For the last week, I have been visiting my father in another city. It's been an experience. I've always wondered about how much personal detail to put in the blog, reading other blogs, there is a lot of information which could be considered personal. Mine, not so much. I'll try to increase that amount somewhat.
The objective for the trip was to divide the household property. That house has been a part of the family for 35 years. We moved in when I was 10, I left when I was 21, I wasn't sure what would happen when my mother died 8 years ago, but my father (who is 85 this year) decided to stay. Now, as his health slowly gets worse, it has been decided that he'd stay at a flatette which has been built next to where my sister lives with her 10 year old son.
Any household that stays in one place slowly accumulates material. Over 35 years, that's quite a lot of furniture, numerous little ornaments, and a multitude of things that mean absolutely nothing to strangers but have a lot of memories attached to them. It's sad to say goodbye but it has to happen eventually, I'd rather it happened now rather than after my father dies.
Having a complete household with Becky, it really wasn't worth taking a lot of stuff that would have to compete with my current stuff in terms of room here. So my brother and sister had the majority of it, I got just two boxes: one full of aircraft books (which I enjoy reading about), the other of mounted photographs. Speaking of photographs, it was the culmination of about 100 hours of work in scanning the family photographs and putting the scans onto DVD for distribution.
I was really upset when my father decided to throw away all the negatives about 4 years ago. How could someone make such a stupid decision? I still don't understand it. However, I decided that we would go through all the photos and scan them, then actually write down who was in what photograph before there weren't any parents to tell us. That has been done, amazingly there are 2,000 scans. This includes such things as my brother's wedding (which none of the family went to because we were living on the other side of the world at the time - my parents didn't even meet his wife until about 9 months later) and trip to India 22 years ago. All in all, there's about 75 years of history there. Going through the photos, I learnt a few things: my mother could be considered attractive (I had never really thought she was, growing up); when I was a baby, we went overseas for 2 years then came back to the same house; and I had forgotten what my cat - that I'd gown up with looked like (there are only two photos of her).
Losing weight while there was difficult. My brother and his daughter were there as well, so I decided that I'd just try my best, and deal with the aftermath later when I got home. My brother didn't care that I was trying to lose weight, he offered me lots of junk - some of which I accepted, some of which I declined.
So I'm back home now, and having to deal with the inevitable weight gain. I've decided to not weigh myself until next Monday. I'm aiming for 6,000kJ a day, which is entirely achievable for a week. I know that avoiding weighing myself is entering a diet "danger zone", but I think for a week, it'll be fine. That means I forfeit a shirt, I can't buy coffee, nor go to see a film until I can prove I weigh less than what I weighed previous to each of those. I'm also resetting the whole relative to what weight I should be system (the green and red lines) early next week. I need to prove to myself that I can lose 100g a day before I start making it a requirement.
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