Atherton Family Notes

We’ve been in Chicago the last few days and we went to the newly renamed Willis Tower with it’s renovated Sky Deck. The main new attraction is the addition of 4 ledges that are basically big glass boxes that extend 4 feet out from the main Sky Deck. This allows you to look directly down to Wacker drive below you and has the effect (at least on me) of making the Sky Deck feel much less like solid ground.

All of us managed to make it out onto the ledge, although all of the girls took a little bit of coaxing. It’s an amazing view, but it just doesn’t feel safe.

Anyway, here is a picture of all the girls — Sandi, Carissa, Celia, Sadie, and Tiphaine — all standing out on the ledge. I’m taking the picture from the next ledge over.

And here I am, barely keeping it together out on the ledge…

Over a million tourists will be in the Sky Deck over the next year, and the number of photographs that look remarkably like these will be enormous. All I can say is, we got ours early.

By the way, if you go to the visit the tower, bring something to do. It took more than an hour for us to get to the top of the tower from the time we arrived due to the long lines.

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Sandi and I have been married for 16 years today and I’ve got a story to tell about her.

She gave me a gift (of sorts) last night for our anniversary. The gift was inadvertently telling me what she was giving me for my 40th birthday — a project she’s been working on in secret for more than 18 months.

Sandi has been doing photography and teaching in a preschool in order to save money for the gift. She let Carissa, Celia and Sadie in on the secret, and to their credit, they have all have been very good about keeping it quiet — from me, anyway. Sandi has apparently told a lot of other people, all of whom have universally said, “wow, you are a really great wife!”

But you know what they say about secrets: it’s only a secret if you don’t tell anyone. The girls have apparently told their friends about the gift, and Carissa even told her teacher at school, Mrs. West. Somehow, the information also got to Mr. Stroud, who was Carissa’s teacher last year and is Cece’s teacher this year. Sandi found out about this and decided to send Mr. Stroud an email asking him not to say anything about the gift to anyone else, just to make sure that it didn’t get back to me.

In the same email, she also asked him to send a copy of a school assignment that Cece for forgot to bring home. In his response, he assured Sandi that he wouldn’t say anything about the gift (which he named in the text). Unfortunately for Sandi’s secret gift — that she had successfully kept quiet for 18 months — I was standing in front of the computer when she opened the email and I saw what Mr. Stroud had written.

Wanna know what it is?

She’s paying for a trip for the family to go to Egypt next year during spring break.

I have wanted to go to Egypt since I was a kid, when I got a National Geographic World magazine talking about the King Tut exhibit that was coming to Chicago that year. My parents even took me to the museum, but I didn’t get to see King Tut’s treasures because the event sold out for the day while we were standing in line. I was disappointed, although I did get to see a lot of mummies and other artifacts in a companion exhibit. Two years ago, I finally got to see that same exhibit when it came back to the Field Museum.

That wasn’t really what I wanted to do, though. What I really wanted to do — and still want to do — is go to Egypt and see the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Valley of the Kings and Luxor in person. Now, it looks like I will finally get to go.

Sandi told me that she was really disappointed that she didn’t get to surprise me. She was going to start dropping hints that she was going to spend her savings on somethings else, and then surprise me by having the girls give me Egypt-themed gifts for my birthday. I’m excited anyway, though. Now I get to spend a few extra months planning my trip of a lifetime.

And by the way, Sandi, I agree with everyone else: You are a really great wife!

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Today is a little more than one month into my personal “Forty by Forty” challenge. It’s been kind of a tough month to lose weight. We have done lots of traveling (so much that I’ve fallen behind blogging it all!) — and lots of eating out — but I’m starting to get on track.

On July 15th, I weighed 266.8 pounds.
This morning, I weighed in at 261.0 pounds.

First the good news: it’s almost 6 pounds that I’ve lost, and any month that goes like that, I’ll take, even if I don’t reach my ultimate goal.

The bad news: I’m slightly behind my goal. I have just over 16 weeks left until my 40th birthday and just over 34 pounds left to lose. One month ago, I needed to lose two pounds a week to meet the goal — now I have to lose about 2.1 pounds per week in the remaining time to hit the goal. That’s actually not too scary, but I strongly suspect that the last 6 pounds are going to be much harder to lose than the first 6.

The next month shouldn’t be so difficult. I should be eating at home more often and the exercise routine is becoming more of a habit. I actually walked almost 9 miles today, which my Nike+ counter suggests should have consumed about 1700 calories. That’s half a pound right there.

My weight since June 29th. Even though I am not quite on track for the goal I set on July 15th, my total weight loss over the last 2 months has been good. I’ve lost 16 pounds this summer.

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