2025-02-20 15:50
This time not only did Ashley find her place in the sun, I found mine as well.
This time not only did Ashley find her place in the sun, I found mine as well.
We have reached the time of the year when the sun shines directly into my eyes when I’m sitting in my chair in the living room. Ashley is cleverly sitting just out of the direct sunlight.
For years now I’ve been fixing the same little feast for valentine’s day: rock Cornish game hen, Uncle Phil’s long grain and wild rice, and flourless chocolate cake.
It’s inspired by the very first meal I cooked for Jackie, just a few days after we started dating.
This year I made numerous mistakes in timing and measuring—kinda weird, since I slept so well last night. Fortunately, a modest amount of scrambling and fixing managed to make everything come out delicious!
Several times in my adult life I have suffered a bout of very poor sleep, usually due to life stress. One of those times, six years ago, coincided with the Oura ring becoming available. So I bought one.
Buying a ring, of course, doesn’t help you sleep better. The Oura ring just offers metrics on your sleep. It’s up to you to make sensible use of that data.
Besides buying the ring, I went down the rabbit hole of reading about sleep. In particular, I read the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Based on that book, and a lot of reading of internet articles on sleep, I started trying to get 8 hours of sleep a night, as measured by my Oura ring.
Of course that’s not what the “8 hours of sleep” number ever was. The number was always a “time in bed” number, assuming that you spent an average fraction of that time actually asleep. (Some people might actually need 8 hours of actual sleep per night, but that’s not what the number referred to.)
I conducted various experiments (which is what the Oura ring makes possible), but about the only way I could get 8 hours of actual sleep (besides being really, really tired) was to spend 10 or more hours in bed. Rather pleasant on the right sort of day when you’re in the right sort of mood, but not really a practical lifestyle, even for someone like me who doesn’t need to go work a regular job any more.
I did the sensible thing, which was to mostly not worry about it, and just try to get plenty of sleep. And I did okay. My average sleep score from my Oura ring over the 6+ years I’ve had it has been 84. (That’s one tick below the cut-off for “excellent” sleep.)
Just lately though, I’ve made another tweak to my “sensible sleep” strategy (which will no doubt seem extremely obvious to anyone who has never had an extended period of very bad sleep): I quit trying to extend my time in bed in an effort to try and get 7 or 8 hours of actual sleep.
Like all sensible people, I’m back to just going to bed when I feel sleepy, and getting up when I wake up feeling refreshed.
My Oura ring likes the results:
In part this was due to hearing an interview with the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman by Merijn van de Laar. He reports that Hadza people spend a very typical amount of time in bed, but only spend a little over six and a half hours of that time asleep.
Of course the smart thing to do is to go entirely by feel: If you wake up feeling refreshed, you’re probably getting enough sleep. If you get sleepy during the day, maybe take a nap.
The Oura ring is for when that simple, sensible strategy doesn’t do the trick.
Some years ago we got this glorious orange Le Creuset braising pan, and since then I’ve been inclined to braise everything I don’t grill. Contents today: venison rib chops—something that probably would grill very well, but Jackie likes the way I braise it, so that’s what I’m doing.
Do you think, with 25% aluminum tariffs in the offing, that bottled beer will make a comeback?
I was preparing a honey-mustard glaze to put on a ham. The recipe called for dijon mustard, honey, and dark brown sugar—that last, presumably, to make it caramelize nicely. The new jar of honey I opened had crystalized rather completely. So I skipped the brown sugar, and just put in twice as much honey.
It was delicious.
Now I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth updating the recipe, given that I can’t expect to have crystalized honey on-hand all the time.
For most of my adult life, trying to use “intuition” to decide on rest days would have been a terrible idea. If I’d let myself say, “Hmm. I don’t really feel like a workout today,” I’d scarcely have worked out at all. Instead, I came up with a schedule, and stuck to it, either well or poorly.
When I stuck to it well, I’d see progress. When I stuck to it poorly, I wouldn’t.
Starting around 5 years ago or so, something changed in my brain: I started really enjoying my workouts.
Partially, it was that they were working well, which is just satisfying. But it was more than that. First, I noticed that I felt better after a workout. Then I started feeling better during a workout. Instead of it being hard to motivate myself to work out, I craved workouts.
People who knew me were mildly disturbed by this. It was unlike me. It was certainly unlike them. I would not be surprised if they began to suspect that I was some sort of pod-person.
