I just watched as the Cardinals beat the Astros in Game Seven to advance to the World Series!! They were down 2-1 and ended up winning 5-2, thanks in part to Scott Rolen’s two-run homer off of Roger Clemens! Wow. Our very Cardinals are headed to the World Series to play against the Boston Red Sox. What an amazing series this is going to be…. wow! Congratulations, St. Louis Cardinals!
Another low carb-wise, as I managed to only eat 13.4 grams of carbohydrates all day. This was partly because we were out of eggs this morning, which meant that my normal breakfast while on this diet was not available. So I just did without, and that made it easier to keep a low count for today. This marks the end of three weeks of low-carb dieting. Three Thursdays ago, I weighed in at 194 in the morning. I’m curious to see what the scale says tomorrow. I’ll guess 187.
The Cardinals won to force Game Seven, which will be played tomorrow, and the Red Sox won to advance to the World Series! Wow! Now they get to wait at home to see who they host, Houston or St. Louis. Tomorrow we will find out.
Tonight we played softball after having three straight rain-outs. We played at 8:30, and we ended up winning by a score of 16-3 or something like that. I batted 1-3 with a single. It feels like it’s been so long since I’ve played!
This afternoon, I took my brother, James, over to Funcoland in South County. He and some of the chubs put their money together and decided to buy an Xbox. So I gave him a ride over there. We’ve had an Xbox in the family for nearly three years, and this second one gives us possibilities. The main attraction is that several Xbox games can be played with multiple Xboxes, and that means that if we hook up both of them to a network cable, then we can play games against each other in different rooms, on different TVs. One thing that’s very neat about this is since we wired our house for media, we have CAT5 (network) cables going to almost every room, so we’re able to have the one Xbox here in the attic and another two floors down in the living room and still play against each other. Ah, the miracle of technology! We haven’t actually experimented with the multiplayer gaming yet, because we need to buy a second copy of the game to do that. Unfortunately, each Xbox must have its own copy of a game to play.
There was another great game in the ALCS. The Red Sox beat the Yankees 4-2 to force a Game Seven! The Sox were down three games to none, and prior to what they did tonight, no team had ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to force a Game Seven. Boston just did that, and tomorrow night they’ll find out who moves on to the World Series. What an amazing series that has been.
News on my laptop… today I won a battery on eBay, and it only cost me $30 with free shipping. That’s great considering I was ready to pay $55 from another website for the exact same battery. It sure helps to do your homework and shop around!
Today’s carb count is 15.4. Just for fun, I think I’ll reel off what I ate today.
Four scrambled eggs and cheese for breakfast (an omelette of sorts, I suppose). Four crabs.
A home-made hamburger pizza on a low-carb tortilla. Six carbs.
Mesquite chicken breast. One carb.
Atkins fudge bar (delicious for a low-carb food). Two carbs.
A few miscellaneous low-carb candies, such as a peanut butter cup, chocolate turtles and small Hersheys bars 1.4 carbs.
I’m kind of hungry now, but I’ll just head off to bed and look forward to eating again in the morning. =)
Sports, sports, sports. What a night for sports! Starting off the day was Game Five of the Yankees/Red Sox series at 4:00 this afternoon. This game was made possible thanks to David Ortiz’s walk-off homer in the 12th inning last night to force a Game Five. Coming into today, the BoSox were down 3-1 in the series. Well, they had another nail-biter and managed to win in 14 innings! That means that there will be a Game Six tomorrow at Yankee Stadium. Wow, what a series! I hope Boston can force a decisive seventh game.
In the National League, the Cardinals lost 3-0 to the Astros tonight thanks to Jeff Kent’s walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth in Houston. So now the Astros are leading the series 3-2 after being down 2-0! And on Wednesday, Roger Clemens is scheduled to pitch in St. Louis. So the Cardinals better get back on track real soon or they’re going to be in trouble.
The Rams hosted the Buccaneers tonight in Monday Night Football, and they had a great game as well. The Rams ended up winning 28-21, but the Bucs didn’t make it easy. The highlight was Adam Archuleta’s 93-yard fumble returned for a touchdown. The Rams are now 4-2, which is great after a 1-2 start to the season.
We watched all three games (or at least parts thereof) over at my grandpa’s house in Belleville. We caught the extra innings for the ALCS game, pretty much all of the Cardinals/Astros game, and pretty much all of the football game. Sports in the fall sure is entertaining! 
