Every day's a holiday

So far, so good.  Yesterday I could not get my fill of food.  Seemed like I was eating all the time and I didn't track my calories.  This morning my weight was exactly the same.  Of course I also played PB yesterday followed by a pretty solid bit of strength training so my hunger was kind of deserved.  I suppose I do have what is referred to as 'food noise' again.   But it is manageable and I am mostly keeping up my protein and fiber first rule.  One day I'll gain a couple of pounds and panic and we'll see where that takes us.  

Last week I was looking at something on my phone and saw a really nice fountain pen and started to think.  Rather than buy it for myself I bought it for Laurana, my granddaughter, who started college a couple of weeks ago.  I had it engraved with her initials and sent along some good paper and ink.  She is an artist in training so she should appreciate it.  

Then, just to be mean, I wrote her a letter and am sending it today.

My guess is that will be the first two pieces of real mail she gets.

This time of year in Maine where I went to school or Vermont, where she is, the sun starts to set early and the first tendrils of winter can be felt.  We spent a lot of time outside and I can still feel the sudden onset of chill in the late afternoon playing frisbee on the quad.  My dorm with my coat was a ways away so I just lived with it until I could no longer do so.

I've been trying for years to get good at sharpening a kitchen knife.  For some reason the skill has always eluded me.  But I went back out to see if there was a local knife sharpening place and realized the cost was now more than the cost of a knife.  So I made another pass at it.  I've got the sharpening stones and the Internet.  How hard can it be.  I finally asked AI a question that fixed the problem I was having.  I'd been, it would seem, holding the knife at too shallow and angle.  I tilted it up a few degrees and it made all the diffence.  I finally managed to get a decent blade on my primary knife.

Which is to say I just removed the band-aid from my index finger.  The one that I immediately cut with my newly sharpened knife.

The universe loves to laugh at me.

I went by Discount Tire to get my air checked and have them check my tread.  And, sure enough both back tires need to be replaced.  $376.  I bought retreads for $25 for my first car.  

On the up side, Dana went to the dentist today and total cost was $21.64 and she had a good visit despite needing a filling replaced.

So bad and good money wise.

Meanwhile Dana fell for a guy who was walking around the neighborhood saying 'you house should be repainted'.  She actually made an appointment with the guy to have him look.  She is not able to say no.  We are not going to use this guy no matter what he says.  I would never, ever pay someone to work on my house who just rings the doorbell to tell me what I need.

Something I've been thinking of doing for a long time and finally started the process is to engage a home inspector I've known for years to come by and do an inspection as if we were going to sell the house.  This guy also does repairs so if there is something we can get it fixed by someone I know.  And if we need paint he will know someone to do it.

I discovered last night that I've still got a few days left on my Fubo subscription set up for the World Cup.  Fubo also has the US Open so I'm watching that too.  I thought I was going to miss the whole thing since I didn't have a subscription for anything but nice surprise.

Now is time for Pickleball drills with a coach.  It is fun and a good workout.

The day after Dolly Parton died I had pickleball first thing in the morning.   They usually have musice playing.  Frequently it is too loud and crap music and really distracting but I think I'm the only one that doesn't like it so I have ear plugs I sometimes wear when it is really bad.

But as I walked in on the day after she died I heard her voice.  My immediate response was 'how nice that someone put on a station of her songs, a tribute'.  My second thought was that of all the joints in all the world with all the songs, this was the most ironic.  Dolly sang a LOT of stuff out of her area of expertise.  Most of the time I didn't mind.  This time was a real reach but regardless appropriate.  This time it was 'Stairway to Heaven.'

 

Dana had a rheumatoid DR visit today so I had no pickleball.  I'm OK with it.  I'm scheduled for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday so is enough.  

Beaux got me up (he does not have to do much more than get down to the floor and I hear his collor) around midnight.  He sometimes has stomach problems and wants to eat some grass as a midnight snack so we've done it before.  I let him out without thinking much about it and he was off like a greyhound at the races and Toby who perked up was out flying after him.  Beaux can really move when he's hunting.  It is the dachshund in him.  The good news is that he was vermin hunting.  The bad news was the vermin was a skunk.  I saw a flash of moving black under the chicken coup and realized what it was.  I called for both dogs to come back and Toby was smart enough to do it.

