The Dog's Room

I have a small room off the main house, like a place that was conceived of as a screen porch, but was converted to a year-round room sometime in the distant past. It has huge windows on three sides, and even a glass door and a leftover window on the interior wall to the main house. It has knotty pine paneling, a symptom of the times in which it was built. It also has fake beams in the ceiling, and an incredibly ugly and in-your-face linoleum now hidden beneath carpet tiles. It has its own electric baseboard heating system, and I installed a through-the-wall air conditioner. 

It used to be the dog's room, since my Abbey adopted it as her own maybe twenty years ago, because she had been an outside dog and she wanted the visibility. When I got Rocky, he needed to be confined initially because he was undergoing heartworm treatments, and I used this room, which had room for his big crate. Later, he had to be confined in order to manage his voracious destruction. The TV has always been in there. Bixby is not generally left in there, so perhaps it’s becoming the TV room. Or, maybe it’s becoming the green room, as I concentrate plants in there.

The last time I substantially upgraded the room was in 2013, between Abbey and Rocky. Between dogs is often a good time for a really deep cleaning. I took all the books off the shelves and dusted and vacuumed all the dog hair, and shampooed the carpet. I acquired my first flat screen tv, and worked the wiring to set up a sound bar.

Now, I’m contemplating a major upgrade. It could use a more efficient and quieter heating and cooling system, so I want a mini-split to hang on the wall. But that requires rerouting an electric line from the opposite wall. Once that is in place, the through the wall air conditioner should be removed, so the outer and inner walls will need to be patched. Patching the knotty pine wall might be a problem, so why not just drywall the whole thing? If I’m doing that, should the fake ceiling beams come out as well?

And so the dominoes begin to fall.

I typically think about these things for a long time before acting. I have researched mini-splits (but don’t understand the name or it’s origin). It’s time to discuss with a contractor. 

Clearing Out

Once upon a time, photography was one of my main hobbies. As is my wont, when I’m into something I can be all in. I always had a camera with me, and I learned to see the world with an eye to lighting and framing. I took classes, I read books, I subscribed to magazines, and of course I acquired equipment! My mind is going right now to a longer essay about how photography has influenced my life, but that’s not the post I had in mind when I started this, so I’m going to push ahead on my original intent. While I did learn how to develop and print in a darkroom, I never got into that aspect of photography, and so didn’t gadget up for that.

I plunged into the world of high-end SLR photography in the early 1990s, the dark ages of miniaturization of electronics, and firmly still in the world of film. I went with the Nikon brand for my camera backs and changeable lenses and was fortunate that they have had a commitment to compatibility - lenses I bought back in the beginning still work on the latest cameras. But, as things got “smarter”, not all functionality transfers. The quality of lenses depends largely on the quality of the glass, however, not on its electronics. And I bought some very high quality lenses.

I also wanted to always have a camera with me. Sometimes things happened, or light became extraordinary, and a pocket camera would be just the ticket. I did NOT have a camera with me on 9/11, and that prompted me to buy my first ever digital camera, a pocketable Nikon. 

The last time I used my film cameras was around 2006, when I went on a big vacation with my first digital SLR, also a Nikon. That was also about when phones started having cameras, but not very good ones. Pocket digital cameras, however, started becoming very very good. So I kept buying equipment, but what I got shifted. But I never got rid of anything! 

One ooky day this past week I decided to tackle the issue of camera equipment. The huge pile of cameras, lenses, accessories, and especially cords and wires took up half of a closet. And since I never trusted cameras to the formerly damp basement, it was prime closet space off the dining room. I could think of better uses for the space. 

I laid everything out on the dining room table, sorting, and figuring out what went together and what still worked and what was just trash. Then became the hard part - I had to decide what I might want to keep and what could go away. And related, what might have some value to someone else, and how could I keep it out of the landfill?

Pocket film and digital cameras were easy for me to part with. I have one nice pocket digital camera that I definitely use, but the rest (some from my mother) could go. Hooray, posting on the neighborhood listserve found homes for all I was willing to part with. Oddly, young people want to experiment with film. Parents want digital cameras for their kids trying to stave off phones for them.  I also had a vintage 1950s film camera, and a broken digital one with retro good looks, and someone else in the neighborhood took them for display purposes. Win win win!

