The Happiest Day of My Life (lately)

Around 6:45 this afternoon:

Across the room, my wife of 41 years 

My cat on my lap

Kaleidoscope on the iPad; I had listened to it in high school, more than 50 years ago

Useful information on Xitter, confirming I happened onto the right answer to something years ago

Homemade chocolate pudding for dessert

And then I went outside, and in our back yard I saw two rabbits.  I wanted to remember them, and make a note of all the good things of that moment.  Like the man said, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Just a note

This past day, I felt like doing something.  That was not how I felt the previous days, or really for that matter, previous weeks.  Sertraline is a good appetite suppressant for someone prone to stress eating, but in me it also largely shuts down the ambition to go beyond the bare necessities of day-to-day living.  In addition, I slept late and still ended up taking morning and afternoon naps.  That's no way for a person to live, even one of my advanced years.

I found interesting articles in English and others in French; I practiced beyond the daily seven-minute-long lesson in a simple short-form course; I walked more than a mile and more for fun than out of duty.  I like not being subject to stress eating, and while I'm taking it, the lethargy of sertraline feels perfectly good, but being out from under the influence makes me feel alive.  Ancora imparo, y'know?

Nice

A sad, sad day

Not that I think anyone else is going to see this, but I'm writing this just for me.  This was the day it happened, this was the day I had been afraid would come, and it hurts now.  It isn't going to be the same going forward.  Preserve your memories; they're all that's left to you.

Saturday Evening Post (What am I doing?)

Is it a healthy curiosity about the world, or just untreated ADHD?

No one's ever accused me of the latter, but tonight I'm bouncing from one thing to another, leaving this one unfinished because that one over there catches my attention.  

Here's what I mean:  

8:14    Bell Telephone Hour, newly uploaded by someone who has obtained a number of television shows from the early-to-mid 1960's that were recorded to color videotape.  This one is from 1964, and a couple of minutes into it, I feel like I don't want to sit and devote full attention to it for a full hour.  Elsewhere in this person's library, I find a Ford Show from 1961 (again, color videotape) about "Songs of the Sea" that has had far fewer views than the rest in the collection, and I bookmark the Bell show and click that Ford Show up on screen.  It's half as long as Bell, but at 8:21, browser history tells me I was reading an article from Le Monde about telemarketers and zeroed in on the term, new to me, "moulin à paroles."   If color videotape is irresistible to me, so are French idioms.  A "windmill of words"?  Well, yes, if you think of someone talking and talking in a way that puts you in mind of a windmill continually turning, never stopping.  After satisfying my curiosity about that phrase, I return to Ford, but increase playback speed to 125%, including the commercials that use the Peanuts characters (and gave Schulz the idea of making a full-length animation on the subject of Christmas).  

When that finishes at 8:45, I go to still another recent upload of the Bell show, this one from 1961.  The tape was showing its age at the beginning, wobbling through the first several minutes, but again I didn't want to commit to an entire hour and so bookmarked that one on the browser bar.  On the right side of the screen are other algorithm choices from YouTube, and one from Martha Stewart on making lemon Danish grabs my attention and keeps it for several minutes until I realize that making the dough will involve much more muscle that I want to devote to baking preparation.  Fold it, roll it out, re-fold it, re-roll it out, oy gevalt.  

Short attention span is locked in, as I spot a Kate NV song and play it, followed by Walter Becker's Medical Science, then a song from Soyuz featuring vocals from Kate NV.  I find the album in YouTube Music and add it to my library.  That breaks the music streak, and I decide to write this stuff down for future reference, in case I (or anyone else, I suppose) want to remember a representative web-surfing night.  

Now hit Publish, then over to Musora for a lesson, then off to bed.  There'll be bookmarked content waiting for me tomorrow morning.

Just asking questions!

Ordinarily, PG goes to bed about 9:00, while I stay up a few more hours.  I usually have a sketchy to-do list, with the understanding that I am allowed to veer off it in the event that something more interesting comes to mind.

