Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #98: Med Ball Tossing, Xmas Light Car, Stupid Bots, etc.

1. I have a 12-year-old client whom I train. Anyone who has kids, or is around kids, knows that trying to get a 12-year-old to do anything they don’t want to do is next to impossible. I have had sessions with this kid where it’s like pulling teeth to get him to do anything besides walk the treadmill or sit on our whole body vibration plate. That being said, when I do find something he enjoys, I run it into the ground. This week, I put my old bones to the test. Little did I know that he would enjoy throwing a 10# slam ball back and forth. It’s a softer, slightly larger medicine ball. Rather than try to get him to do other things I had on my list, we just kept tossing the ball, and tossing, and tossing. In total, we must have spent nearly 25 minutes of our 30-minute session throwing that medicine ball. My heart rate peaked around 130 according to my Fitbit, and I burned 164 calories. I only stopped him when his heart rate climbed up around 170. I only know that because even though he said he wasn’t tired, I could see it. I think I ended that session more tired than him. Oh, and if you’re curious, he came in a second time this week to train. We tossed the same ball this time for the entire 30 minutes. I burned 212 calories this time.

My Fitbit stats from the Weds. workout

2. December has begun, but I still managed to have a second Thanksgiving this week. It consisted of the leftovers my mom gave me. Rather than draw it out over two meals, I crammed all of the turkey, ham, stuffing, and mashed into one giant meal. I even bought myself a little jar of turkey gravy. I was on carb overload. Somehow it made more sense to have all of the food in one shot and eat sensibly for a while, rather than eat two meals on different days. Also my self-control when it comes to food is the lowest it’s likely ever been, so there’s that as well. Generally, I am really healthy, especially as I swan dive toward 50, but I need to work on my self-control. Otherwise, 2026 will be filled with blog entries where I whine about my lack of self-control until people think I’m just replaying the hits. The leftovers were amazing though.


3. It took until December 1st, but I finally broke down and put on my heat. Now in full transparency, I have this neat wall heater that I can turn on and off if I need to heat up my place for a while. So I wasn’t freezing when it got down in the low 30s recently, but I also didn’t trust that heater enough to sleep with it on. The recurring joke I tell is the fact that I set my heat lower in the winter than I set my A/C in the summer. True story. I set my heat at 65 which is perfect for me since I run hot with my Northern European blood. I set my A/C at 68 during the summer. Most people I think would have those flipped but for me they work just fine. Now, much like in summer with A/C, it’s a countdown until I can shut the heat off and open the windows back up. Likely it’ll be around the first of spring.


4. Tis the season officially. I haven’t yet gone to all of my favorite holiday light spots but that is coming soon. By the time this blog goes up, my Charlie Brown-like faux Christmas tree will be up and decorated. There might have already been someone who won the Holidays though. While driving home in the dark I spotted some Christmas lights up ahead. It took me a second to realize they weren’t in someone’s yard. No these were moving. Someone was driving a white sedan, not too unlike my own, but the entire vehicle was wrapped in string lights. It was wild to see. They definitely wouldn’t distract the driver, but I did wonder how they had them lit. Most likely plugged into a USB port, right? I have also found out it is illegal to do that in some states so be careful.

It looked like this.(WNEP.com)

5. I can be both happy and shocked with the New England Patriots being 11-2 on the season. After wrecking the New York Giants this week, the Patriots officially passed my prediction for wins, which was 10. They also lead the league in salary cap room for next season, meaning they will likely be one of the best teams in football for the foreseeable future. The shock is more of the fact that I thought they’d be this good, but not until next year. They’re a season ahead of where I thought they’d be, but I am not expert. The experts have them as one of the Super Bowl favorites, and QB Drake Maye as the favorite for MVP. The NFL had its chance but the kings are ascending back to the throne they had for 20 years.


