Over the summer I went to visit my sister and family in the Pacific Northwest. When I arrived back in southern california, I started on "The South Beach Diet" - around the end of August. By the beginning of November I have lost about twenty pounds. My goal is to have lost fifty pounds by next summer.

I went to Kaiser in July for my annual physical. My doctor says I have high blood pressure. I forget what the numbers were exactly, but it's not real severe. He put me on some pills, but told me "if you can loose 20 pounds I can almost guarantee that you won't need to take these pills".

So I thought about that for a few weeks, and then I decided to try to loose some weight. Since I quit smoking about five years ago I bet I have gained about thirty pounds. I knew when I quit smoking I would probably gain some weight.

My cousin and his wife went on the Atkins diet last year and they both did pretty well and are now in maintenance mode. My sister called me the other day and told me about "The South Beach Diet" and it sounded really great to me. I think I have heard the doctor who invented the diet speaking on the radio once. I bought the book last week and have been on the diet now for one week.

The diet is divided into phases - in phase 1 you cut out all carbs, sugar and fruits from your diet. You stay with that for two weeks to rid your body of the cravings for bad carbs and sugars, etc. Then you go into phase 2 and stay with that until you meet your weight goal. Phase 2 is a more liberal version of phase 1. After you meet your weight goal you go into phase 3 which I haven't even read about yet. I have lost a little more than ten pounds on the diet so far. Actually I went from 285 lbs down to 271.

I flew up to seattle at the end of june to see my sister and her husband. My uncle and aunt were having their 60th wedding anniversary. Unfortunately my uncle had some problems with his heart and had to go in for a "tune up". He had a quintuple bypass a few years ago and sometimes needs to have a valve job.

I went to have my eyes examined today. The eye doctor said that my left eye is actually gaining instead of loosing power. I was getting ready to find out about changing the lenses in my long distance glasses. The lenses are about two years old now, and ready to be replaced.

I brought up the subject of contact lenses. For years I was under the impression I was not suited for contact lenses, because I have astigmatism. Luckily my eye doctor said I can wear the new extended wear contact lenses. He did some measurements, etc and fitted me with a pair this afternoon. I wore them for about three hours. Over the next week, I will keep wearing them for two hours longer every day. I am to return in seven days for a checkup and by then I will be wearing the lenses full time.

I took my Suzuki Volusia in for the 11,000 mile service before the Fourth of July holiday. The service dept. at Saugus Suzuki was quite busy over the holiday weekend and they weren't able to get to my bike until today. I should have just kept the bike for the holiday weekend and brought it in today. The bike is running like a top. She never given me one bit of trouble from the day I brought her home.

I signed up at one of the coolest sports gyms in Santa Clarita, California Here are some specs on the club:

http://www.spectrumclubs.com/cali/clubs/valencia.html

I have never worked out at a sports club before ? this is my first time. My brother used to belong to a really cool club down in west Hollywood called ?The Sports Connection?.

The spectrum club is right across the street from my office, so it?s very convenient for me. I haven?t really found my ideal time to go every day... Lately I have been starting to work at about 7:00 AM so doing a workout before work and getting in to the office by 7:00 a.m. Means I have to wake up before the roosters crow! However, the gal who signed me up at the club suggested that a morning workout is the best for our bodies, because you get your body humming and then you feel great the rest of the day.

Everybody who signs up at the spectrum club gets three hour long sessions with a trainer. For my first session I think I yakked too much with the lady trainer and she didn?t really get to fill out all my paperwork LOL you know me. For the second session, she finished asking all the questions about my body, then she got me up on the treadmill and ran me ragged for about ten minutes to get my heart rate up to 150 BPM. That was it for the second session.

For the third session she had prepared a list of things for me to do at the club and showed me how to use a few of the machines. There are so many different machines to use. They?re all first class pieces of equipment too.

The locker room is very luxurious. There are always two attendants in the locker room stocking new towels and keeping the place in order. They keep the locker room looking really nice. There are plenty of lockers so the locker room is never very crowded. In front of these big tall vanity mirrors they have these pump machines that dispense deodorant and body moisturizing lotion and a little box with cotton swabs for your ears. In each shower are three pump bottles mounted on the shower wall ? shampoo, conditioner and liquid soap ? each scented really nicely. The shower stalls are all lined with ceramic tiles and are spacious.

Off to one side is a steam room and next to that is a dry sauna. I have been in dry saunas before, but I have never been in a real steam room before, so that has been an experience. You walk in and it?s alll steamy and hot. Every few minutes some kind of machine shoots steam into the room. It?s probably all thermostatically controlled to keep the room a certain temp. Tonight it got so hot in that room ? I felt like my hands were going to get burnt! Wow, it?s so relaxing. Now I know why everybody always brags about steam rooms!

