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In response to my post about helping my daughter learn how to drive at the Hollywood Bowl (where I also had my first driving experience at 10 years of age), reader Gary commented that he, too, experienced his first motor vehicle operation at the fresh age of 7 running over empty beer cans with his dad at the Hollywood Bowl parking lot, and surmised that there are probably a buncha angelenos who had impromptu lessons on that landmark’s blacktop.

Gary had the excellent idea of forming a club and throwing an annual picnic, and I responded to that telling him the least I could do was create a t-shirt.

And so on my lunch break, I did (click it for the bigger picture):

If you absolutely love it and gotta have one, it’s available here at Zazzle.

I think the straw that broke it was stepping on the scale yesterday and having it show me the third in a straight string of increases, this one a  1.4-pound gain to 229.6 from the previous day. It’s certainly not the intake that’s driving that number in the wrong direction; I’ve been pretty good at keeping it to an average of 2,300 calories per day. No, it’s the output that’s keeping me stuck in this purgatory. The entire lack of it. This was not a surprise to me, just a long-overdue wakeup call.

And so after pronouncing to my wife last night that I would get up and I would go for a bike ride, mindblowingly for only the second time in two months, I did get up this morning wrestling victoriously against  the usual apathy and excuses  and got on my bike at 6:30 a.m. for a 14-mile sunrise ride up to to the Riverside Drive bridge by the 134 Freeway and back. Oh yeah, and it was pretty out there (click it for the bigger picture).

And what I’ve figured from that hour-long jaunt is that the six pounds I’ve lost over this past 50 days of calorie counting has come entirely from atrophied leg muscle. Seriously, I came off the LA River Bikeway at Fletcher, and by the time I got up the slight grade on Glendale and Silver Lake boulevards to the reservoir — a gentle incline that I used to blast across without giving it a second thought — the legs t’were a-burnin’ and the wind I was a-suckin’. Wow.

The payoff however came when I got home and stepped on the scale and said “I dare you to piss me off” and it opted  not to, instead showing me at 225.4 — a new low.

Sure, I know in this see-saw scene I’m likely to step on the device tomorrow and have it show me 228.8, but I can deal with it as long as I keep my patience and my ass in the bike saddle more than once a month.

What can I say, I’m a sucker for cereus cactus blooms, which open nocturnally this time of year for one night and one night only, closing up the next morning never to bloom again. As such, the local bees (and occasional carpenter bee) waste little time diving in to frolic in the flower’s funstuffs we until about  7 p.m. (the first four minutes). After that it’s just the progression of the petals opening wider.

I think the last cereus timelapse I posted here was of a bloom closing up at daybreak, so at least this time it’s different in that the above shows a bloom opening up at sundown.

As with any previous captures, this is a two-hour interval, in this case filmed August 23 from 6:03 to 8:03 p.m. at one frame per second via the timelapse function of a point-and-shoot Canon Powershot SD1100, supplemented by a tripod-fixed light source aimed on the blossom to provide illumination after dark.

Music via YouTube’s Audioswap feature:
Title: In And Out Of Days
Artist: C-Mon & Kypski
Album: Where The Wild Things Are

Last year, or perhaps the year before, a lady friend who previously blogged under the nom du net of Jo Gillis sent me a batch of sunflower seeds harvested from some she’d grown that year. This is the first one to present itself among the mostly smaller lemon queen sunflowers that surround it.

It is magnificificifitrifiwificent. And I photographed it not just because it is bodacious, but because the squirrels are apt to come get it, behead it and take it away any minute. Literally: at any time.

Having decimated the backyard patch, they’ve now quit ignoring the flowers of Coyote Corner and have started their path of piecemeal destruction. And I am doing my level best through clenched fists, teeth, and sphincter to leave the pellet gun alone and understand that squirrels are a part of the econiche and are just exploiting the resources made available.

But it’s hard. And it’ll be harder when I look out the window and see this beauty gone.