Beaux got a face full of skunk and I did not handle the outcome well.  At all. 

What you are supposed to do is keep the dog outside unless/until they are at least partially cleaned up.  We did not have any skunk degreaser (entirely my fault since we've had skunks in our back yard before and I should have been prepared) so I brought him inside to take him to the shower.  His interest was getting the crap off is face ASAP so he was wiping his muzzle all over the floor in the living room.  In the bedroom.  In his dog bed.  Pretty much anywhere he could get a good wiping surface. 

Results:
1 - The house will smell like skunk likely for a month or two.
2 - Chewy is shipping me dog skunk shampoo and dog skunk floor and furniture cleaner.
3 - Having written the above I realized that Chewy was going to take too long so I bought some from Amazon and it is coming today.
4 - I was up most of the night after the adrenaline dump and the nasty smell (which Dana does not seem to even notice) and I'm exhausted.
5 - We will have a skunk kit by the back door for future encounters.  

So, just as good there was no PB today.  It would not have been smart of me to push through. 

Nothing else to do today.  I'm about ready for a serious nap and then to figure out what to have for dinner.  We have, for the moment, stopped all the food service companies.  They all have one kind of issue or another.  I really hate figure out what to make for dinner and then having to go to the store.  Basic, every day kind of stuff.  Don't like it.  But for various reasons I've burned out on the food services we've been using.  So for now I'm stuck.

Sad, sad life around here in the first world.

My team won in their first Premier League outing this season after having been promoted last year. And my first Premier match.

The level of play was about the same as I expect with MLS tonight when Austin meets Philadelphia.

It is really a luxury to have a morning game and one at night.

The universe is clearly screwing with me.  I lost another pound since yesterday.  I'm a little over one pound below my plateau.  It doesn't change anything but I do think it is funny.  Maybe I feel a little more hungry than I have been.  It is so difficult to tell whether the fading of GLP1 in my system is making a difference in my level of hunger.  I maxed out on my calories last night ending up at 91% of my available calories and 105% of my allowable fat.  We had pizza and that pushed the fat envelope. 

But I ended the day not ravenous so no matter.  I can eat 100% every day.  

Being able to track and being used to tracking food so easily I think will make a difference.  It helps a lot.

I've had my morning protein drink (it is chocolate Whey powder and I do love chocolate in the morning) and my morning psyllium orange drink.  And coffee.  And a small bag of trail mix.

I went to the shelter and gently ran a meeting to get their processes going so that they can streamline their intakes and get them running without depending on working at home.  Right now the staff of two works all day and then takes home a bunch of data to enter.  They've spent so much time doing that they haven't spent any time planning and they are killing themselves and limiting their potential.  I volunteered to set up a Google drive and a process for them to scan in the source data so that volunteers can grab work from a directory and enter it during the day.  Process over people.  Fingers crossed.

So I should be hungry.  My brain has been working.

But I'm going to do my workout first.  I've got about 20 mins of core exercises to do and then a proper meal, I think.  It will work as late breakfast and as lunch.

Yesterday I ended up doing a three or so hour project for the dog shelter.  They had an issue with registering dog tracking chips that had been going on without their knowledge since January.  They had about 140 chips that needed to be registered with the chip tracker people.  Someone had figured out how to drop a list that had the dog/cat name and the chip number.  So the job was to cross ref that data, get the owner info, and enter it into the online site so that it was connected.  Fortunately they only needed owner name and email.  It was a research, cut and paste, enter and cut and paste kind of job.  

I decided to ping a volunteer that had recently been helping (a retired high school science teacher) to see is she wanted to divide up the work.  She was willing so I collected the data from one database and entered it into a spreadsheet.  She took that data and entered it into the chip tracking database online.  

She is so much like me.  I explained it once and she got it.  Then two questions texted during the three or so hours we did the thing and that was it.  The next text was 'done'.  No chatting, no repeating instructions, nothing.  It was really nice.  And we did what would have taken the shelter a week or two to accomplish in under four hours.  Same day they asked for help.