I am sooo out of shape! My arms are so skinny ? they must be the size of Popeye?s girlfriends arms. My arms ache all the time now from all the workouts on the rowing machines, chin up machines, etc! Kristin ? the gal who worked with me for the three sessions told me something I had never heard before. She said that muscles bounce back really fast when you start exercising them as if they are saying ?thank you for exercising us!?

I won a raffle at work a few weeks ago. The prize was the use of a Toyota RAV-4 EV supplied by Southern California Edison. Here are some pictures I took of the vehicle yesterday:

http://www.pbase.com/harrymyhre/toyota_rav4ev

The pictures were taken at the Sylmar Metrolink Train Station. Many Metrolink Stations have EV charging stations. Unfortunately, I discovered the charging station at the Sylmar station is defective.

How does the RAV4 drive? The first thing I noticed about the vehicle is the weight. Acceleration is adequate for around town driving, but you more than likely won't break any speed limits. The speedometer reads no higher than 80 MPH.

I had no problem keeping up with traffic around town on city streets this afternoon. My boss and I then got on The Golden State Freeway and headed down to the Sylmar Metrolink Station. Handling on the freeway is fine - again; acceleration is "majestic". I had no problem ascending Newhall Pass down into the San Fernando Valley. I think Newhall pass is about 1,500 ft. elevation.

We messed around with the charging station for half an hour. The station kept coming up with an "E2" error message and would then shut down. So I doubt the batteries ever got much of a charge.

Last night I found a charging station closer to home. Good thing, because max mileage for the RAV4-EV is about eighty miles.

I can see lots of people in my town of Santa Clarita, California making use of a vehicle like a RAV4-EV - provided they're going to stay within the Santa Clarita Valley where the greatest one way distance we usually travel is around eight miles. The problem is there aren't enough charging stations... And since no new battery only powered cars are being sold in California I wonder what will happen to the charging stations? Will be interesting to see if any new mfgrs enter the market with battery powered cars now that Sparrow is no more, Think never even got out of the starting gates, and the GM EV1 is history, etc.


--- Saturday morning addendum ----

I went over to the charging station close to home this morning. The parking structure where the charging station is was closed. I asked one of the security people at the shopping center if they could open up the parking structure so I could charge my vehicle. The security guy took about ten seconds to process this request. One of the security folks told me the other day they don't see a lot of vehicles utilizing the charging station.

Without saying a word, the security guy walked over and unlocked the chain that blocked access to the parking structure. "FINALLY!" , I thought. I got in the RAV4-EV and parked in the charging spot. Got out of the vehicle, pulled the plug from the charging machine - lo and behold, Murphy was standing over my shoulder and the goll darned plus was one of the large paddles , I think designed for the GM-EV1.

So that's it for my experience with the RAV4-ev this weekend. Monday morning the tow truck driver will come by and take it back to Southern California Edison.

Riding the Xcaliber e-scooter to work almost every day now. I usually ride my motorcycle on Wednesday and ride the e-scooter the other days. The other day at work we had a "commuter expo" which was all about alternative ways to get to work. out in the courtyard, Valley Cycles had some e-scooters for people to try out.

I am now using Time Warner for my cable television and cable modem internet access, etc. So far so good, the digital t.v. is great - a world of difference from what I had before. The cable modem for me is the same as always which is good - no problems, no glitches. The only thing different is I am using Earthlink now as my I.S.P.... Last time I used Earthlink I swore I would never use them again. I hope they're better by now - that was a long time ago.

This morning I tried my route to work on my new Xcaliber 600 battery powered scooter.

First I go for about a mile through Stevenson Ranch (where I live) with one gentle uphill run of about 1/4 mile, then a gentle downhill run of about 3/4 mile, then a stepper downhill run of about 1/2 mile down MacBean Parkway, then it's pretty flat for about another 1/2 mile down Tournament Road.

Then I get to this canyon area called "The Summit Park". There are three ways down the canyon that leads to work. Each way starts off with an extremely steep run - so steep that it's probably unsafe to ride a bicycle... Unless you are fearless or related to Evil Knievel...

So I walk that part. Then there's a roller coaster run of about a mile down through the canyon. The brakes on the Xcaliber are not the greatest... They're drum brakes and basically they're meant for stopping on the flat at speeds of about 10 MPH (IMHO).

Then my route empties into a big park - all flat the rest of the way to work - about a mile.

