Phones, weight, jobs, cars

Here’s the latest on life, in summary form:

• Ditched Qwest wireless service in favor of Sprint. They are very nearly equivalent, but Sprint offers nationwide service without roaming if we want/need it, cooler phones, and data service. We’re getting a couple months of free “Vision” service, which will let us take pictures with the nifty phones we picked up, and transmit them to other phones or email addresses. Not sure if we’ll keep the Vision portion of the service (it’s an extra $30 between the two phones, ugh!) — I just liked the small, high-tech phones more than the stock old Nokia ones they offer for free.
• My new Honda Insight has been performing fairly well even in bitterly cold, snowy, iced-in weather. We had to get to the doctor’s office yesterday for my wife’s OB appointment. The snow was drifted up to two feet. We had a bit of a problem with traction going uphill after being stopped on an exit ramp when in a foot and a half of snow, but we got through it. I put on chains eventually (ugh, I don’t want to do that again soon), then found that most of the pavement was dry and I almost hit a guy trying to stop (anti-lock brakes + snow chains on dry or icy pavement = very LOOONG stops). I took the chains off, deflated the tires a bit, and was satisfied with the performance of the tires in snow/slush/ice at 38 PSI per corner. Time to buy snow tires, though, I think. These Bridgestone Potenza low-rolling-resistance tires feel a bit like Matchbox plastic wheels on the ice.
• My weight hit an all-time low this morning: 220.5 lbs! I have not been this weight since 1995; it feels good. Another twenty pounds, and I’ll be roughly around the weight (180-200 lbs) I fluctuated between in my early college days. Rather than a strict low-carb approach, I actually prefer to follow a “weighted average” of my weight, using the “Eat Watch” program created by John Walker as part of The Hacker’s Diet. I’ve found that, for me, the combination of low-carbing (following the Atkins recommendations for gradually increasing carb intake), plus watching the calories, has been very effective at helping me maintain a consistent 750-calorie deficit per day over the last two months. My goal is steady weight loss, not really fast weight loss. The problem I have with calories while on Atkins, really, is making sure I eat enough every day! If I don’t maintain at least 2000-2400 calories per day, my body kicks into famine mode, and the weight loss slows way, way down (I’m a six-footer that used to be six-foot-one before a car accident). So far I’ve been averaging around 2200-2400 kcal/day, as long as I track what I eat via FitDay. When I don’t track, it’s easy to not eat enough; I really want to avoid weight-loss stalls due to famine-mode metabolism. It does mean that I have to occasionally force myself to choke down some more filet mignon, or have a second or third helping of barbequed chicken, but that’s a burden I’m willing to bear.
• I start my new contracting job January 5. I’m excited and nervous. The most frustrating thing, though, is figuring out insurance… COBRA will cost us $612 a month. I’d rather have that money in our pockets and pay our expenses as we go, you know? Over a year, that would pay for a pretty major surgery. But if we go without insurance, and then I eventually get a job that provides insurance, that new insurance company will end up insisting many health problems are pre-existing conditions and deny coverage. Been there, done that, it’s terrifically obnoxious; even if a condition was undiagnosed, insurance companies like to call it “pre-existing” if it’s not an injury due to accident. The cheapest coverage we can find, independently, is Intermountain Health Care, at about $280 a month. Even that feels like highway robbery. I think we’re just going to do without — except Christy and the new baby, whom we’ll cover with COBRA through February to cover newborn health problems and pre/post-natal care. (Spending around $400 for the two of them for two months seems totally OK since that money will be basically sucking up around $2000 in hospital bills).

Ahh, life is grand!