Wow.  It’s been almost three weeks since I’ve written anything.  That’s three weeks without a weigh-in, three weeks without my wonderfully witty banter, and three weeks of digital blight upon my domain.  Get it?  Domain?  Like dot com?

Ahem.  Right.  Rapier wit, indeed.

I haven’t been idle, however!  This has just been crunch time at school, and I’ve been studying and writing and taking exams and… it’s all over.  At least for this semester.  Seventeen and a half credit hours, and it looks like I ended up with an A in every class.  I’m pretty stoked about that, especially considering I’ve never been an A student.  I don’t even think I’ve even been a B student, except in grade school.  Not that I didn’t have the capacity, just that I completely and utterly lacked the desire.  Consider the following scenario:

Teacher:  Do this problem.

Me:  Okay.  Done.

Teacher:  Correct.  Do this problem, which is very similar to the last one.

Me:  Ugh.  Okay… done.

Teacher:  Good job.  Now do this problem, which uses the exact same formula as the last one.

Me:  *grinds his teeth* Fine.  Done.

Teacher:  Great.  Homework is in the book, problems one through seventy three.

Me:  *pulls hair out and bangs head against wall*

Maybe there are people who need that kind of repetition, but I never have.  Traditional schooling didn’t work for me; I learn quickly.  And yet every child put through the United States public school system has to endure this very same thing.  Perfect for the some, but everyone learns a little differently, and for me it was tantamount to torture.  Mmhmm… probably could have gotten better grades if they had just waterboarded me for hours on end.

To that end, we’ve decided to homeschool our children, largely because they are exhibiting the same patterns of learning I showed when I was in my early teens.  I don’t blame my parents for not making the same choice – the Do-It-Yourself Mom was busy with work and Mr. Fiction was taking care of things at home and trying to repair his own ego after feeling like he’d failed us all – but as I look back at my life, I can see where it would have helped, and how much better off things might have been.

Homeschooling starts this coming semester.  During the next few weeks, while I’m on winter break, Ms. Awesomesauce and I will be cooking up a curriculum for the (not so) little ones, something a bit more broad and a whole lot more off the wall than what you’d find in your average middle or high school.  So far, we’ve decided the bulk of what we’re doing can be covered with in-depth units on specific times and places.  One month we may be studying World War II, and the next feudal Japan.  We’ll cover history, literature, culture, and a number of other aspects of each unit before we move on.  We’re also putting together a creative writing project where the group of us will be reviewing our Wii titles and posting our reviews at our new family blog, Wii Do Something.

Keep an eye here; I’ve got more free time in the next few weeks than I’ve had in a while, so I’ll be posting more, but weigh-ins are going to go on hold until after the first of the year.

In the meantime, enjoy the season for what it is, and don’t try to make it anything it’s not.

The last couple weeks have seemed a little on the rough side.  It felt like I had plateaued, as though things had leveled off, forcing me to become even more extreme in the measures I’m taking to lose weight.  The hope was that such a time would never come, that the weight would continue to fall off until my goal had been reached, and it was disturbing that so soon in the process I was being forced to go beyond.

Well… I was wrong.  This week offered me some good news.  Yesterday morning, as I stepped on the scale, it read out the announcement that my weight was three pounds less than it was last week, putting me squarely at 445 pounds.  That’s ninety pounds from my highest weight, and sixty two pounds from when I officially started keeping track on here.  Not bad, huh?  Inching along at one pound at a time feels like a plateau.  Three pounds puts me back in the game.

But wait, you might say.  Last time you posted, you were 449, not 448!  And that was last Thursday!  You lost four pounds, Mr. Big Simon, sir!

Well, I suppose an extra pound would make my current smile just a little bit more broad, but it just isn’t the case.  The weight I posted last Thursday was actually my weight from the previous Friday, in other words, from two weeks ago.  It felt weird posting again the next day, so I just didn’t.  Needless to say, my weight was 448 last Friday, three pounds more than it is now.

Oddly enough, I haven’t been back to the gym in a while.  Between them moving to a new, larger facility, and a billing mix-up which has since been resolved, the last couple weeks most of my walking has been done at school.  Still, it seems to be back to working, and I’ll be back in the gym next week.  We’ll see how much it helps.

I get asked often what it is I’m doing to lose weight, and I still point people to the No “S” Diet, though I’m not exactly using that system.  I am, however, using a modified version of it, just removing high-starch foods from my diet plan.  On top of that, I’m still exercising regularly, through everyday activity.  It isn’t nearly as difficult as I convinced myself it would be for so many years, and I’m having a lot of success.  Not that I would complain about it coming off faster, but it looks like I’m still right on target for the end-of-2011 goal I set for myself.