Because I wanted to work out nearly every day, I would sometimes wonder if I was over-training (or under-recovering), but that’s not trivially easy to determine in the moment.
I’ve long tracked my workouts, but not really in a consistent way—I’d just write down what I did that day. Sometimes I could look back and say, “Wow. That looks like a serious workout,” and other times I’d look back and say, “Was that really a workout?” But often times it wasn’t clear either way.
Just lately though, I’ve been doing the Mark Wildman workout programs that I mentioned a few weeks ago. That gives me a pretty consistent metric. I’m doing three different programs, each of which has 4 to 7 different levels, each of which can be done with an almost infinite range of weights, but they all have a consistency in design: start with a light weight, work up in complexity, then bump up the weight but go back down in complexity. If you’re consciously attempting to make progress, then it’s pretty easy to make each workout “count” as a workout, while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout.
But while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout is good, it is possible to do that, and yet get over-trained, simply by doing too many workouts with inadequate recovery.
So, today I went back over my past 3 months’ training log entries. For my first cut at this, I’m just counting rest days. I figure that I want to work out either 5 or 6 days a week, which makes any week where I have either 1 or 2 rest days a “good” week.
In the past 13 weeks I’ve had 1 week with 0 rest days, 1 week with 3 rest days, and 1 week with 4 rest days. All the rest were “good” weeks with either 1 or 2 rest days.
That’s just about perfect. The usual advice is to take a “deload” week every 4 to 6 weeks, so 2 weeks out of 13 being weeks with extra rest just about hits the nail on the head. The one week with 0 rest days was probably just an artifact of rest days falling outside of one calendar week—not a big deal, as long as it’s rare.
Anyway, the intuitive rest days seem to be working well. I’m getting in my workouts, and I’m getting in adequate rest. I guess I can stick with it for a while.
Today’s workout was 2-handed club swinging followed by abs.
The main workout went fine, but when I started the ab workout, Ashley had come upstairs. She found the postures of my workout (hollow-body, plank, etc.) to be very provocative, inspiring her to want to help.
“help”
I made a couple of political donations during the last election cycle. Now, every single day I get an email request for another donation, with some statement along the lines of:
“We are rapidly approaching the first fundraising deadline of 2025.”
But, you know what? I don’t care diddly-squat about fundraising reporting deadlines. What I want to know is what you’ll do with my donation to advance my priorities. Your artificial “deadline” means nothing to me, so as soon as you start talking about a reporting deadline, I stop reading your begging letter, and go on to my next email message.
Jackie and I call this path, along the top of the berm along the north edge of our little prairie, the High Road. There used to be a Low Road (down by the creek) and a Middle Way (in between), but they’re no longer mowed.
The sunrise is just a bonus.
While waiting for the bus to go to my Esperanto group meeting last night, I admired how these clouds were nearly the same orange as the barrels under them. (The water main break is fixed, I think. Now they need to fix the road.)
🎶 These snoots were made for boopin’, and that’s just what they’ll do! / Sooner or later these snoots are gonna boop all over you (do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do) 🎶
A group of friends and I agreed last week that the most likely result of the most likely policies coming out of this administration is stagflation.
Talking about it reminded me of the Wise Bread post I wrote All about stagflation, so I re-read that. I think has held up pretty well, even though circumstances (financial crisis followed by a pandemic) meant that things didn’t play out as I’d expected. Even so, I think the analysis of how to produce a stagflation is right on: raise interest rates to bring down inflation, but then panic when it’s clear that you’re in danger of producing a recession and cut rates before you’ve gotten inflation under control; repeat until you have high inflation and a recession.
That is, stagflation is usually the result of a timid Fed, that’s afraid to do its job.
The thing is, the policies that I see coming (tariffs and tax cuts) will produce stagflation even if the Fed does a great job. The tariffs directly raise prices, and the tax cuts (through increased deficits) raise interest rates, producing a recession.
In the Wise Bread article I warn that it’s tough to position your investments for stagflation. The reason is that inflation makes the money worth less (helping people with debts, but hurting people with money), while the recession hurts people with debts and people with investments.
Upon reflection though, I don’t think it’s quite that bad. In fact, it’s really just regular good financial advice:
Basically: live within your means and stay liquid.
Some years ago I came this close to setting up a rule that any email message with the word “webinar” in it be sent directly to spam. I never got around to it, and I guess I’m glad I didn’t, because I just attended a rather interesting webinar on “Fixing Chicago Union Station” by the High Speed Rail Alliance.
