Andrew Huey | pointlessly blogging since 2001
I just noticed my 10 year post in the “on this day” sidebar. And my first post. So it looks like this blog is fifteen years old today! Weird.
I’m not really in a “reminisce about the last five years” mood right now, so I’ll just leave this here as a marker. I wonder if I’ll still be maintaining this blog in five years, at the twenty-year mark?
I bought a new mattress from Macy’s last week, and it was delivered today. My old mattress was about ten years old, so it was time for a new one. And my back has been hurting more than usual lately, so I’m hoping this will help.
After looking at some fancy new internet mattresses, I decided to stick with a traditional mattress from a plain old “bricks and mortar” retailer. I went with a pretty middle-of-the-road mattress; nothing too crazy. I did a fairly ridiculous amount of internet research before finally giving up and just buying something that Macy’s had on sale for Memorial Day, and that wasn’t too expensive, and that felt right when I tried it out.
I also had to go to the dentist this morning to get a filling replaced. (I was originally supposed to get that done last week, but he had an equipment malfunction, so we had to reschedule it.)
So I’ve got my new mattress, a fixed-up tooth, and my laundry is all done. And the novocaine is wearing off now. So I’m going to amuse myself with comic books for a while, then maybe think about doing something else useful, like grocery shopping.
I usually wind up writing a blog post on Memorial Day, even if it’s just a short one, since Memorial Day is kind of an enforced holiday for me. The Tour of Somerville route completely encircles my apartment building, so my choices on Memorial Day are limited. I can’t get in my car and go anywhere, so I generally choose to stay home and enjoy the race. (Though sometimes I’ll hop on a train and go into New York or something like that.) For a number of years, I was really into the race, and had a lot of fun with it. For the last few years, though, I’ve been somewhat jaded about it, opting to get out of Somerville more often than I used to.
I’m kind of enthusiastic about it again this year though. I wore my 2001 race t-shirt yesterday, and I’m wearing my 2004 t-shirt today. (I was looking to link the “2001” text to a blog post, but I only started blogging in June 2001, so I guess that t-shirt is older than this blog, which is really saying something.) I haven’t bought a race t-shirt in years, but I’m going to look for one today. I guess part of the reason I haven’t been buying them is that, in recent years, I would have needed an XXL. But I’m now safely back in the XL range, and could probably even fit into a regular L, assuming they haven’t switched to American Apparel shirts or some other weirdly-sized hipster brand.
They canceled the Memorial Day parade this morning, due to the rain, so it’s still really quiet out. But the race is still on, so things should start picking up in an hour or two. Meanwhile, I’m reading Matt Fraction’s Defenders run, which is fun (though I’m not sure I like his take on Doctor Strange).
After having, I think, a bit too much coffee on Friday and not sleeping well, I stuck with decaf over the weekend and slept pretty good on Saturday night and very good last night. I woke up at around 5:30 this morning, and feel pretty good about it. Here’s a relevant Diesel Sweeties comic. (My “night coffee” on Friday was supposed to be a decaf cappuccino, but I suspect they might have screwed up and given me a regular.)
I’m feeling kind of optimistic this morning, which is really unusual for a Monday morning. Maybe it was all the fresh air and exercise I got over the weekend. I should really get more of that.
Yesterday, I went down to Whiting to visit my friend Gloria and celebrate my birthday. Since it was a nice day out, and I got an early start, I decided to stop by the cemetery and visit my parent’s grave.
The cemetery was nice and quiet, and it was a good visit. They seem to have finished the construction that they were doing, so the main entrance is open again, which is good. (But the bad news is that they still don’t seem to have any restrooms open on the weekend.)
I had a good dinner with Gloria and a couple of other friends. But, during dessert, Gloria got a call to let her know that our friend Ken Butler had passed away. He had been having a lot of medical issues lately, and Gloria had told me earlier that he was under hospice care, so it wasn’t entirely unexpected, but he’d only recently been moved to hospice, so we assumed he’d have more time. (Coincidentally, his birthday was right after mine, and Gloria had been planning to visit him at the hospital for his birthday.)
Ken was a good friend to my parents, and to Gloria. He had done a number of odd jobs around the house for my parents, and was pretty handy with that stuff, which my Dad admired. (These were the kind of jobs that my Dad would have done himself, before his eyesight got too bad.) And he was a driver for Meals on Wheels when my parents were getting meals through that program.
In recent years, he’d had to stop driving, but he had an old bicycle that he’d ride around on. I’d see him at Gloria’s house often, when I was down there visiting. He’d come by almost every day for a game of dominoes with Gloria, and he was always joking around and making her laugh.
I last saw him only about a month ago, and he seemed to be in good spirits despite his medical issues. He’ll be missed.