The route I take HOME is different. I ride on what are known locally as "paseos" (spanish for sidewalk I believe) a.k.a. "bike paths". The paseo system wanders through the city of Santa Clarita. When you're on the paseos you never have to deal with car traffic, so they're *perfect* for e-scooters.

The route home is about three or four miles. It's a steady gentle uphill run up through the santa clarita valley. Then I get to a steep hill on MacBean Parkway and there's no way my e-scoot would pull me up that hill :-) To give you an idea, when I used to ride my old suzuki GZ-250cc single cylinder motorcycle up this hill I always had to downshift into 4th gear.

Anyway - on my loop this morning, the batteries totally ran out of juice *just* as I got to the bottom of that steep hill. No big problem, because I knew I was going to have to walk it anyway.

A middle eastern fellow out at Santa Monica beach stopped me today. He asked me "how long have you owned this?" (my new e-scoot) and I told him "less than a week!" His son is interested in powered scoots - probably leaning toward the gas powered models... I played up the benefits of the electric scoots - quiet, easy to throw into the back of a car, socially acceptable, etc.

I had a great ride out there at Santa Monica today. Bike paths were built out there back about (guessing) twenty years ago during the roller skating revival years - before the advent of inline skates. When the bike paths were first installed there was a big controversy about who had the right to use them. Roller skaters were sometimes chased off the paths...

Seems like everybody is welcome now - joggers, walkers, bicyclists, roller skaters. The weather was beautiful today - sunny, warm (70 degrees) and a slight breeze. I rode north up to where the bike path changes to "pedestrians only" , turned around and road back down to Santa Monica pier and then back to where one of the bridges cross Pacific Coast highway. When I got up to the palisades above PCH the battery in my scoot went kaput- no problem, I was about two blocks from my car.

Was a real unique experience riding out at the beach. I have ridden ten speed bikes, I own a motorcycle, a car - this is a *totally* unique and relaxing experience.

Here in Santa Clarita it's almost spring. We're having a bit of cool weather right now in mid-april but in a few days it should warm up nicely.

I sold my kawasaki concours motorcycle over the weekend. I still have my Suzuki intruder Volusia motorcycle. Two bikes in my garage was making things a bit crowded and besides - one can only ride one bike at a time.

Lately I have been studying zero emission vehicles (i.e. battery powered vehicles). I've always been interested in them, I suppose because my father was an electrical engineer.

While I was selling my Kawasaki, I tried out one of those battery powered electric scooters. The folks at the Santa Clarita Auto Fair had one at their College of the Canyons parking lot. I tried it around the parking lot - however the model I was trying was pretty underpowered.

I did some research on the web and found a larger scooter made by H.Y.C. company from Taiwan. The model name is Xcaliber 600. Check it out! It has an 600 watt motor.

I'll post more about it when it arrives.

Harry

I'm probably crazy for wanting to do that but it's like - ever since I was 18 years old I have liked LITTLE bikes - mini-bikes, etc. I've had the Suzuki for almost three years now - enjoyed it a lot - has plenty of power for me. I've had the Concours for about six months now. Also - plenty of power, took me all over california last fall.

And power is nice, but (see if this makes sense) I have learned about myself - I prefer "kit" over "power". I'd rather have a *super* cool Vespa P200 that has been restored beautifully than a big old powerful bike. Why? Everybody has those big powerful cruisers. I like the idea of having something DIFFERENT.

I'm sure bush and his aides gave the invasion of Iraq long and hard thought. This wasn't they decide on a whim...

And if you remember your history, Neville Chamberlain flew to Berlin (?) and Hitler PROMISED he wouldn't expand his military forces, etc. Chamberlain flew back to England waving the piece of paper that Hitler had signed. A few days later he could have used that piece of paper to wipe his ass because hitler had invaded Poland.

But no, people forgot about that - "Saddam just needs more time" - well time ran out for him. They gave him twelve years to clean up his act and he's still doing dirty deeds.

Forget Saddam - he's dead meat already - but I think the big problem is what do we do after Saddam is gone? Will the Iraqui's hate our guts? Or will they welcome us? Nobody knows for sure about that....

The closer one gets to the grave, the greater the demand for escape mechanisms like scooters, skiing and Viagra.

Spring is here in Southern California. The days are growing noticeably longer. This weekend we start daylight savings time. The weather is great here now. T-shirts, shorts and sandals time is fast approaching and everybody is happy about that.

This is also the best motorcycle riding time of year in southern california (fall is good too). No warm clothing is required and the temps are not uncomfortably hot.

