55 years too late

She's got Bette Davis eye.

Sell!

I believe it's already been noted here that my blood test in early July showed higher-than-normal blood sugar and A1C levels.  After learning the results, I got serious about losing weight, which included cutting out Coca-Cola.  Apparently, that was too much for the local bottler.  

Reminds me of the old story of two guys who drove by a distillery one night.  The lights were on, and one man said, "They're making it faster than you can drink it."  The other one said, "Yeah, but at least I've got them working nights."

 

Headline News

The story reads:  "Donald Trump has decided to drop his lead Georgia lawyer ahead of his surrender on charges of election interference in the state on Thursday evening, according to a report. Drew Findling, the attorney who has helmed the former president’s defense in Georgia, is being replaced with Atlanta-based lawyer Steven Sadow..." 

The website Daily Beast chose the headline, "Trump Ditches Top Georgia Lawyer Before Surrendering for Arrest", but this would have sufficed:

"Trump Fucking Around, Findling Out"

Double Bumble

One of the volunteer sunflowers in our back yard.

 

Voices of Experience

 * Jack Benny, who built a career on kidding about his stinginess, his constant age of 39 years and his old Maxwell, doesn't look even near his real age, 80 years. "I don't feel my age," he said, and added a quick aside. "There are moments, of course."

"I think the secret of staying young is to keep working until you can't."

* As far as 67-year-old Robert Young is concerned, "Real fulfillment is knowing what you want to do — and being allowed to do it. ... I want to work 'till I die." He says this after having tested retirement for six years...

"There were some of the unhappiest men in that retirement community," he reveals. "Former chairmen of the board — some who had ruled business empires. I'll never forget the day one of them complained, 'I woke up this morning and thought, what in the hell do I do today?'"

* Larry Brown said, “I think we’re all wired the same. We need to be busy. We need to be active. You need to feel like we’ve got a purpose and a place. Relaxation and time off gets the better of all of us. I’m at my worst when I have time off.”

* Sergio Aragonés draws regularly, basking in each day at the table: “Your only fear is that with age, your hand or brain will fail. So far, I’m 85 and I’m still okay: The brain is still thinking and the hand is not trembling.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/sports/julia-hawkins-running.html

Do you have any secrets to longevity and staying in shape?

To stay in shape, just keep active. Keep your weight down and exercise. Have a lot of passions, things that you are interested in. Keep interested in a lot of things to keep you busy and keep your mind busy.

And look for magic moments. That is something that I have done in my life — think of the things that are magic moments that happen to you, like sunsets and sunrises, rainbows, beautiful birds, music and people’s lovely comments to you. All of those are magic moments and they are free for all. Be sure to keep your eyes open for them.

Coming in for a landing

Today while PG had PT, I was getting in a little walk, just drifting along with the hovering hoverfly.

Not all the bird seed was eaten

 

My Day at Tabby's Place

Arrival:  1:30

AR2:  Lorna Doone.  She was friendly for several minutes, before turning away and eating, then lying down in her bed.

Feral Room:  2D.  He was lying on a cushion in a sunbeam, and I petted him a little before sitting on the floor.  He got up and came over to sit in my lap for quite a while.  Then he got up and went straight back to his sunny window cushion.

Suite A:  Sat on the floor near Cookie "Monster", and she only growled once while I was there.  

Suite B:  Carrot and Sketch both maneuvered for my lap, but the older, more experienced Carrot got there first.  

Suite C:  Five kittens, two of which enjoyed lap time with me.  Another jumped from the top of a cube onto my back while I was trying to get a good photo of another kitten.  

Lounge:  Good Quality Time with Fenek.

Departure:  4:00 

English!

Reading John Cassidy's column on the New Yorker site, I saw the following:

He "yousst" to go.  But then I read the full sentence:

Now I see he "youzzd" the law to go after mobsters.  Do persons learning English as a second language get told about that?  Same word, different pronunciation, depending on whether it's a verb?  

Speaking of which, here's a list, likely only partial, of words in English that are pronounced differently depending on their meaning:

To associate

An associate

To delegate

A delegate

To duplicate

A duplicate

To separate

A separate item

To appropriate

An appropriate reaction

Invalid

An invalid

His conduct

To conduct

A contract

To contract

A present

To present

A convict

To convict

A conflict

To conflict

To confine

The friendly confines

To combine

A combine

To close

Too close for comfort

To estimate

An estimate

I suspect

A suspect

A subject

To subject

To moderate

A moderate

To compact

A compact

To syndicate

A syndicate

To record a record album

My month

When I started "Before I Forget" during the COVID pandemic, I was searching for something to do in my spare time.  Visits to Tabby's Place were out for the duration, so no petting cats, no writing about cats, no taking pictures of cats, and no preparing photos of cats for publication.  That was a large part of life that was taken away.

Between social distancing, masks, and vaccination, I got through it without getting sick.  But mentally I was grasping for something interesting to do.  

