Fuck It

I'm currently working on an historical house in Pawtucket which is on the register of the Pawt. Preservation Society. Things are progressing nicely. It's not a significant property but it WILL look good as a presentation piece when I'm trying to sell other customers on my mad skillz.

The above pic is obviously the house in mid-prep. Colors will essentially be the same with the dark green being switched to something just a tad warmer. I've had to hire someone to move things along. The owners want the sash work done which is long and painful when working alone. I'll post pics of the finished product.

______________________________

Right about now I usually go into something about my weight....well....Fuck the weight shtick. I'm sick of following it and watching it go up and down like a monkey on a stick. I'm looking to push the last of my negativity out the door and watching a weight scale like some obese soap opera watching housewife only delays what I want.....peace with myself. That, as they say, is that!

-T

Maintaining Redux

I think in the last entry I was heading towards the 200 mark though it was probably more like 204. I am now hovering between 196-194 depending if I evacuated that morning. While I'm not as strict as I was at the beginning of my diet I still try to keep a mental note of how much I'm taking in during the day. I have to admit I feel lots better. My mental state is improved, I have good energy most days and my blood pressure has gone down according to my doctor. I'm contemplating purchasing a bike to burn of a bit more calories so I can get closer to the goal I had set for myself back in January of 8 lbs per month. As it is now though I'd be happy with 180 lbs by the end of June and 160 by September. I think this is a pretty realistic goal.

My other goals? To put it bluntly I would like to regain some of the lost time of my drug/alcohol using years. My prime years from 25-40 were squandered in the worst ways. Not a single day went by where I wasn't getting fucked up, wasn't embarrassing myself and my friends, destroying relationships with both my significant others and with my family. I wasn't enjoying the sun, I was locked into a dingy room nodding off from a load of opiates or geeking from a chunk of coke. When I stopped that leg of my self destruction I took up overeating with the twisted logic of "at least I'm not doing dope" line of thinking. It was a miserable and sad time. I consider myself an agnostic but even with that, I still feel that life is a kind of ultimate gift not to be shit upon.

While I have made peace with myself that the best years of my physical life are past, I still might be able to salvage the last 10-15 years of solid living where I won't be dozing off into my oatmeal. I want to do some travelling, I want to do some fly-fishing off some shallow flats on the Gulf coast of Florida, I want to be sexually promiscuous, I want to tear through a national park in a 4-wheeler while scaring small animals, I want to go to Disneyland..... and Rio.... and whatever else I can fit in and afford.

At the very least I'd like some memories I can look back upon and not cringe.

Maintaining

I'm into the 6th week here of the old diet.

It's been surprisingly easy this time around, probably due to knowing what I went through the last time. The Healthy Choice frozen product is getting a little dull and I imagine I'll need to start getting more creative soon by cooking meals from scratch.

Starting weight in January was 213 or thereabouts. I am now pushing the 200 mark. Most of that came off during the first two weeks so I'm a bit concerned with the slowdown but if need be I'll cut down more. The work season will be starting soon and that should take care of quite a lot of caloric expenditure also.

I also should credit the testosterone therapy. Muscle growth is increasing and I'm feeling great about 4-5 hours after I use the product. It's not a sexual thing, its a feeling of....I don't know....male-ness? Feeling aggressive but in a GOOD way? Anyway, thats causing some calorie burn too. I'd go to the gym but the funds are tight at the moment.

By next post I hope to have some pictures up. Thats if I haven't wussed out somehow. I don't think I will though.

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Obama vs McCaine.

Think about that. My one joy in all of this is that the Christian right are apoplectic as they won't have a narrow minded creep like Huckabee pushing his religious poison down our collective throats.

Once Again

This will end up looking like every other over-40 bloggers January entry. Why? I'm doing the "I'm-losing-weight-and-you-get-to-read-the-boring-details" shtick.

Up until the 31st of December my daily food intake consisted of the following with the only variation being the kind of garbage I ate from noon onwards:

Rise: 3 cups of coffee after which I would refill the pot which would accompany my breakfast.

Breakfast: One Raisin bagel w/cream cheese and 2 Peanut-Butter cup cookies...all from Dunkin Donuts. Bear in mind the total calories for a typical Dunkin Donuts cookie is something like 500 calories. They're big, they're rich, they're incredible.

They're deadly.

I never bothered to check out the carb amounts, cholesterol, saturated fat, sugar, etc. Just 500 calories for one cookie says enough. I don't want to know.

Post Breakfast-to-lunch: coffee with a LOT of milk. I use saccharine for sweetener thank god. Pastry occasionally accompanies this time. Not very often though because like a post-menopausal woman, I stew in my guilt of having consumed a typical adults caloric intake for the day in one a.m. sitting. This goes away after awhile.

Lunch: Ironically enough I don't really go overboard here. I just continue drinking cup after cup of coffee (which, btw, is 2/3rds decaf). If there is something starchy present that goes good with coffee I'll eat it. Again, fresh danish is a favorite.

Mid Afternoon: Coffee, coffee, coffee with milk, milk, milk. (almost a half gallon of milk per day I'm guessing, maybe a bit less)

Dinner: Lately I've been doing the easy thing like soup and grilled cheese. Several nights a week my brother and I will whip up something better like short-ribs slow cooked, pasta or anything that takes some effort to make. during warmer months we grill. Pork Loins, rib-eyes, burgers (big motherfuckers!), Sausage....you get the idea.

Coffee.

And dessert.

And more coffee......up until bedtime.

Physical Activity: Making coffee. PC gaming. Web browsing. This is the routine for December, January & most of March which is my off season.

Oh, don't forget cigars. 2 per day. And cigarettes....about 2 packs per. Yes.