For a few weeks after the election, I was taking meds to reduce stress and its effects, and while my appetite for stress eating was agreeably reduced, there was an additional effect that wasn't as welcome.  Inertia and mild lethargy kept me from doing more than the absolutely necessary.  I would find things online that I bookmarked and never could inspire myself to revisit, and that rankled.  Are you alive or aren't you?  

So now I'm unmedicated once more -- yes, a senior citizen who is taking no prescription medicine, no non-prescription medicine, and no supplements.  I recognize that this is uncommon in someone of my advanced years, and I am thankful.

Food intake is under control, consisting most days of cereal and juice for the morning meal, followed between noon and 5:00 by a normal meal.  Today's was homemade chili and mini pretzels with dabs of peanut butter.  Hardly ever a dessert.  No soda, not even any lemonade.  Weight has gradually crept downward, even though the weather hasn't been conducive to taking walks.  

Then, where's the question referenced in the subject line?  

I'll tell you:  Why can't I concentrate?  No, that's not it.  On Tuesday, I visited the cat sanctuary and took more than a hundred photos, and early the next morning went through them all.  Downloading, tagging, sorting, organizing, all that before deciding which to discard and which to prepare for uploading to the Flickr database.  When I'm doing that, it's as close as I've felt to the last few years of my job.  I felt confident that there wasn't anything I couldn't handle, and when I received something that called on me to do parts of the job I enjoyed, it produced the opposite of stress.

Tonight I did a little writing for the Kitten Fund's letter to supporters, another post-retirement task that causes no stress.  When the draft was done, I consulted that list of bookmarks and took a few off the list.  Reading isn't as easy as it used to be, it's harder to concentrate on the printed page; is that the result of months of X and Bluesky shortening my attention span?  In a few paragraphs, let alone pages, I'm feeling impulses that there's something else I should be doing instead.  There are three books resting on the table next to the keyboard, and a small LED reading light alongside them.  I don't seem to be able to read very long, and that's never been an issue before.  What's going on here, adult-onset ADHD?

Still here

Another good day with PG.  After breakfast, I made a blueberry streusel cake, and when that was out of the oven, put together some spaghetti sauce from her recipe.  I chopped the onion and she grated the garlic.  

Early afternoon, we were in the family room.  She watched Whitstable Pearl and I watched some bookmarked YouTube videos with headphones on the laptop.  My little cat climbed onto my lap sometime during it all.

Supper at 3:00 as usual.  (Cereal for breakfast, and a filling but low-calorie supper.  No lunch.  I want to drop a few more pounds before the next 6-month checkup in January.)  Rice bowl, consisting of some cut-up turkey breast leftovers in a mixture of spanish rice, peas, corn, and pinto beans, with taco cheese and salsa on top.  Later, two chocolate chip cookies, a cup of hot chocolate, and a 1 x 1 square of the blueberry streusel cake.  Up here in the office, drum practice for an hour and four hard candies.  

Too cold and windy to walk outside.  Did fill bird feeders off the deck, otherwise stayed in all day.

In retirement

I dropped 25 pounds a year ago and it hasn't returned.  Today, though, I ate like in the old days.  Hey, a man's gotta live.  

A Mexican Coke, bag of microwave popcorn, and around 2:30 on impulse I hauled out the cookie-baking gear (bowls, scale, sheet pans) and did a half-batch of chocolate chip cookies.  First time in months, and I've thought about it frequently in that time.  Must have had a half-dozen of them, fresh and warm out of the oven.  But back on the wagon tomorrow.

This is how it was planned to go

I get up around 8:00, go downstairs,

Pour a bowl of cereal, a half-glass of juice and fill it the rest of the way with seltzer,

I do not reach for any pills.  All I have is baby aspirin and sertraline, and these days I don't feel like I need either.

I finish off Spelling Bee and begin Immaculate Grid

I check the Politics list within Xitter

I put my dishes in the dishwasher and take the iPad into the family room, and sit down on the recliner

If I'm lucky, my cat will come over and lie down on my lap

I can continue getting news from Xitter

I can read another chapter of 1776 or another day or two of The Long Season

I can put in the earbuds and listen to the machine voiceover while reading a story from Le Monde.

