Yes, 2023 was a year.
Allow me to quote Selma Diamond from Night Court: “I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me.”
I really don’t have more to add than that. I am not an overly reflective type, except when I randomly want to be, and that time is not now.
I reserve the right to edit this post later, though.
Let’s start with the bad news: I am up again, and the rate increased, going from 0.9 pounds in November to 1.6 pounds in December. This is clearly not the way a weight loss trend should progress.
But when I look at the overall month, I do notice something that suggests it’s not as bad as it looks. On December 26, my weight suddenly jumped 1.1 pounds to a monthly high of 172.9 pounds, which was anomalous for the month. I dropped 1.8 pounds after this and if I had started that drop at the day-before weight of 171.8 pounds, I would have ended up with a monthly weight gain of 0.5 pounds, an increase small enough to be a rounding error.
Is this a bunch of rationalization? Yes! But it’s also accurate. And even 1.6 pounds is small enough that I could lose it in a few days.
What I’m saying is that I think I may finally have my weight loss more under control, and just in time for the new year.
First a couple of monthly stats:
| Date | Weight | Body fat | Body water | Muscle mass |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec. 1 | 169.5 pounds | 24.7% | 54.9% | 30.2 kg |
| Dec. 31 | 171.1 pounds | 25.4% | 54.5% | 30.3 kg |
I gained a tiny bit of muscle, but also 0.7% of body fat, like I thought I was a bear getting ready to hibernate. Still, nothing too horrible.
Toward the end of the month, I really did improve on snacking and so for 2024 my goal will remain the same, to get to 150 pounds. At my current weight, that would mean losing 1.75 pounds per month (about 0.43 pounds per week), which seems reasonable and possible. And yet!
I started the year at 164.2 pounds and ended it at 171.1 pounds, so I gained 6.9 pounds, an average gain of about half a pound per month. From that perspective, it doesn’t look too bad. And in fact, here’s a fun change: My muscle mass went from 29.7 kg to 30.3 kg, so I did actually put on a little muscle. Woo.
We’ll see what 2024 brings. Hopefully not donuts.
Weight: January 1, 2023: 164.2 pounds Current: 171.1 pounds Year to date: Up 6.9 pounds December 1: 168.3 pounds December 31: 169.2 pounds (up 0.9 pounds) Body fat: December 1: 24.7% December 31: 25.4% (up 0.7%) Skeletal muscle mass: December 1: 30.2% December 31: 30.3% (up 0.1%) Body water: December 1: 54.9% December 31: 54.5% (down 0.4%) Historical: January 1, 2022: 182.8 pounds
Whoops, I somehow didn’t run all week and after eight days of non-running, my Training Status per my Garmin Forerunner regressed thus:
Way to make me feel like a lazy slob, watch. I corrected this by going out on a rare weekend run and despite possible showers in the forecast, it remained dry and unusually mild once again. How mild? The Apple weather app is showing this currently:
This breaks the record for high temperature on this day, too.
So I headed out with just a single layer up top, which was perfectly fine. At first, I was going to just run the river trail and call it good, but after I got there, a woman with a rather large dog a short distance ahead of me stopped and took her dog off its leash. Bad dog owner! She then used one of those throwing stick things to toss a ball down the trail for her jumbo-sized dog to fetch, repeatedly. I fumed about this for a bit, then changed my mind and decided to run at the lake after all. So thanks, bad dog owner, for making me get even more exercise than I planned!
As the weather seemed to be holding at cloudy, I also decided to not do a short loop and did a full trip around the lake. My 5K pace was very similar to my last run at 5:48/km, though my BPM was higher at 157, not surprising given the eight days off. I am also feeling a bit stiffer than I normally would post-run, but nothing a good day of rest won’t fix.
