I've spent a lot of my day cleaning my house and doing some housekeeping on the Daily Parker. In the latter case, I finished adding the ancient Site News entries that ran from July 1997 to March 1998, bringing the total active posts up to 9,984 (though the blog engine thinks there are 9,988). That means that the 10,000th Post will happen in about two weeks at my present rate of posting.
I also uploaded a few more Fitbit tracks into my Garmin account, including a 14.5 kilometer walk with Parker in June 2016 and both halves of my September 2015 walk through England's South Downs from Arundel to Amberley.
Tomorrow morning I'll push some new Weather Now bits to Production, too. So it's a productive day, with more housekeeping (going through ancient boxes) this evening.
At a friend's prompting, I spelunked through a bunch of old Garmin tracks that I recorded in the aughts when I did a lot of road biking. I used to put a lot of the stats online, too, but that ended in 2007 when I switched braverman.org entirely to this blog.
Anyway, I uploaded some of the tracks to my Garmin account, and now I want to go for a very long bike ride of the type I used to do before my knees told me not to. For example, my longest rides of 2006 (120 km) and 2007 (128 km) were both in preparation for Century rides that, sadly, never happened. (In 2006, my gallbladder exploded a week before the Century, and in 2007, my mother died two days before it.)
Another cool thing: Weather Now has a lot of historical data (registration required), so I was also able to add weather notes to the old tracks.
I've also started recovering old Fitbit walks, like the 20-miler I did in July 2018. (I previously posted about this walk when it happened.) Fitbit is now owned by Google, which only has GPS tracks available through the mobile app, and a horrible interface for finding them. So I've only added a few of them to my Garmin account, but I'll continue to add them whenever I get bored.
Cassie had a solid night of post-anesthesia sleep and woke up mostly refreshed. The cone still bums her out, and the surgery bill bums me out, but at least she's walking at close to her normal speed. She gets her stiches out—and her cone off—two weeks from today.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world:
- Very stupid people have allowed measles, which we functionally eliminated from the US in 2000, to infect close to 1300 people this year.
- Jennifer Rubin argues that the Department of Homeland Security provides neither “freedom from danger” or “freedom from fear or anxiety,” i.e., security.
- Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers is ashamed of the OAFPOTUS's tax bill and what it will do to the most vulnerable Americans.
- George Will praises former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for holding the center against the loony left.
- Echoing my own thoughts, Stephanie Bai wants people to stop throwing blame around for this past weekend's Texas floods. (The blame for future disasters, however, falls squarely on the Republican Party.)
- Paul Krugman lauds victories over NIMBYs that are starting to revitalize building in urban areas.
- Cook County's practice of stealing people's homes for non-payment of property tax will likely cost us hundreds of millions of dollars once the class-action lawsuit gets going.
- Strava has once again lost control of its subscribers' location data, this time outing the Swedish prime minister's bodyguards, and thus the PM himself. Oops. (In fairness, it might be that the bodyguards themselves failed to protect the data by posting workouts publicly.)
Finally, lightning bugs appear to have made a small comeback in the Chicago area after a few years of reduced numbers. Educational campaigns have encouraged people to leave leaf litter undisturbed whenever possible, to allow the critters to breed safely. A mild winter and wet spring also helped a lot.
It was warm enough last night to leave a couple of windows ajar, which lets in fresh air along with every sound in the neighborhood. Also last night, an idiot cardinal found a convenient streetlight, stepped out of the shade, and said something like, "You and me, babe, how about it?" He started his serenade a little after 4 am, according to my Garmin sleep report, and continued well into the morning. I don't remember ever wishing for a cat as much as I did around 5.
Remember this little ode? Yeah. Really feeling it today.
I then had about 5 hours of meetings with various and sundry, with a vet visit sandwiched in for Cassie's annual wellness checkup. (She's in perfect health.)
I might have more creativity tomorrow. Anyway, I hope I do.
As predicted, none of yesterday's snow stuck around. Here's (a new edit of) yesterday's photo:
And the same spot just over 24 hours later:
In fact, the temperature at Inner Drive Technology WHQ has remained above freezing since just before 9am Monday, though it did scrape along at 0.1°C for a couple of hours last night.
Today's forecast predicts a high of 14°C, and this weekend's Garmin challenge predicts Cassie will get a 5 kilometer walk this afternoon.
My Brews & Choos buddy and I trudged 15 kilometers yesterday to visit two previously-unreviewed breweries and two old favorites. Correction: I visited two old favorites and two new ones, she visited one old favorite and three she hadn't visited before.
My Garmin device doesn't have a resume-later feature, but hers does, so she captured the entire route (in miles):
We had bog-normal November weather for Chicago: cloudy and 5°C. We also had a slice of Jimmy's Pizza and a modest amount of good beer. Altogether, a good day.
Brews & Choos Reviews will post this afternoon and tomorrow.
The hot, humid weather of the past week has finally broken, and on the last day of summer yet!
In about an hour I'm starting the first long walk of several I've planned for the autumn, so the 19°C temperature—and, more importantly, 16°C dewpoint—is very welcome. Just 24 hours ago, they were 22°C and 21°C respectively, which one can only describe as "really sticky."
I might not post about the walk until tomorrow morning, but I'm looking forward to it. I haven't gone up the North Branch Trail since last October, and I haven't walked up the stretch from Devon to Dempster since 2018. (Fitbit no longer allows deep links to activities. Bastards.)
I've had a bunch of tasks and a mid-afternoon meeting, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these yet:
Finally, close to me, after the lovely Grafton Pub closed last August, the Old Town School of Folk Music stepped in to buy the space. But that plan has hit a snag after a higher bidder emerged.
I made a note to myself a while ago that as of today I've had a fitness tracker for 3,000 days. Sadly, my past self got it wrong: I got my first FitBit 3,029 days ago. Oopsi.
But it did give me a moment to check my lifetime stats. They don't suck. As of yesterday:
- Total days: 3,028
- Total steps: 40,490, 400
- Total distance: 34,076.1 km
- Goal hit (10,000 steps): 2,771
- Minimum hit (5,000 steps): 3,025
- Mean daily steps & distance: 13,372, 11.3 km
- Median daily steps: 12,770, 10.6 km
- Best 7-day period: 171,122 (7-13 July 2018)
- Best 30-day period: 537,798 (2-31 July 2018)
Not bad. And I'm still getting about 12,000 a day on average, even into my decrepitude.
About 7,000 a day, though it won't hurt to do 10,000:
[T]wo studies, which, together, followed more than 10,000 men and women for decades, show that the right types and amounts of physical activity reduce the risk of premature death by as much as 70 percent.
But they also suggest that there can be an upper limit to the longevity benefits of being active, and pushing beyond that ceiling is unlikely to add years to our life spans and, in extreme cases, might be detrimental.
[A]t 10,000 steps, the benefits leveled off. “There was a point of diminishing returns,” said Amanda Paluch, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the new study. People taking more than 10,000 steps per day, even plenty more, rarely outlived those taking at least 7,000.
Both studies pinpoint the sweet spot for activity and longevity at somewhere around 7,000 to 8,000 daily steps or about 30 to 45 minutes of exercise most days. Doing more may marginally improve your odds of a long life, Dr. O’Keefe said, but not by much, and doing far more might, at some point, be counterproductive.
I get about 13,000 per day, in part because of Cassie. Which seems fine, according to the report. Note that neither study actually found a causal link between steps and health; the effects only appear related.