I can skim the headlines in the Times, Post, and Google News

From time to time, I check Facebook and Slack for news about the foster kittens.  If any, I screen shot the page or copy and paste the relevant text into a NoteTab .txt file, then save it into that month's subfolder in Dropbox.  If there are photos, I make a copy and save them into the same subfolder.  (This feels more important than the rest of the actions.  Those other actions are for my own amusement, but the Kitten Fund is the closest thing I have now to a job.)

Later, I take a walk around the neighborhood, and to keep my mind busy, I put on a podcast or count the rabbits.  

I look over the current lesson in Drumeo and work out the sticking (Today, single paradiddles)

I pull out the four printed pages of the drum part for Rikki and work out the sticking for a few more measures.  (Today, the first four bars of the first chorus.)

As of early June 27, this is how I envisioned retirement.  Then came the Biden-Trump debate and the overwhelming dread it produced.  Then came the first Monday after leaving my job, and the suffocating grief it produced. 

I collected the WFH gear and stuffed it into a provided box, and took it to the nearest FedEx store to return it.  

We had a contractor in for a week, which threw everything off for humans and cats alike.

Then someone shot at Trump.

Then my Welcome to Medicare visit, with an abnormal EKG.

Then my 68th birthday, and a day later, my wife's birthday.  That shook me, too.

Then there was a letter from my former employer that didn't make sense, so I drafted a response to mail back the following Monday morning.

Then the plastic line from the cold water pipe in the basement to the refrigerator upstairs split and sprayed water on possessions that need to be kept dry.  I felt better about my state of mind while solving the immediate problems:  put a bucket under the drip coming from up above the sink; find the squeegee and move the water on the floor over to a drain; find the leak and turn the saddle valve from On to Off, only for nothing to change, so I folded over the plastic line and duct-taped it in place to stop the flow. Just in case, I put a large plastic box under the sealed line and tied the line to the stepladder so it wouldn't thrash around if it did come loose.

The immediate crisis was past, and then I phoned the plumber.

He recommended replacing the plastic line with one made of copper, and replaced the useless saddle valve with one made by SharkBite.  As long as he was here, I asked him to replace the other saddle valve that was controlling water for the HVAC humidifier, and replace the pipe where rubber-lined clamps covered the pinholes made by past saddle valves.  In a couple of hours, everything was fixed, and I felt better about the plumbing in the basement.  I shouldn't have to deal with that kind of problem again.  Cost?  We could afford it.  

Then I contacted the internet provider/cable/phone company to try to get them to reduce the monthly bill, which has risen sharply since the previous reduction.  Not only did I get minimal sympathy, the reduction (such as it was) corresponded with the sympathy.  

Then Biden dropped out.

Then a spring fell off under the rocker-recliner and I had to play chair repair.

All that in less than a month.  PG gave me all the loving support she could.  I walked more, ate less, took sertraline.  By the end of July, I'd gone from 229 to 225.  

Then things got better.  I kept walking and drumming, but ate more and stopped sertraline.  My state of mind was much improved, but by this morning, I'd gone back up to 232, which wasn't planned.

But now that I'm over the shocks of 2024 presidential politics and the adjustment to being without a paying job, the framework I'd planned prior to retirement is holding firm.  I volunteer, doing things to help cats, I learn more about a foreign language, and I learn how to play a musical instrument.  Repeat as long as the household's health holds out.

Done. Next?

For the first time in nearly 11 years, I have no paid employment.  I guess that's one way of putting it.

I'm retired.  My last day was last Friday, and there was just enough to do for the day to pass quickly.  I did what needed to be done, I looked up and it was nearly 11:30.  Same in the afternoon; before I knew it the clock was reading 3:30.  There were 50 messages from colleagues wishing me well.  

I liked my job, but I understood it was time to go.

