On Dieting

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I lose weight, then gain some back, then work on losing it again.

Throughout my life I’ve been lucky where weight is concerned.

First of all, I was always thin. I was the kind of kid who could eat a ton and still stay relatively slim. And back when I was in college, I had my metabolism up so high that I couldn’t help but lose weight. For a while, I was almost skeletal. Without being anorexic or (heaven forbid) bulimic.

Second, at 5’8″ tall, I can weigh a lot and carry it very well. The long legs help that a lot. Heck, put me in a pair of black jeans and a black shirt and no one even has to know I’m overweight.

As I got older, things changed. Unfortunately, they changed very slowly and I came to accept it. 5 pounds here, a larger pants size there. Over a period of 10 years, my weight crept up and up and I accepted every pound and inch. I won’t say I was happy about it, but I certainly didn’t think about dieting. After all, I’d never needed a diet before.

I reached my high of 180 lbs after a cruise two and a half years ago. I felt terrible. I looked terrible. And it didn’t help that the woman from the other couple we cruised with was a “stringbean” — a name my grandfather used to apply to me.

I tried one of those starvation diets with special foods and supplements. It was called Fit for Life. Jeez. How can people do that? I remember eating a 3-ounce serving of meat one night for dinner. It was so tiny, I could barely find it on my plate. Actually, that’s a lie. There was so little food on my plate that night, the 3 ounces of meat stood out like an olive on an empty plate. And frankly, the supplements and special foods cost a fortune and tasted like garbage. Sure, you can lose weight if you stick to it. But you’ll soon be out of money and wondering what real food tastes like.

Results? I lost 8 pounds in two weeks, then couldn’t lose another ounce. I lost interest when the food ran out and I needed to make a trip down to Phoenix to get more.

Next, I tried Atkins. I don’t care what anyone says: Atkins works. At least for the first 10-15 pounds. That’s what I lost and it stayed off for quite a while — a few months, at least. But I couldn’t lose more. And then I started working at the Grand Canyon and noshing an awful lot between flights. The guys would buy these jello puddings in tiny cups. I had to get some, too. And frozen dinner entrees like pot pies you could nuke and then pick up and eat like a sandwich became a lot easier than making salad for lunch every morning before work. So although I lost 15 pounds, I gained almost 10 of them back in two months, just working at the GC.

The other day, I weighed myself. 169 lbs. I’d been down to 159 at one time. My “I’ll be happy with it” goal was 150. My “I’d love to be there” goal was 140. I wasn’t going to get there eating pot pies and pudding.

So I’m back on Atkins and drinking a TON of water. In fact, my primary exercise is walking from my desk to the bathroom about 12 times a day. And filling my water glass. I lost 5 lbs in 3 days. I know I won’t keep up that pace. But I do want to get back down to 160 before I go back to the GC. And start eating salad with lots of meat and cheese again.

I just wonder how I’m going to handle all those bathroom breaks when I’m flying.

Time Flies When You’re Getting Old

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Why time seems to go by faster, the older you get.

This is the official explanation. Or at least the explanation I came up with. But if you think about it, you’ll realize it has some merits.

First, the question: Why does time seem to go by faster, the older you get?

The answer: time is relative. I think Einstein might have proved that, but I’d like to present it in a far less technical way, without equations.

Look at it this way: When you’re five years old, a year is a FIFTH of your life. That’s a huge amount of your known time. But when you’re fifty years old, that same year is a FIFTIETH of your life. That’s a much smaller chunk of your time on earth. So it seems to go by faster.

What do you think? I’m convinced that this is the answer.

Six Rides in One Day?

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Wickenburg residents come out of the woodwork to go for helicopter rides one Saturday.

The phone calls started on Tuesday, June 1. A woman had gotten a gift certificate for a helicopter ride from her husband. She wanted to take the ride and buy her husband the same ride. When could I do it?

I consulted my calendar and set her up for Saturday, June 5, at 10 AM.

Another call later in the day. This guy had a gift certificate for a Ghost Towns tour. He wanted to do it early in the morning. (So did I.) We set it up for Saturday at 7 AM.

The next day, another call. A woman with a gift certificate for a tour wanted to go this weekend. How about Saturday, I asked. I fit her in at 8:30 AM.

Thursday, Alta called. She’d wanted to send a co-worker on a brief ride so she could see her home from the air. When could I take her? I suggested Saturday at 9:30 AM.

In the span of three days, I’d booked five rides. In June!

Saturday rolled along with the usual beautiful weather. I pulled up to the airport at 6 AM and pulled Three-Niner-Lima out of the hangar. And for the next four hours, I flew. Not just the five rides I’d scheduled, but a friend of one of the passengers — I never did figure out which one — decided to take a ride, too.

One thing for sure: I’ll never set a gift certificate to expire on June 30 again!

Wireless Works

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I find that wireless networking is the way to go.