Here’s hoping you achieve your goals, too.

I’ve had a number of people ask me a question I should be quite capable of answering, yet for some reason I’ve yet to come up with a suitable response.  Why, they ask, haven’t you finished writing a book? It’s a fair question.  Contrary to what you might read here, I’m a fair hand with the English language, and love writing in general.  I’m decent at it, and maybe even skilled.  But here I am, blogging away and attending school (starting over, no less!) for psychology, rather than penning The Great American Novel – or at least prostituting my ability to make a quick buck.

I’ve often answered the question with a simple response:  I’m horrible at plot.  I can write, technically, putting out above-average prose at a respectable pace, but storytelling, I tell my acquaintances, may well be out of the scope of my ability.  Yet I know that not to be true.  For years, I’ve not only written interactive fiction with friends, short stories, and the like, but I’ve played as “game master” for countless role-playing sessions, building stories full of plot twists and loops.  Still, here I am, with a dozen manuscripts started, and none complete.

Why?

My dear and loving wife, Ms. Awesomesauce, described my writing to my children half an hour ago, and as I thought about it, I realized she was right.  “Your dad,” she said, “needs to get every word just right.  He’ll agonize over a paragraph for a week in order to get it just right.”  Wow.  That’s me!  Not here, not writing for a blog, but in writing a story, my attitude can be described with four letters:  OCPD.  That’s right, when it comes to finishing a manuscript, I have obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

I am the Adrian Monk of would-be novelists.

To that end, I’ve rewritten the lyrics to the theme song for USA’s series Monk, starring Tony Shaloub.

It’s a Jungle Out There (Writer’s Block Remix)

It’s a jungle out there
Bad grammar and misspellings everywhere
No one seems to care, well, I do.
Who’s your editor?
It’s a jungle out there
What kind of thesaurus do you read?
Do you get the Writer’s Digest every week?
Well, I do!
It’s amazing!
People think I’m crazy, ’cause I rewrite all the time
If you cared about your writing you would too!
Better use that backspace ’cause the words you love so much
Might just cause you
To get a letter
Of pure rejection!
‘Cause it’s a jungle out there
It’s a jungle out there.

Hey there.  Just putting up a note to let you know that I’m still alive, that I still consider this my online home, and that I’ll be posting here, at least sporadically, for as long as I possibly can.  For the few of you who read this (that’s right:  you, you, and um… you, back there, with the red sweater), I haven’t abandoned this site!

Nor have I abandoned my quest toward greater health.  I’ve been negligent in posting my weight for the last couple weeks, but with good reason.  It has to do with little words like “tumor” and “cancer” and a big revelation at the end where we discover it really had nothing to do with little words like “tumor” and “cancer” after all.  Sometimes life throws those little scares at you, and there’s not a whole lot you can do except wait for them to sort themselves out, but in the meantime even those of us as laid back as yours truly (and I do tend toward the lethargic!) can pop into worry-mode and start wondering what the outcome is going to be.  Needless to say, the lump in my throat is neither cancer nor is it emotion; it’s just a cyst, and the endocrinologist who did the tests is just going to leave it there for now, since the darn thing doesn’t seem to be hurting me anyway.  I’ll have to go back in April for another series of tests (in which they jab at my neck with a three inch needle, rummaging around inside to pull out some cell samples, all without the benefit of anesthesia), but overall I’ve got a clean bill of health.

This, of course, brings me back into reality wherein I scoff at my waffling (and I did indeed waffle on the whole weight loss thing during said cancer scare – I was a human Eggo™ with a tiny ego, sort of the anti-Beeblebrox, if you will, wondering if I should even bother, a flippity-floppity dance I eventually overcame) and return to a world where I’m still seriously overweight and need to reduce my manly girth to more reasonable proportions.  (Say… we’re carbon-based life-forms.  Does that mean our effective size is our individual “carbon footprint”?  Yes, I’m laughing at that one.  No, it wasn’t funny to you.  I get that.  For some reason it just resonated as hilarious to me.)

To that end, here is last week’s weigh-in.  For those keeping score (and there might be one or two of you left), I’m down two pounds from the previous visit to the scale, putting me at 449 pounds.  That’s right, for the first time in seven years, I’m under 450 pounds.  I figured I’d post it today, since I’ve got another weigh-in tomorrow, and if I gain weight, I at least want this moment to be recorded.  For me, this is a pretty major accomplishment, and means that, all in all, I’ve dropped eighty six pounds since my highest weight.  This calls for celebration.  Someone get me some ice cream.