Since we returned home, I’ve been fiddling with my laptop. I managed to remove the keyboard, CD-ROM drive and diskette drive — and put them back in place. =) I’m currently bidding on a battery for my laptop on eBay, and I’m seriously considering going after a CD-ROM or a keyboard. The problem with my keyboard is three keys are dead — 0, ; and the right alt key. Now that I know I’ll be able to do the replacement, I’m more eager to try to buy the parts.
Well, I’m very, very tired. Somehow it got to be 2:00 in the morning, and I just now finished updating the website. Today was another 15-carb day, by the way. It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. I think I’ll be having more than that in the next few days, but keeping it low is definitely helping.
I stepped on the scale this morning, and I received a record-low reading of 185.5! That’s an 8.5-pound difference from when I first began this low-carb diet. And, to be honest, I think I’m nearing the end of this diet. I don’t think I want/need to go below 180 or, if so, much below it. By the way, when I say 185.5 is a record low, that’s “modern era.” It’s the lowest since I grew, gained weight, and topped out just shy of 250. It’s probably been a good five years or so. So that’s extremely encouraging.
In volleyball tonight, we won the first two games but lost the third. We played pretty well but made some costly mistakes in the third game. It was very close, though, as we lost by only two points. Oh well.. it’s still fun!
I’ve been fooling around with Windows XP lately. I recently installed it on my desktop computer, and I’ve got to say that I like what I’ve seen so far! I currently am dual-booting with Windows 98 and XP, but hopefully I can soon have only XP on this computer and 98 on the laptop. Speaking of the laptop, the frozen battery trick didn’t work. I guess I’ll be ordering a new battery on Monday!
Right now, I have the Yankees/Red Sox game on TV, as they are in the 11th inning over at Fenway Park. The BoSox are down 3-0 in the ALCS, and they must win four straight games (this one included) in order to get to the World Series. I sure hope they can come back and win! I like the Red Sox, and the Yankees aren’t exactly my favorite team. Over in the National League, the Cards lost to the Astros today, so the NLCS is tied up at 2-2 now, as they head into Game Five tomorrow in Houston.
I think I’ll go watch the end of this exciting game. Hopefully the Red Sox can force a Game Five!
Well, I’ve reached a new low. 15 carbs for Saturday. This is getting a little bit easier to stick with, yet I’m not entirely sure why. It may be because we’re getting more creative with the foods we eat, having a variety, finding low-carb snacks. Whatever the case, I’m just very thankful that I’m not having that difficult of a time anymore. But I do look forward to tomorrow’s off day! Bring on the bread and sugar!
I’ve been working on my laptop lately, trying to get it in working condition. I bought a wireless network card for it, and now it’s online and able to access the network. The battery on the computer is shot, and I think I’m going to have to buy a new one. Before I do, though, I’m trying something odd. Some people on forums suggest that it may be beneficial to freeze the battery for a little while, saying sometimes it helps revive it. So this morning I put the laptop’s battery in the freezer. I plan to take it out tomorrow, let it thaw and see if anything happens. I kind of doubt it will, but I’m willing to give it a shot before I shell out the money for a replacement battery!
Lately I’ve been a little bit slower in making entries as I would like to be. Truth is, I’ve been very busy! I finally got Dad’s new laptop up and running, and I bought his old one and have been working on it for the past few days. It’s got a couple of odd problems. The biggest is the CD-Rom does not accept data CDs. You pop one it, it’ll eject it out. It accepts audio CDs, though, and I have no clue why. I would love to get this fixed, though, because that CD-Rom drive is important!
I didn’t post my Thursday-morning weigh-in results yet because, quite frankly, I wasn’t too eager to do so. I registered at 190.5 and 191.5, which is obviously higher than the 187.5 I hit a week or so ago. But one of the results was probably a little bit artificial, and I’m betting that as I keep weighing myself, the numbers will steadily drop, even if they do fluctuate slightly. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to Sunday, though, to see if I get a better reading. In some odd way, I have the “Well, we’ll get ‘em next time” mentality towards this.
