I have somewhat of a New Year's resolution. My uncle used to advise people that move to Wisconsin that you need find something you love to do in the winter, so that you have a reason to feel sad when it's over. I finally got the idea that I should plan for August/September this way. So I bought a couple super-discounted advent calendars to save for the end of next summer. So far my ugh-summer resolutions are:
1. Enjoy these two advent calendars
2. Resolve to get in the river once per day during that stretch. I always feel better after I actually get in. It could be a nightly routine after dinner to walk down and jump in.
Oh! One other resolution:
Figure out a good craft that I can do during road trips to pair with listening to podcasts. Right now I'm thinking that I could learn to make amigurumi.
Totally support 1.last. The only thing that makes summers tolerable in the south is being in the water.
We just got hit by a record flood on 30-31 December- 5.3m. Almost finished cleaning up the house, fortunately no serious damage.
That still sucks. Hope you get it squared soon.
In good news, my Pokemon that had been on a gym in a state park that apparently doesn't get visited much in the fall or winter has finally returned home after 82 days.
I have Covid again, which means that I probably typhoid-mary'd the NYE party I was at last night. Yesterday, felt a bit hungover from the night before (there was a pre-NY party the day before) so didn't think anything of it. The cough came in this afternoon and I tested positive this evening.
I'm fully vaccinated including the recent bivalent booster. So hopefully it won't be too bad. I wasn't that bad the last couple of times I had it. Getting sick this winter, in the UK, is definitely not advised.
Its January 1 and already I've been called a "woke libtard" this year.
It's weird how that replaced "valued customer" in the emails from Whole Foods.
I posted more details on my injury and surgery at the other place, but it seems like interventions are done and it's just waiting for muscles and nerves to hopefully return to normal.
Over the holidays I did the whole throw out all your clothes and buy everything new. I'm down 50lb from my peak in August and from squeezing into 36 waist pants to comfortably fitting into 32. Most people consider the shopping a reward but I hate buying clothes so it was kind of a pain.
You could buy a belt and call it done. Best wishes healing.
11: Do you have older clothes from when you weighed less?
Do you want us to pick out some clothes for you?
13- I've never been this low. I was losing steadily for several months until the pandemic when I gained it all back, but my prior low was about 20lb above where I am now so clothes from then are still too big. I don't believe BMI is predictive of health except at extremes, but using it as a historical competitor this is the first time I haven't been in the overweight or obese range since maybe age 6.
14- I didn't think of that, would have been fun! I think I've bought most things I need though. I just went to a Men's Wearhouse for business stuff (button down shirts, pants, suits, sport coat) and various casual stores (old navy, primark) for athletic and jeans and basics. I wore all new stuff to a NYE party and someone noticed my sport coat was new because apparently there are stitches in the tail you're supposed to remove. But I also wonder why she was looking at my ass.
Alta is back! There were a lot of twists and turns over the past week, but the eventual upshot was that Amadea negotiated a new set of ground rules with Christina that is somewhat more restrictive than we had before but still consistent with our values and parenting philosophy.
The boyfriend can still come over but can't spend the night, for example, and we need to keep the alcohol locked up (which for now means keeping it in our bedroom, which has a thumbprint lock on the door). We have never actually had a problem with Alta or any of the other teens stealing our alcohol, but Christina seems to have some weird and totally inaccurate ideas about our lifestyle and we're willing to go along with her stipulations so we can have Alta back.
Christina signed a new Power of Attorney and is apparently planning to move back to her rural hometown again, so we'll see how that goes. She came over today to dye her hair and make moose stew, which she, Alta, and the boyfriend are eating right now. Anyway, yeah, it's a huge relief to have things seeming to settle down in a positive way.
I was going to give the boyfriend a ride home, but he decided to walk instead. This did involve some detouring through the front yard to avoid two moose across the street, but he seems to have managed it.
16: Big weight loss is a pretty weird (but satisfying!) experience. I went from 225 to 175 a few years back, then settled in around 180, and the difference it made in my knees alone was stark. I still have all the big-waisted pants on a shelf in the closet because middle age, but I've managed to stay in this range for three or four years now.
Great news! I suspect the moose know about the stew so be careful.
24- That's pretty much the same change I've had. My wife wanted me to donate all the big clothes as motivation while I was pessimistic and thought I should hold on to them. Our compromise was I'll keep them in the basement for a year and if I still don't need them then they go away.
24/27: How significantly did you alter your lifestyle?
I signed up for Noom but mostly just used the calorie counting and daily weight tracking. The community board and educational stuff I've mostly ignored.
