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Another slow-ish day on the update front, because I didn't go out anywhere yesterday. I've been a bit infected a bit with Shobhit's somewhat recently acquired obsession with tracking steps on the Health app on his iPhone, which has prompted me to do the same—and has made me much more inclined to walk all the way home from work instead of taking trains (Monorail + Light Rail), as walking the whole way is the only way I ever get close to meeting the goal of daily 10,000 steps.
The app says I still only made it to 8,260 steps yesterday. Disappointing! But, I think I know why: I ran late getting out to work in the morning, and wound up only walking to the Capitol Hill Light Rail station, which is only about half a mile. I then transferred to a bus downtown so I could get to work by 7:30, and luckily a bus was coming soon enough to meet that goal. But, it also meant I did not walk the last mile to work from downtown like I usually do. When I do that,
and I walk all the way home after work, I tend to get very close to or meet the 10,000 step goal. I did walk the mile from downtown to work this morning, though, and plan to walk home from work, so hopefully I actually reach the 10,000 step goal today.
...
. . . Okay. I just spent an inordinate amount of time on this: I took screenshots of the previous three weeks' worth of daily steps as indicated by my Heath app:
February 19-25, during which Shobhit and I flew to both Brisbane and to Sydney;
February 26 - March 4, during which Shobhit and I flew to Adelaide; went with Uncle David and Mary Ann to Kangaroo Island; and then flew back to Sydney again; and
March 5-11, during which Shobhit and I flew back home to Seattle from Sydney, and four of the days that week cover days last week after getting back home.
This took a bit more time and effort than anticipated, as when I first took the three weeks' worth of screenshots, all the days with the highest step counts were a day off, which took me a second to understand: most waking hours in Seattle, it's actually the next calendar date in Australia, but my app was calculating these step counts by date in the Pacific Standard Time zone. I then had to delete those screenshots, and re-do them after manually changing the time zones in my iPhone to Brisbane for the first screenshot; Adelaide for the second; and actually both Sydney
and Seattle for the third. In the case of the third, I took two separate screenshots, one for Sydney and one for Seattle, so that Sunday and Monday reflected step counts for days in Sydney, and Tuesday through Saturday reflected step counts locally back here in Seattle. Tuesday last week, as Shobhit and I experience it, actually stretched over some 31 hours, having taken a 13.5-hour flight eastward over seven time zones. Time zones to the east are later in the day, but we also crossed the International Date Line, and I remain incapable of parsing the math as to how that resulted in us leaving Sydney Airport at 11:20 a.m. local time on Tuesday, and then landing at LAX at 7 a.m. local time . . . on Tuesday.
In any case, I just wanted a permanent, visual representation of the walking Shobhit and I did on this vacation, with 11 of the 17 days of that vacation exceeding 10,000 steps; 9 of them exceeding 15,000 steps; 6 of them exceeding 20,000 steps; and on 2 days exceeding 25,000 steps—one of those truly barely falling short of 30,000. We did a
lot of walking and were pretty proud of ourselves.
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— पांच हजार तीन सौ चौहत्तर —
Anyway! So I walked home from work yesterday. Shobhit was attending a virtual training for aspirant political candidates on his laptop when I got in, a pizza mostly ready to be put in the oven—I just added some more grated cheese, and some veggie pepperoni to my side of the pizza.
Beyond that, I just watched a good amount of TV on my own, stuff Shobhit isn't interested in: the Marlon Wayans comedy special
God Loves Me, which frankly wasn't as good as I wanted it to be; and the season 3 premiere of
The Mandalorian on Disney+, which I am three weeks behind on. I actually forgot that there had been a season 3, and started watching the season 2 premiere by mistake, finding myself thinking,
Huh. They're having Timothy Olyphant on again? Nope, I was accidentally re-watching an old episode, which I got about a third of the way through before I realized it. Then I actually did watch the season 3 premiere, which I found delightful in spite of seeing some of the seams in terms of the CGI effects.
I also spent a fair amount of time last night tagging photos from the Australia trip. I tagged Shobhit in about 159 of them; tagged myself in something like 64. I tagged Uncle David in 25; Mary Ann in 26, something like that. Fewer photos of both those two than I had gotten in 2020, but that makes sense since we did not stay with them at their house this time. I tagged several locations.
I'm actually very close to done with most of the tagging now. For the most part all that's left are specific skyscrapers in the four major cities we visited (Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney, Adelaide) whose official names I still want to tag them with. That will be part of the final, long step in this tagging process: I am now going through every photo one by one in the main photo feed on my Flickr account, and tagging anything I happen to see that still needs to be tagged. A lot of them need nothing more at this point, so I am already past the first day of the trip. Just roughly 14 days' worth of photos more to tab through.
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I just finished FaceTime "lunch" with Karen—our first in five and a half weeks, not since Monday February 6, both because of the Australia trip and the need to cancel another one in the intervening time, if I remember right because of her own work and travel schedule.
I put "lunch" in quotes because I am still skipping lunches in an effort to lose weight, which is only partially successful this week: I still had two small sample slices of pizza at work yesterday, plus a couple of small slices of pie that were on offer due to it being 3/14, or "Pi Day," for which we do pie sales annually. Today, my "lunch" was just a 120-calorie 2pk of "protein cookies" that I keep eating to tide me over at noon every day.
Anyway. I expected Karen and I would talk a lot about my Australia trip, and of course we did. We also spoke a lot about her and Dave having had covid, which I completely forgot about. She noted that we had texted about it, but I just forgot about that because of the tons of shit in my memory bank from the intervening time: I had actually texted her
a photo on February 24, of "Erskine St" in Sydney, because Dave's last name is Erskine. Karen had responded,
Dave will be thrilled. We are looking for entertainment as we go on Day 3 of Covid and 3 more until the meds are over. I responded,
You have covid?? Oh no, and she replied,
Yup. Finally caught us. I was really sorry to hear that, but of course soon after totally let it slip from my mind and I focused on all the vacationing at hand.
In any case, her and Dave's experience dominated maybe the first twenty minutes of our hour of chatting, including Dave starting to feel unwell on the plane ride back from visiting Karen's parents in Massachusetts. (I didn't ask if they wore masks on the plane. I should have asked, maybe. I'm going to guess they didn't.) He tested in the middle of that night and woke Karen up with his positive result at something like 2:00 in the morning, waving his positive result in front of her face until she put on her glasses. She spent the next day in a panicked frenzy of getting as much work done from home as she could, with the expectation that she would test positive soon after, and by the next day she did. She didn't really work at all for the next week, and still stayed home for the week after that as well.
This was their first time actually getting infected with it. I feel like I should start knocking wood, what with how many times I've had exposures and still don't get it again. I'm still fairly convinced my total four covid vaccine shots plus having had it before continue to keep me with a robust immune response. My understanding is that we'll be getting annual boosters going forward, but I probably won't qualify for another one until around September I'm guessing, so who knows where my body's immunity will be, or stay, between now and then.
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[posted 1:09 pm]
