Social Distancing From The Kelvinator

I should begin by explaining the term “Kelvinator”, a term I know only because of my maternal grandmother, Launa Phillips Jones Allen. My grandmother called every refrigerator she owned a “Kelvinator”. The company that manufactured the Kelvinator began life in 1914 (when my grandmother was just a teenie-bopper) as the Electro-Automatic Refrigerating Company, but two years later became the Kelvinator Company. The name was a tribute to the Scottish physicist William Thomson (a.k.a., Lord Kelvin), who accurately determined the value of absolute zero, a temperature we cannot reach, and below which no temperature can exist. (For your information, that is -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.) My guess is that her first refrigerator was a Kelvinator, which set the stage for the rest of her life.

I spent most of my life about 40 pounds underweight. According to the old height and weight charts from the 1960s, the days before “body mass index”, I should have weighed about 185 pounds when I graduated from high school. I weighed 147. My weight stayed pretty close to that figure until August of 2007, when I quit smoking. Almost overnight I found myself 10 to 20 pounds overweight, a swing of 50 to 60 pounds. Suddenly I couldn’t fit in my clothes (most of which were bought in the 70s and 80s – God, I miss those collars and lapels!).

I was able to drop my weight back to the 185 pound region fairly simply: I stopped buying Cheez Its, Starburst Fruit Chews and Skittles, and started buying Braeburn apples. Still, this required a new wardrobe, as 185 was considerably heavier than 147. I bought new clothes, and began to enjoy being a normal weight.

That changed sometime after May 21, 2013, the date I married Kathy. Later that year we found her bathroom scales in a mover’s box, and on October the 19th of that year, I began my routine of weighing first thing in the morning, and entering the data into a spreadsheet. Periodically I printed out a graph of my weight versus time. This is the figure at the top of this blog, which covers the dates of October 19, 2013 through May 21, 2020.

The first thing to notice is that, although there are fluctuations, the trend is upward. There are a couple of dips along the way, but in general, like a graph of the stock market versus time, the graph tends to go up, up, and up. The second thing to notice is that, very recently, there are no fluctuations. My weight is up, and it appears to be staying there.

Clearly I am not successful at social distancing from the Kelvinator.

Kathy tells me we are going on a diet, if she can just remember the name of the diet. We had lunch with a college roommate last November, and he was telling us about a wonderful diet that he and his wife used with great success. Perry, if you see this, send me a message and tell me yet again the name of that diet, so I can placate Kathy. I prefer the Braeburn apple diet, but Kathy isn’t buying it.

There is one positive thing to report. The bathroom scale that I have been using since October of 2013 finally died. Kathy bought it about 20 years ago, and apparently the batteries in it need changing. I cannot see any easy way to get into the thing to change the batteries, so I made the executive decision that it should go into the trash. With no scale to measure my weight, and no spreadsheet on the bathroom mirror to confront me with my failings, I will now lead a happier, if somewhat heavier, life.

Bon appetit!