I wasn’t sure how to summarize the year. It was not a good year. Bad things happened, and the stage is set for more bad things to happen in 2025. Global politics are a mess and fascism is on the rise.
I won’t even mention the U.S. election except to say that Americans have given themselves a generational black eye by putting Trump back in the White House when he belongs in jail. So much for accountability and consequences.
For me, the year was a series of health-related issues. I got sick twice for the first time in years, one minor illness, one that lingered a bit. I hurt my right knee again, but managed to bounce back and resumed running sooner than I had in 2023. I even posted some of my best run times in two years, which was nice. But health problems dogged me right to the end. I am only a day out from weeks of antibiotics to deal with a bacteria infection. This wiped out most of December, but I did manage to lose weight and keep most of it off as a result.
My return to running yesterday ended in disaster, as noted in an earlier post, when I tripped and fell hard on a sidewalk. A day later and I feel like I’m recovering from a car crash. Do not recommend.
Strata nonsense consumed much of my time. Too much. Stress was a constant companion. I don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, or dark. I just see the tunnel and it is very long.
Hopefully I’ll emerge from it in 2025.
May we all get through the next year intact.
Good riddance to 2024.
A cat trying, symbolically, to run from the year that was:
EDIT: Comics Outta Context had an apt choice to ring in the new year:
The best news is I’m down for the month and also down for the year. Hooray!
The not-as-good news is I was close to being down a decent bit more, as three times during the month I hit 165.2 or 165.3 pounds, including just a few days ago. In these past few days, despite no drastic changes in eating, my body weight suddenly started swinging wildly up and down. But even though I gained 0.6 pounds this morning, it couldn’t erase the rest of the month’s weight loss, meaning I am still down 2.2 pounds for the month and 5.7 pounds for the year.
These are pretty small numbers and I remain, as of today, some 16+ pounds short of my goal, but at least I am moving in the right direction.
December complications:
In the first week, I developed a bacteria infection, which kept me from running for four weeks. This is probably why I suffered the slight shrinkage of muscle mass. It did lead to a massive 3.1 pound overnight weight loss in that first week, and by the end of the month, I’d kept about two-thirds of it off, which is pretty good!
That second run–yesterday–resulted in me tripping and hitting the sidewalk hard, so I’m unsure how soon I’ll be running again. We’ll see.
The general lack of activity, associated stress, and discomfort did subdue my appetite for large periods, but once it improved, I came close to using food as comfort again. Bad!
In terms of stats, for the month, they have mostly improved. For the entire year of 2024:
Body fat went from 25.2% to 25.3% (neutral)
Muscle mass went from 30.5% to 29.7% (bad)
BMI went from 24.7 to 23.8 (good)
A mixed bag.
2024 was a mixed bag, indeed. Here’s to 2025 being a nice lean bag.
Stats:
January 1, 2024: 172.3 pounds
Current: 166.6 pounds Year to date: Down 5.7 pounds
December 1: 168.8 pounds December 31: 166.6 pounds (down 2.2 pounds)
Body fat: December 1: 25.9% December 31: 25.3% (down 0.6%)
Skeletal muscle mass: December 1: 30.0% December 31: 29.7% (down 0.3%)
BMI: December 1: 24.2 December 31: 23.8 (down 0.4%)
The good news: I completed my first run in 28 days!
The also good news: My pace of 5:53/km was slightly better than expected, given the extended time off (due to infection).
The not good news: At the 1.95 km mark, I tripped on the sidewalk just past the river trail and gravity won. Summary:
Laceration of left elbow. Did not break the skin.
Scraped right knee. It’s a pretty standard scrape.
Left hand: Torn skin, bloodied.
Right hand: Torn skin, bloodied, but more so. The right hand absorbed the majority of the fall.
Wound/Bandage update: I appear to have hurt my upper left thigh somehow. There is no visible bruise, but a few lacerations. It is very sore. It also seems my right wrist absorbed a lot of the impact and when I flex it a certain way it becomes very unhappy. Not a sprain (I think), just sore.
I now have four bandages/gauze covering various parts of my body. Kids, learn from me: Tripping on a sidewalk is not cool. Don't do it, no matter what those other kids say.
