Another Saturday Morning at the Funny Farm…

Rescued another little old lady.

It’s not 8 a.m., and I’ve walked Cassie about half a mile, run a tenth of a mile (which is not very far), rescued the old gal, bicycled about two miles, and jumped in the pool. Pretty quick, it’s off to the Costco to buy a pair of jeans that fit.

Yes. By the light of dawn I came across another elderly damsel in distress, trying to make her way along Feeder Street. She could barely stand on one leg and was trying to hold herself up against a wall. Looked to me like she’d had a mild (I hope) stroke.

Stopped and asked if she needed help; she said she was in a bad way but lived right around the corner. I said I’d get my car and drive her, so ran the dog back to the house and picked up the chariot. Asked her if this had ever happened to her before; she said no. I said, “Maybe we should go to the ER instead of to your house.” She said no, her son was at home.

When I got her the two hundred feet to her house, she revealed that her son was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him up. 🙄 I suggested maybe she’d like me to go in and roust him out. She, understandably, wasn’t anxious to have a stranger in her house, to say nothing of one that would create a little drama.

She said she’ll be 80 next weekend. Hope she makes it…still kickin’.

The old gals around here are dropping like proverbial flies. Must be the climate change.

Down to 136.7 pounds this morning! That is 1.7 pounds short of CardioDoc’s announced goal. In theory.

Whereas CardioDoc thinks 135 is a healthy weight for an old bat of my build, I’m targeting 130, for a couple of reasons. Main reason is that these bright and shiny weigh-ins occur the minute I roll out of the sack in the morning. By early afternoon, the weight has gone up a couple of pounds. So, IMHO, the real weight is two or three pounds higher than the morale-boosting dawn figure.

And also, you know and I know that shortly after I arrive at the goal weight, I’m gonna backslide. So I figure that under the best of circumstances, an ego-stroking 130 pounds at the crack of dawn will mean the real figure hovers around 132 to 134. And if I decide to scarf down a pizza with a couple of beers, there’ll be some wiggle room in the calculations.

At any rate, all my pants and shorts are literally falling off me. Even the stretchy jeans look like sacks held up with a belt. So I need to go over to the Costco and buy a couple pair of blue jeans in a smaller size.

My friend Harriet, who lost her excess weight in the wake of colon cancer surgery from which she has recovered and never gained it back, urges me to donate all the “fat clothes.” Her theory is that if you have nothing in the house that you can fit into, you’ll be forced to avoid gaining the weight back.

However, I’ve found that not to be true. After I lost a comparable amount of weight on the Atkins diet — this was about eight or nine years ago — I got rid of all my size 12 Costco jeans. And that was fine for about 18 months, until I decided I simply had to have some pasta!

Pasta is my comfort food. And I believe it needs to be ingested with beer. Dark beer. Guinness. Young’s Double Chocolate. That sort of thing…

Well. Within minutes, of course, I gained all the weight back and didn’t care because I’d missed my pasta so much!!! I had to go out and buy another wardrobe of jeans, the garment of choice around here.

That was fine when I had a job. But now there’s just no way I can afford to buy a whole closetful of jeans. Two whole closetsful: I’ll need several pairs now, and if I throw out the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection and then fatten up again, I’ll need several new pairs of 12s.

So. My plan is to wash all the baggy jeans, fold them up, and stash them in the garage. Then if this whole project turns into a Fail after a year or two, I’ll at least still have some pants that fit.

In another 15 minutes it’s off to the Costco in Paradise Valley, which a) is upscale enough to have a better choice of loot (and their wine selection is better — got one of the worst bottles of wine ever from the Safeway yesterday…it’s not even good enough to cook with!), and b) is close to a Sprouts, a Whole Foods, and a Trader Joe’s, allowing me to pick up my weekly dose of fresh produce and absurdly coddled meats in the same shopping trip.

Happy Saturday!