God bless the troops in the middle east putting their lives in danger so that the world may be a peaceful place. Give them the wisdom to make the right decisions in the most difficult time of their lives. The entire world looks forward to the day when peace will return.

My friend Alex was involved in a serious motorcycle accident back in the 1980's. He didn't ride for like twenty years. Then I bought a motorcycle about two years ago. I hadn't ridden for around thirty years. Alex and his wife come over and right away he's like "where's the new bike man?" We go down to the garage to check it out. Alex asks me "can I take it for a spin?? Just around your complex." (I live in a condo complex with private roadways.

Alex takes off grinnin' from ear to ear. Two months later he bought a brand new Harley-Davidson Dyna Sport and he's havin' the time of his life ridin' it all over Southern California.

When I was a young boy I lived in seattle, washington. It never really gets very cold in western washington. And we lived near Lake Washington which keeps the temps a little above others in western washington.

So in winter when it got down close to freezing temperatures, all the boys who lived on my block looked forward with GREAT anticipation to the night
when we would go to sleep and wake up and find either SNOW or ICE on the ground.

One night it did freeze over night. That morning my buddies from school came over to my house and pounded on the door to tell me the good news. I woke up, put on my clothes and went RUNNING outside without eating breakfast (unusual for me even today!). Remember - freezing temps are RARE around Lake Washington, so we wanted to take advantage of that ice!

When we got down to the sidewalk in front of my house, we all found a SPLENDID patch of ice! Throughout the year, a slow trickling underground stream ran through my father's property out onto the sidewalk. Overnight,
just enough water had frozen on the sidewalk to make a nice sliding area.

So I walked up the street about fifty feet and started runnin'
When I got to the ice I started a skid..... I slid for about two feet and *WHHHHOOOOOOPPPPP* I went flyin' on my keester.

Ever see that movie "Home Alone" where the guy slips on the ice? That was me. I hit the sidewalk so hard I separated my collar bone. Luckily I was young and I bounced back easily.

Here in santa clarita, we had rain off and on this weekend. We are now at fourteen inches of rain for the season, which is two inches above normal for this time of year. There won't be many more rains so I tried to enjoy the rain while it lasted. The "Endless Summer" goes on for a long time here in Southern California.

This weekend I watched the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" on DVD. Great movie if you haven't already seen it. Sunday night I watched the first annual TV Land awards show. They saluted a lot of the old timers.

Today at work I continued working on my new series of shiptape jobs. There are many many pieces I will need to put together to make this work. I will need to draw diagrams of how it all works after i'm done with it - otherwise I'll never remember how it works.

The sun is shining brightly this afternoon!

audblog audio post

Gigi has been enjoying her walks in Central Park this week. I have taken her there after work several times this week.

The weather this week was quite delightful. However today (saturday) it has started raining and the weatherman reports that it will rain througout the weekend.

At work I have been building a new set of jobs to replace the old "shiptape" job. These new jobs will take full advantage of our new batch scheduler CONTROL-M. This old job was more linear. It processed one ship at a time. In my new scheme I process all the ships at one time in parallel fashion.

It's the beginning of march now. I found a different partk to take Gigi for her excercise - Central Park here in Santa Clarita. Much more room there than the summit park. I took her there this morning and she enjoyed it. Didn't see any bits of tennis balls either.

The days are getting a bit longer now and slightly warmer. We had a tiny bit of rain the other day. It'll probably rain one more time this season (or maybe twice) and that'll be it... I saw on the news that the Western United States are going through a four year drought.

President Bush and Colin Powell seem determined to invade Iraq. Seems like their ears are closed to the rest of the world and their minds are made up. The U.S. Senate is eerily silent on this issue. No debates. The senators are probably afraid that they will be labeld unpatriotic.

Gigi has pretty much full recovered from her abdominal surgery a few weeks ago. She has been enjoying long walks as she always does. However, she is still skittish about jumping from a chair in the kitchen next to the window, jumping from the sofa down to the floor, etc. She can jump UP on to the sofa... but she's skittish about jumping back down for some reason. I'm sure she'll eventually regain her confidence. Until then, I help her down.

The rains of a few days ago have subsided. However the skies today were full of black clouds. We will definately be getting more rain in the next six weeks.

At work I am building a new set of jobs to archive voyages from the Austraila CICS region. Our associates from TATA did the preliminary work of converting about 75 existing procs to use symbolic names instead of hard coded filenames. This way, the new procs will work for any CICS region. My job has been to build new job definitions in Control-M (a BMC job scheduler that runs on our IBM mainframe). I am in "testing" phase with the new jobs now, running them against the data files from one of our test systems.

