Blood test. The doc keeps track of my thyroid stuff. No food after 5 last night, off to the lab at dawn…
Spent the trip over trying to figure how to run the windshield washers, since it’s been dry and dusty and it’s a sunrise…got the back ones to work.
Finally took the manual in for reading material. If you operate the washers like the Subaru did, you get the rear window washed. To wash the front ones you pull the whole lever toward you. Nice. And if you do it while the lights are on—there’s a headlight washer. I find that improbably amusing. But—it is a safety thing. It’s just something I tend to take care of on the road with a scrubber when I stop for gas.
The neat thing is we’ve gone 210 miles and are still on our 4th gallon of gas since we bought the car. The tank holds 10. We’ve been watching it go down. We still don’t know if the tank was completely full when its odometer started (it had 21 miles on it when we bought it) so we don’t know if we’ve gone 189 miles on that tank since we got it…or 210…but either way, we’re happy. Ordinarily we’d have bought another 40.00 worth of gas between mid-July and Sept 1, and we haven’t reached halfway on the original tank. We’re still real happy with the car.
I shed 2 of the 4 pounds I gained. Jane has us trying this Sensa stuff, which is supposed to curb appetite, to reduce the urge to snack…we’ll see.
And—we finally got the new filter (additional filter) running on the pond, and it’s good! I had to run all over getting hose for it, but so far so good. When we started, we had 10 baby fish I could practically hold in one hand, and we had a skimmer rated for 3000 gallons, which was what originally I thought we had—but we don’t: we have 5000 gallons. So now that Ari requires a salmon net (literally) and several of the others mass nearly as much, they produce a lot of waste. You can about double the waste of your pond if you have grown koi. So I got a sits-on-bank filter that runs about 2000 gallons an hour—and voila! Clear water in the first 24 hours! I’m happy!
I was driving through Providence from the Submarine Museum in Groton back to Boston, a little holiday at the end of a business trip, when I ran into a sudden blinding rain storm. I had familiarized myself with the controls of my rental car, of course, but the suddenness of going from dry to storm startled me. Reflex took over. I’d driven mostly foriegn cars previously, and even the US cars didn’t have something as benighted as a column shifter. I hit the right stalk down, hard, which in the car I’d left at home, would have put the wipers on full speed. It didn’t. You know that interlock that’s supposed to keep the transmission from shifting into too low a gear at too high a speed? It didn’t. I immediatedly realized my mistake and flipped the stalk back up. You know that interlock that’s supposed to keep the transmission from shifting into reverse gear at too high a speed? It didn’t. I finally got things organized, and got the wipers working. Fortunately, the rain was entirely water and no transmission parts.
Congrats on gas and pounds and fish!
OMG! Lol!
Great that the weight is coming off as quickly as it went on. Clear water…yes! I love the way fish look in clear water, like they’re dancing in air.
Proge thinks one reason our water is clear is that he decided that since we were just on the edge of 3000 gal he opted for the 5000….and he can enlarge the pond too!
I have spent a good part of the day getting all the crap out of the pool that got blown in during the same storm Walt was in. We made it home just before the rain got really dense.
Is there such a thing as fish dropping fertilizer? If so, how much does it sell for?
Well, it gets broken up by the water, much as mud would be: but pouring pond water onto plants generally makes them grow very nicely.
Finally feeling good enough to sit up and walk around after my surgery. Unfortunately have suffered from dropped toe during the surgery so I will be using a walker for the foreseeable future. Sorry I didn’t get to wish you Happy Birthday on time.
Ready, good wishes from you are welcome at midnight by pony express.Any time.And I so hope that toe gets improved!
All winter, I water my houseplants with goldfish water from our tank (and replace it with clean, fresh room temp water: thus doing both a water change and mildly fertilizing the plants). I also put some of the droppings from our bunny’s litter box (or occasionally the floor) on the plants too. So far, very healthy, long lived houseplants.
Good luck and best wishes with your recovery, read4more!
@ready4more the wheelie ones with the glides in back are nice! I have found sitting ‘cancan’ exercises to help. Sit at the edge of the chair, straighten the leg and set it down. Then lift the knee as high as you can and set it back down. I don’t know why this helped me, but it did!
I lost three inches of quad (top of thigh) muscle in my left leg in the 4 weeks I was in a straight leg brace after I broke that kneecap (Part of the quad attaches to the top of the kneecap). Once I was able to bend my knee again, they had me on quad exercises — straightening then lifting the leg (straight leg raises). Also good to work your ankles if you can – flex foot up then down and point toe, which works your calf muscle, which is where those blood clots like to form. Pumping the foot helps keep the blood from pooling in the calf muscles. Hope your bathroom doorway is wide enough that your walker will fit through it. Mine wasn’t. Had to go through it sideways.
