Jack of Harts

Jack Hart’s grandmother is proudly noted as being named Amanda Carter, and in my stories is the first governor of Mars in the 21st century. Yes, that was an allusion to the John Carter of Mars stories. It is also a nod towards Stargate SG-1, where Amanda Tapping played Samantha Carter. You might say that I crossed the streams of fandom a bit when I created that name and character. She was never what you called a face character. She did show up in some stories I wrote, but was never the main character. I kept writing her as the profession astronaut or the reserved governor as her siblings or children were getting into all kinds of trouble. And in some of my stories, the cybernetic intelligence Dixie talks about all the trouble her Carter boys got into, and basically tells Jack that he’s a chip off the old block. The key thing is that the Carters were generally offscreen or secondary characters, cousins and aunts and uncles that Jack remembered vacationing with on Mars. I never intended to have any of the Carters be what you might call main characters. Oh, the tangled webs we weave for ourselves.

I wrote the Guns of Freedom a year ago, and wrote it way too long. It wasn’t accepted, but this weekend I devoted a couple days to slicing it down to size and heavily editing it for use in another open call. Shrinking actually made it a better and tighter story, and I like it much better now. Sometimes, cutting stuff out is good. 🙂

I haven’t lost much weight since my last update. I’m now hovering in the mid to low 250s, got under 253 for the first time in well over a decade, so the waveform of my weight loss continues to go down. And the average has in fact gone down ten pounds over the last 31 days. So that is the correct trend for me to have.

The interesting thing is that I just saw my doctor again this week and did blood tests, and the news there is very good. After having lost 30 pounds since January, my Pre-Diabetes is just gone. Almost every other number is good too. Losing 30 pounds has resulted in just about every blood number improving in a substantial way. And she was happy to see me again and congratulated me on my continued improvement since the last time I saw her. The one exception they will be investigating. It is probably just me being 50, but investigations will continue.

In other news, I can once again button the top buttons on my work shirts. I have always had a fireplug neck that makes it just about impossible to button my shirts all the way up. My entire life this has been a case. For the first time in I can’t remember how long, I actually CAN button that top button now. Doesn’t mean I’m going to enjoy it. Or that I’m going to go out and do it for funsies. But I am actually physically capable of making the neck of my shirt meet itself after wrapping around my neck. That is a rather new experience for me. And when you add that to the continued shrinking of my waist and stomach and thighs, I continue to have more room in my clothes than I used to.

It is truly amazing to see the physical indications of my weight loss, even when my weight loss hits momentary hitches. My body continues to adjust to the loss in weight, and continues to shrink as I continue to work at it. That is always good.