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.)  

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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.