The District

Guess what the wife wanted for Mothers day?

A weekend in Washington DC.

Since her kids couldn't afford it, and lacked basic planning skills, I took the lead while they took the credit. It was a shorter visit, leaving on Friday and returning on Sunday.

Of course, it started to rain just as we were outside Syracuse. The rain followed us all the way down. That combined with the spaghetti mess of a highway system that surrounds the nations capitol and a six hour drive took us eight. Fortunately, we only planned to arrive on Friday, not do anything. 

Saturday, the main (and first thing in the morning) event was the open house of the Washington DC Temple. I was taken there when I was four and remember very little. The wife was there as a baby and remembers exactly what you'd expect her to.

It was amazing.

Afterward, we went to the air and space museum. The one with the space shuttle. Ok, I knew it had a space shuttle, so I wasn't surprised by it. What got me was... everything else. Once we arrived, I had a clear shot of Discovery pointing right at me. A quick glance at a map showed silhouettes of the other aircraft. I didn't recognize most of them, but the one in the center was unmistakable. The SR-71 Blackbird. 

My wife wasn't impressed. "It's a black airplane" Ok, she may have been a little impressed, but clearly lacked my enthusiasm. 

The National Archives was where my son Z wanted to go. He wanted to see the Constitution (he also wanted to read it). You can imagine his disappointment when he couldn't read it. I had to explain that it was written in an old writing style called 'cursive'. He was happy enough when we got him a printed copy. 

It rained the entire day. 

Sunday morning it finally stopped raining, and we walked the National Mall. My normally rambunctious kids felt the solemnity of the Lincoln Memorial, choosing to frolic slowly and silently. They kept thinking the Washington Monument was much closer, not realizing just how tall it was. We walked much and saw much.

Then I drove much, much faster getting home than we did heading down.

Cardiac silver lining

Quick followup:

I removed the joy from my diet and replaced it with vegetables. Sometimes I'm just hungry and whenever I reach for something I know I like, the label tells me why I was having trouble before. So instead of eating anything, I'll just be hungry for awhile.

Anyway, in two weeks I dropped 15 pounds. It's visible in my face and I'm down a pants size. I thought it would be harder.

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.