smrt watch

I got a smartwatch for my birthday in 2014. It was a Samsung Gear 2 Neo, and getting notifications on my watch was novel and convenient.

Right after Thanksgiving in 2019, the wifes phone MELTED when it was charging, and its replacement came with a Samsung Gear S3. She didn't want it, and my Gear 2 couldn't charge any more  (rust on the exposed contact points - there's your big design flaw)

Since then, this watch doesn't know what it wants to do. For a year it was fine, no problems. Then a forced software update pushes its way through, and the battery life drops so precipitously I needed to bring the charger to work. It was only after I started to look for a replacement that the battery problem went away on its own.

It managed for another year and a half after that. Then it just stopped responding. Sure it would vibrate when a call came in, but it wouldn't light up. I still needed to grab the phone to see who was actually calling. But the fact that it didn't want to wake up was growing. I could tap it, spin the bezel, and nothing would happen. I had just assumed it died.

I took it off for a week, considering if I even wanted a smartwatch any more. Once I decided I was done with them, I noticed it was lighting up every time a notification came on my phone. It decided it wanted to live.

My watch is a teenager.

Seven

My daughter turned seven today. She skipped school while her mother took her shopping for new clothes. Then she hung out with me and played video games. She's not normally the video game type, but I suppose she likes Animal Crossing.

She spent herself so hard she fell asleep early.

Cardiac misery

I went to the doctor about my shoulder. You see, it shouldn't hurt when I'm not doing anything. That was back in January. I had a long run of physical therapy, and it solved most of the problem. A cortisone shot took care of the rest.

That's not what I'm here to rant about. They took my blood pressure, and it was high. That's when I let it out.

"It's always high. Every time I come in anywhere, they check it and it's high. It was so high once I was sent to the hospital. They kept me there all day, ran every test, and found nothing. Even went back for more tests, came up with nothing. It's just always high"

That got a few looks. Two seconds later (yes, it was that fast) they pulled up a history of my blood pressure on previous visits. The NP, as battle hardened as she was through years of looking at sterile charts, actually broke character and looked genuinely worried. A few vials of blood were taken and shuffled off to the lab. The next day, I got a call about how, apparently, I'm about five minutes away from a heart attack.

I might have expected that if I was overweight, or had a nasty junk food habit that would lead to being overweight, but, I don't. I spoke with a dietician (that's where my hyper literate wife rolled her eyes. She reads about 10 books a year about nutrition and health, and is super healthy by herself, but I digress), and it seems there's very little I can do to change my diet. Of course, I still have to make those small changes before we can take any further steps.  Meanwhile, I have to try to not die between now and May 17.

I would think it was all bunk if I didn't feel like there was a problem before they did the blood work.

State of the blog

How long have I been doing this?

If you're new, you probably looked to the right and saw the dates going back to 2008. That's when I started this particular blog, after moving away from the built in blog feature in MySpace.

Yes, I used the blog feature in MySpace. In fact, I was sad when I discovered all that data was lost. 

Prior to this, I had a blog on Xanga of all places. I didn't even know it existed until it was introduced to me by some friends that also thought about blogging. 

Fun fact: none of them blog. At all.

But let's go back even further. Go back thirty years. I started writing in a journal regularly back in the sixth grade. Those, thankfully, are hiding in a dark corner of my house. I've mostly gotten over the crippling fear of people reading the things that I write. I say mostly because I'm doing this on the internet.

For a couple years, they would automatically import from here to Facebook as a note, but they killed that feature without warning. I never bothered doing it manually, because I didn't care.

So going back to my lack of fear. Let's be honest, there are probably like three people reading this anyway.

Out like a ham

So many unusual sayings about the year. With March it's "In like a lion, out like a lamb" which made no sense to me growing up, because every lion I've ever seen was always just sitting around while everyone else busied themselves. Meanwhile every lamb was always on the move, and wouldn't shut up.

I guess when the saying was first coined back before lions were always stuffed in zoo's, and lambs needed to be quiet to stay alive.

Either way, it doesn't fit the March climate any more. More like, in like a lion, out like a lion that hasn't quiet left yet, hang on it'll be another week.