6. I could post this every single week but I try to space them out. I hate LED headlights and curse whoever thought it was a good idea to help a driver out by blinding every other driver on the road. They should either be illegal or every car should have window tinting put in for free at the expense of the car companies who use LED headlights on their vehicles. I am shocked that there aren’t more accidents caused by these people blinding other vehicles. If you have so much trouble seeing at night that you need a pair of suns on your car then maybe you should stay home, or get an Uber. This will inevitably come up again in the future but I’ll let it rest for a while.



7. Welcome to the Frozen Tundra of Cape Cod. This week winter arrived a little early. There was a day this week when the low dropped to 15 degrees. With a howling wind, the real feel was in the single digits. Yes I know we’re in December and live in the Northeast but still that first day that the temperatures crater like that are just brutal. Luckily that morning I didn’t have to leave the house until close to noon. By that time it was nearly 30 degrees, downright balmy. The best part? We still haven’t gotten any snow on the Cape. So yeah, there’s still that to look forward to. Can you hear my sarcasm?


8. The CAPTCHA system, or ‘proving’ you’re human on some of these websites has gotten ridiculous. I’m all for hitting that stupid check mark to show I’m human. Once I’ve done that shouldn't that be it? In doing some research on an online newspaper archive I had to check that stupid box. Then I started scrolling through the pages of this newspaper when after 5 or 6 clicks that frickin’ box pops up again saying ‘our internal servers think you might be a robot.’ It’s like hey you moron bot, I literally just clicked the box 10 seconds ago. What do you think? That I am an AI that became sentient literally within the last few seconds? There are not enough synonyms for ‘stupid’ to make this make sense.


9. One thing I’ve noticed during my recent times of watching tons of funny cat videos is how many people would rather sit and film their cat breaking something rather than get off their lazy butts and stop them. I have seen tons of people filming while a cat is slowly nudging something fragile toward the edge of a table. They just sit and film and say ‘no’ or ‘don’t’ until the object falls, and breaks, and they get all pissy at their cat. It’s like, hey, it’s a cat. What did you expect? Get up, walk five feet, and grab the glass, or whatever it is before the cat breaks it. You’re not going to get enough views to earn enough to even replace that broken object so use your brain. I guess that’s asking too much.


10. It pays to double-check. I had plans over the weekend to take a drive to the local community college library. I find that when I am there my creative juices really get flowing. I had checked to make sure that the library was open. It said Sundays they were open from 1-5p, great. I got everything packed and ready to go but something told me to just look again. This time instead of a generic internet search I went right to the college website and it said they were closed on weekends. I was naturally disappointed. Then I triple checked. The ‘closed on weekends’ hours start on December 20th. So not only can I apparently not read correctly, I also seem to not know what day it is. I’m one step away from having warm milk and a nap as my height of excitement.

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: #46 - Funny Signatures, That’s Not Toothpaste, Bad Road Work, etc.

 

1. December arrived and boy did the weather follow suit. I went out to shoot the sunset on December 1^st and was definitely under-dressed. The fall has been at least somewhat warmer than usual. I took that for granted and went out dressed like it was 55 degrees and not 35 degrees. The temperature, a howling wind, and the sun setting at 4:10pm made me immediately long for spring. Oh well, at least starting December 14^th the sunset times will start getting later. Before you know it the sun will be setting after 5pm again, well February 4^th.

2. I have begun digitizing my old Las Vegas journal to share on my blog and on Patreon. Granted these will be somewhat redacted and I’ll tell you why. In this journal there is a lot of great insight into me, full-on in my quarter-life crisis, going through a cross-country move. The problem is not sharing some deep thoughts, it is the sheer amount of girls I was interested in that I name-dropped. I was a bit surprised. I think I was really looking for whoever was going to come along and fill that void. That being said, I don’t think naming names is going to do any good. Not that they’d all be reading my blog, but I highly doubt any of them would read my thoughts from nearly 25 years ago and suddenly say ‘I never knew!’ and we live happily ever after.

First part now up on this blog.