Or not.

The last couple weeks, my gym has been moving, meaning they’ve packed up their equipment and hauled it across town, not that the building sprouted legs and started dancing.  They’ve got a larger facility with more equipment now, which is great, but I haven’t had access to the place for almost three weeks, which sucks like a puppy on its momma’s teat.  I’ll be back to the gym next Monday, though, now that they’re open again, and glad for that, too.

All in all, no huge tale or inspiration this week, just a post to let you folks know what’s going on.

I’ll be back soon!

Happy Birthday, Weird Al Yankovic.

Thank you for 33 years of laughter and fun…

… and for being the geek you had to be.

Right… tell me there’s a Ray Bradbury fan out there who’s looked at the number on the image to the left and gets the joke.  Tell me the title isn’t causing massive coronaries on the part of my book-reading friends.  Tell me you’ve ready Fahrenheit 451.

Yes?  No?  If you have, isn’t it good to be in the know?  And if you haven’t, well, you’re missing out.  It’s a classic work complete with the kind of lesson you don’t find often in modern novels.  Go to the library, check it out, and take a couple hours to experience one of the greatest pieces of speculative fiction of the twentieth century.  You won’t be disappointed.  And on the off chance you are, I offer you a full refund for the cost of this advice.  Either way, I promise I’m not about to put together a modern day book burning.

No, the 451 reference, other than being the temperature at which paper burns, is the weight the scale offered me this morning.  Sure, it’s only a pound less than last time I posted my weight, but the amazing thing is what happened in the interim.  You see, after telling Ms. Awesomesauce I wasn’t going to weigh myself, I ended up flitting over to the local clinic and hopping on the weighticulator.  I was flabbergasted, astonished, and even downright disturbed to find my weight at 471 pounds.  In other words, during my week off, during the time when food in all its most dangerous and delicious forms was once again free game, I gained a whopping 19 pounds.

Which only makes it more astonishing, and perhaps even mildly confounding, that my weigh in put me squarely at 451 this morning.  But you know what?  I’m not going to argue.  It’s the same scale at the same clinic at the same time on the same day of the week.  I don’t know how I managed to fluctuate in the range of twenty pounds (each way!)  over the course of the past two weeks, but the scale doesn’t lie, under normal circumstances.

You know what they say:  Never look a gift horse in the mouth.  If this isn’t a gift horse, I don’t know what is.

Things are progressing nicely.  By the time October is over, I’ll have achieve the goal I had hoped I would reach in September.  That’s how it goes, of course; better late than never.  (Curses, Kent!  I almost said “Better Nate than lever”!)  My 2009 target weight- 400 pounds – probably won’t be reached in the next two months, especially with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years Eve, and two birthdays coming up.  Still, I expect to drop at least twenty more pounds – and hopefully thirty! – by the time we ring in 2010.  Still, I’m a whole lot closer than I was just a few months back, and I’m getting closer every day.  The plan is on track for the December 31st, 2011 “final goal” of 225 pounds (or less).

All in all, things are going very well.  Clothes are getting loser, skin is getting a little more baggy (I’m told it will tighten up, eventually), and people are noticing the difference.  I’m certainly not complaining.

It’s been five  months since I started this whole get better thing began.  If you’ve been reading since May, you know that since starting to actively try and lose weight, to make myself a healthier me, I’ve had my ups and downs, weeks where I’ve dropped a few pounds, and even a couple where I’ve gained.  I’ve lost  over fifty pounds since then, and over eighty pounds since my highest weigh-in, way back in January.  That, of course, is huge – it’s an excruciating process, and every pound is a little victory.  At the same time, every pound is just one more step in an extended journey, since there are still over two hundred more to go, and at least two years of tweaking my diet, adjusting my exercise habits, and everything else changing entails.  Two years (or two years plus!) is a long time!

For that reason, I decided earlier this week to take a vacation.  No, there wasn’t a trip to Disney World involved (though you wouldn’t have heard a complaint from me), nor did I roadtrip across the Southwest United States, visiting the Grand Canyon, Roswell, and the London Bridge.  In fact, I didn’t go anywhere at all, or at least anywhere out of the ordinary.  That is, except three trips to a local Mexican restaurant, one visit to Applebee’s, and, worst of all, McDonald’s.  None of them were necessary, except perhaps Applebee’s, since I was out of town at my endocrinologist’s office and needed to stop somewhere for lunch, but I had good excuses for each and didn’t make a pig of myself.  Add to that only one chance to pop in to the gym in the past few days (what can I say?  It was a busy week!) and there you have the substance of my break from healthy eating and activity.