The problem with this in relation to work is when I start up in March for the season I can barely last 2 hours for the first several days and its becoming harder every year now that I'm older.

The main reason though is this: I need to socialize. I need to get laid. Things have changed since I started the testosterone replacement therapy. I'm no longer content isolating myself. According to most general estimates for Americans I have about 15 more years of life that won't be taken up with having to wear depends, using a senoir citizens card, watching my hair fall out, etc. I nearly killed myself quitting drinking and drugging, it would be pretty neat to be able to enjoy things. That can't be done when one looks like about 210 lbs. of pasty white dough. Oh, and I'd like to see my cock once again without having to use a mirror.

Just sayin'.

A couple years ago I did a short term diet which I went from eating stuff similar to the aforementioned to something drastically different. I became very careful with what I ate. I was 230 lbs at that point, the heaviest I had ever gotten (did I mention I'm 5'-6"?). I tried to keep my carb intake below 100g per day. Most low carb diets (which have recently fallen out of favor) suggest under 30g but I felt that was just too difficult to maintain over a long period. I tried to keep my overall caloric intake to about 1000-1200 calories per day. The key was buying pre-made frozen dinners (Healthy Choice were my favorite). Most are under 400 calories and the newer ones don't taste too bad at all. For breakfast I would eat something like a couple of strips of turkey bacon and two eggs and made them into sandwich wraps using low carb wheat wrap bread. These actually are quite tasty. I don't do the silliness of separating the egg yolks and disposing of them as egg-white only sounds awful. Also, yolks, while adding flavor, aren't all that high in calories. Other days I'd allow a couple of slices of toast, margarine and some instant oatmeal. Lunch would simply be a piece of fruit along with a couple of glasses of yummy water.

And that was it. I lost 20 lbs in less than 2 months. Then I tripped up somewhere along the line but I never gained back the weight.

This time I'm simply doing the same thing. I keep things flexible enough so it isn't work and I don't get crazy counting every gram of carbs or every calorie. I just try to keep a general tally in my head of what I'm eating and what it comes out to. As of this writing I'm in my 5th day and my body is currently going through sugar withdrawal. I expected this because in the past I had gone through the same discomfort when I tried stopping eating sweets and meals with a high starch content. The upside is the years of trying to kick habits have left me with a mentality that can deal with such periods.

So thats it. I hope to make a progressive pictorial documentation of the process from now until the summer when I hope to be able to remove my shirt without embarrassment for the first time since the early '90's. Hopefully I'll update this blog more often as well now that I have something to write about.

-fin

OK Then....

Soooo....

My dick wasn't getting hard. Nope, it sure wasn't. Granted I'm no longer 18 where I was able to rip underwear with a clench of my genitals but I still expect to , you know, hang a towel on it once in awhile. I went into this in a past blog update but the short version is I went to a specialist who required almost a years worth of blood testing before he felt comfortable enough that my Pituitary gland wasn't doing its job of telling my testicles to come up with the goods. Finally, last month, he prescribed me a product called "Androgel™". At $275 per box which contains two bottles it is essentially Purell (gelled alcohol) with testosterone. 4 pumps of the actuator delivers a days dose to be rubbed on either my lower front torso or my upper arms. The literature tells you several times in BOLD TYPE not to use it on your genitals because you'll absorb TOO MUCH of the steroid. I promptly lathered my pelvis and junk liberally with it. At about the two week point I woke with an odd feeling, a pronounced tightness in my shorts. It was like having an old friend back. I grinned like an idiot for the rest of the morning.

Aside from those lurid details there was another thing I noticed, my mood was much more stable. I had worried that I would end up losing my temper with my son because upon reading any article on 'roid use they inevitably list all the negatives and never the benefits. One of those negatives being what is known to all of us as "roid rage". Well, the opposite effect took place. I was more relaxed and approachable. Where I usually lost my temper with Nick I was able to have a coherent discussion. This had always been one of the hallmarks of my depression. Not so much the down and blue feeling but a quick and unreasoning temper. It felt good to have a talk and not go back to my room and mentally go over what I just said and regretted.

At this point I'm pondering what part, exactly, did this lack of testosterone (aka "Low-T" in medical slang) play in my affliction. Could this be a hereditary thing going back in my family? Could my father have suffered from this? I vaguely remember a frank discussion with him long ago in which he confessed he was essentially impotent. My father had suffered from brutal bouts of depression and, unfortunately, died about the same time the new wonder drug class of seretonin reuptake inhibitors had hit the marketplace. Could his doctor have neglected, out of the endless testing that the VA Hospital had done, to give him a simple test to check his levels of testosterone?

At this point the best I can do is warn Nick that he could be susceptible to the same issue down the road. For myself I'll just cross my fingers and hope that my medical coverage will continue to pay for this treatment. Its not something that has a final goal, replacement therapy is ongoing and open ended. It's also quite expensive. Match that with the fact that its a non life threatening ailment and its a prime target for the insurance company bean counters to slash. I suppose the only thing I can do is to make the best of it. If that means putting my dick in every open orifice I can find until the RX runs dry then so be it. I've got lost time to make up for.

So if you see a guy running towards you with a fleshy roll of quarters in his hand just hear him out, he's got something to ask you.

Happy Valentines Kids

Kratos once again showing off why he is teh PIMPEZ!



I can't wait until Jack Thompson gets ahold of this.

CAT YELL!!

Absolutely hilarious. This guy reminded me of my father. "THATS WHY WE'RE ALWAYS SICK IN THIS FUCKIN' HOUSE" was his beef with the cats which he viewed as useless disease carrying rodents. We always had one though.