[Dec 9,11,14,16,18,21,28,30: 3.2 miles on Watson Rd. Dec 23,25: lake loop 3.45 miles in Loveland, CO]
I’m keeping up OK with my running but have been dropping the ball getting the blog posts done.
December is coming to a close, and along with it the year 2024.
We had a nice trip out to Colorado for Christmas. There was some scrambling on the way back when our flight out of Denver was cancelled. But we were able to do a quick switch to a United flight to Memphis and drove to Jackson to pick up the car and continued on home. The next day (12/27) I went to Jackson again and picked up our checked baggage.
The month started out with good weather, but we had some tornado/storm weather come through over the last weekend.
And now here it is the 31st, New Year’s Eve.
Today I’m going in for a colonoscopy, my 2nd. I’m all prepped up. I haven’t eaten any solid food for a day and a half. One more round of the flush-out sauce and off to the clinic I go. I wouldn’t mention that here except that I wanted to book-end the posting from Feb 2015 when I had the last one.
This is at the same place that does the endoscopy (in from the upper end) and I’ve had that twice recently, so I’m starting to get used to it.
I’ve been off from work since the 20th; back to work this Thursday Jan 2nd.
I could get used to not working. Problem is that when I’m not working I am usually spending more money 🙂
I have been making morning YouTube videos almost every day, as I described before. But I think I may be running out of steam. I was sitting in the Walgreens yesterday waiting for a pharmacy refill and had the distinct thought that maybe I should stop. It’s been fun. But I’m not really sure I’m adding any value for myself or for others. We will see.
An interesting project popped up earlier this month. Ray Ray the radio station guy called me up. He had an antenna that needed to be tuned up for the new LPFM station in Maben, MS. We tinkered with it a little bit and I got them to leave it with me. I was able to get it tuned up nicely and the young man doing the project stopped by on Saturday the 21st and picked it up.
That was the first time I had fired up my vector network analyzer since we moved back from Iowa to Mississippi.
My spectrum analyzer was wounded in the move and needs some serious help. I need to dig in and see how bad it is. They make some pretty cheap SAs these days that use a laptop for the signal display and maybe it would be cheaper to just buy a new one.
I really enjoyed doing a radio-related project. I’ve been missing that.
Anyway, I got his antenna tuned up to be resonant on 95.5 MHz (the same as our little station here, but they are far enough away that we won’t interfere with each other.) I took a picture of the final readings:
Except for part of last week while we were travelling, I have been doing some work with my free weights. I usually do bench press and bicep curls. Once a week or so I will do some squats, those take longer to recover from. I feel like it is helping, that I am standing up a bit straighter. Also, I can get the groceries in from the car with fewer trips, so that is worth the effort.
I’m trying not to overdo. My dumbbell curls with 15? lbs are pretty smooth. For bench press I do a few with the 45 lb bar alone, then put a 25 on each end and do 5-ish with 95 lb. Squats I am using the bar alone.
The downside is that I gained about 10 lbs, I’m hoping it is the good kind and not the donuts and ice-cream kind.
I have it figured out that I can do the weights on the same day I do my morning jog. That way I can recover for a rest day. If I try squats on the off days then the jog the following day is a sorry mess. Usually it is M-W-Sat.