The scale upon which I have been weighing myself these last four years (and these last 43 — and counting — days) has been an off-the-shelf, 9-volt-battery-powered digital model purchased from Rite-Aid… or maybe back then it was still Sav-on.

Wherever it was acquired I’ve never really cared whether it was ultra-accurate, just that it was within a pound or two of whatever my ever-fluctuating specific weight was at the time.

Lurking in the shadows of the spare bathroom is another digital scale that I haven’t utilized this time around, in part because in 2006 during the course of my six-month 52-pound drop from 260 to 208, on the one or two occasions I stepped on it, its measurement varied from mine by as much as five pounds… in the wrong direction — and that was not only a blow to the momentum, but also a seed of doubt planted. “What if that scale’s right and mine’s wrong?”

Sturdier dieters than me would discard the more forgiving scale and start using the less forgiving one, but I clung to the scale I’d been using, of course not without always wondering what the other one might read.

Well, about a week ago I finally manned up and ventured into the spare bathroom, where I hauled out that long-bothersome sucker for a comparison. Sure enough, my scale read 228. That scale read 231.

So I said to hell with both of ‘em and their discrepancies and went research on their varying asses. Googled up “most accurate scale” in my web browser and bless them, I found Consumer Reports had done a test to find the best one out there and the result was the Taylor No. 7506.

I told Amazon to ship me one and it arrived this morning.

Stepping to it I was ready to accept whatever it calculated my weight to be. But first I took to my go-to old scale, which read read 226, and then the possessed one in the spare bathroom, which listed me at 232. The respective bipolar bastards dared deliver a six-pound spread.

Then came the new scale’s verdict: 227.6 (its 10ths of a pound are new and a nice touch).

So while it would be nice to list 226 as my weight today, I’m sucking it up and recalibrating to 227.6. Maybe that extra 1.6 pounds is the confidence I have of it being a more realistic assessor.

After weeks of counting pollinators as part of my ongoing involvement with the Great Sunflower Project, I thrill with every bee I see. But I have to say, I’d been hoping for a little more variety beyond just honeybees.. Well, that variety arrived with my count including my first carpenter bee — and my timelapse captured its arrival to the flower beautifully (click it for the bigger picture).

We bought a new froguarium for our froggies last weekend, because after I cleaned it on Saturday it sprung a leak — a slow one, but a leak nonetheless. So we went to a pet shop on Hillhurst in Los Feliz Village and got a new one… only to find it was a muzzafuzzin’ leaker, too. So I did what I should’ve done in the first place and applied some sealant to the first one — successfully! — and back the frogs went into their old tank. Instead of returning the new one, I ran a couple beads of sealant around its underside and fixed it, too. So now the froggies are back in their new digs, and the old tank’s sitting out on the potting table in the backyard. Inside it is the old circulating pump because we also bought a new one of those when we bought the new tank.

You’re probably not like me in that if you have an old circulating pump hanging around the house you just let it hang around the house. Or throw it out. Me, if I happen to have an old circulating pump  hanging around the house I want to put it to use as the heart of a tabletop water feature.

So I did. On my lunchbreak today.  Using a plastic plant box, an old watering can, and decorated with  some roadside granite pieces we picked up on the highway in to Yosemite last December. a couple river rocks, and a trio of little square pots that had been languishing. The water gets pushed from the plant box into the watering can, and comes out splashing on and off a chunk of quartzy something that’s been in the backyard for as long as I can remember. Oh and it’s balanced by a plant that I’d adopted and cared for at the office and brought with me when I started working from home. Check it out:

I’m pretty dang proud of it.

Well, it finally happened. After two months and a fair amount of nurturing, cajoling (and head shaking for planting so many sunflowers in such a generally sunless spot of the front yard, Coyote Corner is proud to present its first blossom of the bunch, as shown half-opened as of this morning in a capture from our SunflowerPatchCam, (which updates every 10 minutes):

Hopefully many more to come!