Now in 2023, I've done something about it.  Priorities look like this:

(1) Tabby's Place

(2) French (audio and print)

(3) Drumming

So you know what I do under the first item.  The second, I re-subscribed to Le Monde and found a free text-to-speech app, so I have the option of reading and listening, or just reading, depending on the degree of difficulty of the material.  I'm also using Google Translate when I get stuck on a word or a phrase.  The latest Trump indictment is giving me articles to read; for every French article based in France, I'm reading 2 or 3 based in the U.S.

And #3:  Drumming?  Bet you didn't see drumming coming.  Neither did I.  

Here's how it started.  YouTube set me up with videos of a child named Yoyoka who has lots of fun on the drums.  I didn't know enough about it to tell, but commenters who said they had many years of experience proclaimed her to be gifted.  I didn't learn anything, but it was entertaining to watch her play along with a song I knew.

Then because I showed an interest in Yoyoka, I started getting recommendations for a German girl named Sina.  She played songs I remembered from the 70's and 80's, and in particular I found she had played along with Steely Dan's "Home at Last."  Her videos utilized multiple cameras with closer shots, so I could see more of what she was doing, and I watched it again and again.  Pretty soon, I could actually see some things that made me think, "I could do that."

One day, another Sina video appeared on the screen:  "Learn how to play drums in 10 minutes."   I added the video to Watch Later, but didn't watch it for some time.  I suppose I didn't believe her and was afraid of wasting time and being disappointed.  But now I know there's a pretty easy backbeat that is used, in one form or another, in plenty of popular songs.  That was in April.  Soon, I was comfortable tapping on a table, first with my fingers and then with pencils.  

A few weeks later, I decided to take another step, and bought a 2-pack of no-name drumsticks from Amazon for $6.  Using a spare chair, I made believe the seat was the snare and the padded part of the right arm rest was the hi-hat.  Sometimes I tapped my shoe against a foot on the table, producing a hollow metal sound, and if I was barefoot I just tapped my foot on the floor for the bass drum.  

Google gets data from its users, and it started to pile up frequent searches from me for drum information.  How to, what to, when to, and especially, drumming with as little noise as possible.  So many videos showed long-haired, bearded young men bashing away at 200 bpm, and that didn't interest me at all.  I like the timekeeping aspect of drumming, not the show-off element.  So I learned about practice pads and electronic drum sets that can let me learn (and make mistakes) in near-silence.  

I also confirmed my suspicions that the e-drums from manufacturers I've heard of (Roland, Yamaha) cost plenty.  I won't spend the money until I'm good enough to justify it.  It's the same pattern as other hobbies.  Start with a cheap set of golf clubs, and when I get good enough to justify it, then get a better set.  Don't start out with a $2,000 set of Taylor Mades or whatever and shoot 120 with them.   

Last night, I took another step, signing up for 90 days of online lessons from Drumeo.  I believe I'd gone about as far as I wanted to go with the original scattered approach, and picked a focused lesson plan, "30 Day Drummer."  That starts in a few days, which gives me time to get used to the Drumeo website and what it has to offer.  I'll probably have more to say here down the road.

Now I have three activities that I find interesting which don't depend on youth, which can be done after retirement, which don't require a lot of money, and which are more than simple pastimes, like Strat-O-Matic was.  (It really *is* just a dice game, after all, even if I didn't realize it for many years.)  

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Finally, in January I saw the family doctor and got a clean bill of health, with another appointment six months down the road, this time with a general blood test.  My blood sugar had been hovering near the magic number for years, and maybe I knew that this next test was going to put me over the top.  From January to early July, I ate and drank what I wanted, just as I had for decades before.  

The day finally came.  My weight was 253, my fasting blood sugar was 114, and my A1C was 6.8.  The advisories that had turned to alerts were now flashing bright red. Time to change or join the rest of my family with Type 2 diabetes.  The PA strongly recommended losing 10% of my body weight before the next appointment in 6 months.

The first thing I did was to re-start taking sertraline.  For some people it can lead to weight gain, but in my experience it acts as an appetite suppressant, or maybe more accurately, it helps relieve the stresses that had led to too much of the wrong kind of food.

The meds did their job, and I came up with a meal plan consisting of fewer carbs.  Salads with lean chicken, pieces of apple, tomato slices and carrot slices, all tossed with red wine vinaigrette with Dijon mustard, just like I had in France in 1982.  Homemade soups and chili with only a little burger meat.  Chicken scaloppini with a tomato-lemon sauce a la Pat. 

No cookies, next to no ice cream, and only tiny squares of the coffee cakes I made for PG.   Especially nearly no soda.  (Had pizza and Mexi-coke last Friday.)  Even without exercise due to the scorching summer heat, I lost weight quickly, reaching 239 and a fraction last week.  Now it's cooler and I can add walking to the plan.  225, here we come.

I had known all about this eat-less-exercise-more for years.  Only now, I didn't just have the want-to, I had the had-to.

A simple flower

While BB was getting PT yesterday afternoon, I walked around the parking lots of some of the many medical buildings in the area.  This was along the edge of one, in a drainage area where hedge bindweed had taken root.  

 

Just the one

In a neighbor's yard this morning, there was one tiny fleabane with an even smaller hoverfly on it.