So, I just finished installing a new hardwood floor in our guest room. This, after a 2pm performance of my show (the fifth performance in the last four days). My sister is arriving from Seattle on Tuesday, and I am racing to get the room ready for her. Tomorrow I will get the baseboard trim done and reassemble the room, so I think we are golden.I didn't get the closet done, but that can wait for another day. I also plan on installing a new floor in the master bedroom, but that ain't happening until after Christmas. Aside from that, I also hit the treadmill this morning and watched two more episodes of Doctor Who. You'll never guess which character annoyed me completely.

So let's talk about that.

In lieu of saying something pithy or relevant today, I think Cyanide and Happiness has summed up my weight loss journey pretty well with this recent short:

Oh, I also started watching a new Doctor Who story today, so let's talk about that.

In no particular order, today:  I set a new record low for my weight, just below 245 lbs, so my target of getting below 240 before my birthday next month seems do-able; the show I am in is now sold out for the remainder of its run, with seven performances remaining; I am now on vacation until the second of January, and I was able to clear out my entire bug list  before going, with one exception, so I feel pretty darn good about that (especially since we did a really cool software release last night, with some work of which I am very proud); and, oh yeah, I finished watching the first Fifth Doctor story.

So let's talk about that.

Look, here's the deal:  Today has been a long day of work, plus a theatrical performance, plus a software release, and now it's almost midnight and I want to go to bed. But I'll write this up all quick-like first.

So let's talk about the very first Fifth Doctor episodes.

Well here it is, the end of the Fourth Doctor era. It's weird, in that in some ways I feel like I have been watching Tom Baker stories forever (every day for three months), but in other ways it feels like it came and went so quickly. I'm a little bummed that the new restoration of Shada hasn't been released yet in the US, I would have liked to include that in my viewing. I will have to add it to my list of associated things to watch once I finish the main series, along with K9 and Company and a few others. After 92 days, 41 stories, 335 miles, and 625,000 steps, I am done with the Fourth Doctor. 

So let's talk about his final goodbye.

As I am sure you readily remember, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the state of entropy in any isolated system (such as the Universe) will always increase over time.So, for example, left to its own devices your home will always get more messy and it will always take more effort to clean it up than it took to mess it up in the first place. Currently my own desktop is a monument to the Second Law, although I do intend to remedy that situation in the near future. I can honestly state that no chemistry of physics teacher taught me about thermodynamics; no, I learned about it from Doctor Who all the way back in 1981 and it has stuck with me ever since. This proves that the show lives up to its remit to be an educational program as well as an entertaining one.

Let's talk about that.

I had another strong day on the treadmill, and another good weight checkin. I also had a very long day of work plus a performance in the evening, so I am exhausted. The only thing I want to note is that I have a couple of big milestones coming up. In two more days I finish the Fourth Doctor. In about a week I will hit 1,000 miles cumulatively walked. In about two weeks I will hit 2,000,000 cumulative steps. Yes, I might actually hit that last one on Christmas day. Ho, ho. ho!

I also finished the first story of this Master trilogy, so let's talk about that.

Biggest thing first: This morning I broke the 60 lb barrier, I am now weigh more than sixty pounds less than I did when I started this project last February. Back in September and October it seemed like I had reached kind of a brick wall, hovering around 260 lbs with no real forward progress, and I had made my peace with the idea that that was my limit. Then in the last week of October the dam broke and I started making progress again. That was when I set a personal stretch goal to weigh in at under 250 at least once before Christmas. I hit that goal the day after Thanksgiving. With this morning's weigh-in at 246 lbs I have completely shattered that goal. So now my new stretch goal is to weigh in at under 240 lbs before my next birthday on January 15th. What is my end point? I have no idea. As I said when I began, my real goal is just to feel better and more healthy, and I have certainly reached that goal. I don't expect to ever see the other side of 200, and I don't know that I would really want to. But holy cow, this project has already been far more successful than I ever imagined it would be, and I still have nine or ten more Doctors to go (depending on how you count).

In other news, I started the next-to-last Fourth Doctor story today. Let's talk about that.

I actually got to sleep in a bit today, which was nice. Then I hit the treadmill for an hour, go cleaned up, and went and did a performance of my show. It was a special one for me, a Sensory Friendly performance specifically for autistic persons and their caregivers, and my son was in the audience. It was pretty dang cool. Now I"ve got about thirty minutes before I need to go back to do the evening show.

So that gives me enough time to talk about today's viewing.

I gotta tell ya, these days just keep catching up to me in the worst way. It's after midnight, and I am just finally sitting down to write this. The good news is, my moving average is back below 250 as expected, and is withing six hundredths of a pound of my record low. Tomorrow is going to be a brutal (but rewarding) day. I have two performances of my show, and the first one is a Sensory Friendly show, to which my autistic son is attending. It will be the first feature-length theatrical production that he has ever gone to, and the first time he will ever see me performing on stage.Not that I have any kind of a major role, I am just one of the ensemble players doing six different parts over the course of the show, but it has been a great experience and I am thrilled to have my son coming to see me. On the downside, it's hard enough to squeeze in an hour on the treadmill along with my full time job plus performances. Getting this blog post done is tough to fit in. But here I am.

So let's talk about today's viewing.