Speaking of weight and such, today’s carb count is a cool 20 grams of carbohydrates. I believe that’s my lowest yet! And it’s a far cry from the 50-carb limit. Maybe one of these days I’ll post what I eat in a given day and the carbs contained therein. But I’m not sure who all is that interested in learning that. =)
I’m really tired, but I will say this before I go to bed: Today’s carb count was 32. Tonight’s softball game was cancelled. G’night.
For those of you who aren’t tech-savvy, a driver is a file or collection of files that is written for a specific piece of computer hardware. For instance, once installed, a sound driver will tell your computer that you have XYZ Sound Card, and then you will be able to play sounds.
Why the lesson on drivers? Well, let’s start from the very beginning. My dad recently purchased a new notebook computer. It’s a nice machine, and it certainly is a big step up from his five-year-old Toshiba notebook. Well, this state-of-the-art notebook came preloaded with a state-of-the-art operating system, of course, in Windows XP. Well, there’s one small problem — the particular version of this specialized software that we use, as court reporters/scopists, does not run on Windows XP. And since Dad uses his computer daily for deposition transcribing and editing, that presents a problem. So, I decided to that the thing to do would be to revert back to Windows 98 in order to allow this software to run.
I installed Windows 98 on the new notebook with no problems. The trick, though, was that all of the drivers that were supplied with the computer were for Windows XP; not 98. In plain English, this means that we would have no audio, no colors (aside from the 16-color default), no wireless Internet, etc. So I embarked on a search online to find drivers. The tough thing is that “they” don’t really make drivers for Windows 98 because, after all, why would someone want to go back to that ancient operating system when they can use the latest and the greatest?
After some searching, I was able to locate the audio driver. Bingo — we have sound! Next, I found the network card driver (for the built-in network adapter). The next two were the hardest — finding the video driver and the driver for the wireless network card (enabling wireless Internet, networking, etc).
After much trial and error, reinstalling Windows a couple of times, and plenty of praying I was able to successfully get a video driver to work. Thank God! Now the screen had vibrant colors and looked great. The only issue now was the WiFi adapter. So, I searched Google many times, I searched forums, www.driverguide.com — lots of different websites and lots of dead-ends. Until finally, I found a driver that worked! I was thrilled! So as it stands now, Dad’s notebook has Windows 98 successfully installed, and the wireless Internet works beautifully. What an upgrade this is going to be for Dad!
Now, for most of you, everything I just wrote was probably strange, boring, confusing or all of the above. At any rate, that’s what happened today.
In other news, today’s carb count was 28. I’m actually starting to notice some weight loss. How about that! I also watched the Cardinals beat the Astros, the Yankees beat the Red Sox and George W. Bush beat John Kerry in the third debate (I honestly think it was a blowout, though some cable news networks would have you believe otherwise). We’ve got an election coming up in less than three weeks!
Not a whole lot to write about, but I guess I’ll write just the same.
Today’s carb count was 29, which isn’t bad. I haven’t come close to 50 for a while, and I’m guessing that that will only help my dieting, going well under my self-set limit of 50.
Tonight’s softball game was postponed due to rain. And that was just fine with me, because my right knee is still bugging me from Saturday’s football games. It’s kind of surprising, but it is still pretty swollen compared to the left knee. What’s odd is at times it will hurt a whole lot and be really stiff, and then other times it won’t be so bad and will be a lot looser. I guess it might just take some loosening up to get it to feel better. Either way, I’m happy that we were off tonight so I can give my knee a little more time to heal up before I have to go running around again.
By the way, several entries ago I wrote about the possibility of a great new feature coming to this here website. Well… I have reached a decision, at least a temporary one. That decision is to not follow through with the idea I had — at least not right now. I’ll go ahead and let you in on what the feature would be. Essentially, it would be a screen grab of my computer that would be updated every 15 or 30 seconds. It would be small enough to where most text and everything would not be readable, yet would be large enough for people to be able to get the general idea of what I’m doing on my computer — for example, if I’m scoping, writing an e-mail, browsing the web, playing games, etc. One of the main reasons I’ve decided to not go through with this is our unreliable Internet. The connection is in and out all day, and so far we haven’t found a way to get it to consistently work. If things do pan out where we’re able to get that new Internet service I was talking about several days ago, then it would make things very interesting and I would very much reconsider doing this screen grab idea. I know it’s not anything huge, but I thought it might be interesting to be able to see what’s going on on my computer. For now, though, you’ll just have to take my word.