It is an interesting development.  As work inevitibily expands to reach capacity the shelter will no doubt find other such things.  As with all non profits they have royally screwed up some stuff and I've been fixing it by myself.  Now I've got someone to do it with me we might actually replace people with process and develope some efficiency in what has been a chaotic place.  The shelter is about to open a new canine shelter building, a HUGE update to what is currently a pretty depressing and overcrowded dog facility.  It will allow them to add something like 40 or 50 dogs.  

They do not have a process that does that very well.  So maybe we can figure that out.  It would be interesting.

The other volunteer is a dog person too.  !!

This morning I decided to cut myself off from GLP1.  I've reduced my dosage so not it's not much.  I can still feel the effects of taking it so stopping may matter.  But right now I can still kick it off again, renew the shipments, if I want to.  So it is a good time to test.  I've plateaued at 185 now for months.  I'll gain a couple of pounds then lose 3.  Water coming and going.  I don't much change my eating habits and I maintained a plateau before I started taking the drug.  It was just too high.

I'm still 'overweight' by medical standards but for whatever reason I've always been overweight.  I was borderline in the Navy at 180 and my original intent was go get down to 175 which is where I am 'supposed' to be.  But I would be lean and not have enough strength to be safe.  I need to have sufficient muscle mass and strength for all the stuff, like walking, getting out of a chair, and such.  And at 185 I can retain sufficient muscle.

I'm doing the daily 'Lifelone Mobility' program and really have just gotten used to a half hour a day every day no matter what.  It won't make me an olympic athlete but I can move, balance well, and maintain enough muscle to play pickleball which is an absolute bargain with so little time involvement.

So we'll see how it goes.  I weight myself every morning and have set an upper limit of 190 max or 187 for five days.  Either two happen and I'll go back on GLP1.  

I've still got my food tracking app, Cronometer, and am used to using it.  The process is protein first thing in the day, then some good worthless carbs, and then more protein around lunch and some healthy carbs and then about half a dinner with some balance.

I'm good at boring so doing that every day is not hard for me.  We'll see how it hits in a month or two.

I've walked the dogs, had my protein shake breakfast, had my coffee, gone to the Ortho doc and got my knee shot, been to UPS to drop off a return, bought a couple of things at HEB and picked up prescriptions.

I feel so accomplished.  While all that was happening I listened to my Hacks On Tap podcast and got my political junkie fix listening to the Michigan primary wrapup and the Wisconsin preview. 

Now what?

I'm kind of at loose ends until 4 this afternoon when I've got pickleball drills.  It is three people and a trainer.  It is fun and I learn a lot and develop muscle memory that I really need and I run around for an hour and a half.  Good stuff.

The shot in my knee was to facilitate both pickleball and resistance training.  I'm back in my online program every day again.  The cataract surgery threw me off, or I used it as an excuse.  Either way I fell behind and lost some of the muscle mass in my legs.  So I'm working back and until I get a little further down the road I've got too much pain in my knee to do what I need to do.  The last shot I got was in February.  The object is to no longer need shots and never knee surgery.  I'm not sure if it is possible but it it is I'll get there by being diligent in building up my muscle mass around my knee and keeping it.  

Just to balance things out I just scheduled a massage for my birthday to run at the same time as Dana's counselling session located next door. 

Dana's therapist's name is Roxie.  My massage therapist's name is Candy.  Kind of makes you wonder.

We didn't make it out of the house yesterday to see Dana's brother.   She had some spaghetti that she'd saved from lunch the previous day (she had it for lunch, brought it home, I had a meal of it and there was enough left for another meal..  such is portioning in America).  The sauce was spicy as nearly everything in Texas is spicy.  I really didn't like it and would have been happy to see it in the trash but she had what is left and the spicy hit her hard this time.  She spent much of the day in bed.

So we're going today, I assume.  

I'm playing computer tech at the moment with the Dell laptop I acquired.  I've got Chrome Flex on it and that was working fine until recently.  Now it is in a reboot loop that I've tracked down to a problem with Chrome.  And, actually I just fixed it.  Turned out to be an update issue.  Something in my Chrome that I routinely sync crashed the new installation when it was not updated.  So, now it is working.  