Keeping within calorie limits was a big change. I cut way back on a lot of things I routinely ate like cheese and pasta. Mostly eating vegetables, fruits, high protein foods like tofu, fish, and protein shakes. Precooked frozen shrimp was surprisingly effective and not too expensive as big bags from Costco. It was unpleasant for a few weeks then not so bad. Also relied on the usual trick foods like cauliflower and spaghetti squash. I think for maintaining weight I won't need to be as heavy on those and it's just avoiding things that can quickly add up. I probably used to eat 500 calories of cheese as a snack.
Pre-COVID I had been doing WW which was sort of working but had stalled. The problem I had with that is they give you unlimited amounts of some foods like fruits which I would game and still eat too many calories. Noom you track everything so you don't end up eating 2000 calories of fruit in addition to non-zero WW point foods, and I found that complete tracking worked much better.
Oh and as far as activity I increased it somewhat but I was already fairly active- weekly hockey, 1-2 hours of tennis a week, e-biking to work 6.5 miles each way. I found a second weekly hockey game and we joined a winter tennis club to keep playing year round, but I've been mostly inactive since being injured mid November and haven't had any weight rebound.
I lost about 65lbs about 3.5 years ago, finishing just a couple of months before Covid hit. I kept most of it off for about 2 years, but since my wife started full-time college, I've just not had time to hit the gym as much as I'd like, or the convenience of cheap food stalls in the market near my office to get convenient high-protein food. So I've put quite a lot of it back on. I'm still about 20lbs+ lower than my highest weight, though, and much much fitter overall than I was then.
I've managed to lose 4 or 5 lbs over Christmas, and I feel like that'll continue as I think I've managed to settle back into some better habits. My daily routine, though, because I do school drop off and pickup, doesn't allow for me to exercise as much as I once did, so it isn't quite as conducive to weight loss. Our routine before was that my wife and I alternated pickups, so I worked late 3 nights a week, and hit the gym after work when it was empty.
I was back cycling again regularly after about 3 months off (mechanical issues with the bike, mostly, rather than lack of motivation). We'll see if I can get back to that next week if I shift the COVID quickly. Right now I feel shitty.
I'm still running a lot -- I picked up the habit over the pandemic when I stopped going to the gym. Training for a half marathon on February 11. I am in theory aiming to do it in 2:00 flat, but I don't think I'm going to manage.
I feel very secretive about weight-management because of internalized feminism and feeling like I'm betraying my gender somehow. Anyway, I've tracked what I've eaten for years, enough to be a habit. I'm sure I've mentioned that before. I vaguely worry about Jammies though. He likes to pretend he's invincible/doesn't have sleep apnea/isn't worth prioritizing, and it makes me nervous.
The big obvious changes were switching from the high-sugar coffee flavored energy drinks to artificially sweetened soda ones, and cutting out fast food breakfasts and food truck lunches, and that alone was at least 1000-2000 calories a day. Didn't actually change my activity level that much beyond taking more walks. I have never been an exerciser.
I was biking about 40 - 60 miles a week, I guess, until the summer and had been doing that for more than a year. Some weeks I'd go closer to 100 miles. I really like it, so the plan is to get back to doing about 60+ most weeks. I did about 30-40 a week for the month leading up to Christmas.
re: 35
For me, I skipped some snacks that I tended to eat in the afternoon when tired, but the main thing was switching to a much larger, more protein heavy lunch, which tended to mean that I just didn't want to eat as much the rest of the day. Which didn't feel like a massive hardship.
I like exercising, though, especially once it becomes a routine. Which is ironic, because I mostly look live I've never exercised in my life.
feeling like I'm betraying my gender somehow
Look around at the world. There are so many easier ways to do that now.
I've never been able to exercise just for the purpose of exercise. I just can't do distance running, stationary bike, lifting weights, most other gym machines. But biking somewhere or chasing a ball or a puck around and I can go on forever.
Surprisingly our 13 year old decided he wanted to start running and he went out and did a 5k with essentially no training and posted a 25:03. So now he's all into that. Our 16yo is a serious rower so I've been trying out the used erg machine he bought which is somewhat tolerable.
One other change I mentioned before is I stopped drinking much. Used to have a drink or two most nights, now it's 1-2 per week. I got wasted NYE because I had a couple of 16oz strong IPAs and some sangria and between lower weight and reduced tolerance I was pretty fucked up. My wife said I told the same story to the host at the end of the night that I had told earlier in the evening but that either he was drunk too or he played along.
