The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Lots and lots of steps

Yesterday I did, in fact, get a butt-load of steps—and so did Parker. He and I walked over 16 km together, bringing my totals to 26,144 steps and 21.6 km overall. That's only my 5th 25k day (out of the 584 since I got a Fitbit), the last one being on March 8th.

 

Busy weekend

With two performances and two rehearsals over the weekend, I didn't have any time to post. I also didn't have as much time as I wanted to walk, though I did manage 20,249 steps for the weekend. (That was a little disappointing, especially because yesterday's weather was perfect for being outside.)

Meanwhile, the chorus have finally put up videos of our April fundraiser. So, yeah, we did this:

I'll leave finding videos of me holding a puppet as an exercise for the reader.

June to March in 12 hours

The Tribune has a graphic up demonstrating how Chicago temperatures dropped 20°C in one day. We went from a high temperature of 28°C at 4pm Monday down to a morning low of 7°C by 7pm Tuesday.

I should mention that I had several windows open Monday night, and closed them around 4am. That helped a little, but it would have helped more had I turned the heat on.

Despite the colder weather, through yesterday I've had six consecutive days of 15,000+ steps, including two of better than 20,000. Today looks promising as well. Fitbit also has a new feature that awards a pip for each clock hour in which you get 250 or more steps, the idea being to get you off your ass. I've got my app set to count from 8am to 9pm. Since Friday, I've had 13 of 13 hours four of five possible days—and today looks pretty likely as well. (The trick is to take Parker for a walk at 5 minutes before the hour, which gets me two pips in 10 minutes.

Decent weekend so far

Today's weather was finally spring-like, meaning twenty degrees warmer away from the lake than near it. But Parker still got over an hour of walkies, I've gotten (so far) about 18,000 steps, and all the windows in my house are open for the first time in about a month.

Also, I made a decent showing yesterday at a trivia tournament (tied for first place, but lost the tiebreaker), and today at a Euchre tournament (upper half of the pack, 7-2-1 overall record).

That is all. Time to feed the dog, and maybe walk another couple thousand steps.

Fitbit reports the damage

Scroll down and you'll see that I did not achieve my goal of 25,000 steps on Saturday because (most likely) I ate contaminated kefta kebab on Friday night.

My Fitbit did provide some interesting data, however, that underscores how disappointing the trip turned out to be.

Sleep: I average 7 hours a night, generally. Friday night, more because I had absolutely no responsibilities than anything else, I slept in, getting 9:34 total. But then the sleep chart goes almost full-circle as the Fitbit recorded all my naps. Total sleep from Friday night to Saturday evening: 14:11. Total sleep in Bend: 20:41. (Given that I was only in Bend for a little over 40 hours, I slept through more than half of it.)

Steps: Instead of 25,000 on Saturday, I got 11,633. That includes the one-hour hike Saturday morning when the symptoms first hit me, and a shuffle to the nearest Walgreens to pick up some Gatorade. Do you know how much I hate Gatorade? Less than I hate serious dehydration, but only just.

Resting heart rate: My RHR usually hangs out around 63. Give me a good, painful illness, and that goes to hell: 65 on Friday, 68 on Saturday, and 70 yesterday, despite yesterday being spent mostly in transit.

Weight: Well, here's the silver lining. My body mass has remained frustratingly stable about 3 kg over where I want to be since mid-November. While I expected that to drop some as the weather got warmer, as it has every year, I didn't expect to drop all 3 kilos in one weekend. This may have something to do with me having no solid food from my bagel Saturday morning until I attempted (successfully!) some pretzels, saltines, and a hard-boiled egg yesterday afternoon. I also had a bit of success with a container of steamed white rice when I got to O'Hare. It turns out, water has no calories, and Gatorade has just over 200 calories per liter. So altogether, I had perhaps 1,000 calories in two days, at the same time my body was shedding every gram of food and water that got into my system from Friday night on.

Don't worry, I'm hydrating. I might gain a kilogram back in the next day or two. On the other hand, my appetite hasn't fully returned, so I might keep it off for a while.

Anyway, other than being pissed off about spending my one day in Bend asleep or on the pot (and not the pot one would ordinarily want to be on in Oregon), I seem mostly recovered. It's going to be a beautiful day in Chicago, so I plan to get another 20,000 steps today. And drink a lot of fluids.

Warm, but still a miss

Yesterday's temperature at O'Hare got up to 21°C, which we last hit on November 5th, and is the normal temperature for May 15th. It was quite a lovely day, in fact. Tom Skilling pointed out that this was the earliest 21°C day in 16 years, and was 3 weeks earlier than the average date of its first occurrence based on 145 years of data.

I tried, I really tried, to hit 30,000 steps, but...well:

Crap. I missed 30,000 by 225 steps, and missed my record by only 721:

2015 Apr 26 30,496
2016 Mar 8 29,775
2015 Jun 15 28,455
2015 May 2 26,054
2015 Sep 5 24,771

Note that on September 5thalso missed a goal by almost the same amount. Quite irritating. Still, yesterday's step count was fully 4.86 standard deviations above my mean daily count of 12,660, so it was a pretty good effort. (At this point today I'm already up to 9,534, so the week is looking pretty good.)

And Parker got over 90 minutes of walkies.

Back at the Remote Office

Man, I have missed this:

I had lunch with a friend here at the Duke today (and I walked, getting me to 15,000 before noon), so why not stay and write some documentation?

I've also decided on a new rule. I gave up beer for February because I think there's a correlation between me drinking beer and me staying consistently 3 kg over my target. Well, not much changed, and I missed beer, so my New Rule is that I can have one beer per 10,000 steps (or fraction thereof). And I think I'll aggregate this over the week.

Working from home on the warmest day in months

Yesterday's 17.2°C temperature at O'Hare was the warmest since it was 17.8°C on November 15th. It might not get warmer than that, but who cares, because it that's plenty warm for early March. 17.8°C is Chicago's normal temperature for April 29th; the normal for March 8th is 6.1°C.

That's the good news. The better news is that working from home means Parker is working napping from home as well. And we just got back from an 80-minute, 8.1-km walk, his longest in (no surprise) even more months.

Now the bad news. We were walking from the car dealership where they are figuring out how much I'm to pay them later this week. My car has a couple of "minor" symptoms including a damaged tire (thanks, Chicago!), but it's a 7-year-old BMW. So anything that would cost $100 to fix on a Corolla will cost me $200. Can't wait for the call...

I do have some work to do today—more on that this afternoon. But I'm already at 11,000 steps, with a goal of 30,000 for the day. I've only hit that number once, last April 26th. There's a lot of day ahead of me, and it's 9,000 steps back to the car dealership. Stay tuned.

Update, 11:26: The 11am temperature at O'Hare was 19°C, the highest reading since November 5th. If we hit 23°C we'll have the warmest day since October 21st.