I will definitely part with my Nikon film camera back. I will not got back to film. But all the other SLR equipment I can’t decide about. The digital camera back I have is from 2011, but it was high end and is still good. I do not know if I’m going to use it again, but I can’t quite part with it. And as long as I might use it, I am also hanging on to at least some of the ten lenses and the many many accessories I have to go with it. At least for now. I put all the stuff I have left into a big box, and its in my spare room until I’m ready to take the next step to sort and dispose. I imagine taking out the camera back, and doing some photography around here with some of the nicer lenses, and trying to decide if I should keep any of this at all. Will I ever use it? I’m not likely to ever schlep it on a trip that involves airplanes. Too heavy and bulky.

So what I have that I definitely use are a very nice pocket digital camera (bought in 2011), and a high end Sony self-contained large and heavy digital camera I bought for my cancelled 2020 trip to Iceland. I don’t know how to use all the features of the Sony camera, and perhaps I should focus on that instead of idle dreams about the SLR. The joy is that I don’t have to decide this now, it can wait a while.

I believe I will be able to find someone to take all of the Nikon equipment that I’m willing to part with in a batch. When I’m ready to part with it, I’ll start by putting out feelers among young people I know that are in the local art scene. I know some of this equipment has monetary value, but not enough money that I’m willing to go through the extra trouble of actually selling it myself. I won’t mind if someone takes it all and sells it because I just want it to be used.

Delicious and Indulgent Foods that are not Sweet

 

I am trying to cut back (but not eliminate) sweets from my life. Sweets play an important role in my life - few things feel as luxurious or indulgent as do sweets. Sometimes I want soothing, a feeling of taking care of myself, and baths or hot tea don't do it for me at all. I'm not a huge fan of wine, and I've cut way down on all alcohol, wary of migraines. In my quest to find alternative satisfying luxuries, I ended up at the Georgetown Olive Oil Company.  

They are a tiny little storefront on M Street in (duh) Georgetown. When I went there, the door was locked and I had to ring for admission, and the sign on the door said they were only allowing three customers in at a time. I was, at first, the only customer. 

They stock several olive oil varieties, and many flavored olive oils as well. They also have dark and light balsamic vinegars, other vinegars made from different wine varieties, and flavored vinegars. They had to serve the tastings to me - in tiny paper disposable cups, just to wet your mouth and get a sense. Drinking even a swallow of olive oil or vinegar was a new sensation for me. On a subsequent trip, I may bring in my water bottle for clearing my mouth. Other customers came into the shop, and so I didn't get a chance to sample everything (which I would have enjoyed!)  I came home with several small dark bottles, Moroccan picholine varietal oil, lemon-flavored oil, premium white balsamic, and peach-flavored white balsamic. (They re-use the bottles, and there is a discount for bringing them back.)

Reading about how to do an olive oil tasting, the pure taste without food is recommended,as is done in the shop, but I decided to set it up with some extras: a baguette, some leaves of butter lettuce, some (homegrown) cherry tomatoes, a farmer's market peach. I pulled from my cabinet the standard bottle of olive oil and the balsamic vinegar, for a comparison. My girl came over, and we happily went to town. 

The Moroccan picholine olive variety had a real bite, a taste that came back in the back of the mouth. I liked it fine on the baguette, but it was overwhelming on the plain lettuce - it would need something to tame it - or compete with it - like a lot of good pepper. The lemon-flavor was good, but my girl and I were disagreed on whether it overwhelmed the underlying flavor of the oil. The white balsamic was heavenly, sweet and sour at once. I loved the peach flavored balsamic, but my girl couldn't stand it.

I'm indulging myself on the oils, keeping in mind that olive oil degrades rapidly - no point in hoarding it. Vinegar will last for years, literally. I have used the peach vinegar to cook with once - finishing some pork chops. But where I found I really liked it was as drink. The peach vinegar mixed 1:1 with rum over ice makes a lovely little tipple. I looked up "shrubs" and they are pretty much this. (Oddly, I tried some seltzer in the drink, and it made it much worse.)

Georgetown Olive Oil does mail order, but I enjoyed the experience in the shop, and I want to return the bottles, so I imagine I'll be back down there before much longer.

The (Mental) Health Part of My Report Card

 It's so hard to measure mental health. This shows simply what I can actually measure. But there is some really good news here:

My migraines, the only thing tracked in red, are on their way down!  I had three months this year with no migraines at all! I had two in January, but each of the other months that show any migraines reflect only one, though the number of hours varied. Sadly, my streak has broken, I had a migraine in early October. (But I got 5,000 steps anyway!)