I find that I need to be doing some kind of progressive program to stay interested in exercising. Just running a lot, I get bored. Having a GPS watch tracking whether I've done the scheduled workout for week eight of my half marathon training program and making passive-aggressive comments if it thinks I'm slacking, I stay interested.
I miss running, but I didn't have a passive-aggressive app. I just pretended I was chasing after the orcs that took the hobbits.
I am very impressed by people stories of major shifts in diet and exercise, and feel sort of exhausted reading them. I feel like I would benefit from making small shifts in diet & exercise -- I should definitely start going to the gym again after losing the habit during COVID -- but I think of them as small shifts rather than lifestyle changes.
JCC
Jewish Community Center or Joint Congressional Committee?
Whichever is closer to your home or office.
The JCC doesn't let you bring in Slim Jims though, so getting protein between sets can be difficult.
I lost about 25-30 pounds maybe about a decade ago and since I hadn't expected it, I started to worry part way through the process. I didn't buy a scale until I got worried, so I'm not quite sure what my starting weight was. I just remember being surprised it was between 200-210 at one point.
Eventually, I realized what must have happened was I lost all the weight due to completely cutting out soda drinking, which I'd done to reduce caffeine once I started drinking coffee. I'd had at least 3 cans a day (or the equivalent) for years. I didn't change anything else and my weight has basically stayed around 180 ever since. I thought it might go down once I started hiking again but it never has.
a day (or the equivalent)
When you were on another planet?
I was drinking about four cans of Pepsi a day and stopped. I lost 20 pounds, but that was decades ago and I'm now heavier than I've been ever before.
Sometimes I had the plastic bottles.
I decided to row a 2k for the hell of it. 8:36 which the internet tells me is average for a beginner my age.
46: Is that actually true? It reminded me of an incident at the Jewish Community Center chess club when I was in high school. A gentile chess player was concerned about whether it was OK to bring a fast food cheese burger into the Center, and so he asked me. I could barely understand the question- I assured him that it was fine. But maybe I was wrong.
I also played chess at a JCC!
JCCs are typically reform, right? They won't care what food you bring.
53: We were told once, years ago at a function for our son's karate, that we had to bring cookies and that the cookies had to be kosher.
19 is great news! Best wishes things keep working out going forward!
I've never seen anyone eat in the weight room.
35: Artificial sweeteners seem to cause problems for me weight wise. I think I eat other bad stuff and more of it when I drink Diet Coke regularly. I wasn't exercising enough and gained weight but had lost a bunch. I switched from Splenda to lakanto monkfruit. I think Splenda is so sweet thatI wound up wanting more sugary foods, but monkfruit works for me. And I'm drinking water with lemon or these TruLemon TruLime packets.
On the days I go to work (once a week) I skip breakfast and lunch and go for a walk at lunch time. If I had coffee with milk I'm hungry but water with electrolytes and I can fast.
I can't find anything recent, but I was right about back in the days.
Alive and well. My wife and I have each been in a spread sheeting mood recently; me for a play-by-post backend, and her for a "Walk the Year" challenge. My game just launched, so hopefully the advance work will make it easier for everyone.
She swapped medications and was hit by nausea, so our New Year's weekend was quiet at home. Her doctor okayed setting it aside for now, so hopefully she'll bounce back and they can try a different medicine.
I'm stuck in the middle of a giant battle over whether we should build a cool, pedestrian friendly open space at the center of our city, or whether we should hold on to 13 parking spots. Local building owners have roused quite a rabble against the project, and I had to stick my head over the parapet in favor.
64: we are now in year 10 of a giant battle over whether to build a dyke to stop the city centre flooding, or whether it would be better to keep 24 parking spots by the river. The recent flooding of the city centre is unlikely to shift opinions that flood defences are a waste of money.
Ironically the local building and business owners are entirely in favour of losing the parking spots because they have all just been catastrophically flooded but there is a well organised anti-flood-dyke group that has successfully delayed the project by four years so far, at a cost of over £1.5m in legal and consultation fees, and is now pointing to the cost of the delay as a reason not to build the dyke.
It has occurred to me that it would have been faster for me to go back to university, take a degree in civil engineering, qualify as a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers, design the dyke myself, and then sneak out at night with a spade and build it by myself by hand.
The fear of running out of parking is wild. People are terrified of it.
They couldn't use any of the riverside parking for a few days recently because it was four feet underwater.
If this goes on I'm going to buy an Amphtrac.