But let’s start from the start. I have been battling a bacteria infection for most of the month, and the last time I ran was on December 2nd. I felt I was ready to run again, so did my stretching and opted for a short 2.5 km run on the river trail. I dressed accordingly (running pants, rain jacket) and headed off. The first km was better than expected, with a pace of 5:46/km (I was expecting something closer to six minutes). I figured the second km would be slower, and it was, but not for quite the reason I expected.
When I run the river trail, I normally head past the gate at the far end, run down the sidewalk to where Cariboo Place meets Cariboo Road (they like cariboo around here), then turn and head back. I was heading toward the intersection when my left foot managed to perfectly connect with an uplifted section of sidewalk, causing me to trip. I had time to ponder whether I would regain my balance or go down. Given the momentum, it was inevitable that gravity would win, and it did.
I want to say I looked to my right and could actually see the skin tearing on my right hand, but that doesn’t seem possible, so maybe my brain was adding spice. As I laid on the ground, I did look at my right hand, which was bloody, then my left hand, which was also bloody. I paused the workout.
I stood up and, with nothing actually broken or sprained, resumed the run, being a bit more cautious on the sidewalk part. I kept going and finished the 2.5 km, with an average pace of 5:53/km, which is decent for a run that included me falling down.
Other than the tripping part, I experienced no issues or discomfort. This is good and is encouraging for regular runs going forward.
The hands are cleaned and bandaged now, but are stinging a little. Getting them cleaned and bandaged was a bit of an ordeal. They will probably sting for a while yet.
I am including photos of both my left and right hand, taken shortly after the fall (just after I finished the run), so the blood looks very fresh, like I had just murdered someone. The photos are behind spoilers, for obvious reasons. This looks worse than my previous tripping incident: Run 449: Foot meets tree root, tree root wins
NOTE: Bloody hands
Left handRight hand
The scene of the crime.
Stats:
Run 906 Average pace: 5:53/km Training status: Strained Location: Brunette River Trail Start: 1:47 p.m. Distance: 2.51 km Time: 14:47 Weather: Cloudy, some sprinkles Temp: 5°C Humidity: 90% Wind: light BPM: 149 Weight: 166.0 Total distance to date: 6,387.5 km Devices: Garmin Forerunner 255 Music, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: HOKA Speedgoat 6 (157.5/284/441.5)
I did not like the plain background of the original, so put the backpack on a beach. I also changed the backpack from blue to green. I’ll probably tweak this again…eventually.
This article is just all-around depressing: Casual Viewing
Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)
And:
Netflix’s “views” might look impressive on paper (even Sweet Girl, the TNM starring Jason Momoa as a vengeance-seeking survivalist whose MMA-trained daughter takes up his cause, was viewed 6.7 million times in the first half of 2024), but these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to autoplay, or skip around, or watch at 1.5x speed. All this distracted, piecemeal activity is rolled into Sweet Girl’s total viewing hours (12.3 million at last count), which the company then divides by the program’s runtime (110 minutes, or 1.83 hours) to produce those 6.7 million views. According to Netflix’s rubric, two users who watch the first half of Sweet Girl and close their laptops equal one full “view”—as do 110 users who each watch a single minute.
To compensate for reading this, here is a cat watching a TV with more attention than a typical Netflix subscriber:
Eventually I’ll probably crash File Explorer by just opening it. It seems to crash a lot now, regardless of circumstance.
And I don’t troubleshoot it anymore, because there are so many possible reasons it might be crashing. I just live with it. Or spend more time in Linux Mint, whose file manager does not constantly crash (yet).
Has it really come to this, feeling fondness and nostalgia for Windows 95? I’m sure it was horrible in its own way, and I’ve just blocked the details, but still.
I saw this, uncredited, on Mastodon. On the one hand, it’s kind of trite. On the other, I like the actual colour and composition of the photograph and agree with the sentiment. It seems so much of our world is built around competition and while competition is not bad in itself, it perhaps shapes too much of what we do in our society, and encourages a kind of selfishness that isolates us from each other.
