This morning I hit a huge milestone - as of today I have taken more than one million steps on the treadmill for this project. I've got another big milestone coming later in the week, but I will save that for Thursday. Also, I have to say... in the past week or so I have noticed something else: for the first time I am looking in the mirror and seeking Skinny Me instead of Fat Me. Sure, I have more excess body fat to lose, but for the very first time in nearly two decades I do not see myself in the mirror and immediately compare my own gut to my father's tremendous beer gut. So that's pretty nice. Also, as one might suspect, I watched two more episodes of The Claws of Axos. 

Let's talk about that.

Ugh. Just, seriously... ugh. I am so tired. I barely got any sleep last night, my (adult autistic) son was up half the night, and if he wasn't keeping me awake then my dog was. Not surprisingly, my time spent on the treadmill was not awesome. I did watch the first two episodes of The Claws of Axos, but it was mostly at a slow stumble. This is going to be a very brief post.

The good news today is that the pendulum of my weight has swung back down the past two days. It seems like 270 has been a very difficult barrier for me to break through, which is not surprising since that is where I bottomed out the last time I tried to lost weight a few years ago. Hopefully now I have crashed through that wall and can keep making forward progress. At the moment I have a personal goal to have weighed in at least once below 260 before I leave for Last Vegas in two weeks, and to be consistently weighing in the 250's by the time I return home two weeks later. Here's hoping.

And yes, I did watch the end of The Mind of Evil today. I don't have much to say about it, but let's give it a spin.

Earlier today the sad news came that Deborah Watling, best know as the Second Doctor's companion Victoria, had passed away. She was diagnosed with lung cancer only six weeks ago. Her era of the show is one of the most impacted by the missing episodes, with only two of her stories available in a complete state. Those two,however, are among my very favorite of the Second Doctor's era -- in no small part due to her performance and they synergy she had with Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines. She was by all accounts a lovely person, and will be greatly missed. 

In much more pedestrian news, I watched two more episodes of The Mind of Evil today. Let's talk about that.

Today marks the five month anniversary of the day I started this ridiculous project. In that time I have walked 476.44 miles on the treadmill while taking 975,375 steps, watching 283 episodes and 55 stories of Doctor Who, and losing 40.02 pounds in weight. If I would have had this checkin a few days ago it would be more, but the last three days have been particularly frustrating on that point. I thought that I had finally smashed through the 270 lb barrier, but the losses last week were too much too fast and so for the past few days I have bounced back up above that line. On the one hand that is really, incredibly galling. On the other hand, this morning for the second day in a row I completed a full 55 minutes at 4.0 miles per hour at incline level six. Even a week ago that seemed impossible. As I noted last month when I wrote a similar checkin, I just want to feel good about myself physically and mentally. The simple truth is, I do. I have more stamina, I am sleeping better, I feel like my appetite is...  appropriate? Is that the right word? Like I don't crave junk food all the time, instead I crave more water and non-carbonated beverages and things like fresh fruit. Both professionally and creatively I am consistently more productive. 

And on top of that I am watching a ton of Doctor Who, including stories I have never seen before. It's really pretty awesome. Next weekend I am meeting Peter Capaldi, John Barrowman, and Karen Gillan, so how awesome is that? And yes, this morning I watched the first two episodes of The Mind of Evil.

Let's talk about that.

My single biggest embarrassment as a long-time Doctor Who fan is that, given that I have never really watched any of the Third Doctor's era prior to this project, that also means that by extension I have never watched any of the eight original Master stories featuring Roger Delgado. It is an appalling and glaring oversight, and one which finally begins to be rectified with today's viewing of Terror of the Autons. Is Delgado's Master everything I hoped it would be?

Well, let's talk about that.