This morning, I unplugged everything related to the former job and piled it in one corner of the office.  Soon I'll gather it all up and drive to the office and drop it off.  Filling that space now are the 2 monitors for my home PC, flanked by the Yamaha speakers the company paid for.  The wires that were in place had to be untangled, and in a couple of cases they weren't long enough anymore in the new setup, which forced some problem-solving behavior.  Anyway, I learned something.

Ready as I'll ever be for retirement, I guess.  I am concerned when I see this quote:  “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.”  

Advice I read somewhere recommended having something to retire to.  I have TP for photography and writing and just getting out of the house for awhile.  I'm still following the online music lessons, and although I won't earn an advanced degree, an associate's will probably be all I need or want.  And third, the Le Monde subscription is giving me practice reading and learning French, not only through reading, but also the AI that reads articles aloud.

The best days are past, but I've also seen advice to focus on the good that is still around.  No other realistic alternatives anyway.  And away we go.

Countdown (but to what?)

Closest thing I can think of now is that I ran through stages of grief, and have now reached Acceptance.  Not so much for the job, but for the past 11 years, where there was a steady paycheck with steady yearly increases.  Even though I know SSA has yearly increases too, it starts from a lower point, right?  Yeah.

What was the percentage of people who couldn't come up with $400 for an emergency expense?  (Not as high as the initial headlines blared.)  A few days ago, I looked at replacing a valve on the downstairs toilet, but realized I didn't have the tools or the experience to get it done, even with YouTube videos to reference.  Of course, the plumber tried to upsell me, pointing out that the flapper wasn't as bright red as it should be, so why not replace both the valve and the flapper, only $249, it's like an internal overhaul, you know?  "Let's just get the piece that needs fixing, thanks."  Even that cost $125, and I know the complete valve didn't cost more than $25 retail.  Give 'em an inch, they'll ask for a mile.  At least I have a couple of paychecks still to come.

June 28 is a few days away.  Then I have to step off that looming cliff, the one I've been unsteadily approaching for the past 36 years.  Might as well look on the bright side (if there is one).  Maybe I'll discover I can fly.

Countdown

18 days of work to go.  Not handling it consistently well, either.  About what?  Pretty much what you'd expect.  Do I have enough money (probably not) and what if I run out.  Sometimes I feel like I have enough going on that I won't miss the old job, except every other Thursday when the paycheck no longer gets direct-deposited.  My last planned splurge was a Steely Dan t-shirt, high-priced to begin with, and larded with a heavy shipping-and-handling fee before tax.  But the 1996 Art Crimes shirt is worn out, and the 2003 shirt from the Borgata concert is showing its age as well.  

But I have my essentials:  someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to.  Even the virus that laid me low for a few weeks has receded, leaving only an occasional hacking cough.  

Just for my memory, here's the day in a few words:  woke up alone at around 7:30.  PG had already gone downstairs.  I reported for work, booting up and logging in, then walked downstairs for a bowl of cereal and glass of juice.  The workday started slowly and by noon, I had showered, dressed and was ready to drive to Wegmans.  We got everything on the list and took it home, then I made a sandwich, poured a glass of lemonade with seltzer, picked out a half-dozen small pretzels, and went back to work.

Several more hours passed.  I had a bowl of chili for supper, and after that a small serving of homemade vanilla pudding with the last of the canned whipped cream.  Reclined in the recliner and listened to part of Kaleidoscope (subject:  the radio Green Hornet) before Mike Whorf's voice made me nod off.  Watched 15 minutes of "Madison Avenue" and the 15-minute Seinfeld speech at Duke.  Then went upstairs to practice.  

There, short but with enough detail to be interesting to me somewhere down the road.  

OK, now what?

I came down with a cold at the beginning of the week and have been hacking unsteadily ever since.  It's forcing me to slow down, take naps, get more rest.  PG began to show the same symptoms this morning, and she was in bed tonight before it got totally dark.  

But with just a half-day of work tomorrow, I'm looking forward to feeling closer to normal for the coming weekend.  With PG under the weather, I'll pick up some of her chores.

