Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #94: Fine Tuning, Hack Attempt, Soaked Walk, etc.

1. After celebrating my birthday last week, and frankly doing a little bit too much celebrating over the last few months, a change is needed. I can tell that I need a serious detox. I need to eat better and go to the gym more, and probably lay off the edibles for a while. Sadly, as my age creeps up, I start to realize that these changes are necessary. I can either keep doing whatever I want and enjoy a steady decline until I am useless. Or I can make a few changes and prolong my vital years for a while. I’m not saying I’m going to suddenly be the guy who’s at the gym 6 days a week and eating a nearly perfect diet again like I was doing in the pre-COVID years. Still, when you wake up the day after your birthday feeling your age, a little fine-tuning won’t hurt.


2. A major difference between me today and me 20 years ago is consistency. What I mean is that in my 20s, I could skip the gym, or miss a day of vitamins, or skip a healthy meal, and it would have no consequence. I would still feel energetic, vital, and ready to conquer the world. Now, in my late 40s, I can still have those feelings, but there’s a big caveat. I have to be consistent. I have to be consistent with healthy eating, consistent with the gym, and consistent with vitamins and supplements. It’s almost like if I skip any of those for a few days, my body just assumes it’s time to shut down and get old. If I keep up on these things, it’s a way to trick my brain into thinking we’re still in our 20s, or at least 30s. I say this because, as I mentioned in the first entry, I skipped on all of these things for a few weeks, so no wonder I woke up the day after my birthday feeling a thousand years old.


3. It’s kind of ironic that even though I work as a trainer, I rarely use our gym facilities to train myself. I think I see it as still being at work. That means that if I got done before we were closed and I was in the gym working out, and people came in, I could easily be coerced into doing some sort of work off the clock. In those times when I do workout there, like I did this week, I am presented with option overload. Every possible piece of equipment for me and me alone. It leads to a great workout, but also a workout where by the time I leave, I am no longer a solid mass, I am some sort of liquid that flows out the back door and to my car. I was totally gassed and then had to run errands before finally getting home to eat dinner and collapse into my chair like a puddle of melted ice cream. All good stuff.


4. One night this week, I was comfy in my chair, relaxing as the melatonin started to prep me for a good night’s sleep. Then suddenly, my phone alerted. No, it wasn’t a friend or family member; it was a fraud alert from my bank. Some idiot had tried to use my debit card for a purchase, but luckily, it was flagged. Well, there went my drifting off to sleep. I had to immediately wake up to report the fraud and cancel my debit card. It all went well, the fraud was caught, and I wasn’t charged. If you’re wondering just how much the attempted fraud added up to, it was a whopping $10. Yup, that’s right. It’s like if you’re going to try to steal my money, at least go for broke. Ten bucks? Needless to say, I did not get a good night’s sleep after having to deal with that, but I am grateful that this idiot got caught and didn’t get one cent of my money.


5. For those who have been reading my blog for a while, the cute girl I have mentioned a few times in the last few months came back into my work this week. It’s funny how I look forward to seeing her, but in reality, it’s such a short window of opportunity for face time with her. Honestly, it’s like 2-3 minutes, maybe once every 3 weeks. I do try my best to have something interesting to say, or to try to say something that might make her laugh. There’s not much else I can do. I can’t linger too long and pry too deeply into her life since I am at work and she hardly knows me. If this were 15 years ago, back in my prime of cryptic posts, I might have said too much, or used my Internet detective skills to find her online and tried to find a way to ‘bump into her.’ Now, as I am rocketing toward 50, I just try to not look or sound like an idiot while she’s in the office. That has to be enough at this point in my life. I’ll see her again right before Thanksgiving.


