I gotta say, having finished Phase One of this ridiculous project and being well over a year-and-a-half into it, I am definitely battling against gaining weight back. Which, on one level this has never been specifically about weight, but it remains a good gross indicator. For the first six months it was a pretty steady progression, from nearly 310 lbs down to about 260 lbs. From there it became more difficult to keep the momentum, but I still got down to nearly 240 lbs. Then, as you can see from looking at the graph on the sidebar (which I keep there and public in order to keep myself honest and motivated), I started moving back in the other direction. Some of that, I tell myself, came from putting on muscle mass when I started adding push-ups to my routine. This past six months I have floated back and forth between a little over 240 and a little over 250. Don't get me wrong, I am proud of what I have accomplished, there is a non-trivial part of me that is vain enough to say I really want to break that 240 barrier. I am also vain enough to say that, for some reason, I really want to get down to a 38" waist (I started at 46 or even 48, and I am currently down to 40). So how am I going to get there?

Before I get to today's viewing, a bit of a story:  At some point in the evolution of the Time Treadmill I fell into a pattern of ending most of my above-the-fold paragraphs with "...so let's talk about that." (or some very close variation thereof. I don't know when I started doing that, I'd have to go back and look and that's more effort than I feel like expending, but in any case it pretty much became my default at some point. You can imagine, then, how chagrined I was last night when for some reason I watched an episode of the popular YouTube show Good Mythical Morning, and discovered that "let's talk about that" is their catch phrase -- to the point where now they have created a spinoff "show about the show" called (you guessed it) Let's Talk About That. Now, I have watched their videos before on occasion. I am not a subscriber, not a fan to the point of watching on any kind of regular basis, but I have definitely watched more than a few episodes. I honestly, truly, did not set out to poach their phrase. I don't even know whether I heard them say it before I started writing it, but it is possible. Which makes me a dirty, filthy plagiarist. So, um... why don't.. we... have a conversation... about the aforementioned subject...?  (Crap, that just ain't gonna work.) Nah, let's just hit the Time Treadmill and talk about Terry Nation unknowingly plagiarizing himself.

Wow, I got lazy in August. I mean, sure, I crossed the finish line and then took some well-deserved time off. But after a year-and-a-half of daily posts, I only worked out on 1/3 of the days in August. That changes in September. I am still working my way through the Tom Baker Season 12 BluRay set, and will be for another five days, and then I will start in on Torchwood. As for today, I had a unique pop-up-video style viewing. So let's talk about that.

Holy cow, I didn't intend to take another five days off. It just kinda happened. I don't even have any great excuse really. I mean, yesterday was a mess because a service technician was supposed to be here between 8am and noon so I didn't want to treadmill in the morning and be interrupted. I figured I would do it on my lunch break. Instead, the technician didn't show until mid-afternoon, and by then my day was shot. I had no time in the evening. So that's one weak excuse and four days with nothing but laziness to blame. I'm a complete fraud and failure. Ah, well.

On the other hand, I performed a structural redesign on the Time Treadmill and then watched the back half of The Ark in Space today, so let's talk about that.

Check it out, the Blu-Ray release of Tom Baker's first season was successful enough that the BBC just announced Doctor Who: Peter Davison Complete First Season coming this December on Blu-Ray. For those readers who happen to be my wife: no, I have not pre-ordered it yet, and yes it would make a lovely Christmas gift. The set includes remastered versions of all 26 episodes from Season 19, including the very excellent Castrovalva, the last true pure historical story Black Orchid, and of course Jonny Lee Miller's television acting debut in Kinda. It is a really solid season with only a few missteps (I'm looking at you, Four to Doomsday), and I am really looking forward to revisiting these episodes in a few months.

Speaking of revisiting new episodes, I watched the first half of the Blu-Ray version of The Ark in Space today and it was pretty awesome. Let's talk about that.

Usually when I title these posts, I pick my favorite line of dialog from the episode(s) I watched that day. At first I would always try to give the title some context in my post, but eventually I gave up on that as being more effort than it was worth. In any case, I had no trouble at all picking the title for this post, at the point where the Brig exasperatingly says, "Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets..." As it turns out, I like that line so much that I picked it as the title for when I watched this episode the first time around. Oops. So instead I went with my second favorite bit of dialog, from the end of the story when the Doctor decides he is tired of UNIT and wants to scamper off and see the universe again.

So let's talk about that.

After eighteen solid months of being on the treadmill dang near every day, it's not especially surprising that I am not all that eager to hop back on after basically two weeks off. But here I am. I decided that, rather than jump right into the next spinoff (Torchwood), I am going to take some time to enjoy the recently-released BluRay of Tom Baker's fantastic first season as the Fourth Doctor. So I started in on a re-watch of Robot. So let's talk about that.

When I started this ridiculous project on February 20th of last year, I deliberately didn't calculate how long it would take. I guessed a little over a year, and it turns out to be more like a year and a half. Today, though, I hit a huge milestone. Today I watched the 50th Anniversary special, meaning that as of this morning I have watched a full fifty years of Doctor Who in four hundred and ninety four days. Wow. With only one Eleventh Doctor story left, I only have the Twelfth Doctor era left to go through. I just double-checked my count, and I must have missed something the last time I worked it out. I need to finish by Monday, August 6th because I have a work trip that begins on the 7th and I want to have a clean break. But I just counted it out,and if I miss no days and watch one episode per day I won't finish until August 8th. That means I have to double up on at least two days. It looks like Under the Lake / Before the Flood would be a good double fallin ...

Good lord, what a long day. For the past eleven months I have been watching two 25-minute episodes per day, but this morning's viewing was the twentieth anniversary special that is effectively a movie with no breaking point. That meant that I spent a full 102 minutes on the treadmill, walking further than I ever have in a single day. Then I had a full day of work, and then a big birthday party. Aside from being Alexander Hamilton's birthday, today is my wife's birthday (and also my boss' birthday, and also a friend's birthday), plus my own birthday is on Monday. So we had a whole big thing planned for tonight. Unfortunately my wife has the flu and couldn't go out, but we filmed everyone singing to her. After that I had to go back to work to do a software release, and so now here I am at nearly midnight just finally writing this post.

So let's talk about the big twentieth anniversary special.

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.