Gigi is feeling much better today. She wanted to go for a longer walk today after work. She had some major excitement when she saw a large mouse cross her path along the sidewalk. Tonight I fed her half of a doggy biscuit. This evening she's happily chewing on a large (too big to swallow) white rawhide strip.

Today we had a good soaking rain here in southern california. It hasn't rained here since the end of December. The weather report predicts lots of rain tomorrow.

I picked Gigi up from the vet saturday afternoon. She nudged her nose against the door - she knew she wanted out of that place! But then when she got outside she ran out of steam and couldn't make it over to the car. Sometimes when she gets tired or it's too hot she'll give me this look as if to say "dad? Can you carry me?" So I helped her into the car - she wouldn't have been able to make the jump anyway - she's pretty wobbly right now. She has been resting happily all day. She's still her old self because a cat showed up on a t.v. commercial and she started growling - maybe not as loud as when she's 100% but she noticed that cat!

And her appetite is back. At the vet before the released her, they gave her some fishy flavoured doggy food and man, she perked right up when she saw the plate of food and wolfed it down and licked the plate clean. After that I held a little cup of water and she lapped at that for quite a while. She was thirsty.

Saturday night I gave her some more soft food and she eagerly wolfed that down too and then she had a nice drink of water so that was good to see. I was worried she might not be able to eat. The doc said when they have to do these kind of operations that the problems happen from three to five days after the surgery so I hope she can pull through. She is a strong little dog so I'm sure she will.

Today she rested all day long. I took her outside a few times so she could get some fresh air. I sat over by the “kiddy area” is here in my complex and let her watch the kids playing on the jungle gym. She got to see one of the neighbor’s dogs – his name is “jack”. She couldn’t play with him like she usually does, but I’m sure she was glad to see him – he’s one of her favourites and he likes gigi too.

My friend Darlette has bought a new toy for Gigi. I’m sure Gigi will love her new toy – I always like to see her reaction when she gets a new toy. Funny how she can always tell that a toy is for her but some how she knows. Well it’s sleep time around here – all the lights are going out and I’m going to put Gigi to bed. She has been resting very very well and not fussing with her stitches. The vet explained something about that she put the stitches on the INSIDE so Gigi would feel less pain. Now how they do the stitches on the INSIDE I have no idea, but she’s right – you really can’t see any stitches on the outside at all.

I went over to the park sat morning to have a look around. I walked up to the end there where we play with the dogs and there wasn’t anybody there. I saw Jimmy – Risky’s owner and he told me that animal control had two vehicles out there the other night. They drove up there into the canyon area and showed the light on Carla – Grrrrr’s owner. Carla high-tailed it up into the canyons and they didn’t catch her – hah!

I walked back and forth in the grass looking for pieces of tennis balls. I just wanted to see if I could find any. Sure enough, I found three chunks about the size they pulled out of Gigi’s belly :-( And also – amazingly – I found a piece of surgical tubing – now how the HECK did that get down there in the grass. And if you look around, you see those plastic tops from sports bottles – know what I mean? There’s always this “prelim” plastic top on a sports bottle. You pull that off and then there’s the regular little top that’s fixed to the bottle itself. People typically throw that little “prelim” top wherever they feel like.... The govt should really ban those – just like they banned the removeable pull tabs from soda cans in the sixties.

edit your blog:Last night I called my sister Karen in Duvall, Washington and talked with her about the Huell Howser shows. I also called my Uncle Ken and told him about the Palm Springs shows.

I have been watching the Huell Howser series on Palm Springs on KCET this past week. He went to "The Living Desert" and did a show about that. He walked thru Palm Canyon with famous architectural photographer (?) Schulman - very good show. And spoke with one of the Mayors of Palm Springs from way way back in the 1950's. A guy who was behind the creation of the famous Thunderbird Golf Course. The shows are available on DVD if you're interested. Try www.californiagold.com or www.kcet.org or run a search on Huell Howser for more info.

On Thursday; Feb 6, 2003 they performed abdominal surgery on Gigi at Chatoak pet hospital. They removed ten pieces of chewed up tennis balls from her stomach. She stayed at Chatoak until Saturday; Feb 8, 2003. I took her home on Saturday and she is recovering now.

My Cairn Terrier Gigi became very ill today. I took her to the vet and they ran tests on her all day. X-rays showed that she had swallowed something in her stomach. I knew what it was - cut up pieces of tennis balls that she had found at a park I take her to. I took her to Chatoak pet hospital in Northridge today.

edit your blog:

What a better way to start my blog than with "Hello World"