My weight loss since 4/27 is now -31.8 pounds. That puts me at 183 pounds, and a BMI of 24.8. which is in the range of normal weight. I still want to get down to 170-175. And more than that, I need to exercise more, tone more, and come up with a more sustainable plan for keeping the weight off, because I can’t keep eating at Subway every day forever.

I did, however, lift my ban on Quizno’s recently, and I ate there once in Denver. (The ban had to do with an incident in 2005 where I got food poisoning from their location in St. Marks, which is now closed.) Quizno sandwiches are marginally better, or taste more substantial, but I think it’s just the change in bread. They are all (or mostly) less healthy, or at least contain more calories/fat compared to subway, but within a reasonable amount. The one thing I like there is they have this Sobe diet grapefruit-berry-something or other drink that is absolutely incredible, and tastes like it would be filled with sugar, but has none.

Off topic: you can now download Air in the Paragraph Line #12 for free from paragraphline.com. Get it from the archives page st http://paragraphline.com/zine/archives.html. And if you didn’t hear about this previously, you need to mosey on over to http://paragraphline.com/blog/ and/or add that to your links or RSS thingy to get the latest news.

I was going to go off on another tangent, but the morning is quickly slipping away, and I have too much to do today…

Paragraph Line Books has a blog now! It’s at paragraphline.com/blog. The hope is to publish news items there, and then it’s easier to put them in other places with RSS. Right now, on the zine page, I have this hand-edited mess that takes forever to edit. This is much easier, and I can also get other people to guest-blog an entry, like all of the authors in the zine or books. So it should be fun – adjust your bookmarks accordingly, or for more fun, get some kind of RSS client and drop in the feed address. (I wish every single thing in the world had an RSS feed. So like, if I was sitting here and wondering what the tire pressure in my car was, I could go to a feed and find updates.)

I am back in town, by the way. Very busy, many things to do. TGIF but it will be a long Friday.

Baseball news – we are going to a Brewers/Dodgers game when Sarah’s sister is in town. The tickets just showed up yesterday – the most expensive ones I could afford, and $60 seats will be 20% shittier than $21 seats in Coors Field. But the Brewers seem to be bouncing back (8 wins straight since the break), and I’m not sure what’s happening with the Dodgers. They haven’t pulled the trigger on a lot of high-profile trades, and the rumor is that the front office is pissed about attendance this year and doesn’t want to spend a dime on anything else. But aside from Arizona, they are the only other contender in the NL West (unless the Rockies win the next 21 in a row again) and are only a game back. So it could get really good or really ugly.

I am also trying to get to an Angels game, and I might try to catch the Mariners down in Anaheim next month. Seattle is an incredible 24 games back from the Angels at 38-63. If it weren’t for San Diego’s 38-65 record, they would be dead last in the majors. But I really want to see an Angels game, an even better if it’s on a run for to the playoffs. And I never saw the Mariners the whole time I was in Seattle. I never saw them play in the Kingdome either, even though the view out of my window was the Kingdome, and now it’s gone. I don’t care about the NBA, but now the Seattle Supersonics are the Oklahoma Sonics, which is also a mind-blower.

Sarah’s going to be in Seattle that week, and we talked about making it another trip for me, but I am not sure about it. I haven’t been back to Seattle since I left in 1999, and I think I would get that weird nostalgia mindfuck I had in Denver this week, but times four. I’m not even sure who’s still in Seattle, or what’s in Seattle. I’d like to make the trip, but maybe not this year. I’d also like to time the trip so I could see a game at Safeco Field, before they tear that down and move the Mariners to Vancouver or Kentucky or whatever.

Also my internet connection has been fucked. Maybe 1 out of 9 connections stalls and times out, but then a second later it works. It’s annoying. Between this and all of the cable TV problems, moving to my ranch and living in a teepee is sounding more and more enticing.

Speaking of cable snafus, I’ve gotta go to Fry’s and spend money I shouldn’t need to spend on some cables and crap to get our new cable box to play nice with our DVD player. Fucking savages.

I’ve been meaning to update for a while, but everything other than my stuff has taken over lately. Hopefully, I will just work on my book and catch up today. I also get to drive to Torrance today, which sounds like a pain in the ass, and I guess it is, but I very rarely drive my car these days. Most days, I either eat lunch and dinner from the fridge, or walk, mostly to Subway, but there’s another sandwich shop (Hogan’s Heroes), that I hit when I can’t do the Jared thing anymore. (Oddly enough, my favorite sub is now the Veggie Max. I still love the BMT, but my old holdout, a 6-inch BMT with cheese, bacon, and mayo, is about a weeks’ worth of fat.) Anyway, I don’t drive my car that much, and I do love driving my car, so it’s always good to take a run down PCH, even at $4.45 a gallon.