Here are some photos of Patrick that I used to have in a gallery on my old Blogger site, but which got lost when I switched to WordPress. I thought I’d just re-upload them, and put them in a new post.
I honestly don’t remember if I scanned them in myself from prints, but that’s probably what I did. The original post was from 2004, so these predate all the ScanCafe scanning I did a few years back. And I don’t think I had a very good scanner in 2004. I should probably figure out where the originals are for these, and re-scan them.
(Note the awesome “Return of the Jedi” T-shirt he’s wearing in a few of these!)
Today is the 12th anniversary of my brother Patrick’s death. Here’s a photo from his birthday party, long ago. I’m not entirely sure which birthday it was. I notice that he (and a couple of other kids) seem to be drinking out of Star Wars glasses, so that’s a clue, but not much of one, since we were all probably drinking out of Star Wars glasses, on and off, from 1977-1985.
Oh, and if it’s not obvious, Pat is the one in the Roselle Park shirt, with the big smile on his face.
Today is the sixth anniversary of my Mom’s death. Here’s a nice photo of her, and someone with bunny ears. (Probably Patrick, though it might be me.)
The last couple of years, I’ve been writing year-in-review/goals posts on New Year’s Day, and I’m going to continue with that this year. For reference, here are links to the 2015 and 2014 posts.
Weight & Health
This category is pretty simple, so I’ll start here. I was at 200 pounds on New Year’s Day in 2014, and 165 on 1/1/2015. Today, I’m at 150. I had set a goal at 160, and got there, then everything past that just happened very gradually. I’ve been between 150 and 155 for the last few months, and I’m comfortable with that. So, for 2016, I’m just going to try and maintain my weight, within that range. Using the Lose It app has become enough of a habit now that it would seem weird not to log all my calories and weigh myself (almost) every day, so I’m going to keep doing that.
On the fitness front, I haven’t made much progress, though I’ve kept up with my habit of doing as much walking as I can. I haven’t started doing any other kind of exercise, and any thoughts I had about that were put aside when I had my hernia surgery a few months ago. I think I’ve healed up enough now that I could consider some new exercise ideas, and I might do something about that in 2016, though I’m not sure what.
My neck and back continue to bother me a bit, and I’m still not sure what, if anything, I’m going to do about it. I will likely buy a new mattress in 2016, which should help, since my current mattress is ten years old.
Speaking of mattresses, I’ve started using Sleep Cycle on my iPhone to track my sleep. I’m still not sure if it’s really that helpful, but it’s at least a little better than my old alarm clock, so I’m going to stick with it in 2016. I used to go to bed around 11pm most nights, but I’ve gotten into the habit of going to bed at 10pm lately. I get up at 6am, so that’s giving me eight hours in bed rather than seven, which is probably a bit healthier. And I’ve started setting my alarm on weekends also, so my time in bed is a bit more consistent now, from day to day. I still have trouble sleeping on some nights, and I’m not sure why. I know that afternoon coffee drinking definitely affects me, but I can have trouble sleeping even when I’m not drinking much coffee. So I’m going to keep thinking about this, and see what else I can do to improve my sleep.
Education / Programming
I didn’t do much in this area this year. I did learn a lot about SharePoint development, for a project at work that never really came to fruition. And I spent some time learning Ruby (and Ruby On Rails). I took Michael Uslan’s Rise of Superheroes course on EdX, but didn’t take any programming courses on EdX or Coursera. And I spent some more time on F#, starting a new book, Real World Functional Programming. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of weeks, but I want to pick it back up this month and get through it. Aside from that, I’m not really sure what I want to do in 2016. My day job is still going to be mostly Dynamics AX work, and I don’t have any consulting work coming up. So I’d like to continue with F#, and Ruby, and maybe more iOS development, but I don’t have any concrete projects that I’m working on or particularly interested in right now. So that’s something to think about.
Work
I’ve been at SHI since January 2013, so I’m just coming up on my three-year anniversary. SHI does performance reviews at year-end, so I just had mine recently, and it went well. I’m reasonably content with my day job, and I’ll likely stick with it through 2016. Since I’m only doing Dynamics AX work there, though, I should really try to get involved in some other projects, outside of work. I didn’t do any of that in 2015.
GTD / organization
I did pretty good on this front in 2015. I’ve kept up on my bills and paperwork, for the most part, and have finally switched over my Merrill statements to paperless. (I blogged about this last month.) I’m got things pretty well-organized in OneDrive now, and I’ve making effective use of my Evernote account. I had started consolidating all my personal notes into Evernote back in November 2014, and I’m pretty happy with the way that’s worked out, enough so that I recently paid for another year of Evernote Premium.
Comics and Books
I donated most of my comic book collection to Superheroes for Hospice early last year, and successfully avoided buying them all back. I have been on a bit of a tear with Comixology and Humble Bundle sales recently, but that’s all digital so none of that stuff is cluttering up the apartment the way 25 long boxes of comics did.
