Does this look like malaria to you..yellow fever maybe?

Weight: 200.4
Delta M: -2.6
Mileage: Up for debate*
September Mileage: 85

The weather was too good to let everybody sit at home this afternoon, so after I got home from work we packed up the kids and headed to a forest preserve a few towns over. It’s small, and hardly used, and has a nice path for small family hikes. We got about 50 yards into the woods before the swarms of mosquitoes massed and advanced. We told Son#1 to save himself and did our best to keep them from flying off with Son#2. When we got home it was getting close to dark so I did some intervals on the trainer.

As I mentioned before, I was in the Navy and did a stint on a submarine. It’s not near as glamorous as one might think, in fact, it was kind of boring. After seventy days into a 100 day patrol you get a little cranky. Everybody is tired of each other and desperate for entertainment and that’s where the calendar comes into play. It’s kind of like those construction paper chains you use to make in grade school counting down the days to Christmas, except a little more ritualized.

I was on a Trident class submarine. We had 24 missile tubes, so 24 days out, we entered Tube Days*. We had a picture of a hot chick in a bikini and a cold bottle of beer we taped to tube 24, the next day we moved it to tube 23 and so on.

Nine days out, we hit Single Digit Midget days. This usually coincided with the end of hate week, which usually started around tube day 20, but that could vary depending on training schedules and tests and all that stuff. You would ask somebody to pass the salt, and being so sick of your nagging ass, they would simply stick a fork in your eye and twist. You just had to try your best not to take it personally, because chances are you’d be doing the same to somebody else at breakfast tomorrow. It can be tricky though, monocular vision can mess with your depth perception.

Anyway, after Single Digit Midget Days, 6 days out, came the Holiest of Holies, No Mores. There will be no more Tuesdays…no more Mondays…you get the idea. This can be pursued and drilled down almost infinitely, no more boat hot dogs, no more powdered eggs made with powdered milk, no more navy showers but hopefully that wasn’t set more than 3 days out at the most.

BOCOD was usually set somewhere in No Mores, but that’s about as detailed as I’m gonna get on that one. If you know somebody in the Navy ask them, I don’t think most of you are set for that level of depravity yet, and some may even like me still, and I don’t want to kill that. I’m a family man now, those days are behind me.

The only reason I bring all this up, is that tomorrow, or Sunday at the latest, I hope to enter No Mores. No more 200’s for me. It has taken me longer to lose the weight this time than it did last time, but I am more concerned about keeping it off over the winter than I am about how fast I am losing it. Unless it involves steroids, a lot of weight lifting, a personal trainer, and a lucrative contract with WWF, I never want to see 200 again. I don’t care if I have to chop off a limb.

*I did walk today, and then rode the trainer, but I have a hard time calling that "miles".