My car still reminds me a lot of Denver, and I have enough distance from Denver that I have odd nostalgia about it. I guess this came up, because last night I was listening to BT’s This Binary Universe, which is a very ethereal and emotional album, and deeply reminds me of the end of summer/start of fall last year. It’s the kind of album that will always remind me of that point in my life, of that year, and for whatever reason, when it came up in shuffle last night, it deeply hit me. I don’t want to live in Denver, and I don’t want to be in last year anymore, and I realize it’s stupid to look back and say “hey, remember 12 months ago?” but maybe not being there makes it more nostalgic to think of there again, if that makes any sense. And in a strange irony, I have to go to Denver next week. But I won’t be in our apartment, and I won’t have the Yaris there, and Sarah won’t be there, and I will spend all of my time in a hotel down in Lone Tree, except for one brief outing to go see the Rockies lose to the Dodgers.

The gas book – it goes. It’s 150 pages, but I have a lot of holes to fill. I’m starting to worry about all of the post-writing things, like the fact that I don’t have a cover, and don’t know how I will sell it. I also need a web site, and a way to convince people that I’m somehow an authority on this stuff.

I am doing a lot with Paragraph Line Books, too. I’m in the process of getting set up to print books directly with Ingram, and bypass the lulu.com process, hopefully at a savings. I’m also moving paragraphline.com to dreamhost, and that will let me add some new features. I’m also supposedly working on #13 of the zine, and I’m supposed to be writing my story for it, but I haven’t had time to even look at it. Maybe later today.

As of Sunday, I have lost 28.6 pounds in 12 weeks. That puts me at 186.2. Using a BMI calculator (which may or may not be bullshit), 185 and above is overweight, starting at 184 is the normal range. WW says my ideal range is 147-177. I think getting to 175 would be reasonable, and 170 would be work, but I have no idea how I could maintain below 170, let along 147.

Okay, work.

I’m back from SF – been back since Friday. It was a pretty easy trip back, mostly because we both carried on our luggage, which is getting harder and harder to do. The last two times I’ve flown, I got the magic TSA “kilroy was here” slip in my luggage. I think I have had three or four of those now; I should collect them and coat the outside of a suitcase with them. Or maybe put one on cafepress and make a t-shirt. (Actually, I would LOVE to, before my next Dodgers game, make a shirt that’s a parody of the old “Raid Kills Bugs Dead” logo, but with “Penny Kills Umps Dead” and a sketch of an umpire getting hit in the face with a ball.)

As of Sunday, I have lost 10% of my body weight. I’ve gone from 214.8 to 192.6 since 4/27. My eventual goal is somewhere between 170 and 175, which maybe I will hit by fall. I think the deal with Weight Watchers is when you meet your goal, you don’t have to pay anymore and can come for free, but you start paying again if you go above. It would be nice to lose another 20 pounds in another 10 weeks, but I know that won’t happen. And I have not been working out at all, aside from walking, so I will need to get on the case there. Liggett mentioned rowing machines on LJ, which I don’t have in my gym. But, I live a few blocks from the largest body of the water on the planet, which makes me wonder if I could find a place in the marina to rent a canoe or kayak on a regular basis for cheap, and figure that shit out. I wanted to do this in Denver when I was laid up with a bum ankle, but Denver essentially has no water, except for those stupid fake lake fountains they put in front of planned communities and malls.

Bart Everson has been keeping paper journals since around the 18th century, but all of them were underwater after Katrina. He was able to carefully dry them out and scan them, and now he has put a batch on lulu.com for free download or purchase. Check it out at http://www.lulu.com/content/2747572. I wish I could scan in my old journals, except they only go back to about 1993 with some fits and bursts going back to early high school. But my handwriting is completely unreadable, and I tend to put the things I don’t want in public on the paper version. I am itching to get another book out on lulu. My last non-zine book was The Necrokonicon, and that was mid-2006.

I am writing a new book, and it is about how to get better fuel economy and drive cheaper. I know that’s all the rage right now, which is why I am trying to get this book done and on Lulu as fast as possible. I might need a couple of you to give this thing a read before I unleash it, so drop me a line if you’re interested. I think my only caveat is that reviewers have to pinky-swear that they’ll tell all of their friends and try to get someone else to buy a copy, because I risk the situation that the three people who would buy one are the three people I gave a free copy.

I accidentally left my iPod in my car and left it playing on shuffle, so a shitload of songs got added to my last.fm thing. It sort of freaked me out, because I was like “how was I listening to GTR eight hours ago?”