tech degration / planning
I thought I had done pretty well yesterday. I weighed myself this morning and, after weighing in at 152 lbs even yesterday, I shot right back up to 153.5.
WHAT. THE FUCK.
I blame Eric. He's the one who sent us home on Sunday with his artichoke dip on Sunday. (I didn't get any pictures of this batch, but here's a photo of when we were introduced to it on Christmas 2015.) I actually have had very little of it since getting back home -- until last night. Shobhit made a potato paneer dish with naan for dinner, but while we waited for it to finish cooking, we shared the last sleeve of Ritz Crackers with about a quarter of the pan of artichoke dip.
It was probably that what killed me. Okay, and I'll admit, I did have a sample sandwich cookie at work yesterday. All right! I had two. But, that alone likely would not have stopped me from being down this morning -- I had no ice cream at home last night, after all, and I had the previous night, and my weight was still down the next morning. I realize fluctuations day by day are normal, but it's definitely not normal for my fluctuations to be this great. It's just annoying, is all. I was rather enjoying three days in a row of weight loss, and to suddenly jump up like that kind of sucked. The key, really, is to stop snacking at work at all, and less even at home. When I lost 30 lbs in a matter of months in 2010, it was entirely because I did just that: no between-meal snacking at all, plus small portions for all meals. It's that simple.
A lot more easily done when living alone, of course. And a bit part of the challenge for me is that Shobhit can pride himself on eating either nothing or next to nothing all day at work, thereby justifying his larger portions at dinner time -- when I am often home after grazing at work all day. So I'm surrounded by excesses of food pretty much every waking moment. Shobhit doesn't work for a grocery company and I do. Self-restraint is a lot easier for him when he's in a place all day that has no free access to large quantities food.
Lunch with Karen at Six-Seven Restaurant at the Edgewater Hotel today! Ivan, who was in Bellingham yesterday to take care of things for his imminent move to Bellingham (where, after three months getting nowhere finding work in Vancouver -- so much for that plan, I guess, he's moving both to work yet again as a nurse and to take a yearlong school program for hypnotherapy), asked if his weekend visit could start today so he wouldn't have to take two trips. He'll arrive late this evening and leave Sunday morning. Shobhit leaves for his Triangle Recreation Camp gay camping weekend tomorrow right after work, so I'll see him tomorrow morning for the last time until Sunday. I have Happy Hour with Laney tomorrow evening; Space Needle with Ivan Saturday evening and possible meetup with Danielle and her friend Jeanna (who is herself visiting from out of town) during that same afternoon; the August "store to farm" bike ride from the Redmond PCC Sunday morning.
I've got a lot of shit going on. And that's not to mention the next weekend, when I visit Ivan in Vancouver, my last chance to do so! Shobhit was befuddled by my desire to do this, especially when Ivan apparently has no room for me to stay with him ("Trust me you don’t want to stay in this hellhole"), seeming to assume it would be impossible for me to have fun there without him. Uh . . . trust me, I'll do fine.
Anyway, I had a lovely lunch with Karen as always. We shared the gyro sandwich -- I didn't even try for the truffle macaroni and cheese because that's way too heavy after all the shit I ate last weekend made me gain too much weight. There was a long train running down the track on my way over but as always I was able to use the Olympic Sculpture Park overpass to bypass it, even on my bike. Karen did get stuck behind the train but I got us a table and she made it soon enough. Apparently she and her family are leaving for a couple-week vacation to Scotland tomorrow. She says it's supposed to rain the entire time they're there.
I had kind of hoped Shobhit and I could watch a movie last night, but that never happened. We had errands to run, and Shobhit had way too many news program clips to watch online about Tuesday's primary election. He's always all over that shit, and things are looking pretty good for us, it seems. A "blue wave" this November is kind of our only hope, and even then it's only to put greater restraint on our unhinged president for the next two fucking years. (Many people, including Shobhit, love to talk about the likelihood that President Fuckwit will be re-elected.) This is a guy whose administration is easing up restrictions on fucking asbestos. It never stops boggling my mind how many people -- conservative and liberal alike -- had such hatred for Hillary Clinton that they honestly thought this guy would be better.
Anyway! I rode my bike home. Walked my dry cleaning over to get dropped off. Shobhit had an earlier shift yesterday but still got home after me because he went to get an oil change and get gas. I investigated why the TiVo would not show live television, only to discover it now wouldn't power on at all. No matter what I did, I could not turn it on. The lights would flash for a second and then it would die again. I just accepted this machine had finally died. Do you know how long I had that thing? 11 years! I never once replaced my original box, either, for one key reason: I purchased lifetime service, which saved me a shit ton of money over paying for the service monthly, but it applied only to the box I had at the time. I got many emails over the years attempting to sell me a new box, which I never upgraded to because I'd have the added expense of paying again for service.
Well, now the box is dead. And degrading, quite literally: it's been sitting on the shelf in our living room entertainment center for so long that when I lifted it up to check it out, four corner plastic pads it sat on broke apart, literally crumbling and falling to the carpet below. It was like I was Indiana Jones checking out an ancient artifact.
I feel no compulsion to get a new TiVo box now either. It served me well for the better part of a decade, but in that time the world changed in ways that made even TiVo -- which revolutionized the way people were watching TV in the mid-2000s -- is a bit dated now. I've had the Apple TV box for nearly four years now (I got it in November 2014), and for a little while, it worked well in tandem with TiVo. But in the past year or so, network apps via Apple TV have allowed me to watch 99% of what I wanted to via just the Internet connection. Literally the only thing I still used TiVo to watch this year has been The Big Bang Theory, because CBS is the only network being stingy about offering anything through Hulu, and that show has declined a great deal in quality in recent seasons anyway. I truly have no pressing need for the TiVo at all anymore.
Now the question is: do we even need the cable subscription at all? TiVo was the only thing being used to access it; therefore, again, The Big Bang Theory has been the only thing we've used it for. All other regular network shows we still watch -- Modern Family, for example -- are easily accessible through network apps on Hulu. We're now debating whether to quit Comcast altogether and finally make the switch to Cascadelink. Other people in our building have sung its praises.
Now there's also the question of the TV itself -- a Samsung flat screen I purchased in . . . May 2010. Holy shit, even that is eight years old. Its 27 inches actually seemed large at the time; anything bigger would not have fit in the TV box portion of our small-ish entertainment center. Shobhit has talked relatively recently about finally updating to a bigger one, and perhaps we should. I paid $419 for that TV in 2010, and for that price today I could get one as large as 49".
I tried to plug the cable directly into the TV and get cable channels for watching live TV that way, and have yet to figure out how to make it work. I don't know if it's because the TV is so old now or I'm inept or both -- only that any tutorials I can find online clearly assume more recent models are being used. Probably this poses a choice for us to make: keep the cable subscription and get a new TV; or chuck the cable subscription and keep the TV. Keeping both the cable subscription and this TV clearly makes no sense.
I did just think of something, though. I checked my file folder in my filing cabinet for the TV owner's manual, and it was not in there. I just remembered I have a few things like that in the small cupboard under the TV itself, and I should look there this evening. I bet it's there, and has instructions on how to set up the cable connection. If there's any way to get it going without having to get a cable box, perhaps we'll hold off on canceling it. Otherwise, I think it's curtains for Comcast Cable. I pay enough in monthly fees for Netflix, Hulu and Amazon as it is. (I'd re-sign for HBO Go on its own and that would add another cost, but we'd still be pay less for that than having it as part of a Comcast cable lineup.)
[posted 1:27 pm]