A week into the diet and I’m down two pounds and that’s right where I want to be. There probably are nutritionists out there who’ve spent careers studying physiologies and metabolisms and can site data to back up their claims as to the complexities of losing weight, but as I’ve said before as far as I’m concerned, at its simplest — or maybe simplistic — level, shedding or gaining pounds is the result of an unequal input/output equation.

Plus time. And that’s where the trouble comes in. People want to rush the job and so they get suckered into spending money on fads and wonder pills and miracle contraptions from an industry that feeds off our need for immediate gratification. Think about it, which website would you be more compelled by:

• www.loseapoundaweekbycountingcaloriezzzzzzzzz.com
• www.dropfivepoundstomorrowbysleepingandtakingacapsulekapow.com

We want our weight lost and we want it now!

But for me what makes the methodical long haul more digestible is knowing that basic equation (for my weight/age):

• +/- 3,500 calories = +/- 1 pound.

These last 10 pounds I added on didn’t magically appear over www.twodaysofmesnoozingandtakingsomeoverhypedpill.com. It was a slow process over the 10 weeks beginning when I started working from home in May and stopped all my bike commuting. Throughout that period I kept eating as I had been, and with the severely reduced activity level to counter it managed to overdose a cumulative 3,500 calories every week on my way to finally having to surrender a belt notch at the beginning of July (one that I should have let go in mid-June but I was in denial). Better late than 10 more pounds later, that notch was my wake-up call to begin the march in the other direction.

And so far in this first week I’ve trudged downward, accumulating an approximate per-day calorie deficit of 1,000. Multiply that by seven days and you’ve got 7,000 calories. Divide that by 3,500 and  two pounds gone. See how simple that is?

Notice I didn’t say “easy.” Yesterday in fact, was tough. I was hungry pretty much from 10 a.m. until Susan got home and made dinner, and I’m looking sideways at today hoping things are easier. The good news was I didn’t nosh on a metric ton of cashews and trail mix. Instead I tried to fill the void with pan-fried greens and sugar snap peas and baby carrots. And more sugar snap peas and more baby carrots. Then I had a 60-calorie sugar-free pudding cup. Then I had some cashews — but kept it to one measly serving.

Thankfully between that and Susan getting home my iPhone4 arrived and the new toy diverted my attention from my stomach and thus prevented me from risking a return to the nut jar and going full-on Cookie Monster on it. Whew!

I’ve had some early success with my newly undertaken diet. Stepping on the scale this morning at the beginning of Day No. 3 I was surprised to find myself suddenly four pounds lighter than the 236 I was when I started this thing on Tuesday. Hang on now, don’t worry. I’m sensible enough to be aiming for an average loss of a little more than a pound a week, and I’m well-versed enough in the process to know such a drastic fluctuation could very well “correct” itself at tomorrow’s weigh-in and I could be back where I started.

But it was still a heartening and empowering victory to see the numbers go in the right direction so quickly. And I do consider it a victory — however false or small, because I do consider a diet a war. As such, I couldn’t help but think about those retreating four pounds as an occupying enemy to whom I felt like calling out “Yeah, you’d better run. I’ve only begun to fight and you’re gonna lose!”

Ultimately and simply, it’s a numbers game for me. I don’t care about nutritionists and their books on how to lose weight. Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem might work for a lot of people, but I don’t need them. I follow the basic rule of outputting more than I input. And right now even at its most sedentary my body burns about 3,000 calories a day. So by doing nothing more than consuming an average 2,000-2,500 calories a day I am guaranteeing that I will lose.

Sure that’s the easy part. The hard part is the doing it.

Fighting — getting mad — is the trick for me. It’s like a switch that I can only flip after an interminable amount of time doing nothing but thinking about doing something. I spent the last two months feeling myself growing and even when I finally had to admit defeat and surrender a notch on my belt a couple weeks ago, I still hadn’t found the resolve to take action. But when I finally did, it was very liberating. Tremendously invigorating — this time even more than when I last went to battle in 2006, because now I remember how good it felt to break 210. How proud it made me feel.

And how I can’t wait to get back there again. Slowly and steadily.