Here was this day:  not much appetite, so small meals.  Besides the usual chores like scooping cat boxes, I pulled some weeds and whacked some others.  PG and I transplanted some flowers into one planter box; it already contained oregano in one corner, mini daffodils in the opposite corner, and an Indian blanket we found in the front yard in 2021 now filling in the corner between them.  

Still leaves one corner, which is where PG wanted to place an orange geramium she bought a couple of days ago at Walmart.  Then between the oregano corner and the geranium corner, we finally transplanted some white phlox that PG bought late last summer.  She actually bought two of the phlox that day at the farm market west of here, and the second one was buried in the space between the new marigold and the existing mini daffodils.  Got all that?   There's more.

Some intentional white flowers had spread so that there was a small patch right on the edge of the driveway.  We decided I should dig them out whole and put them in the middle of the planter box, the one remaining area.  Not only were they on the edge of a hard asphalt surface, but on either side of the root bulbs were metal pieces that held the border together.  More work loosening the dirt so the flowers could be lifted out, roots and all.  But I did it.

So that's complete.  We also have two planters hanging off the deck rail in which I scattered marigold seeds last Monday, and some sprouts are beginning to appear.  What else?  Whacked weeds coming up through the crack across the driveway, and followed up by pouring cleaning vinegar in it.  The hope is to put some sticky black stuff in the crack to get us through one more year, then having the whole driveway re-done in 2025.

Pulled some weeds near the dying cherry tree out back in preparation to cover a piece of the ground with a thick tarp.  A few weeks and everything under it should have died, at which time I'll lay down fresh fabric and cover that with brown mulch.

Back inside, I worked on my monthly assignment for TP, involving spending time with kittens and talking to people who are fostering kittens.  I forget who said it, but they advised seniors to have not only something to retire from, but also something to retire to, and Kitten Fund letters fit the bill.  Piecing together notes from the foster humans and choosing photos they've provided, plus evaluating kitten videos and deciding how to put them into one quick but entertaining YouTube video.  That's about the hardest part, because I'm now learning OpenShot for the video production; Inkscape for static title production, and today I downloaded Blender to create moving titles.  This is a perfect example of my natural impulse to stress over making stuff perfect instead of settling for good-enough.

Finally, I came up here at 8:00 and fiddled around with practice, not stressing about the slow progress I'm making but instead appreciating that this exercise is intended to be difficult.  By now I know that Repetition and Patience will get me through it in the end.  After 90 minutes of that, I set aside the sheet music and got into Blogger to get it down in writing before I forget (to coin a phrase).

In Google Keep I put together a list of several tasks I began and which are still unfinished because the person who can help hasn't returned my call or my text.  The landscaper was supposed to re-seed the front yard, where his heavy machinery had worn away the grass -- non responsive.  The rollover from my 401(k) to the existing brokerage account -- the 401(k) side says "Rollover Mailed to Institution", while the message on the brokerage website reads "Awaiting Arrival of Rollover."  They've read that way since late March.  So I followed up with the 401(k) team, and after 20 minutes on hold yesterday, I left my number and am awaiting their callback.  

Then, there was the guy who phoned out of the blue about something personal to me.  I emailed him back and asked him to put it in writing, but two weeks later, there's been no response.  If only I could get rid of the spammers who insist on regularly leaving messages for me to call them back at once.  Star-60 blocks the number they claim to have called from, but I know and they know that's not going to stop them for long, if at all.

Keeping Busy

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?'"

 

Credits for the above video:

Video production (OpenShot):  JM (also age 67)

Videographer (Samsung Galaxy 23+):  JM

Graphics (OpenShot and Inkscape):  JM

Still photo:  JM

Music production (Mixcraft):  JM 

    Mixcraft is Ikea build-it-yourself music.  They give you the instrumental loops, and you put them together however you see fit.  In this case, four bars of the solo acoustic guitar, then layer in loops of the bass and organ, and some percussion.  Fade out at 0:42 or so.

Next:  write the Kitten Fund monthly letter to its supporters.  Plenty to write about, and plenty of kitten photos to display.  All I have to do is show up, play with kittens and pay attention.  

Content

Accent on the second syllable, to be clear.  