I'm putting off trying to fix a problem at the dog shelter that I thought would be easy.  It is an spreadsheet merge job that should be a breeze with Gemini but I'm having all kinds of problems and it is hurting my brain and now I'm putting it off.  Fortunately it is not a must be done today kind of job but I do need to get it done one way or another.  Gemini is great until it isn't.  At one point a couple of days ago it was telling me that there was an entry on line 119 on the spreadsheet that was not there.  It is very annoying when you can't really say 'look here!!!'.

I backed out and started all over again with a new prompt that I told to not use any history or prior chats or prior inputs.  Then something came up and I had to stop.  So I'm starting all over again with more knowledge this time but less patience.

Looking at our schedule this week revealed a bit of a surprise.  Dana's son and wife and, presumably, two children are coming to town.  She told me they were coming but I don't think ever said when and so I'm only semi-included in the stream of information.  I'm committed to some specific work at the shelter on Tuesday morning when we're supposed to be with them so will catch up when I'm done, I guess.  We have lunch, again without my knowledge, on Thursday.  Fortunately I don't have anything scheduled mid day on Thursday.  They're more interested in hanging out with each other than me anyway and there are a lot of explosive contact points that I generally avoid (Trump/religion et al).

Other than that things are the usual suspects.  Pickleball, dog shelter, soccer matches at night.  A few doctor visits only one of which is mine (knee shot).   

I've decided to add a year of Peacock to my subscriptions.  It is $109 per year for the version I want and it includes all the Premier league matches for their season starting later this month.  I'm assuming that Peacock with add a bunch of stuff and then jack up their rate next year so I'm going to get it while I can.  I'd have to renew Fubo if I didn't do that and not everything I want is on Fubo and Fubo is $157.97 per quarter.  

So I basically will be paying $210/year for all the soccer I want to watch.  Actually a pretty good deal.  Goodby NFL.  I'll probably catch a game or two as it flies by on Amazon or something I've already got access to but I don't much enjoy it.  Way too many commercials and after watching soccer, way too many starts and stops.

Funny how things evolve.  If Austin had a pro baseball team I'd likely be more interested but when my 'local' teams are Astros and Rangers I can't get very excited about it.

Wow, now we've got August and then a couple or three months more and it will cool down.

I decided to get a second steroid injection in my right knee. The last one was in February. I'm doing OK but I do think I can do better, more physical therapy strength training and push my court mobility so that may be I can get back to where I don't need any more injections at all. I'm pretty sure unless something drastically changes that I can and will put off knee replacement indefinitely. The Internet Death Clock said I was likely to die at 89 but now says over a hundred. Regardless I'll keep my knee as it is as long as I can.

We're going to visit Dana's brother, Mark, today. He has some kind of progressive nerve desease in the vicinity of ALS. He's been bedridden for many years now in a care facility and, of course, his mind is not all there. He's only a year or so older than me but their family genes seem to be problematic and he didn't take care of himself much.

Dana visits once a month or so and obviously can't drive there. It is a $50 Uber ride so I'll be taking her. I haven't seen him for maybe a year so he may not even know who I am.

Nothing to be done. It is why I keep up the long term health insurance for both of us.

Today is insect day it seems. Somehow we ended up with a batch of houseflys all, it looks like, born in the past few days. It is not at all usual for us to have even one fly and we've killed dozens. Not sure how they got in but I ordered what turned out to be the wrong size replacement dog door flap from Amazon today. It came within 3 hours but by following the manufacture process to measure the flap I ended up with a medium when I needed a large. I ordered the right size and it will be here tomorrow.

Meanwhile we continue to deal with wasps of all kinds. This has been going on for a year. Whenever it is warm we get wasps. I will go around and spray half a dozen nests in the house soffits and the next day there will be more. I bought a couple of wasp sticky traps. They are replacing the ones that I've had hanging on the corners of the house. Not cheap but not chemical. And they work. They seem to keep the nest population down but I've spent about $90 on three cycles of the things.

Having written that I made a DIY wasp trap.  We'll see if it works.  

I cut the grass and my hair yesterday so I don't have much in the way of chores to get through today.  Other than the Mark trip I'll just be waiting around for the Austin FC game.