Enjoy the poster below, which is very cool, even though unrelated to Chicago.
I told Ashley that she’s “The number one girl in my eyes.”
Then I had to carefully explain that this did not mean that she should boop me in the glasses with her snout.
“A goofy number of guys think they’d win against a grizzly when they’d lose to a Canada Goose.”
— One of the sword fighters in my HEMA club
I don’t know, but I assume this is happening because I block scripts from sites other than the one I’ve gone to visit from running in my browser.
I wasn’t going to turn on scripts, because it didn’t seem important to visit this particular page, but in the time it took me to capture the image below and write this text, the page seems to have decided that I am human after all!
It was really too cold outside (2℉) to pose for photographs, so I brought Ashley inside before taking a picture.
Then, after taking her jacket off, I fixed myself a hot cocoa.
But no hot cocoa for the doggo. Poor thing.
I don’t think of myself as someone who wishes ill for others. I genuinely do not wish for anyone to come to harm. But I’m struggling just a bit with schadenfreude right now.
Take, as an example, the wildfires in California. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, these fire events were not just entirely foreseeable; they were actually foreseen forty years ago. And yet, there are tens of thousands of people who apparently made the calculation that the views from a house on a hillside at the urban-chaparral interface were so good it was worth taking the risk—and especially so, given that a large fraction of the costs of fighting those fires, and insuring against financial loss, could be spread to other people. People like me.
I think I’m allowed a bit of, “I hope you are enjoying the entirely foreseeable consequences of your choices.”
As another example, take the snow about to hit New Orleans:
By Tuesday, the winter storm will drop freezing rain, sleet and likely several inches of snow onto south Louisiana, including in New Orleans, Metairie, Slidell, Baton Rouge and Lafayette.
I have to admit that when people in red states face an extreme weather event that’s entirely to be expected, a certain part of me thinks, “Well, you could have voted for politicians and policies that would have greatly ameliorated climate change, but you didn’t. Enjoy the entirely foreseeable consequences of those choices.”
And, as a non-climate example, apparently a lot of black and brown male voters refused to vote for Kamala Harris. I suspect many of them will be surprised and saddened by the utterly predictable deportations of friends, family members, neighbors, coworkers, and employees over the next few years. And I will be very sad about that—sad for the people deported and their friends and family, and also about the dreadful police actions that will be required to make them happen. But I hope I will be excused from feeling no sympathy for the bosses who find themselves having to pay up to get workers who haven’t been deported, and very little sympathy for the people who voted for these policies and find that everything they want to buy costs more.
“Welcome to the entirely foreseeable consequences of your actions as well.”
I had one of these accounts whose rate never went up as interest rates rose. I kept it longer than I should have, but I eventually switched banks. (I wasn’t going to switch to their higher-rate “Performance Savings,” because screw that. They can pay a market rate, or they can lose my business.)
[Capital One] operated two separate, nearly identically named account options — 360 Savings and 360 Performance Savings — and forbade its employees to volunteer information about or marketing… the higher-paying one, to existing customers.
Source: NYT
Zone-2 cardio has been having its moment. That comes from a lot of sources, but unfortunately a big one is Peter Attia. I say “unfortunately,” because Attia seems to have a weird, compulsive sense that zone-2 cardio work needs to be, I don’t know, pure in some way, rather than just being enough to promote good metabolic health.
Attia suggests that you do your zone-2 work on a treadmill, stationary bike, or rowing machine, so you can be in control of your effort level at all times. Then you can just get into zone 2 and stay there for 45 minutes.
I think this is crazy, and not just because 45 minutes of steady-state activity on a treadmill or stationary bike would be excruciatingly boring.
I do my zone-2 cardio with a mixture of walking my dog, running and occasional hikes. Walking the dog isn’t perfect, because the dog keeps stopping to get in her sniffies, and no doubt my heart rate drops out of zone 2. Running isn’t great, because my heart rate probably spends a lot of time in zone 3 or zone 4. A lot of it is zone-2—at least, I can talk while I run, which is one of the tests for zone-2. (I run very slowly.) The hikes are probably perfect zone-2 cardio, but are a big time commitment in a single day.