Oh, good! Re the move I imagine it helps relieve pressure on the lower back.
I can say the 2:5 diet seems to work for me. (I’ll know better how well when I get my A1C results back in a couple days.) I don’t do consecutive days, spacing the two evenly in the week. One “short day” at a time doesn’t seem to alarm my body, “Hey, we’re starving down here!” If I have strenuous physical work to do I try to not do it on a “short day”. For those without severe metabolic issues of course, consult your Doc.
Not to be pedantic, but “2:5 diet”, 212,000 Google results; “5:2 diet”, 18,800,000 Google results. (This is a common Wikipedia test for, “What do we call this article?”)
The PBS program has reappeared, but goes away again in just a couple days:
http://video.pbs.org/program/michael-mosley/
If I understood YouTube’s Crashcourse Biology, the single day of fasting is the time it takes to deplete one’s normal cellular reserves and turn on full fat-burning.
All that aside, I’ve been tending to try to get the two fast (600 cal. men, 500 cal. women–25% of normal calories) out of the way by doing fast/feed/fast/feed. That lets me miss a fast and just try again the next day, and then relax for the rest of the week. But, the more you do it, the easier it gets. I drink lots of tea on fast days, and sometimes Crystal Light or Kool-Aid fruit punch (tough to find the unsweetened in my area), a standard from my childhood as Hawaiian Punch. It gets so easy, I’m pretty much doing Alternate Day Fasting (fast/feed/fast/feed/fast/feed…), another diet in Mosley’s program,right now.
I feel fine, and though I occasionally run amok on feed days, the weight is coming off.
“Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy”
Pedantry is fine by me, as long as you know your subject and are not trying to teach an expert. I have had someone who can neither sew nor dye give me long lectures on both subjects in spite of the fact that I’ve taught him what little he knows about them. Annoying!
Re: 5:2 Diet 🙂
Just got test results, the one I always pay most attention to is A1C, 5.8, down from 6.1 six months ago. 🙂 There was a similar drop in cholesterol, which has always been a little high. All was not joy :(, WBC & CRP were up a bit, but I can’t blame the diet for that. 😉
Mine were pretty good. I can cut back on the fat a bit. I see the doc next Thursday, Jane on Tuesday…
Jane bought some of the Sensa stuff at Costco, the week 1 set, and she and I are both trying it. You sprinkle this sweet or salt powder on what you eat and it’s supposed to curb snack-cravings.
Well, it doesn’t change the taste of the food, and I’m not sure that it’s working, so much as you’re aware you’re doing this stuff to stop snacking, and so you kind of have to cooperate with it: it warns there’s no miracle, just a slow effect…so the weight has indeed come back off, plus a pound. I am now officially skinnier than I have been since the 1980’s, when the weight began to come on. I weighed 180 when I began trying to install that friggin’ garage door lock in 109 degree heat in a (necessarily) closed garage…and that was just before trying to sell the house on McKinley before moving to Edmond: I’d never used the garage except as the cats’ place (back when I had a registered Persian cattery)—and if I was going to sell the house, the door had to actually work. I have never sweated so much in my life. I sweated from about 183 all the way to 180, which was, at the time, still too much…but it encouraged me to think I was going to get back to 175, which was what I liked to weigh.
I’m headed there now. Just watch me.
We’re watching! I notice the meter ticked up another pound lost! Huzzah!
I’ll check out that Sensa stuff.
I read somewhere that vinegar–because it’s such a strong taste?–can suppress hunger. I think I mentioned before that a few calories of dijon mustard does that for me. Probably any strong condiment would work.
But one of the points Mosley makes is that hunger is temporary. It has to be. If you’re distracted by it while hunting or gathering, you end up as the meal.
Saw this article and thought about the attempt on Ari. http://www.npr.org/2013/09/04/212641932/bald-eagles-are-back-in-a-big-way-and-the-talons-are-out?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=DailyDigest&utm_campaign=20130904 I wonder how many other koi pond owners have had the same concerns?
Yep, they’d have to net the whole bay to keep those fellows out. They’re not stupid—but you can count on them having good enough eyesight to miss the net: eyesight so good we can’t even conceive it, except as high def at all focuses at once.
Happy Belated Birthday! I hope it was fun. Sorry I am so late. I try to check the blog often but have been in a whirlwind this week…this summer…this year!
always welcome—and we know the schedule blues!
@Walt — my wife and I are doing 5-2 also (week 4). Working for both of us. We do fast/feed/feed/fast, and do the fast on work days so we’re out of range of the fridge! Ham is a good item – low cal for the amount, as is chicken breast. As you know, you can really pile up veggies. I miss carbs and beer on fast days. Glad you are doing well too !
All we all have to do is keep it up, Aja Jin.