Around noon today, I drove somewhere, parked, got out, walked in, a minute later walked back out.  No pain in my back, in my knees, in my feet.  Blood flowing without any problem.  Breathing normally.  Recognizing how fortunate that makes me as a 67-year-old.

After six inches of snow Sunday night, I wrestled around a heavy snow thrower to clear the driveway, the brick walk behind the house, the sidewalk along the house, and the sidewalk along the street.  Later in the afternoon, came back out after the township plowed in the end of the driveway and shoveled the wet, packed snow onto piles on either side.  No trouble.

Floaters in both eyes, tinnitus in both ears, some plumbing problems, but the kind to have (the kind that doesn't require Depends).  

I love my wife, I like my job, and whenever I want, I can go spend time with cats.  They've asked me to take pictures and write about cats, I didn't have to apply for anything.  I am reasonably competent reading and hearing a second language (speaking it is something else, since I don't get any practice).  I am learning a musical instrument, taking lessons on drums for the first time after my most recent birthday.  

While putting together a piece for Special Needs cats, I found that it would help if I knew a little something about video editing and creation.  I had made a hundred or more short YouTube videos over the course of a 10-year period, then ran out of inspiration or something and stopped completely.  

Sony Vegas isn't available to me now, so I went looking for a replacement, free and open source if at all possible.  OpenShot seems to be the answer; it's installed now and I've been checking out tutorial videos on (what else) YouTube.  This of course leads to the realization that although I've done a better-than-average job of tagging the digital still photos taken over the past 25 years, the video clips aren't nearly as well-documented.  There's a project, and a big one.  It'll keep me busy when I'm not taking pictures and processing them, or loving on cats, or writing about them, or reading/listening to French, or practicing variations on a half-time shuffle.  

I haven't forgotten...

It's the sertraline.  I used it to suppress my appetite and block stress eating, and it worked.  I lost 15 pounds quickly, but then hit a plateau.  I stopped taking it, followed by the return of occasional desserts, and what do you know, I went from 237 to 239 in short order.  

So after a few weeks of that, I went back on, cut out desserts and anything resembling stress eating.  Dinner table conversations dwindled to nearly nothing, which is a negative side effect.  Blog posts disappeared altogether, which isn't all bad, except for the times I'd think of something overnight and forget it by morning.  

But once more, sertraline did the job it was intended to do, and I weighed in at 233 point something this morning.  If/when I reach 228, that'll be 25 pounds, and good enough that I'll give cold turkey a try.  I've been lethargic, and I'd like to feel something again.  I do function, fulfill obligations and all, but not as much beyond that as when I don't take anything.

The typical day consists of a bowl of cereal with whole milk and a 50-50 combination of juice and seltzer.  That is ideally done at 10:00, so I don't miss lunch.  If I do want a bite in the afternoon, I get a banana, maybe some peanut butter with it.  Maybe a cheese stick.  Then for supper, a small serving of something.  Spaghetti with meat sauce, or a small bowl of homemade chili.  PG makes chicken scaloppini with skinless white meat, and I like that a lot.  Tonight, it was a 1/4 pound burger with A1 sauce and a pickle slice.  Generally, either milk, 50-50 lemonade and seltzer, or Evian.  A few mixed nuts or peanuts. So two small meals, almost no sweets, and walking around the block for exercise.  

The doctor P.A. tossed off "Lose 10% of your body weight" as if to say "like you could do that."  Maybe it was reverse psychology, but I'd already begun losing weight before the appointment and nothing she said changed anything I did after it.

 

Lots planned, lots done

Sunday, September 17

Just notes for now.  If I feel like it, I'll expand on them eventually.

Photos of the freshly blossomed purple asters in the wildflower patch around the corner, below the Route 222 bypass.

Photos of the Quakertown, NJ meadow.  Different from last year.  Signs warning to keep out, don't pick the flowers, beware of the bees, and a rope "fence" to delineate the Keep Out area.  Earlier this summer, I walked in a large section of the area that's now roped off.  (Not the meadow part, but the mowed part along the edge of it.)