For reading, I’d set myself a goal of 50 books in the Goodreads reading challenge for 2015. I came in at 96, so that’s good, but many of those were comic book TPBs, so it’s not as impressive a number as it could be. In fact, I see that the last prose novel I finished was a Dresden Files paperback, in August. So I should probably start reading a new novel soon, just so I don’t forget how to read the darn things. I’ve done a fair bit of non-fiction reading this year too, long form (but not book-length), mostly New Yorker articles that I read either in the printed magazine or that I’d saved in Instapaper. (I kind of wish that Instapaper had a statistics page I could look at to see what I’ve read recently, but if they do, they’ve hidden it well.) And hey, this article on good news from 2015 looks like one I should save and read!
Life-logging, journaling, and blogging
I’m not sure if I’m using the right terms here, but I’ve definitely been doing more and more of this “quantified self” stuff over the last few years. And also more of the “qualitative” stuff via blogging and journaling. It looks like I wrote a little over 100 posts on this blog in 2015. That’s a pretty respectable number, and some of them took a bit of work and thought to put together. Overall, I think blogging has helped me work through problems, set goals, and keep track of them. (And I occasionally write a post that might actually be useful to someone else, though not as often as I’d like.)
Via my iPhone, I’m now tracking everything I eat, my weight, my sleep, and my daily step count, and I’m actually paying attention to all of those things. I’m not sure how much good it’s doing me, except in the weight loss area, where it has definitely made a huge difference over the last few years. So I’m going to keep doing all that in 2016.
In addition to this blog, I’ve also been keeping a five-year journal for the last nine years. (I’m just starting the last year on the second book.) It’s somewhat useful, but there’s not much room to write anything beyond a few lines, and of course it’s old-fashioned paper, so it’s not searchable. I’ll keep up with it this year, but I’m not sure if I’ll start a new one next year.
I bought Day One for iOS about a year ago, when it was on sale for a buck, but didn’t really start using it. I bought the Mac app last month, when it was on sale for $7, and I want to start using it this year, to supplement the stuff that I post publicly on this blog, and the stuff that I scribble in my five-year journal. If using it becomes a habit, I’ll probably drop the five-year journal in 2017. The guys from The Sweet Setup wrote an ebook on Day One that looks interesting. I may pick that up, and see if it gives me any good ideas.
Hardware and Software
I didn’t do too much with major hardware or software purchases in 2015. I didn’t buy a new desktop or laptop computer. I didn’t buy a new iPhone or iPad. I did buy a $35 Kindle Fire, but that’s a pretty minor purchase. My biggest purchase of the year would be the TiVo Bolt, which is working well for me. I replaced a hard drive cable in my MacBook and the speaker in my iPhone, so I could squeeze a bit more life out of those.
I think there’s a good chance I’ll buy an iPhone 6c in 2016, if such a thing is actually released. My iPhone 5s is working fine, except that the battery is clearly on its last legs, so I’m going to need to replace either the battery or the phone before 2016 is over.
I’m almost definitely going to buy a new desktop computer soon. My current machine was purchased in 2010, so it’s about time for a new one. I’d rather just upgrade some parts in it, but it’s old enough that it’s not going to be able to run Windows 10 without replacing the motherboard, and I don’t want to do that. (And I’m not even sure if I can, and don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to figure that out.)
For software, I’m going to keep up my Office 365 subscription. Even though I’m not doing much with Office itself, the subscription is worth it for the OneDrive space. And I’ll keep using a lot of the applications I’ve been using, like Evernote and 1Password.
Summary
Well, this has turned into a long post, much like last year’s one. I started writing this around 10am, and it’s now 11:45, so I should really wrap this up and start thinking about lunch. It’s nice to have nothing important to do on New Year’s Day. It’s been quiet outside on Main Street all morning, and pretty quiet here in my apartment building. I’d like to go out for a walk, but it’s a bit cold out there today. Maybe after lunch it’ll be warm enough for a quick walk around the block.
Looking at the “On This Day” sidebar on my blog, I see that I don’t normally write a blog post on Christmas day. But, well, I don’t have much to do today, and I woke up at 5:45am, so I might as well write one now and kill some time. So, Merry Christmas!
Due to circumstances beyond my control (as the saying goes), I’ve found myself on my own with no particular plans today. So this is, I think, going to be my first “free-form” Christmas, with no obligations or expectations.
It should be in the low 60s today, and cloudy (but hopefully not raining), for most of the day. So maybe I’ll go out for a walk or two. I’m thinking about hopping on a train into New York, but I’m not sure what I could do in NYC on Christmas day on my own, aside from just wandering around aimlessly.
I think maybe sitting around at home and watching old Doctor Who Christmas specials might be a good way to spend the day.