Pleasantly, the trail was not that busy. Maybe the clouds–which did look a bit threatening–scared a lot of people off. Many people were bundled up, which would normally make sense. I mean, December 30th is very much winter, after all, but 11C is the kind of high temperature we’d normally get in March. You really don’t need gloves and a parka when it’s 11C.
Also, as a change of pace, I skipped the Spruce and Conifer Loops, after starting my run by the fountain near the dam. This meant that I was about 0.22 km short of the 2 km mark when I passed the 2K marker. I did not like this. I closed the gap a bit by taking the Piper Mill Trail, but I normally hit the markers pretty much right-on or even slightly ahead by taking the side trails, so I’ll probably go back to them next time. Still, it was nice for a change of pace.
In terms of issues, none really. The left hip was a bit crankier because of the time off, but didn’t factor in much. The left knee is a bit stiff, but more in the not-running-for-8-days way, not because of knee issues in general.
Anyway, it was nice to get out and get back on track. That will be a wrap for my runs in 2023, a year of ups and downs, for sure.
Stats:
Run 842 Average pace: 5:48/km Training status: Recovery Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW) Start: 10:43 a.m. Distance: 5:03 km Time: 29:13 Weather: Cloudy Temp: 11ºC Humidity: 88% Wind: light BPM: 157 Weight: 171.1 Total distance to date: 6100 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 5 (235/441/676 km)
I asked Adobe Firefly to create a scene of hide and seek in a mansion and, really, I should have known what I would get. I mean, it did nail the hiding part.
It’s been a while since I did one of these, and I figured I should get one more in before the end of the year. It’s not perfect, but it’s snow goosey enough. Based on a photo I took at Iona Beach on October 22, 2023.
I don’t mean old-timey music like ragtime or something, rather I’m talking about eschewing a streaming service like Apple Music and going back to my old music collection, which consists mostly of CDs I’ve purchased and ripped over the past 30+ years. All of the files are local, tucked into a folder on my PC. The app to play them, Windows 11’s Media Player, provides album art and metadata, and that’s it. It doesn’t curate, recommend, provide radio stations, “for you” or anything else. It just lets you listen to your music library.
And it’s kind of refreshing. I can listen for hours and know I’m not burning bandwidth (I know I have the bandwidth, it’s more a principle thing). There’s a tangibility that’s missing with streaming. And everything is something I’ve already picked out, bought and listened to many times already. There is a welcome familiarity, but also a chance to revisit albums (kids, ask your parents what an “album” is) I haven’t listened to in years. Certain music invokes memories of other times and places. It’s weird and, usually, kind of wonderful.
Unlike my phone, which has a truncated version of my music library, the PC has everything, so when I hit shuffle, I never quite know what will come up. I like that.
Now I’m off to listen to Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe, which sounds more like a law firm than a majority of the members of Yes.
The problem:
The solution:
And yes, I did actually uninstall the game. My wrist and overall productivity are already thanking me.
And the hours played? Pretty sure that’s a typo. Yeah, that’s it.
I couldn’t remember if I had made resolutions for 2023, which may give you an idea of how well I did at keeping them. Let’s find out and have a good cry together!
The 2023 resolutions were:
Weird bonus resolution:
Overall: Eight resolutions, four successes. This is actually better than I expected. Onward to 2024!
NOTE: For 2024 I am skipping the "easy" stuff that I would probably be doing anyway, like running and birding.
New for 2024: I will check in at the end of each month to see how well I am doing on these things and use a letter, star, number or some other system to mark my progress or lack thereof. It’ll be fun!
One from an email newsletter, two from Mastodon.
From a Microsoft Designer newsletter. Put cats on anything:
Cat go down:
Cat go fast:
…unless you are talking about grammar, then your Boxing Day email flyer may suffer a little under the load. I remember working Boxing Day in retail1It is the abyssal hell you imagine, so I’ll cut the proprietor here some slack and not call them out by name.