I’ll be back, hard at it, tomorrow.

While I’ve got your attention, might as well tell you why I was visiting the endocrinologist.  My doctor found this lump in my throat, on the right side.  Her first thought is that it’s a goiter, a non-cancerous enlargement of the thyroid gland.  According to the tests they ran, my thyroid isn’t acting up, so it’s likely just a benign cyst within the gland.  There is a small chance of the growth actually being a malignant tumor, but my doctor brushed off the possibility, saying that if I had a tumor as large as the lump currently in my neck, I’d probably be dead.  The endocrinologist, apparently, isn’t willing to take the same chance.  I go back in on Friday the 30th for a biopsy, and they’ll be able to give me a more clear picture of what’s wrong and what must be done in order to fix it.

In the meantime, I’m not letting it change who I am and what I do.  After all, it’s just a lump right now.  Sure, it’s more, but I don’t know what it is, and as long as I don’t know, I would be wasting effort and energy worrying.  It’s a lump.  Soon enough, I’ll know if it’s going to hurt me or not.  My faith is in God; I know God’s will is going to be done no matter what.  Either God will keep me safe, or God will be the strength shining through my weakness.

In either case, I will likely have to go through some kind of surgery in order to have it removed.  Until then, I guess you can just call me Lumpy.

Remember those Schoolhouse Rocks! cartoons, the ones they showed back in the 70s and into the early 80s?  The one that stuck with me dealt with the number three, multiples of three, and how the number seems to pop up a lot in life.  This week, “three” has personal significance because it’s the number of pounds I lost, pushing me a little closer to my final goal.

It’s been another one of those strange weeks, too, when I haven’t set aside the time to hit the gym and get my walking in, and ended up eating out more than I should have.  The last part is especially true when you consider the size of a plate of nachos supremos at El Pueblito, one of the Mexican restaurants in town.  (Odd side note:  Small town in Kansas, and what do we have here for dining?  Well, the closest thing we had to a “classy” restaurant recently closed, leaving us with a couple greasy spoons (no complaints about that!), fast food, and the choice of three Mexican restaurants and three Chinese restaurants.  There’s that three again!)  Thankfully, the guys at El Pueblito are happy to provide take-home boxes or just whisk your plate away if you can’t (or shouldn’t!) eat any more.

Of course, it’s a difficult thing, saying “Wait, no more of that really good stuff”, especially when we have such a great time going there in the first place.  The wait staff are all from Mexico, I believe, and have been gracious enough to help me with as I learn Spanish.  Not that much of it is sticking, mind you, but if I dine there enough, maybe some of it will rub off.

In the meantime, I’ll at least get some great food.

Generation X provided us with nothing if not a rich variety of entertainment options with limited technology and a limited budget, and few films that have achieved cult status amongst those who grew up in the 1980s exemplify that fact as thoroughly as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Those of you who lived the life of a geek (or a nerd, as they were more often called in that decade) recognize the title as one of the worst movies ever made, and yet one steeped in a vat of pure awesome.

I am ashamed I did not know either of those facts until tonight.

The movie was released in 1984, sandwiched between genre classics Return of the Jedi (1983) and Back to the Future (1985).  I was eleven when it hit the theaters, old enough to know what I wanted to watch, but too young to have the financial independence to make good on my pre-adolescent plan to subsist only on Butterfingers, episodes of Dr. Demento, and science fiction flicks.  Add to the mix parents who were wholly uninterested – not in the genre itself, they loved the Star Wars movies and E.T. – but in pulpy b-movie format shows characterized by bad writing and worse acting, and you have the recipe for a young Big Simon missing this beast in its native habitat.

Tonight, over twenty five years after its release, I watched Buckaroo Banzai for the first time.  Sitting here in my easy chair, The Digital Kid (who wandered off ten minutes in) and The Coppertop watching my monitor from odd angles, I set into motion the hundred minute train wreck of genius.  Starring Peter Weller (best known for the title role in the movie Robocop) as the improbably named Buckaroo Banzai, a fantastically talented physicist, neurosurgeon, Samurai, rock musician, jet car driver, and comic book hero (thank you, Wikipedia!), the story spins quickly out of control as it introduces character upon character, including some names better remembered than the lead.  Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, and Christopher Lloyd also appear as a fellow surgeon and new member of the Hong Kong Cavaliers, a scientist possessed by the leader of a malicious alien faction, and an alien in the form of a researcher for YoYoDyne Propulsion Systems, respectively.

