[recent runs: Saturday 1/18: 6.25 in Starkville; 1/20, 22, 25, 27, 29: 3.2 from home]
I visited my GP last week and caught her up on what I had done since the last visit in the fall of 2023. I went back a couple of days later for a blood draw. Later they called and said I need to start taking a thyroid supplement. So now I’m officially on two pills each day. Last year I started taking something for acid reflux. I guess so far these are both pretty innocuous. But I was kind of proud of being able to say I was not on any medication. So it goes.
Dr David Boylan passed away last week at age 102. He was the dean of the engineering college when I was at Iowa State. And he attended the church I went to in Ames. My college roommate ended up marrying his youngest daughter, where I was the best man (if I remember correctly. He was the best man at my wedding also.) I sent him (Dr. Boylan) a birthday card a couple of years ago wishing him a happy 1.00×103 (that’s kind of an engineering joke.) I’m told he enjoyed it.
I’m back to counting calories. I was getting up over 200 lbs again and that must stop. So today was day 3 and it is going ok.
Also I’ve been using the free weights on the same days that I run, that has been going well. I do arms and abs and sometimes squats. I have the safety bars set up so I can get under the bar and do bench press and they would keep me from getting squished if I dropped it. I don’t load it up a lot. I’m trying not to get too far out ahead of myself and mess up my joints.
I’ve been thinking about putting a solar battery charger into the shed, maybe put in some low voltage lighting. I have a small solar panel and a charge controller which are left over from other projects.
The shed is on the side of the house where the breaker panel is (on the inside), so in theory I could trench and run a circuit out there. But the house wall is brick and the shed is configured to be “portable” so I’m just thinking about it.
Another project is in the works though. I had replaced the capacitors in a piece of tube audio gear I picked up with that batch of stuff from over near Tuscaloosa a couple of years ago. I sold that recently on Ebay and I plan to use the proceeds to repair my fancy HP spectrum analyzer that was damaged by the movers when we moved back from Iowa three years ago. The thing that broke was the CRT. The best repair is to replace the CRT with an LCD. There’s a guy selling a kit for that. Or I could just get another display section off of Ebay and replace my whole display section. Or I could buy a different spectrum analyzer altogether. I’m still at deer-in-the-headlights stage on this project.
I have not made any further progress on the WWV project. I need to at least get some data during the winter in case the signal is too low to get it live in the summer. That way I could continue the software work if I want too.