Sixty-first weight progress report

This post is yet another weight progress report, continuing the previous one, part of a long series since I started in January 2015.

My recent weight loss has been more than the year-long trend, but I fear it may be mainly water loss and not loss of fat. I am hovering on being back in my target range (thanks to my defining the target range to get gradually wider as I age), but I’d still like to be about 5 pounds lighter, so that I’m in the middle of the range, rather than fluctuating around the edge of the range.

My weight has continued to drop, though very slowly. I’m roughly back to pre-pandemic levels.

My bicycle odometer shows that I had very steady exercise back when I was commuting to work by bicycle, then almost nothing during the pandemic shutdown, followed by a steep increase in the past year (due mainly to my commuting to classes at Cabrillo College).

As I predicted in my last weight report, I did take the bus a few times to Cabrillo College, though not as often as I expected, and I went to Cabrillo more often than I had expected, due to rehearsals and performances, so I’ve been able to keep up the exercise, averaging 10.8 miles a day for the past 2½ months.  Now that the Cabrillo Spring semester is over, though, my exercise levels will probably drop down to the mid-pandemic levels, unless I deliberately do something about it.

One thing I’m planning is to take a couple of acting classes at UCSC summer session: THEA 20 (Intro Studies in Acting) and THEA 124 (Movement for Performers).  This will mean 5 weeks of biking up the hill twice a week with 7 hours of movement (3.5 hours for each course) each time.  I’ve already checked with the instructor to see whether the courses are suitable for me, and they sound pretty good.  I can get half-off on tuition, because I’m a community-college student, though the price is still much higher than community-college courses (though slightly less than taking the courses through UCSC Extension’s Open Campus during the school year). The only risk is that few people have registered so far (4 for THEA 20 and 6 for THEA 124) , so the classes might get cancelled. According to https://summer.ucsc.edu/instructors/scheduling-enrollment/cancellation.html

Summer Session Course Enrollment Minimums.

• Lower division courses need 12+ students
• Upper division courses need 8+ students

So we still need 2 more students for THEA 124 and 8 more for THEA 20.  Give that classes start only a month from now, I suspect that THEA 20 will not make its minimum, even if the 5 students registered for the second summer session of THEA 20 switch to the first summer session.  There is a better chance of THEA 124 running, but it is still likely to be cancelled.  I have no plans for exercise if both are cancelled.

I’m still figuring out what courses I will take at Cabrillo in the Fall—I’ve registered for one MW course: TA 11 (Voice and Diction). The only other MW course I considered was TA 10B (Intermediate Acting), but it is early in the morning and is being taught by Donald G. Williams—I don’t think that I can take an entire semester of Don Williams’s preacher persona, particularly not if I have to get up early in the morning for it. I have also considered two TTh courses: TA 13B (Intermediate Improv) and TA 33 (Makeup and Masks), but they conflict with each other, so I could only take one of them. If I decide to take a TTh course, it will probably be Makeup and Masks, because that is only offered once a year, and I have other places I can take improv classes.

The Fall play at Cabrillo will be a musical (SpongeBob SquarePants), which would not offer many roles for me, as I don’t sing.  The only spoken roles are French Narrator, Security Guards, and Gary the Snail.  Of those, only Gary the Snail seems like a viable part for me (unless the French accent of the French Narrator is supposed to be really, really bad—I’ve never watched SpongeBob SquarePants, so I’m not familiar with any of the characters).