I would love to shower praises on the film.  I would like to, but it’s nearly impossible.  The main character, while interesting, is such in the way that you want to know more.  Sadly, the movie never expounds on the myth of Dr. Banzai.  He is, simultaneously, everything a young geek might wish to become; he’s handsome and debonair, witty, and has the kind of charm that has stunning women (and their twin sisters (separated at birth)) swooning, even falling at his feet.  He’s blessed with a Swiss Army Knife of skills, but there’s no explanation for his wide variety of talents, which apparently includes the ability to play every instrument imaginable (he plays both guitar and organ in a night club scene, but also switches to a flugelhorn, a tiny trumpet-like instrument that looks like a miniature tuba (not to be confused with the wrap-around sousaphone, which most people call the tuba)), a pitch-perfect voice, cat-like driving reflexes, gunslinger-style pistoleer skills, unquestionable leadership, and an almost preternatural understanding of “Science!”.  Unfortunately, the enigma he represents is too much to swallow, even in pulp satire.

And yet there is a charm to the movie that makes you root for the good guy and laugh at the silly, almost childish jokes hidden throughout the script.  Somewhere beyond the crappy dialog and worse special effects, there is a certain allure to the flick that is as difficult to pinpoint as it is to resist.  Maybe it’s that child in me, the one who wanted so badly to see Buckaroo Banzai at the Fiesta Mall AMC theater back in ‘84.  Or maybe it’s the scribbler of tall tales I wish to become, reminding me that sometimes the absolutely absurd is precisely perfect.  In either case, Dr. Banzai’s adventures will go down as one of those movies I will want to see again, even if it’s only to imagine I could have been both stupidly cool and dangerously mysterious.

In the past I’ve called myself a Jedi Watchman, a Browncoat, and a Roughneck, but tonight, I take on not one but two new titles.  In honor of the schlock goodness of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, in honor of the 25 years I’ve wanted, somewhere in the back of my head, to see it, tonight I am a Blue Blazer Irregular and a member of the Hong Kong Cavaliers.  As a certified geek and interested retrospective onlooker of the 80s, I’ll carry that title proudly wherever I go.

… because wherever you go, there you are.

If indeed there is such a thing as a regular reader of bigsimon.com, said reader is probably wondering where yesterday’s weigh-in post went.  The calendar hailed the arrival of Saturday some eleven hours ago, while I was laying in the dark, staring at the place where there should be a ceiling, and I realized with a start that I had written nothing.  (There almost certainly was a ceiling, since it was there when I turned the light off and it’s there now, and I doubt it had any urgent business elsewhere in the middle of the night.)

There are three different conclusions you might come to.  First, you might conclude that I am lazy.  Second, you might conclude that I was busy.  Third, you might conclude that there was nothing of any import to note.  None of these preclude the others, though any of them could stand on its own.  I could have spent the day lounging in my rather spacious recliner, playing Team Fortress 2, skipping the visit to the clinic altogether, thus fulfilling all three suppositions, or I could have left any one or two of those actions (or inactions) out.  The truth, however, is that a) I am lazy – an established fact, or I’d likely post here far more often! – and showed that laziness not by sitting in this comfortable chair but by mostly avoiding it completely, b) I was busy doing, well, the busy-work of parenting and being a halfway decent husband (taking my wife out to dinner after dropping the kids off at a concert counts, right?), and c) I did go to the clinic, and I did check my weight, but found myself to weigh precisely the same amount as I did one week ago.

In other words, all that to say I lost no weight this week, but I gained no weight, either.

I’m not bothering with the why of it now.  When I first started out, this would have frustrated me to no end, but I’ve come to the conclusion that my body is going to act in an unpredictable fashion no matter what I do, and the only way I can compensate is to keep on doing what it is I have been doing – eating well enough (despite occasionally wandering into the land of nachos supremos) and walking (or treading, since the device is called a treadmill, not a walkmill) – and let nature and biology run its course.  Besides, my body is prone to some strange fluctuations; when I weighed myself mid-week this past Tuesday, I had gained twelve pounds!  Imagine the dismay when I read those numbers.  But then to return three days later and have those dozen pounds melted away again…

Well, I’m just happy they didn’t stick around.