Attia suggests that you optimize your cardio workouts by getting 3 hours a week of zone-2 cardio, which can optionally be divided into 4 45-minute workouts. And I’m sure that’s fine. But I suspect that getting in a couple of runs a week, along with a good bit of dog walking, is going to check the zone-2 cardio box no problem.
My theory (and I am not an MD, nor even a PhD in exercise physiology, but still) is that this is fine. You don’t need to get 45 minutes of pure zone-2 cardio to be metabolically healthy.
As I see it, the test for whether you’re getting enough zone-2 cardio is whether or not you can engage in a moderate level of exercise for an extended period—a 3-hour hike, let’s say. If you’re metabolically healthy you can go on and on at a moderate pace, because you’re doing it almost entirely aerobically.
If you can do that, you’re getting enough zone-2 cardio, regardless of whether your sessions are 45 minutes long, and regardless of whether they add up to 3 hours a week. If you’re not metabolically healthy, even going at a moderate pace is going to push you into anaerobic metabolism, which will quickly become impossible to maintain.
It probably is true that you need to get in 3 hours a week if you’re going to be able to go on long, long hikes. But the idea that they need to be pure zone-2 sessions, rather than mixed sessions at all different levels of intensity, is just crazy.
For the first time ever, actually took the time to properly caramelize the onions, meaning that this batch of French onion soup was a real success.
About a decade ago, thanks especially to finding the work of Katy Bowman, but also from taking an interest in parkour and similar disciplines, I came to realize that movement was a better model for healthy activity than exercise.
Then came the pandemic.
For a lot of reasons—in particular, the loss of the opportunity for moving with a community—I found that returning to exercise suited me better, especially in the early days of the pandemic. (Follow that link for a pretty good post about where training falls on the movement vs. exercise spectrum.)
Over the past year I realized that it’s been five years now that I’ve prioritized exercise over movement, despite the fact that I still think that movement is the better choice. But when I started thinking that I should start trying to emphasize movement more again, I realized I already have been.
The biggest way that movement has snuck back into my practice is HEMA (aka sword fighting). There is some exercise involved in training for sword fighting, and it is certainly not a complete healthy movement practice all on its own, but it is moving, for a purpose, with a community—things I had been lacking for years.
The next biggest has been walking. In particular, dog walking. It’s not that walking has snuck back into my practice. I have always been a walker, and all that getting a dog changed was that now I walk every single day, instead of merely almost every day. (Even during bad weather, I average at least 12,000 steps per day. When the weather is nice, I top 15,000.) What having a dog changes is that now the walking is not exercise. It’s movement, because I’m doing it for a purpose that has nothing to do with “getting some exercise,” and rather is about making sure my dog is getting what she needs.
I still do some exercise. In particular, I’ve paid up for four workout programs by Mark Wildman: His two club programs two-handed and one-handed, his slamball program, and his “actual action hero” ab program. I skipped getting a kettlebell program (I’ve been doing kettlebells long enough that I feel like I know how to integrate them into a fitness routine, plus my sore elbow seems to be aggravated more by kettlebell moves than by club or slamball moves.)
I’m really pleased with the two-handed club program, which adds to the basic swinging moves a set of lunge moves, a set of squat moves, and a set of ab moves (that work toward a get-up).
The one-handed club program is also good, but much more technical and specific. It’s purpose, I guess, is to improve your alignment and structure, which is cool (and which I expect will be useful for sword fighting), but it doesn’t look like it’s going to do a lot for overall fitness.
The ab program is interesting. Mark Wildman wrote it for his friends who are stunt people, who needed a program that could be done in a very small space (basically a yoga mat on the floor of a trailer, which is what stunt people live in on-set), that focused not on making your abs look good (although it definitely will) but rather on building the muscle, strength, and control to do the sorts of moves that stunt people need to do. It’s designed to be done in just a few minutes every day at the end of your usual workout. It has 50 moves, and it gives you a different combination of them every day for up to a year (assuming you can work up to doing continuous ab work for 14 minutes a day, five days a week.
So, I do continue to exercise, because it seems useful, and it suits me, but I’m going to resume trying to prioritize movement going forward.
I lived in Los Angeles briefly in 1986. While I lived there, my dad sent me this book:
It talked about landscaping to minimize fire, flood, and mudslide risk, but my key takeaway was, “Only a moron would live in Southern California,” and I moved away before the end of the year.
It was a government publication, so the PDF is available: https://www.fs.usda.gov/psw/publications/documents/psw_gtr067/psw_gtr067.pdf