3. Something a bit interesting to me. I noticed now that it’s December that when I turn my heat on I like it at around 64-65 degrees. I run hot so I don’t need it sweltering to be comfortable. The interesting part? In the middle of summer, I like my air conditioner to be set at 68-69 degrees. So my heat is set to a lower temperature than my A/C is. I don’t know, I thought those numbers would be flip-flopped. Actually, it would make more sense for the temperature to be equal all year round no matter the heat or A/C.

4. I feel at times like my life is an echo chamber of my own thoughts. What I mean is that as I continue on a journey of trying to become totally self-employed I sometimes find myself trapped by my own mind’s limitations. I want to use my writing and creativity skills to do something meaningful and fulfilling but it’s hard to see outside of my own little box I’ve been in for years. It can feel like the Seinfeld episode where George gets an audiobook and the narrator sounds just like him. Sometimes you need advice from a voice that’s not your own.

5. For the first time in quite a while I visited a spot called Scargo Tower in the neighboring town of Dennis. It’s a beautiful stone tower with one of the best views on Cape Cod. I shot a video of me going up the stairs to the top at sunset which was great. I was shocked when I drove up to it that there were no other people there. My excitement was short-lived as while I was shooting the video a van full of people showed up. Then after they left a young couple showed up. I decided to leave the tower to them because I was young once. I just found it funny that as soon as I thought about how great it was that nobody was there all of these people showed up. I should have just kept my mind blank.

6. A random patient at my work made me think of one of my favorite memories of my Nana. Long, loooong ago she would get Christmas cards from her trash man. It was nice, and also a way to remind customers to tip the people who take their stinky trash away for them. Anyway, the trash man signed his card and I believe his name was Doug Carp or something close. I can’t remember for sure but someone in the family remarked that his signature made it look like his name was ‘Dog Crap.’ That alone was too hilarious, but the best part was my Nana’s reaction. She laughed in only the way she could until tears were literally streaming down her face. Those were some of my favorite memories of life, someone making my Nana laugh until she cried. I miss those days.

Maybe just print your name next time?

7. On one of the mornings when I have to get up before 5 to get ready for work I nearly had a unique experience. When going to brush my teeth in my drowsy state the first thing I reached for to put on my toothbrush wasn’t the toothpaste. No, I grabbed my deodorant. I even popped the cap off of it so I was close to having a different sort of fresh mouth. However, nothing will top the time as a 5-6-year-old kid when my sister and I brushed our teeth with Preparation-H, the hemorrhoid cream. Yes, that happened. Hey, give us a break, the old tubes of Preparation-H look just like toothpaste to little kids.

8. One part laughing, one part shaking my head in sad amazement. There is a road in my town that was a part of drainage repairs over the last several months. It’s right in front of where I go to the gym. After all of the repairs were done the time came to repaint the double yellow lines that go down the middle of the road. I said ‘middle.’ In a stunning act of stupidity whoever was painting the lines had them running two-thirds over to one side. This means that you can fit a car and a half on one side of the road while on the other side, any vehicle that isn’t a Smart car is hanging over into the other lane. I have no clue how these people couldn’t figure out how to paint lines down the middle of the road but don’t worry I’m sure they are getting paid a lot to be that dumb.

9. I am a huge fan of retro commercials. The ones I grew up with from the 70s through the 90s are great. I even like ones slightly older. However, I find more recent commercials to be annoying or just plain stupid. One that I constantly hear on my Spotify app is both. Garden of Life probiotics might be the worst one yet. Talking about loving to poop is one thing, and this product helping you to poop is fine. I think it’s the way the woman in the ad gushes about just having pooped to some other woman like she’s 3 years old that just annoys me. It sounds like what a toddler would say to a parent with the child then hoping to get a toy or at least a cookie for pooping on the potty. So dumb.

10. I have found that feeling lost and feeling dehydrated are very similar. By the time you realize that you are either it is way too late and it will take a lot more work to get back to normal than it should. It’s just that you solve one easily by drinking lots of water. The other? I am still trying to figure out how to solve that one.