I remember way back (we’re talking about the 1990s here at the latest) when Boxing Day sales were items featured on local news, mainly because people would line up at A&B Sound at some absurdly early hour to get great deals on stereo and related AV equipment. Remember when people would line up for the new iPhone? It was like that, except it happened every year, for decades.
Now it’s mostly just a ton of e-flyers in my inbox and people placing orders online. And Boxing Day starts on Christmas Day…or earlier.
And I’m okay with that, really. I do not want to stand in a line.
(Also, I would be remiss to not point out the somewhat odd choice of using “It Gets Better!” as a shopping slogan, since it is best known for the It Gets Better Project to help out LGBTQ+ youth.)
I’ve been on a science fiction movie nostalgia trek (ho ho) for a while now, and here’s a couple of mini review of two recent rewatches, both of them direct sequels to their first film.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). At the time this was pitched as the movie that “saved” Star Trek after the slow and, some would say, ponderous first film, which focused on a Big Idea. The sequel ditched the space jammy uniforms and brought back a classic villain from the original TV series, and swapped out the mystery of V’ger with a cat and mouse chase between Khan and Kirk.
The movie holds up remarkably well 41 years later. Some of the effects work is dated, but the scenes of the Enterprise and Reliant flying blind in the nebula and nearly colliding, are still thrilling to watch (just ignore the fact that no one actually looked out a real window to see where they were going). Kirk struggling with mortality and getting older is a great emotional frame for the film, and Shatner doesn’t ham it up under the hand of director Nicholas Meyer.
Ricardo Montalban clearly relished playing Khan, and Meyer allows him to ham it up–but never to the point of making the character appear a fool. He also gets the most quotable lines. “Revenge is a dish best served cold. And it is very cold in space.”
Still recommended after all these years, and probably still the best of the original cast movies.
Aliens (1986). What an odd movie series this is. The first two films are great, the second two are pretty bad, and they all have weirdly long gaps between them, defying Hollywood convention to crank out sequels. The gap between the first and fourth Alien movie is 18 years!
But here we have the first sequel, coming in seven years after the original and in terms of the timeline, 57 years after the events of Alien, when Ripley’s pod is found, and she is brought out of hypersleep.
For some reason, Disney+ (where I watched it) does not offer the Special Edition, which is both good and bad. You miss the early scene of the colonists going about their business before the alien infestation, which helps to give context to what comes later (though you can also argue it also kills the mystery when the marines first arrive at the settlement to find no one there). Likewise, there’s a terrific sequence with automated turrets missing from the original cut, where you see their ammo get depleted…and the aliens keep coming. AND you also don’t get the scene where Burke confirms to Ripley that her daughter had died two years earlier, which really helps provide motivation to her character for the rest of the film.
All that said, everything else that makes this a great sequel is still there. Effects-wise, it mostly holds up, though some of the models are clearly models (in the same way that today’s CGI is often very clearly CGI) and any shot of the dropship where it is not shot against the starry expanse of space looks shockingly bad, to the point of distraction. Everything else, crucially including the aliens themselves, still looks great.
I’d forgotten what a complete spaz Bill Paxton’s character was. Several others in the movie repeatedly tell him to shut up and calm down. It’s great. This film is definitely a James Cameron joint, as he loves his military hardware and foul-mouthed grunts. There are scenes where weaponry is lovingly explained. There’s testosterone spilling all over the place. And it is all neatly undercut when the characters realize what they are up against.
Sigourney Weaver gets a lot more to do here, and this is clearly her character’s film and story. She makes it work with a terrific performance, aided by a solid supporting cast. Paul Reiser, better known as the lovable, quippy husband on Mad About Her, is perfectly slimy as the human villain, cold and calculating until his inevitable and appropriate end.
I could quibble about a few plot contrivances and conveniences, but they ultimately don’t detract from a story that expands on Alien, while providing its own terror-filled ride. Still very much recommended, although watch the Special Edition if you can, the added scenes really do flesh the story out more.
And one from October 27, 2023.