I’m not on the road right now. I’m in my bedroom, lounging on my bed with two big pillows behind my back. The air conditioning is on and the house is comfortably cool. My laptop is where it should be: on my lap. When I’m finished writing this, I’ll upload it to the Internet without moving more muscles than it takes to click a mouse button.

And look Mom! No wires!

I had cable modem installed in my house the other day. It isn’t a traditional cable modem. It’s a wireless one. We live beyond the cable boundaries and depend on Dish Network for television. But satellite Internet service isn’t Mac friendly and I won’t buy a PC just to have Internet in the house. So I went with wireless cable. They put an antenna on the roof of the house and it points at the big transmission tower about a mile west of here. A wire from our antenna comes into the house where it attaches to an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. The base station acts as a DHCP router and shares its signal with an old Strawberry iMac (via old-fashioned Ethernet cable) and any computer within range that has a wireless card. That’s how I can lounge upstairs and surf the net at relatively fast speeds.

My home network isn’t the only wireless network my PowerBook connects to. When I’m up at the Grand Canyon, waiting for a flight at Papillon, I sometimes wake up the PowerBook to check my e-mail. As soon as I flip open the lid, it connects me to Papillon’s wireless network, which has been configured so I can access it. And two weeks ago, when I was in New Jersey for a funeral, I flipped the PowerBook open at Newark Liberty Airport and was surprised to find myself connected to the terminal’s wireless network. There are a few other networks I’ve managed to connect to, too, but there’s no need to go into details. Still, I find it amazing that wireless networks are so prevalent these days.

Makes you kind of wonder what’s traveling around us in wavelengths these days.

I’ve got all the equipment I need to set up a wireless network in my office. I just don’t have the time. I’m working on my Quicken book revision (again) and am too burned out at the end of a day to sit around and configure a network. But one of these days I’ll get around to it.

Hard to believe there are still people accessing the Internet via dial-up connection, isn’t it?

Writing Under Pressure

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How I hit the keyboard and produce at an alarming rate.

When I got my summer job at Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters, my editors were quite upset. Especially Megg at Osborne/McGraw-Hill. You see, every summer for the past six years, I’ve devoted about two months to writing or revising Quicken: The Official Guide for Quicken Press, which is an Osborne imprint. The book sold like crazy in its first edition (for Quicken 99) — in fact, it was the second best selling book of all time at Osborne. Although sales have fallen off a bit, it continues to sell well and remains the top-selling book about Quicken every year.

Osborne makes money producing and selling this book. I make some money, too, although not as much as I’d like. It’s a Windows book and I really don’t like writing about Windows software. After 55+ titles (I’ve lost count again), I’ve gotten cranky and picky and would rather spend time flying than sitting in front of a computer writing about accounting software.

Can you blame me?

Anyway, my schedule at Papillon requires that I live up at the Grand Canyon every other week. Up there, I live in a trailer (which is discussed extensively in another blog ). I have my laptop, an Apple PowerBook. But I don’t have any of the other equipment I need to write computer books. And frankly, I like it that way.

On my off weeks, I assured Megg, I would work on the book. I’d reviewed information about the software’s new features and told her the book would be about a 20% revision. I’d knock it off during my off weeks in the month of June.

Well, the month didn’t start very well. My uncle passed away June 4 and I felt compelled to fly back to New Jersey to visit him one last time. That killed four days that I could have been working. That equates to at least four chapters of the 18-chapter book. To make matters worse, when I returned to Wickenburg after my trip, I got about 4-1/2 hours of sleep before I had to fly up to the Grand Canyon for my week at Papillon. Although I’d managed to finish the first chapter, I later discovered that my e-mail software had failed to deliver it to Megg & Co. When I returned to my office on June 14 — halfway through the month! — Megg still didn’t have any chapters.

After handling e-mail, voicemail, and chart orders (I run a discount mail order business for aviation charts and pilot supplies — PilotCharts.com ), I finally put my nose to the grindstone (or my fingers to the keyboard) and got to work. I revised Chapters 2 and 3 on Monday and Chapters 4 and 5 on Tuesday. It’s Wednesday and, unfortunately, I have a doctor’s appointment and a haircut appointment, so I think I’ll only get one chapter done today. But if I keep up my rate of production, I should be able to get through Chapter 10 by Friday afternoon. And I’ll probably do two more on Saturday.

The revision work isn’t difficult, especially when revising material that hasn’t changed. I read over every word and make minor changes to clarify information. I’m also adding sidebars, although I’m not convinced that they’ll really add anything of value to the book. Then I make brand new screenshots. That’s where things slow down, because I have to make the software’s screens look a certain way before I take the picture. That often requires manipulating data by creating transactions — sometimes dozens of them — to show what I need to show.

I complained a bit to Mike about the work yesterday. It’s terribly tedious and very boring. He reminded me about the “paychecks” that accompany projects like this one. That shut me up.

I’ll have the book done by the end of the month as promised. I have to. There are three more titles for Peachpit Press lined up behind it.