1. Plateaus. I’ve been hovering about a pound or two on either side of 190 for a little over a month now. I’m not doing anything different than I was when I was steady losing. I’m just… stuck… in a spot where the numbers say I should be losing slowly but steadily. The obvious option – slash another hundred or two hundred calories out of the day isn’t appealing since I’m already coming in around 1800 a day. Losing even more time in the day to being out walking or on the damned exercise bike is equally unappealing. This process has already monopolized more time and effort than I really wanted to allocate for it. Fifteen months in, and there’s still not one bit of this effort that has proven to be a good time. 

2. The reward for good work. The reward for good work isn’t recognition, or accolades, or more money, it’s simply being assigned more work. In some cases, it’s being assigned more work that someone else in your work unit can’t or won’t do. Not only does that become a bit awkward when passing in the hall, but it’s also a bit agitating in that I don’t have the stomach to just let projects die on the vine because I don’t want to work on them. I wish I did. In the government there seems to be a whole cottage industry in being able to duck assignments you don’t want just by quietly refusing to do a damned thing with them. As I trundle into the last third of my career, I wonder if it isn’t time to take a page out of that book since there are no obvious consequences.

3. Buyer’s remorse. I bought a spanking new La-Z-Boy recliner a few months ago. It’s very comfortable. It looks good. I spent at least an hour sitting in it in the showroom before making the decision that it was the one I wanted sitting in the living room for the next 10-15 years. I thought I made a solid decision. Here’s the thing… I don’t like it as much as the recliner that it replaced. I don’t enjoy the fact that it’s a rocker as much as I thought I would. Because it’s a rocker, it also comes on a raised platform, and this is where my displeasure was unexpected and something I couldn’t have reasonably accounted for in the store. I’ve always kept a dog bed on the right-hand side of wherever I ended up sitting in every living room I’ve ever had. While I watched TV or read in the evening, I’d casually dispense ear scratches or pets. Because of the raised platform configuration of this chair, I can’t sit there and pet the dog while he’s laying down without throwing myself into some oddly convoluted listing position. So, I’ve done the only reasonable thing and pulled the old recliner out of mothballs and pressed it back into service while relegating the fancy new La-Z-Boy to the sunroom/office as a comfortable place to sit during the duty day.