6. If anyone is looking for a great station to craft on Pandora, I’ve got a new one for you. If you like smooth R&B from the 1970s through early 90s, create a station with the 3 following seed songs: Knocks Me Off My Feet by Stevie Wonder, All This Love by Debarge, and Oh Honey by Delegation. I created it this week, and it has played nearly nonstop anytime I have music going. If you enjoy that type of music, you won’t be disappointed. It’s amazing how I’ve had my Pandora account since 2009 and still have a few of those original stations. My Grunge station, Torn Jeans and Flannel, was the first one I ever made. Anyone else have Pandora that long, or have you mostly gone to another music app?


7. Not sure if it’s just my site, but this week there has been an annoying glitch on Facebook. I love looking at the memories page to see what was going on in the past, especially since I’ve been on Facebook since 2007. This week, I haven’t been able to see all of my memories. It’s mainly because I get one or two memories that go on repeat. For example, I had one day where there was a sunrise photo from last year that was repeated 18 times before moving on to the next memory, and that memory was repeated 16 times. Then it was just the end. You would think that with the billions of dollars the guy who owns the site has, he might spend a little to fix glitches. I mean, I enjoyed those memories, but not a never-ending loop. Who knows, maybe Facebook is becoming like a dying mall, where yes, it still is operational, but the owners are just letting the tenants move out and the rats and spiders move in.

The future of Facebook?

8. I was lucky this year and got basically a full week of birthday celebration. It finished off this Thursday with my mom, stepdad, one of my sisters, and one of my nieces. Besides just getting to see them, we had a good laugh at the fun array of gifts they got me. Food was a big one as I got two meals of my mom’s amazing chicken stir fry. Then there was a family-sized box of Count Chocula cereal, my favorite. My cake was three slices of cheesecake. This was topped by a flashing keychain alarm and a small pocket knife, since I do enjoy wandering in the woods on random adventures. Oh, and a little straight cash homey, as Randy Moss would say. It was an awesome haul and capped off what was a really fun birthday week.

My birthday haul, pretty legit

9. One of my new pleasures on YouTube is a channel called Ros – Adventure Cat. It is a super cute, very chatty, orange and white cat who has a small camera on his collar. It’s a vlog from a cat’s point of view. It has subtitles for what Ros says as he roams around looking for birds and mice. There are hundreds of videos, and I highly recommend it for anyone who likes cats or just cute, fun content. My only problem is that I am going to end up getting attached to Ros, and someday something bad will happen, and then my life will be shattered. Until then though, I’ll be binging cat vlog videos.


10. I had two choices. I could do some content work in the morning and go for a walk in the afternoon, or vice versa. I chose the latter. I figured if I didn’t get up and out in the morning, I might not go at all. Well, I chose wrong. At first, my walk was fine. It was cloudy but mild. Great. So I decided to do a little longer loop around a new extension of the bike trail near where I live. As I went down that way it began to drizzle. Still, no big deal. Then, there I was, nearly 3 miles from my car when the skies opened up. It started pouring rain. I had to take my headphones and shove them in my shirt so they wouldn’t get ruined. I was walking the bike trail in the rain for over 45 minutes, totally soaked. It ended up becoming a fun adventure, mostly because I had no other choice. By the time I got back to where I parked, it was like I had gone swimming in my clothes. Oh, and of course, when I got back to my car, the rain stopped. The afternoon was sunny and 60 degrees, by the way. Wicked boo.

11. Similar to my game of chicken with my air conditioning in the summer, we have reached the same game with the heat in winter. Yes, it’s not winter for another 6 weeks but in the next week on Cape Cod, we will have several nights where the lows are in the 30s. Luckily, I have a small electric wall heating unit in the bathroom. I can turn this on and it does a fairly decent job of warming up the general area. Saying that, I haven’t used it to try to heat the entire apartment with the temperature hovering above freezing. I try to hold out on the heat until Thanksgiving, since it will stay on until sometime later in March. The irony is that my preferred temperature when the heat is turned on is actually lower than where I set my A/C in summer. It’s kind of a weird anomaly. Anyway, I am sure next week will be a test. How long can I hold out? We’ll see.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #31: Wall Crickets, Recycling Payouts, Voided Steaks, etc.

