bren : blog

I always think I’m not much of a goal setter, but then I keep various little mental benchmarks in my head. Sometimes I talk about ‘em, but mostly not. Might as well mention the current goal(s)…

A while ago I was able to convince some friends to plan a climb on Mt. St. Helens with me. We’re scheduled to climb on October 3. We’ve even got the permits purchased. Problem is, I’m totally out of shape and would probably keel over halfway up if I had to march up it right now. Relatedly, I’ve got high blood pressure and I’ve been at least 20lbs overweight for the last several years.

I’ve done a lot of rock climbing in my day, but the only real mountains I’ve climbed are St. Helens and Hood. That’s because when I was younger I really hated walking uphill. It’s still not the funnest thing, but somehow it has become much more tolerable as I’ve grown older. Anyway, I never summited Mt. Hood. I just got tired out and sat on the Hogsback, about 100 yards from the summit, until my friends tagged the summit and came back down. Good enough for me. And when I went up St. Helens, I was apparently in such a hurry to pack that when I got to the top I realized that I’d only brought a bottle of grape jelly. No crackers, no water. Just grape jelly. That sucked. Fortunately friends took pity on me and shared their meager rations.

So I’m kind of on a path toward redemption on St. Helens. But I still need to get in shape. I’m still overweight, and I still have high blood pressure. All this stuff was roiling around in my head when I went to see Dr. Tim, a naturopath, about my blood pressure. He said (duh), “lose weight.” But he also gave me a 3-week “cleanse” program to try out. Basically, I could eat anything I wanted as long as it didn’t contain caffeine, refined sugar, wheat, dairy, red meat, or chicken. Plus I was supposed to drink a couple of special smoothies each day, with a bunch of supplements, etc. Easy, eh? Well I stuck it out for three weeks. The coffee headache from the first couple of days was the worst.

I dropped 17 pounds and my blood pressure went through the floor. A few pounds have come back, but the BP has stayed low. BP is divided in to systolic and diastolic measurements. My systolic dropped from around 140 to around 110. My diastolic dropped from around 90 to around 73. I’m pretty stoked about that. I’ve stopped taking high blood pressure medicine for now, just to see what the readings would do. So far, they’ve stayed down.

So I’ve dropped some weight and dropped the BP. I’m satisfied with the BP, but not happy with the weight. I was at 240 on Monday, May 4, 2009 and on Friday, May 22, 2009 I was at 223. I’m hovering around 227-229 right now and I want to get to 220. Dr. Tim says I should be at 215, but we’ll see about that.

The one thing I didn’t do, that Dr. Tim said I should’ve done during the “cleanse”, was exercise. I kept meaning to, but I just never did it (aside from waking or biking to work–a flat 5 blocks). Always had a good excuse in my head. What I absolutely know is that I’ve got a big hill to climb on October 3, and if I don’t start climbing some smaller hills now, I’m gonna really be hurting.

So I mapped out a quick 2.5 mile running route that has two decent hills in each direction. The second hill is an absolute killer. It gains about 100 feet in elevation in about 100 yards. It’s steep. I can’t even run up half of it yet, but when I can run up the whole thing, I’ll turn around and start working on a second lap. I’ve also got to start planning some intermediate hikes to help get my legs conditioned to longer uphill walks. One a month between now and October ought to do it.

So there you go. Everything is out in the open now! I’ve got to start running and hiking some hills. Get the weight down to 220. In fact, this evening I told Amy that when I hit 220 I’m going surfing. I haven’t been surfing since my regular surf buddy died several months ago. I miss it, but if I can hit the water at 220, I know I’ll be feeling really good.

That is all.

I’ve pretty much settled on the watch I’ll be using for the next many years. It’s served me well for the last three years, and it has the functions I want: waterproof (as much as I’ll ever need, anyway), stopwatch, readable dial, visible in the dark, never needs a battery. I love it.

But I’ve been swapping out watchbands on the thing ever since I got it. I’ll wear a band for a couple of months and kinda settle into it, then either the band will wear out or break, or I’ll get tired of however it digs into my skin or tears out my wrist hairs. When I got the watch, the first thing I did was throw away the goofy green canvas watchband that came with it, and put on a velcro wrap band. That lasted for months until the velcro got tired and kinda wore out. I tried a metal bracelet for a while, but that tore hairs and was clunky. Then I tried a nice leather band with a deployment clasp that never needed buckling. That was nice, but the leather wore out around the clasp, plus it was ridiculously clunky.

I also noticed that I was removing my watch when I sat down at a computer. That’s because the clasp/buckle/strap of the watchband was always digging into the underside of my wrist when I had my hands on the keyboard. Very annoying, so I just took off the watch. Thing is, I didn’t really want to take off the watch because I’d invariably walk away without putting it back on. Taking it off was only slightly less of a hassle than suffering through the annoyance of the watchband digging into my wrist.

So that’s the backstory. Last year I caught a whiff of an interesting watchband and bookmarked it for later. I eventually bought it and have been wearing it for the last few months.

The Zulu strap has been a great band, and probably the only one I’ll use for this watch from now on. It’s a single strap, so it weaves between the bars on your watch body, basically in the same way as those velcro straps. It does have a pretty beefy buckle, but the nice thing is that you can position the watch much closer to the buckle so that the buckle isn’t directly under your wrist. Initially I positioned the buckle on the outside of my wrist, like the instructions said. I quickly realized that I roll my wrist outward a lot when I use the keyboard, and that position bugged me. So I swapped it around and positioned the buckle on the inside of my wrist. Perfect!

The strap is so flat that I don’t really notice it when my hands are resting on the keyboard. The strap itself is totally bombproof, with an option to weave the tail of the strap back through some metal loops as a backup fastener for the buckle. The buckle isn’t going anywhere though. The overall look of the Zulu strap is sort of “military” but when you position the buckle on the inside of your wrist, it’s a lot less noticeable. Also, the metal hardware comes in either silver or black. The black hardware might make the band even less noticeable.

I have the regular version, not the diver’s version. It fits me just right, but I’m 6′4″ with medium sized wrists for my size. The watchband goes to the third hole and is able to double back through the metal loops. If I go to the second hole, I can’t double back, but the metal loops lay down on the tail of the band and keep it flat. If I ever have to buy a second band, I’ll probably get the diver’s style and just cut it down to my size. Even on the third hole, it could still use just a few extra millimeters of tail through the metal loops.

Anyway, it’s a great watchband. It feels like it’ll last forever and it lets me leave my watch on when I’m at the computer. Nice. In the vein of Merlin Mann’s tactical Internet pants, I’m dubbing this the tactical Internet watchband. Can you believe I just wrote over 700 words about my watchband? Me either!

We moved pintglass.org to a new web host today. The old one finally got on our nerves enough that we moved to Dreamhost, which is dreamy.

Maybe I’ll blog again someday.

Tru got to stay up for New Year’s Eve, so to kill some time we messed around with stop motion animations. Have a look!

My (very sweet) sister-in-law, with whom I apparently disagree mightily about both politics and religion, has a nice post-election blog posting.

I considered responding with a blog post of my own, but ended up just dropping a comment in on her post. My comment is so long I probably should’ve made it into it’s own post. Whatever. Feel free to yell at me either here or there.

I looked for a McCain-based version to do an apples to apples comparison, but it doesn’t appear that they’ve put one out. If you know of a McCain branded calculator similar to this, let me know and I’ll slap it up here too.

(Advent Conspiracy)