The rest is fairly mundane. I meditated a lot in January, reflecting both participating in a challenge and also trying to deal with migraines. My anxiety went through the roof in May (thinking about my upcoming trip), and I used meditation to try to deal with it. So more meditation is, perversely, negatively correlated with mental health. 

My sleep is ok, and resting heart rate is acceptable. That's all there is to say about that.

The Activity Part of my Report Card

 My activity level through September was down overall from last year, pretty much any way I try to measure it.

June stands out as the least active month, and July and May tied as the most active. In May, I was getting ready to sail to Bermuda and started getting active. I was inactive (as my fitbit measures it) in early June. When I got back from the trip, I was zonked, and spent way too much time on the couch. Early July had me in Maine, hiking lots (some days more than I wanted) and when I got home I kept that up to some extent, getting ready for the Boston boat trip. The August stats reflect the lower activity from a week on the ship at the end of the month, though I did take some long walks in Boston before leaving. September, I started to turn things around on the activity front. 

One of the things about measuring, is looking only at averages can be misleading. That's why I add the high calorie days (>2,000 cal) and the very low step days (<5,000 steps). Back in my working life, I was going to get 5,000 steps just going about my work life, from the car to the office, around the block-sized office building to meetings, across the street to lunch. Now, to get 5,000 daily steps, I do have to work at it a bit. It's pretty much impossible to get there without leaving the property (unless I use the treadmill or the trampoline, neither of which have been appealing lately). Some days, I'd just as soon hang out with the dog in the house and yard.

I've read a few newspaper articles that suggest a strong positive correlation between more steps and longer longevity. There seems to be general agreement that very low average daily steps (<4,000) has near-term bad outcomes (ie, those people die soon) and there is almost a straight line increase in longevity as steps increase, up until about 8,000 a day. Above 8,000 steps a day probably has health benefits, but the relationship to longevity is fuzzy. (A very big note here: everything I've read on the subject from original sources notes correlation, not causation. Many newspaper headlines are sloppily along the lines of "Want to Live Longer? Walk More!". No one has shown that a person working to increase the average number of daily steps will by doing that improve their own longevity. Perhaps as your body winds down to die, you walk less.)  I care less about longevity than my quality of life, and fitness is so very important to that.

My trend on those very inactive days has been in the wrong direction, even giving myself a pass for June and August multiple days on board a fairly small ship with no where to go, and a need to hang on to keep from falling. I decided to aim for zero days of less than 5,000 steps in the month of October. While the dog is very happy to be out ranging in the back yard, he also approves of walks. To get my 5,000, I need two or three times around the smallest block here, with separate trips usually spread out over the day. I have also have a goal of having October average 8,000 daily steps, which means each day of only about 5,000 steps has to be offset with days of 11,000 steps or more. So far so good on both these measures, though 10 pm sometimes has found Bixby and me taking another spin around the neighborhood to hit the target.

I may have noted before that "miles" come from my Garmin running watch. Those miles only come from deliberate walks of at least a mile, not from incidental steps accumulated during the day. Those have trended up, as I go out more often on a trek or a run, sometimes with my girl.

Workout days suffered during my weeks of summer travel, but are trending up. I've noted that I just don't work out well on my own, and I'm regularly working with my long-time personal trainer. I definitely can tell the difference, that I'm getting stronger. I will do a shorter workout on my own, mostly on days I have been otherwise pretty inactive. I know my body feels better when I move. I'll often do squats or balance exercises while waiting for something in the kitchen, or sometimes when watching TV. Those things don't get recorded here, but my body knows and appreciates it.

Why a Report Card?

I compiled my stats for the last two months since last I reported. I have some categories for the way I look at things - activity, mental health, amusements, weight, and money. I've been posting the first three here. As I took a look at this, and looked at comments from previous report cards,

I also spent some time thinking about why these particular stats.

In my working life, I spent a lot of time with metrics. How you measure them, how you interpret them, what you use the information for. There was a fad in the 1990s for the "balanced score card". The basic idea was it was useful for companies to measure not only traditional things like finances and productivity, but also other items that could prove important to the company, like human capital and customer satisfaction. The theory was that things you paid attention to were likely to improve, and if your company believed these "softer" things were important, you would pay attention to them, try to improve them, and reward your people for doing them well. But softer things are harder to measure directly. Often they need to be measured indirectly, inferred from other items. There are tradeoffs around how much effort should go into counting the hard to quantify. And there are debates around whether the things you can count are shedding light on what is really important. So there is art as well as science to this process.

