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 #70: Good Firewood, Cute Bunnies, Musical Parking Spots, etc.

 

1. I was out for a drive and went past a house that had one of those racks filled with bundles of firewood. That’s pretty common, especially on Cape Cod. Then you’ll see a cheaply made sign that says something like ‘Fire Wood $10 a bundle.’ Well, this particular house must have been having bad luck with its sales. Their sign said exactly what I just wrote, but then scribbled in black marker next to it was the word ‘Good.’ So, putting ‘good’ next to your firewood sign, I don’t think, will bring new potential customers, but that’s just me. It’s like Milhouse on The Simpsons saying ‘but my mom thinks I’m cool.’ Nah, doesn’t work.

2. Nothing is better than ending a day of work by being challenged to a race on a ski ergometer by your boss. A ski erg basically mimics a skiing motion and is great for cardio training. If you’re not prepared, it can leave you wiped out. We battled it out to see who could get to 500 meters fastest. My boss did it in 1:29, I finished in 1:31. Both really great times. I was gassed and then had to drive home with my arms destroyed and feeling like I wanted to lay down and sleep. I will be trying to beat his time, though, in the future, just after warming up first.

3. I can still run, not as fast or as far as I used to, but each time I do, I feel a little more confident. Nothing kills that confidence like playing some basketball. I go to a full court at a recreation area less than a mile from where I live. Rarely, if ever, do I see people playing there so I usually have it all to myself. Running up and down the court is doable. Stopping, cutting, and most of all jumping, these are a different story. I played a ton as a kid and was even on the school team in 7^th and 8^th grade. Now staring down 50, I feel my age when trying to do any sort of jump shot. My left knee has nothing left to give. I’m surprised I can clear an anthill with my sad hops today.

4. It’s late May with Memorial Day Weekend arriving. Yet here I sat one evening this week, bundled up in my winter night clothes, wrapped in a blanket. A heavy rainstorm on Thursday was dumping 1-2” of rain. That kept temperatures hovering around 50. Coupled with gusts of over 55mph, it left it feeling like it was in the mid-30s. Of course, I’ve had my heat off for over a month, since you know it’s spring. Memorial Day Monday will be sunny and 65 but still that one chilly night was like the scene in a horror movie where the killer comes back for one more scare.

5. Few things will stop your heart than having it say your credit/debit card was declined. Luckily, when it happened this week, it was because I had mistyped my own PIN number. I was paying for something at a store and saw the ‘declined’ pop-up. Even though I knew that I had simply typed the wrong PIN number, my heart jumped. In this day and age, with identity theft being a real issue, your mind immediately goes to ‘oh no did I get hacked?’ I breathed a sigh of relief when I tried a second time with my PIN, but there was a split second where I was terrified.

6. I love rabbits. They’re so cute. The only thing cuter than a rabbit is a baby bunny. So you can imagine my thrill when coming home one evening this week, I saw a little puffball bunny eating grass in the front yard. I am working hard to get photos and/or video. I could try to coax it closer with food. The problem is that it’s a little one I don’t want to get it used to people as it’s not going to be a pet. I’d feel bad if this little baseball-sized fluffy bunny got hurt because it started hanging around waiting to be fed. There are coyotes, owls, foxes, and other animals living nearby that would love a rabbit dinner. So I’ll have to work on my skills with a zoom lens to get some bunny photos.

7. The Planet Fitness location I go to this week, finally, and I do mean finally, updated its equipment. I have the Black Card membership and have visited probably close to 10 other locations. Each of those has equipment like medicine balls, kettlebells, bands, foam rollers, and other things that are great for exercise. The gym closest to me seemed to think dumbbells and machines that constantly broke down were good enough for us. They were closed 2 full days putting in all new equipment, and I will say I was pleasantly surprised by what is there now. Although true to form when I got there, one of the new cardio machines already had an ‘out of order’ sign on it.

8. It was an odd sight while sitting in a mostly empty beach parking lot that I saw a car parked a ways away. It backed out of one spot, but rather than leaving, it moved about 3 spots down and parked again. I thought to myself, was the view really that different, like 10 feet away? They only stayed a few minutes longer, so I’ll never know what was up with them. Maybe they have a parking spot checklist and they’re trying to spend a few minutes in all of them before the end of the summer?

9. I have fallen down a rabbit hole of watching other people play the Friday the 13^th game that came out in 2017. You can play as a counselor trying to survive, or even better, you can play as Jason and kill people in some really gruesome ways. I enjoy watching others play for a few minutes as long as there’s no commentary from the players, just the sounds of Jason on a killing spree. I should probably just get the game and play myself. Then I can post YouTube videos of me playing just like a 15-year-old!

10. It takes a special kind of person to pull up to a trash can at the beach and get out to throw a full garbage bag into it in broad daylight. This lady didn’t even try to hide what she was doing. I debated saying something but I figured at least she threw it in the can, unlike the scum who leave full bags of trash on the side of the road. After she left, I briefly thought about checking to see if she had thrown anything away with her address on it. I had a fantasy of finding her house and throwing the bag on her lawn. Then I remembered this would mean I’d have to dig through someone’s bag of trash in a public place. There’s no way I wouldn’t end up looking crazy.