My neighbor has a truck that is too tall to fit in his garage.
I just bought a ticket on Amtrak. It costs $12 each way for me to go to Waco next week to visit my friend.
How much does it cost if you don't have a friend?
We have so much damn parking. But everybody has to park exactly in front of the store that they are going into or terrible things will happen.
I'm looking for examples of small cities where they took out parking and good things happened.
They replaced a surface parking lot with a very nice park by Pitt.
I read a terrible post-apoc SF novel when I was a kid called "The Amtrak Wars" in which the US is ruled by a federation of underground city states, the Amtrak Federation, linked by armoured trains running through the mutant-infested radioactive wilderrness, and it was in fact the first time I had encountered the word "Amtrak", which means that comments like 73 always have a slightly future-shock feel for me.
67: why not just import some beavers into strategic upstream spots? god i love beavers beautiful monomaniacs just love 'em. this would be so much more fun and effective of a nighttime stealth manoeuvre ...
Are there enough trees for the beavers to work with?
There definitely are enough trees, and there are beavers elsewhere in Scotland, but forcibly relocating beavers is at present not allowed - we have to wait for them to spread naturally. I could try to encourage them to immigrate of their own free will.
Tiptoeing across the countryside leaving trails of beaver treats...
Poster campaigns emphasising the chewiness of our local trees.
I guess I picture most of the U.K. as treeless. Except for Wales and where they went camping in Harry Potter.
But everybody hasstore owners have to park exactly in front of the store that they are going into or terrible things will happen.
I'm looking for examples of small cities where they took out parking and good things happened.
Is Fayetteville, AR small enough?
I guess I picture most of the U.K. as treeless.
Most of it is, by US standards. 13% forest vs 33%.
Also, the Parking Reform Network has a map of where reforms have happened with even a logarithmic-scale population slider.
In the low five digits range of cities I see Dover, NH; Auburn, ME; South Burlington, VT; Canandaigua and Ithaca, NY; Norwood, OH; many more.
"Come and teeth on our wood. "
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my trees:
So I did sit and teethe.
The Mississippi River broke through a protective dyke today. What is that, a large woman saying "Don't go near the river -- stay away from the river"? ... I know we can't use the word "dyke." You can't even say "lesbian." It's "women in comfortable shoes."
85: One day they'll make the No Exit-esque psychosexual drama of HP7: Part I that's just the three of them in a tent in the middle of nowhere with no plan just learning that hell is other people.
We could get Mitt Romney to front it. Didn't he have that weird line about how he liked Michigan because the trees were the right height?
92: That's mostly the movie as is.
Though they could add in an explanation of how post-coital "accio semen" has kept down the teen pregnancy rate at Hogwarts.
"Come and teeth on our wood. "
I attempted to explain "Three's Company" to the kids yesterday. "See, it was scandalous for a guy to live with two women as friends, because it was assumed he'd pressure them into sex. So the landlord wouldn't allow it. So their workaround was to pretend the guy was gay. So the humor came from the idea that you wouldn't want to be gay, and he put on this exaggerated stereotyped gay act. So the humor came from switching back and forth, according to whether his landlord was around or a love interest was around..."
The kids: "It doesn't sound very funny."
Me: "It wasn't."
i'm pretty sure there are beavers in var parts of eng & scot lands today thx to nocturnal human logistical support...
97: Did you explain about the really tight shirts?
And the wacky misunderstandings?
I never wanted to buy a house in Canada until I found out I can't.
I might be able to draw some examples from Fayetteville, but the issue here isn't so much parking minimums (which we have not eliminated but made some progress on) as it is, these are city-owned spaces with meters that cost $1 an hour. We have a ton of them and people love them, because having a shit-ton of parking right in the middle of downtown is great. If you are in a car, at least. We also have a dangerous-ass downtown traffic pattern. We can fix it and pedestrianize the leftover bits to expand our central square at the same time, but 13 parking spots is a deal-breaker.
Our local free weekly is being bought by the Blocks (Trump-loving, union-busting asshats who own the Post Gazette). It's going to be really weird to have the Tribune Review as the most trusted local paper.
102: I know you said it wasn't about parking minimums, but are any of these helpful: https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/articles/360054485571-End-Parking-Mandates-and-Subsidies-Case-Studies-and-Examples
For example this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/9/how-to-solve-a-parking-problem-without-breaking-the-bank
I've floated the idea of buying off the parking interests with a downtown circulator bus/tram for shoppers so they don't have to walk all the way from the massive surface parking lot bonanza located two blocks over. I hope nobody notices that I'm trying to sneak a new public transportation system into the city.
