Weight for it…

I lost 1.2 pounds since last week’s weigh-in. Which sort of surprised me, because my scale at home wasn’t showing much of a difference.

I’m pleased. I think I’ve been pretty good about following the plan, since Sunday anyway. (Friday and Saturday were potlucks, and there’s no controlling the food there.) I’m still working out the rules of the core plan, in which you can eat certain foods for meals and certain foods for snacks and can only have one meal a day with brown rice, potatoes or whole wheat pasta in it. Some cereals are core, but not ones that have any flavor to them. All the non-core foods have points values, and you get 35 points a week to spend on those. Plus whatever activity points you earn each day.

My problem is that I have become wholly resistant to counting points at all. I figure I can have 5 a day, but then I’m doing so much walking, surely I have an activity point here or there to spend. Plus, I don’t have that much to lose, so I don’t have to be that strict…you see where this is going?

And let’s not forget that all my meals this coming Sunday through Thursday will be prepared by Mickey Mouse, which will make it hard to keep track of points or stick to core foods. So Friday of next week, right after my next weigh-in, that’s when I’ll really get serious.

Long lost

Do you ever reach out to old friends via mass e-mail? I did recently, to pass on some information about a retiring graduate school dean. The first two people to respond were, predictably, among the handful of girls I still exchange e-mails with and have seen a couple of times since grad school.

Next was my best friend from grad school. A boy. We’ve been in touch sporadically and I think he sent a mass e-mail about getting married a couple of years ago. Yeah, I crushed on him pretty hard the first two quarters of grad school, but he had a girlfriend, so I settled, wistfully, for being his writing buddy. During our last quarter together, he found a new female writing buddy and we never regained the closeness of those early months, learning the 5 W’s and the inverted pyramid, and memorizing the AP stylebook.

We loved grad school. When we were assigned beats, we mocked a fellow student who didn’t file a story every day. “Why wouldn’t you want to write a story every day?” my friend pondered.

He also was a vegan, and one of three major influences in my becoming a vegetarian. The other two being my brother and Buddha.

Neither one of us is a reporter now. I don’t think he ever worked as a reporter. To be fair, he is a foreigner, and may have had trouble getting a job, but within a year or two, he was concentrating full time on his music, and touring with his band. I never heard him play or saw him pick up an instrument.

I, on the other hand, still strongly identify with my grad school experience. Maybe I’m not a “journalist” per se, but I consider that education to be the foundation of the skills that I apply every day.

In his recent e-mail to me, my friend said he doesn’t think about grad school much, which I find sort of astonishing. I think about grad school all the time.

He also didn’t mention being married, but did have some weird hyphenated last name going on.

While we’re on the subject

What’s with this conceit of having an entire student body work at a country club for the summer? Or even hang out at a country club for the summer?

(I’m talking to you Beverly Hills, 90210 and Saved By The Bell and copycat High School Musical 2)

I mean, I’ll defend Beverly Hills, 90210 to the end. I’ve lived in that zip code, and I’m here to tell you that 98% of everything that happened on that show is real. But no one I know ever spent the summer at a country club.

I have failed

Or rather Isis has.

I don’t know where I went wrong. I’ve been walking her every morning for a couple of weeks, throwing in practice commands all along the way. She’s behaved well at home, even learning “Go to your crate” (cus that’s where the treats are) and “let’s go inside.” She hasn’t been racing around the yard until we catch her, but comes inside eagerly.

Yesterday I took her to my company picnic. It was a long drive and it was fun to have her in the car. We played on the beach while we waited for the ferry. She raced around me in circles in the sand while I transferred the leash from hand to hand behind my back.

She was well behaved at the picnic. Only made one child cry, with a lick to the face (no teeth), which really was the fault of the grandma who let the child’s face get that close to my dog’s. Then we went for a long hike. I felt so lucky to have a companion dog like her.

On the way back, I took her for another beach walk by the ferry terminal. This time, the beach was small, and surrounded by steep rocks and concrete walls. I thought to myself that probably I could let her off lead and she could run in the water, play in the sand, and surely she would come right back to me when I called, if for no other reason than she gets nervous in unfamiliar places.

Oh, if only I had attached her “light line.” (A string that you clip to the training collar that you can use to stop a dog when off lead.) She did not come back to me when called, but instead raced around like a she-devil.

I won’t mention the laws that I broke by having her off lead, and by not picking up her poop. (I know. I’m so ashamed. I was going to get a bag from my car and come back for it, but there wasn’t time.)

I made several more errors in judgment in the next 10 minutes, none of which resulted in my dog getting hit by a car, but very well could have. I should have let her run around on the beach until I caught her, but I thought probably she wouldn’t climb up the rocks by herself and if she followed me to them, she’d pause and I could catch her.

Wrong. She raced up the rocks and I think in front of the cars waiting to pay for the ferry. I couldn’t see, because I was still on the beach. I could have tried calling her back to me on the beach, but instead, I thought maybe I could get her to walk with me to the car and jump in (because she does that without a leash all the time).