Quality Time with my good girl Lorna Doone.  They should take off that orange collar soon.

Cookie "Monster" swirling at my feet to greet me.  I didn't offer her the Hand of Friendship, though, not yet.

New cats on the list for photos needed, but several are hiding, can't photograph them

Was able to photograph cats in Suites B, C, E, I, lobby, Community Room

Good Quality Time with Fenek, plus good snapshots and an interesting situation to describe in next month's letter to his supporters.  (YIL about microchip feeders, which open only for certain cats.)

Shoprite:  Whole milk only 3.69, 50 cents or more lower than in PA.  Sale on Tropicana juices, $1 off per bottle, max purchase 4.  So I saved $4.

Back home, downloaded and tagged photos

Practiced 20 minutes before calendar program beeped at me.

Watched Nebraska-Kentucky without falling asleep.  Probably couldn't have done it before losing 15 lbs.

Not bad for a man of my advanced years.

The Good TImes are Here and Now

Last night, I was looking around YouTube for songs to learn with reasonably simple beats.  I called up John Hiatt's I Don't Even Try and soon found myself playing air drums and singing (if you can call it that) along.  Then I opened my eyes and saw Pat walking past me into the kitchen.  Usually even with my eyes closed I'll see the hall light come on before she walks downstairs.  Musta really been into the beat.

This morning, as I collected the stuff for breakfast (cereal, milk, juice, seltzer, spoon) I was softly singing (IYCCIT) Walter Becker's Down in the Bottom.  That's another song with a reasonably simple beat, as far as I could tell last night.  I'm sure that the beat doesn't get lost in the music, unlike some other songs that are on the Beginner list at Drumeo.  

Pat commented that I must be happier these days, since I'm singing more.  Interesting observation, and a true one.  Work is going well, home life is great, and I have plenty of absorbing (and useful) things to do in my spare time.  

Visiting shelter cats and loving them, either socializing the frightened ones or giving the social ones a lap and some petting.  Writing, about one cat in particular, and taking pictures when I see something interesting.  At the very least, the good images get posted to a blog where at least a lot of Singaporeans see it, and the best ones are used by the shelter for promotional purposes.

Sometime in the past year, I believe, French got a whole lot easier.  Although I had re-started learning the language in 2002 with the help of Champs-Elysees -- after a couple of decades of inaction -- it was hard to read anything without numerous consults of a dictionary, either the Larousse in the office or the one online.  As recently as during the Covid pandemic, I remember just giving up and not trying anymore.  After one of my credit cards was used by someone with bad intents, the credit card company issued a new one with a different number.  I tried to change the card number on file with Le Monde, but three months later I was no longer able to log in for subscriber-only articles, and I took that as a sign to stop struggling.

Then last year, I found that it was now possible to use Google Pay to subscribe to publications outside the U.S.  Even better, I'd been away long enough that it was possible to take advantage of a lower-cost subscription offer.  And suddenly, and counter-intuitively, after weeks without trying to learn anything, I could read French comfortably.  I still use Google Translate for an individual word, and now and then I do a search when a phrase makes no literal sense and I strongly suspect an idiom.  But now I look at the Times, the Post, and Le Monde equally as much for news.  It's a mystery, but it's also a sense of accomplishment.  I've read the articles that say learning a language helps keep the brain from rusting out.  And hey, you never know when you might need another language in case Trump gets re-elected. 

So there's (1) Tabby's Place, with all the useful things it provides, (2) French, which I can understand in spoken form (as long as it's spoken reasonably clearly) and now can read (with occasional help from Translate).  And recently, adding (3) drumming to the list.  All things I don't have to stop as long as my brain and body hold up.  Maybe I'll never do any drumming except in this house, but it's a pleasant experience to learn.  

And as if on cue, a big brown truck stopped in front of the house, and its driver carried a good-sized brown box and set it down just to the side of the front door.  That would be the new drum throne.

One last thing:  I take care to choose songs sung by humans with imperfect singing voices.  Whatever it takes to keep from sounding pitiful!

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."

 

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.