Two blocks doesn't sound very far unless you've got to move large bags of kitty litter. Just have people teach their cats to use the toilet. (Tip: For older, less agile cats, using a squatting toilet helps. )
106: we have a pilot program going of that exact thing. I'm really hoping they give it enough time and that people use it.
We are looking at three years of downtown construction to pull up a bunch of ancient pipes. Its an opportune time to introduce a new transportation mode while all the regular driving is dug up and inconvenient. Maybe people can get hooked.
Seems easier to just clean the litter box regularly.
88 is an impressive piece of data collection.
106: I'm not aware of cases where they successfully got rid of public lots like that - Berkeley, of all places, spent a shit-ton of money to build a new "green" parking garage downtown last decade! - but some thoughts:
* You could charge closer to market prices for the parking and use the money for stuff people want.
* Some of that money (and/or money from redeveloping some of the land) could fund the shuttle, and it could go to some slightly further-out parking.
As you may know, expensive parking actually helps businesses by increasing throughput and decreasing the number of non-shoppers who just park all day. It may also decrease congestion if you price up to the point where about 20% of spaces are vacant at any given time. The trouble is the business owners usually don't accept this because of personal inconvenience.
107 obligatory link https://www.charlesmingus.com/mingus/cat-traning-program
There are several populations that are the result of "unauthorised escapes", potentially with human help, though the RSPB will be very disapproving if they suspect you of involvement in beaver smuggling...
But if you have to have driving, it would be great to put a garage where the parking lot is, and then maybe fill in the parking lot with retail and/or housing so that the parking isn't so expansive.
Last time that someone brought up a parking garage on my campus, what I remember as the response was "Covered parking is $40,000 a space, paving open land is $500 a space." (assumes starting from an empty lot). My memory is poor, but I did understand then why nobody was planning a parking garage here. Heck, the campus created overflow parking by just throwing those cement curbs-for-your-front-wheels in an grassy field, so, what, $50 or less per spot.
* You could charge closer to market prices for the parking and use the money for stuff people want.
We could never do this. It would be an affront to all the poor, impoverished people who drive expensive cars.
There have been plans for a garage, but it costs a ton of money and I am not believing it will happen in the current interest rate environment. Obviously turning those surface lots into apartments is, or ought to be, a priority, but until that happens they are capable of providing far more parking than we actually need.
You should just encourage everyone to buy bigger cars.
They don't need my encouragement. We have a bumper crop of those extended-cab giant pickup trucks with five-foot grills made for eating pedestrians.
People picture Texas as some unique hellhole, but the US is a monoculture. Actually not, but non-urban America transcends state lines.
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know ... morons.
In the meantime, you could restripe two-thirds of the spaces to 8 feet width, to be deliberately inhospitable to massive SUVs.
Oh, I like that. I can definitely suggest narrower parking spaces. It won't happen but its a beautiful troll.
Be sure to boast loudly about how much more parking you're providing.
We could go to four-foot wide spaces and double the number of spots!
Not that a four-foot space for my e-bike wouldn't be sweet.
124. The people who drive massive SUVs wouldn't hesitate to take two or three spaces and fuck everybody else. In some situations they already do.
I'm starting to realize how compromised the bike lane plans have been in the design. They really went with the shittiest, most dangerous option that has the least impact on parking.
Slightly better... they want to paint sections of the road green.
They do that here. I don't know if it works well, unless you like cars parked on green paint.
So its not true that green paint provides some kind of force field that prevents automobiles from entering the space?
124. The people who drive massive SUVs wouldn't hesitate to take two or three spaces and fuck everybody else.
Maybe we could make that official policy. Narrow the spaces. If you want to take two, that's fine but you have to feed both parking meters.
Parking meters these days being a stupid app.
I resent being asked to download an app, so I still pay the meters by credit card.
Meters are what a pocket full of change is for.
It's $2/hour in many places I park.
Spray the green paint on a regular basis. If a car becomes partially green, it's the driver's problem for staying parked there.
Whoa, big bucks. If we charged $2 here, maybe there would be revenue for bike and pedestrian projects.
Oh, there's an idea for app-based parking meters: they're mostly license-plate-based where I am (no sticker to put in your car window) so the system knows how big the parked vehicle is and could charge by time times area.
Three dimensional space-time parking rates.
As your car approaches the speed of light, it gets shorter and taller. But I guess you can't be traveling an appreciable proportion of the speed of light if you're parked.