So it has been two weeks… Down to 276, which is 16 pounds… not quite where I wanted to be, but I guess a pound a day isn’t bad… and it seems like it will be keep going at that level… I think that quite a bit of the first week was water, since my diet was very high in sodium (I salted pretty much everything…) and now I have virtually no sodium in my diet… In fact, the other day I got a bottle of V8 juice when I needed something in the afternoon, and it tasted horrible… and I used to put salt in V8 in the past…

Yesterday when I heard that Steve Jobs was resigning as CEO of Apple, like so many others that have come to count that company to deliver products and services that make our day to day life with technology better, I started to think about what the future will hold… I’ve only been a Apple convert for a relatively short time (a few years…) but in that time I have come to count on his leadership of Apple to make my life better…

280… 7 days… 13 pounds down…
It’s still working, and apparently at about the same rate… which makes sense, since I really don’t take in many calories, and I’m just as active as I was before… All good news, since it looks like I will be on track to hit the 250 goal in about a month… Labor Day weekend might be a bit difficult, since I will be in Lakehurst flying all day, and can’t really take the juicer with me and don’t know what the availability of juice will be over there… Not to say that going to dinner with the guys at an Italian restaurant will make things harder… but with this kind of progress, I really don’t want to fall back on that weekend… Guess I’ll just have to figure something out…

So today is a full week on nothing but juice… Amazingly, it hasn’t been that bad… Saturday was a bit difficult (with the anniversary party and having to look at mounds of barbecued pulled pork and chicken) and yesterday when Ann made dinner and I had to sit and watch her eat ravioli and spaghetti with sauce the temptation to eat was there, but on a daily basis for the last week I really haven’t missed solid food that much…

Five days in now… still going strong… Just got back from breakfast with some friends, and didn’t really have a problem with watching them down pancakes, eggs, bacon, and other stuff… Although I had a 12 oz glass of tomato juice and the same size glass of orange juice (the tomato had so much salt in it that I almost couldn’t drink it…) and my bill was actually higher than everyone else…

Ok… after getting back from the cruise, I decided to go on a juice fast… Before I left, Ken came in one day and told me that I should watch a documentary that just came out on Neflix, “Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead”… (pretty sure that there was some inference there, which was probably deserved… except for the sick part…) So I watched the documentary… It was well done, and made sense… So I went ahead and ordered a Vita-Mix 1300 TurboBlend 4500 and a Breville 800JEXL Juice Fountain Elite 1000-Watt Juice Extractor… figured that I might as well get something that would last, especially if I was going to take this seriously…

Here are the pictures that Ann and I took on the cruise… Might get around to organizing them sometime, but I think that I got them in chronological order (for the most part…)
Greek Cruise Pictures on Flickr

Day 10 – Friday
The day started with the alarms going off at 4… Showers and final packing, triple checking drawers, checking for passports and other documents, and to the checkout at the gangway… Had our passports stamped, everything loaded onto the bus, and about 8 couples were headed to the airport… about a half hour trip to the airport, and then we got the bags sorted out and went through the first security check at the Istanbul airport… then to the baggage check in, where we got all of our boarding passes (some of the others only got the first one…) and had our passports looked at and scanned again… then down the hall (literally…) and through bag and body scan number two… then a long walk down to the gate and we sat outside the gate area, where there was security scan station number three… These were all luggage on scanner, laptops out, through a metal scanner stations… don’t know where they thought we were going to get anything along the way, but I guess it’s good to know they are careful… I had to explain to one of the security guys what my iPad stand was… he sort of thought it could be a weapon… Time passed pretty quickly and soon we were on the plane… Turkish Airways… Needless to say I wasn’t expecting much, but other than the fact that the guy in front of me almost immediately reclined his seat and my knees were in my face the rest of the time, the service and food on the plane were great… Now one interesting point… we get scanned three times for weapons, get on the plane, and right away the pass out a meal with metal knives, forks, and spoons… far more dangerous than the iPad stand that was questioned, but whatever… And I have to hand it to Turkish Airways on two other counts… One is that I can’t remember the last time that I had a meal (that was actually edible…) on a 2.

Day 9 – Thursday
It was very stormy during the night, and even though our tour wasn’t going out until 1:30 in the afternoon, I had talked to Chris last night and wanted to get together and talk, and he suggested 7:30 so I sat my alarm for 7 and got up then… When I woke up, it was raining outside (the first time during the trip…) and it was very rocky on the boat… so much that the shower door kept sliding open and shut and the water was sloshing all over the place on the floor…

Day 8 – Wednesday
Got up around 7 or so, and as is usual practice by now we went to the deck to get breakfast… The breakfast menu on this cruise is great… bagels and lox, all kinds of normal breakfast stuff, and lots of unusual breakfast items that make it different enough every day to keep it interesting… Anyway, we got on the bus to Ephesus, and arrived 30 minutes later or so… I was expecting the worst, since our guide from yesterday told us that it would be blistering hot and much worse than the yesterday… but when we got out of the bus, it really wasn’t that bad, especially in the shade… The other nice thing was that the bus drove to the top of the hill, instead of us having to climb yet another hill to see the tour…