter, though. We had such a good time drinking beer and cider, eating meat until I started getting a sinus headache, raising our glasses for birthday toasts for everyone in the place, singing along with a man playing an accordion wearing lederhosen, taking the complimentary apple schnapps shot at the end of the meal, and even inhaling spearmint snuff through our noses to wash it all down. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have had as much fun at the Tofu Hut.
Please know that I am in no way blaming my family or friends for my decisions, successes, and failures. I need to be mentally healthy in order to make it through this, and being able to go out and have fun once in awhile will help me stay on the right track long term, even at the sacrifice of a big result on Fridays. Anyway, I jumped on the scale this morning just to check the damage, and even with a big breakfast at IHOP (which does not stand for Impressively Healthy Organic Platefuls) yesterday morning, I had only gone back up to 269. Other good news: I dropped two full belt sizes in the past two weeks and people who don't know about The Challenge are commenting on how noticeable my efforts are. That's more than enough to get me back on the horse and to keep blasting my way to October.
In other news, I am now a degenerate pony gambler and I have an enormous scoreboard in the middle of my living room. First the horses. To put it lightly, my mom has never met a blackjack table that she didn't like. She's not an addict or anything, but if we are in a casino, she's at a blackjack table. I decided to take my parents to Running Aces Casino on Saturday night because I was afraid that if we didn't go do an activity we'd just end up eating again. My sister went to a movie with a "friend" (cough, cough), so we headed up north.so my mom could get her cards fix and my dad and I could sit at the bar and watch sports. Running Aces also happens to have horse race betting, so my dad decided he'd teach me how to bet the ponies. After a couple of races, I officially had a scientific method of picking the winner and the second place horse. The general idea was to always pick the horse with a girl's name in a possessive format (Rachel's Dream, Annie's Glory, Sophie's Choice) and the horse with the most intimidating cool abstract name (Axion, Scoozi, Mitsubishi). Sometimes there was a car on the track that served as the starting gate, and betting on the Buick was also a safe choice. We did pretty well making $2 bets on each race, and if you don't count the cost of the beer we drank (which is usually the only place I put down money at the casino because I consider a beer for $3 to be a win every time), we actually came out ahead on the night. If I'm forced to go to another casino, I think I've found my calling.
Next up, the gigantic scoreboard. Perhaps you remember the tale of the Sensational Seven, a rag-tag group of teenagers who bonded over the years and came together to win the Sioux Falls city Hi-Y league at the YMCA back in the spring of 2009. If you are a Facebook friend of mine, you also know that right after the blog post was made one of my old teammates found the ORIGINAL scoreboards that were used in the YMCA in the Zip Foods gym during our championship run. I posted the link to the scoreboards on Craigslist and made a statement about how it would be the ultimate gift for me. Brent called on those scoreboards, and I was informed that they officially were gone. Oh well, life sucks sometimes. Well, when my family arrived Friday night I saw my dad walking off steps in my house like he was measuring something. It had started to rain, so my mom decided we needed to go down and get my gift out of the back of the truck before it was ruined.
Before we go too much further, let me tell you about my apartment. It is not a big space, and I have it arranged in a way that befits a nearly 30 year old bachelor. It is adult with just the right amount of fun to make it look like I'm not trying too hard. I also have a genetic predisposition to collecting random junk, so I have to fight that very hard because it is very easy to let it take control. If you don't believe me, look in my car.
Okay, back to the story. We went downstairs in the rain to fetch my gift out of the back of the truck. The thing six feet long, four feet high, and weighed 900 lbs. I live on the second floor of my apartment complex, so we worked to get it inside and up the stairs. In the process I lost about 4 square inches of skin, bruised my ankle bone, and either pulled my groin or suffered a hernia. We got it in and got it in a place where we could close the apartment door. My best guess was that it was either a really tall entertainment center or a fake fireplace. Either way, it was huge. So, I unwrapped the plastic and saw this:
The ultimate gift framed in a tree's worth of lumber. I was awestruck. On one hand, this was the single coolest thing I've ever been given. It is an authentic relic from one of my most cherished period of my life. It is amazing. On the other hand, it is enormous! Evidently my brain somehow had shrunk the size of the scoreboards over the years. The gyms we played in had 80 foot ceilings which clearly threw off my ability to accurately measure how big these were, and the dimensions of 4' x 6' on Craigslist clearly didn't register. I had the same problem a few years back when I paid $60 for a Three Stooges beer sign that I assumed was a portrait size and ended up being about the size of a large postcard. Measurements clearly aren't my thing.
Anyway, if you come to visit me, expect to be welcomed by a fully functional scoreboard as you walk in the door. Someday when I have a house and a room dedicated to my childhood glory, this thing will be the centerpiece that will have everyone talking. Until then, it is a really, really big place to set my keys. Still, I'm pretty blessed to have a great family that would be thoughtful enough to buy it, frame it, and haul it all the way to Minnesota, and I can't wait to get the Sensational Seven up here to sign the frame. Maybe we can even watch some old game tape while wearing our championship T-shirts.
I hope you had as great of an Easter weekend as I did. If you're like me, you hid your eggs last Monday and still haven't found them all! Thanks again for your continued support, and it is never too late to make a pledge towards my health for the American Heart Association!
Scoring from home,
Jeff
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