Having put up with the state of my house for over a year now, and been in a state of constantly trying to go about sorting it in a rational, organised fashion, tonight I suddenly took a left turn at the washing up and cleared the top of the fridge. bits and bobs have been accumulating there for about 2 years: kitchen scales, party stuff, empty boxes - in short, crap. After clearing it off and cleaning it, it looked a bit stark. It didn’t look like a good place to put a pot plant so I thought I’d have a quick search of the web for people’s kitchens and see what people put on top of their fridges. The results are:
- Nothing
- a cat
- crap
I think I’ll go for (1) for now.
4694 steps
I’m back in Engerlernd now! It’s great to be back, Kate’s not forgotten me. She’d made choccy cupcakes that each had a letter on top. If you suitably arranged them they said
M E C H E W L E M O O
I’m not sure what she meant by that. I’m a bit worried for her mental health.
Steps: between 3219 and 12219, on account of putting the pedometer on my belt clip whilst at salsa.
OK OK sorry the comments are not appearing. I’ll fix ‘em soon.
Step stats: 11587, over two days, three airports, a train ride a walk home and a shopping trip.
Today I’m feeling surprisingly good, though at any given time one or other eye seems to require consciously focussing.
[EDIT]Righto, fixerated. Both problems are due to wordpress being written in a slightly naughty way. They had their reasons to do it that way. I’m going to head over to wordpress and try to convince them those reasons weren’t very good ones.
It looks like my blog might actually be working… w00t!
Everyone’s comments are currently being held hostage by haloscan, who want me to give them $12 for the ability to stop using them.
If I do get the comments, I have the horrid feeling I’ll have to manually connect them back up to the posts they pertain to.
Somebody tell me this isn’t so!
Somebody tell me TRUTHFULLY this isn’t so!
Steps: 4018 and not expecting to do much more this evening as I’m trying to get ahead, to UK time.
Going through a lumpy period with my new blog. You won’t know this of course cos it’s not live yet. But I continue to faithully post, if only to log step stats. Which today are 2917. Uh-oh. Looks like I’m going for a walk tonight before I get to play on the internet.
Addendum: I went shopping, which took the count to about 6500.
Then dancing, which took the count to 7800. Now that was with the pedometer on my belt so the real figure is 2000-9000 more than that.
When I complained about blogger’s lack of workingness, Simong told me that it was easy to convert from blogger to wordpress. He even knew some people who’d done it. I was skeptical, as due to Dealing With Stuff I currently measure things on an effort scale of
none → cursory → too much
So I gave it a go. After 15 minutes fighting mySQL’s stupid* privilege system, I did the 5 minute install in about 1 minute 30 seconds, and now have a blog!
Unfortunately it’s on the wrong host… but there we go…
And now I have to try to migrate my blogger blog to it, but… wow! It really seems to work!
* really.
Tonight I went out for food to some italian place. I had calamari and canneloni. The calamari portion was bigger than my head. I ate about 1/3 of it. Then the canneloni came with soup and salad, both mercifully small. Then I ate half the canelloni and got them to put the rest in a box for later, american style. Yay! Getting the hang of this. Step stats: 7564, largely owing to having parked 6 blocks away from the restaurant.
Having recently watched ’supersize me’ I thought I’d at least start monitoring my toxin intake and exercise level so today I bought a Micro Pedometer. In the store there was a choice of three pedometers, all with exactly the same bullet points on the back, and at $16, $22 and $27. The $27 model was all bells and whistles and looked a little cumbersome, so it was between the other two. They could not be differentiated by the blurb on their boxes so I bought the cheaper. I then drove for probably over an hour looking for where my day’s hike was supposed to be starting from, so time was pressing on by the time I got to try out my new acquisition. I carefully calibrated it with wild guesses at my step length and my weight and thought, at least it’ll give me a step count, which is a good relative measure of day-on-day activity. So I clipped it on my belt and walked 20 paces. A quick check: yep, it had registered at least 5 of them… hmmm…
Well, on a rocky uphill it registered 60 out of 200 steps, and on a smooth descent, 15 out of 100. So in other words, just go for a walk, then at the end multiply the pedometer reading by, oo somewhere between 3 and 8, and you’ll have the distance you walked. Great. Fortunately, I found clipping it to my shoe gave a far more favourable reading, being within 10% of actual number of paces in a few checks I made. This was a little bizarre, as I’d expect my left foot to experience roughly half as many steps as my belt might. Ho hum.
So in answer to the rhetorical question I asked myself in the shop, THAT’s possibly the difference between a $16 pedometer and a $22 pedometer.
I probably won’t even try to get my money back as I bought it out of town and it was in one of those cunning packs that you have to all but destroy to get it open. What’s the bets the shop return policy is only in resaleable quality…
Addendum: Today’s step count was 5261. I was supposed to walk 3.2 miles on this hike, but having spent Saturday in bed with some kind of delerious cold-sweat fever thing, my legs started going like new-born bambi about 2/3 of the way up the mountain, so I turned back and wibbled back to the car.