When I first started this blog, I focused on diet and exercise. I've been tracking my weight more or less daily since 1998. During my first Big Weightloss, I tracked not only my weight, but also my exercise times, recorded manually, into a spreadsheet. The first personal activity wearable trackers hit the market in 2010, just as I started this blog, and I was an early and enthusiastic adopter, poring over the statistics they produced. I learned my memory is not a good record of what I've actually been doing, and wanting to see a positive change in the numbers can be a good motivator for me. So I'm sold on personal measurement for personal improvement.

The approach of the balanced scorecard is attractive to me. Fitness is very important to me, so is my weight (possibly more than it should be). But clearly a well-rounded individual has more to them than fitness and appearance. But how to measure these?

So the things I choose to show here are partly chosen simply because I can count them. Just as I have a wifi scale that records my weight automatically, and a fitbit that does the same with my sleep and steps and other items, I've aimed at things that can be measured with minimal effort. I meditate using an app on my iphone that keeps stats for me. I track my migraines on an app as well - it'll produce a report I can share with my doctor.

How can I measure personal fulfillment and social connections and creativity? I need to start by trying to get more specific about what are my goals. So in no apparent order: I want to stay mentally engaged, including with current culture. I want to stay socially engaged, keeping up with good friends and finding new people. I want to travel. I want to sail. I want to be a good steward for my little slice of the planet. I want to support my family. I want to be engaged as a good citizen. I want to lead a bigger life than I do on the couch with my ipad. 

Also, I don't want to be creepy by recording every interaction I have with friends and family! 

So that's what's driven the categories I'm recording under the general heading of "amusements".  What can I measure with a minimum of effort that reflects the above aspects? Many areas are not measured at all, but several are, at least indirectly. 

Because most of my reading is on the kindle, and the kindle can be connected to automatically record finished books in Goodreads, I can count my books with a minimal of manual entries. I found an app for recording movies watched - it's a manual entry to note what I watched (but all the info about the movie is in the app, I just check a box that I watched it), but otherwise similar to Goodreads - it keeps the records and produces the stats. 

Blogging, taking pictures for blogging, making graphs for blogging, thinking and planning about blogging, is one tangible bit of my creative life, and it can be captured neatly by looking at the number of posts I've done. "Trips downtown" shows when I'm leaving my couch and my block to venture further afield. Sometimes it's to see friends (that's mostly from the Before Times), sometimes it's to shop, to go to a museum, or to take a walk. Number of nights away from home measures longer travel, and days at the boat is self-explanatory.

Dog Walks

After I retired, and continuing through the pandemic, I got in the habit of driving downtown on Sundays for a sunrise walk. I don't do it often, and until this last week I hadn't done it since acquiring Bixby. In fact, my last time was the morning of the day I acquired Bixby, in December of last year.

Having a dog to walk with was one of my main goals in getting another dog, but Bixby has been challenging to get to the point where I was comfortable walking with him far from home, or far at all. The problem is he is a scaredy-dog, afraid of all people and dogs he doesn't know. This turns into barking and lunging at potential dangers. I've worked hard with him, under the guidance of a trainer, to counter-condition him. Instead of "stranger-danger" I'm trying to condition him to "strangers=treats!".  Now, most days, around the neighborhood, we can walk around people, and with a sufficient physical distance, can even pass other dogs. It seems like after some time, or after a surprise close encounter, his anxiety tank is full to overflowing, and he's like a two year old having a temper tantrum, unable to control himself at all. The trick is to prevent his tank from filling up. When I see him approaching the limit, the only solution to prevent a melt-down is to pick him up and hold him, oriented so he can't see the approaching danger, and move away from it. I've acquired a shoulder bag that can act like a baby sling, holding him close while still having at least one hand free. I use that also for rest breaks - he is, after all, a very small dog.

So last Sunday we did a sunrise tour of the monuments. It was perfect weather, and I (at least) had a great time. We parked literally at sunrise by the Smithsonian, and spent about an hour and a half total walking and sniffing, accumulating 3.5 miles. At first, there were very few people and no dogs. By the time we were done, after nine o'clock, the mall was getting crowded. But in the whole time, he never had a meltdown. I'm not sure Bixby had a great time, because he was on high alert so much. But he has serious FOMO so I'm sure it was better than leaving him behind.

In the sling - my arms aren't long enough for a good view