Weight: 279.5 pounds

Exercise: Took Ollie for a 25 minute walk around the neighborhood. It’s my off-day from both the pushups and the running.

We’ve had our English Setter, Ollie, for 10 years this month. He was a full-grown stray when we took him in. Michelle’s sister Billie found him outside of her work near Swope Park. He is somewhere between 11 ad 13 years old now according to the veterinarian’s guess about his age when we first took him for his shots.

He seems to be aging pretty well. He was like a puppy on our walk today. He was running all over the place sniffing and peeing. But he’s kind of like me: he’s losing some hair. He had a flea problem a couple of months ago that caused him to lick and chew at his skin until he had a bald patch on his lower back. We took care of the fleas but his hair isn’t growing back very well. I wonder if they make Rogaine for dogs.

Fallling back to the wimp category allowed me to finish the Week 1, Day 3 workout of the hundredpushups.com plan but just barely. I did five sets of pushups (4,5,4,4,5) and I just barely managed to do the fifth pushup in the last set. Although the plan is six weeks long, I suspect that I’ll be forced to repeat some weeks because of failure to progress. I used to think I was in pretty good shape for my age, but boy was I wrong.

I weighed 280 pounds on the bathroom scale this morning. I’m starting to think I should weigh less often. The daily ups-and-downs mess with your mind. But then again, my mind is already plenty messed with.

I’m on vacation from work today. EDS has a use-it-or-lose-it policy on vacation days, so I’m taking random days off between now and the end of the year just so that my vacation days don’t go to waste as they have in years past. Next year, I’ll be up to 18 vacation days. I’ll have to try a little harder next year to spread those out. Maybe we’ll even have to go somewhere as a family next summer since we haven’t done that in a couple of years. I love going to see St. Louis so maybe we’ll do that if we only have a long weekend, otherwise, I’d like to try someplace new.

It’s cold and rainy today, but I ventured outdoors to do the workout from Week 1, Day 2 of the Couch-to-5K running program. I did a five-minute warm-up walk, followed by 20 minutes where I alternated 60 seconds of jogging with 90 seconds of walking. By the end of it my fingers ached, but I otherwise felt great. I wonder why running would make my fingers hurt.

Anyway, I weighed 277 pounds on the bathroom scale this morning. I did pretty good on my diet yesterday except when I got home from work in the evening. Jill had made a baked penne pasta dish for dinner. I ate a bunch of that and then had 2 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I have no idea how many points any of that stuff was and didn’t bother to try to find out. I really need to fix my attitude in that regard. I need to find out how many points a meal represents before I start eating it. Otherwise, I’m going to gain all the weight back that I’ve lost this year.

Oh, yeah, as a follow-up to the gay marriage topic I was talking about yesterday. I was wrong in one major respect. Even if gay people live as if they were married, they still can’t adopt children or act as foster parents in some states. I thought of this as I read a post on digg that was talking crap on Arkansas for being a backward hellhole because they had voted in the election to not allow unmarried people to adopt or be foster parents. So there are some rights that you get via the state’s legal recognition of your marriage that you wouldn’t get from a separate civil contract. But still, I think gay people should go ahead and make de facto marriages even where they can’t make them de jure.

I did Week 1, Day 1 of the hundred pushups program this morning. I didn’t do very well. I did five sets (6,6,4,4,1). The last set I was supposed to max out but do at least five. I only managed to do one. And the bathroom scales say that I weigh 280 pounds this morning. I didn’t do very well following Weight Watchers yesterday. Michelle and I went to a “celebration of life” which is sort of like a wake or a funeral, and they had a potluck buffet. I didn’t really pig out but I also didn’t try to count my points.

To make this post relevant to other people, I’ll guess I’ll make a point about the funeral. The funeral was for a gay friend of the family. His husband kept talking about the “holy union” that they had had 15 years ago in St. Louis. I kept wishing that he would just call it a wedding. For all intents and purposes, they were an old married couple. I figure that’s how to make gay marriage a legal reality. First you have to make it a reality of daily life in this country, and then it will become a legal reality. If gay people want to get married, they should go ahead and do it. A marriage in the legal sense is a contract between two people. The government has predefined the terms for straight people, but there is nothing that says gay people can’t make a contract between themselves. They can then call it a marriage even if the government won’t. Then eventually, the anti-gay-marriage laws will seem as archaic as the anti-miscegenation laws.