She raced in front of me dangerously, but there were no moving vehicles nearby, so we were OK. She started toward a woman standing near a railing and I called Isis back to me. Perhaps if I had let Isis run to her, she would have let the woman pet her long enough for me to grab hold of the collar. As Isis ran in my general direction, the woman looked apologetic, because I guess she had sort of called Isis to her. I said, “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know if she was bothering you.” And she said, “Oh no, I love dogs.” Shoot. She could have been useful.

Then Isis weaved in between the parked cars, completely humiliating me as I tried, “Isis, come!” “In the car!” and luring her with a cookie. Finally, some other passengers helped me sort of box her in, and as I took her back to the car, a woman helpfully said, “You shouldn’t have taken her off her leash.”

Yes, thank you.

I have oft said that I never planned to take her out in public off leash anyway, but I guess having her in the off-lead class gave me the impression that it could be done. Clearly I’d made an error in judgment that I won’t make again.

So todaaaay, we had a practice test. We will be missing the final test next week (Disneyworld), and I already planned to go through the whole 12-week course a second time. During the test, I was pretty surprised at how well she was doing, following commands and such. She got a perfect score on the “stand for examination,” where she stands and lets the tester pat her down, without moving a foot.

By then, the leash was off, and little missy knows full well that when she doesn’t have the leash on, if she gets farther than an arm’s length from me, she’s free as a damn bird. So she broke free and raced around the testing ring, letting out a few barks, pouncing playfully, picking up rocks in her mouth, chasing her tail. This happened a couple of times when I actually managed to catch her, and I was at the point where I didn’t mind ending the test, but for some reason, we kept going. Finally, she broke away and ran behind the dog kennels to a big open field of grass. She raced and raced and picked up sticks and frolicked until finally, between the trainer and one of the other owner’s children and me, we managed to catch her. I think it was the trainer saying, “Siiiit!” angrily that did it. Or maybe she was just good and ready.

In the real world, that sort of thing would get you tossed out of obedience trials, but in this kindly setting, it earned my dog a 60 out of a possible 200 on her practice test. I don’t mind the failure so much as the sheer belligerence of it all.

The only reason I’m not taking her to the animal shelter right now is that our Halloween costumes arrived…

Wait watchers

So I’ve gained 5 pounds since moving in with Rob. Which isn’t that much, but after about a year of planning to lose a few, and somehow gaining a couple instead, I decided that I needed reinforcements to boost my motivation.

Enter Isis and our morning walks and a return to Weight Watchers! I’m just sort of curious about what kind of secret weapons of “mass” destruction (get it?) they’ve developed since my last weigh-in, in 2004. They have some kind of “core” plan now.

I planned to go to today’s 12:15 meeting, which is in a different location, but I think it’s actually the same meeting that I first starting going to, before I realized that I’d weigh less if I went to the 8 a.m. Friday meetings without having breakfast. Or a sip of water.

This morning, I’m eating my 100-calorie snack of Reese’s Pieces with cereal puffs about five seconds after sitting down at my desk when my office mate tells me that on account of our organization winning a major lawsuit, she’s been instructed to buy the “staff” snacks. The staff today is me and her. She asks what I want, and I just can’t make myself say, “carrot sticks and Diet Coke.” She suggests getting us each a dozen Krispy Kremes and I don’t object, thinking, “I guess I can have one of those for lunch.” The plain ones are only 5 points, if you were wondering.

I haven’t eaten one yet. The trick will be eating just one between now and tomorrow when I can get Rob to take the box to work. Right now, I’m just concentrating on holding out until 12:15. How evil would it be to show up at the meeting with a dozen donuts?

Psst

Did you try clicking on the picture of my pretty princess, and see the other wonderful pictures I took the other day?

Just looking at them while at work makes me want to rub my face in her fur.

I’m pretty excited because Rob and I are going to Disneyworld in a week and a half. I’ve never been. Isis will be spending the week with her grandparents. I hope they don’t lose her.

I need a third TiVo

Mine’s full of So You Think You Can Dance episodes that I can not delete. Last season, I kept wanting to go back and rewatch dances and couldn’t and I was so thrilled to see a bunch of my favorites performed again in the finale. Which I still have on my TiVo.

This season, I kept every single performance episode until TiVo refused to record the three “finale” episodes this week unless I deleted something. I painstakingly deleted the one with Lacey and Kameron’s “All That Jazz” number and another one or two, and I hoped that the finale last night would have enough of my faves so I could delete more, but I still have a good 14 hours of shows that I want to watch over and over and over again. And they haven’t come out with DVDs of this show. (Music licensing, I’m sure.)

Ironically, having all those episodes sort of spoiled the finale for me, because after the final performance show Wednesday, I went through and watched my favorite dances again, so all of the numbers they did Thursday were pretty fresh in my mind. And none of them were actually performed better than the first time.

Speaking of Kameron, how come he was the only one in the top 10 who wasn’t asked to reprise a number? Sara, my fave, got to perform three (deservedly so, of course), and Anya, Jesus and Hok didn’t even make the Top 10, and they got to perform…