Coming out of my funk and a weight loss update

After being in one of the worst mental funks of my life for about a 2 day span, I feel like I'm finally coming out of it and returning to baseline. These things are always triggered by something stupid, and they do blow over (at least mostly) after a little bit.

My mood completely bottomed out yesterday due to a craptastic day at work. We really need to get better clerks. They drive me insane. For nearly a 2 hour time span yesterday, every single customer that came to the counter required the assistance of a pharmacist. It was stupid stuff too. Stuff that we shouldn't have had to help on. Stuff that they should have known how to do. Our script count wasn't even that high yesterday, but it seemed like we did 1,000 scripts instead of somewhere in the high 300's.

This brings me to another disturbing trend. Our volume has dropped precipitously since the previous year. A couple weeks ago, we were down 20% from the previous year. That is a huge fall. One of the factors is that a major chain opened up right next door to us a few months ago. However, their increase in script count doesn't entirely coincide with our decrease. I think mail order must have a lot to do with it. Maybe even the high gas prices and shaky economy are contributing because supposedly most of our stores are down (not like we are though).

We were the only show in town for a long time. That's why we were filling nearly 3,000 scripts per week at one point, which is incredibly rare for a store like us. Now that a big chain competitor just opened 1/4 mile away from us, people have an option, and for some insane reason, a lot are choosing to go to our competitor. They did offer a coupon. I guess that must have given our customers an incentive to switch. People are crazy about those stupid coupons. Within a year, another big chain competitor will be opening up a store that's about a 1/2 mile away from us on the same road. It'll be interesting to see what happens to our script count them.

Fortunately for me, if our store does get cut down to a 2 pharmacist store, I'll be one of those pharmacists. I really don't want to change stores. I live so close to it now. I save a ton of money on gas, and if I really had to, I could walk to work or ride a bike when the weather is warm (although walking would take me about 30 minutes).

In other news....

4/19 - 172 lbs
4/23 - 170 lbs
4/26 - 169.5 lbs
4/30 - 166.5 lbs

That's 5.5 lbs in 11 days. I'll take that, especially considering I haven't done anything radically different. I just stopped over-eating. I have a fairly quick metabolism, so I really have to eat a lot of food to maintain a weight around 170. I ran into problems because I would order a large pizza and eat the whole thing in one sitting. I'm just retraining myself to eat proper portion sizes.

In addition, from the start of the year, I've completely cut out soda (I only drank diet anyway, but now I drink none at all), and I'm now working at drinking nothing but tap water and milk. That's my plan for home at least. When I go to a restaurant, I might order a diet coke or some other beverage (I can actually count on one hand the number of times I drank soda so far in 2008). When I'm at home, I plan to drink tap water and milk. I'm going to try to give up bottled water because it's a waste of money and resources to drink water out of a bottle. We've all been conditioned to drink bottled water now. When I was a kid, I used to drink tap water all the time, and there was nothing wrong with it. No, it doesn't taste quite as good as bottled water, but taste is something you can get used to.

That's all for now.