1. The other night I was trying to sleep when I heard the sound of a cricket outside my window. I figured it was close by but eventually, it got quiet so it had to have hopped away right? The next night I started hearing the cricket again but this time closer. At first, I thought it was in my wall. It turned out it was on my windowsill, but it was obscured by the towels I packed around my air conditioner so that no cool air leaked out. Once I figured that out it was game over, I peeled back one of the towels and sprayed a little Raid in there, and I haven’t heard the cricket since. Of course, the joke will likely be on me in a few weeks when I take the a/c out and a dead cricket lands on my foot.

2. I was listening to a favorite podcast of mine this week. The host was answering questions from his listeners. One question asked what the best way was to remember/honor a loved one who had passed away. The host’s answer has stuck with me ever since. He said to try to live the life that your loved one who had passed want for you. It made me step back and seriously reassess my current life.

3. I know I have mentioned it before in these blogs but I have to reiterate how much I love the downtempo music. It is like a shot of good vibes to my brain and also helps me relax, write, and think. It’s to the point that my Pandora station has at least a few dozen ‘thumbs up’ songs. I’ll put a favorite of mine at the end if you want to dip your toes in.

4. For the first time in 5 years I planned an overnight road trip. I am headed to Northern New Hampshire to stay at a place I stayed at in 2012. I can’t believe it’s been so long since I spent a night off of Cape Cod. My only hope is this return trip to Lincoln, NH goes better than the last. Oh don’t get me wrong the place I stayed was amazing, and the places I visited were as well. The only problem was that I drove all the way up there and forgot my memory card for my camera so I had to use my iPhone 3. Not exactly high quality.

Hoping to get lots of much higher-quality photos this time!

5. Being semi-smart I actually (re)signed up for AAA before my trip up to New Hampshire. I got the Plus package half-off, what a deal, $51!? Now I almost hope I blow a tire or lock my keys in my car. Almost.

6. I follow that last thought up with being semi-stupid. I scanned a steak at a supermarket and the sale price didn’t come up. I asked for help and the employee came by and voided the original scan. He then scanned the steak again and put in the sale price. I was only half paying attention and saw 2 steaks listed on the screen not realizing one had been voided. So when I asked ‘what about that steak?’ he calmly said ‘I just voided it you’re all set sir.’ I hung my head and apologized before leaving. The steak was good by the way, to end the story on a happy note.

7. When out for a run on the bike trail I was getting passed by, and then passing, a mother and her young daughter who was probably 7 on their bikes a few times. The daughter seemed really nervous when getting to road crossings and her mother had to coax her across. After seeing this once it was happening again at another crossing and instead of running past I slowed down and looked at the daughter and said ‘don’t worry I’ll walk across with you too.’ She slowly followed her mother across and I was on my way. It doesn’t take much effort to be a compassionate human.

8. I take my bottles to the supermarket to recycle them. I typically take a few weeks to fill a trash bag with plastic liter bottles. Each time I go I end up leaving with about $1.25 on a receipt. Rather than go right into the store and cash it I try to wait until I have a less embarrassing amount to get. This week I took roughly 4 months' worth of recycling receipts into the supermarket to cash in. My total? A whopping $14.10. What is my plan for it? This is the only time I will buy scratch tickets. I’ll likely lose on them all, but hey it’s basically free money so whatever.

9. With 3 full days of vacation coming up I am well aware of, and prepared for, needing to hit the gym hard upon my return to Cape Cod. I plan on driving a lot and taking tons of photos and videos. One thing I don’t plan on doing is any formal exercise. That coupled with ‘enjoying’ the restaurants of each area I visit means it’ll be running and weights aplenty starting next weekend.

10. A highlight of the week for me was recording a foolish video filled with inside jokes for my oldest friend while on a run on the bike trail. Part of it consisted of me angrily yelling at a butterfly for not staying still to allow me to get a photo. Too bad the people going by while I filmed didn’t get the memo that it was a joke, I looked like I needed to be sent to the nut house.

David Arkenstone - Falling Stars