Today I dug through a pile of very old jeans and found two pairs of 30–30 to put aside. The rest were mostly 32–30 and 33–30; I’ll be putting those in a clothing collection box the next time I go out.
I can wear the 30 inch waist again.
Really, I’ve been able to for months, but I’ve been cinching up my belt and tugging the 32’s up all day because I wanted to make sure I am really there, that the weight and the waist aren’t coming back.
I am really there.
I’m happy about that. It’s required years of cutting calories — no keto, Atkins, or anything like that — and exercise, but I’m there again, back where I was as a young man. If I had to attribute my success to only one thing, I’d give the award to retirement. No more work stress, no more hours of driving, no more fast food on the road, plenty of free time for exercise.
There are some wrinkles though, mostly on my face. I look older.
Sometimes a mirror or a reflection in a glass window will catch me by surprise and an involuntary “Whoah!” will leak out. When we do a FaceTime with our daughters I wonder who that old man on the couch beside my wife could be.
It’s me, but not the me I know.
And my wife doesn’t like it. As my waist has melted and my face has drawn in, she has regularly reminded me that “A little fat is good for you as you get older.” When that didn’t work, she ramped it up to “You look old!”
Well, hell, I am old. I’m a 1948 model and I have some rust. But here’s the thing: since losing the excess weight, I feel better. I’m more energetic, peppier, and I have more spring in my step. I’m a tad over 5–10 and 150 pounds, which is not overly skinny, at least by my standards. I’d give me slim, okay? And I like slim. It feels good to be slim again and step into my old 30–30's.
I’d rather look old and feel young than the other way around. Why wouldn’t I?
Losing weight isn’t easy. As I noted, retirement helped me avoid crap food, relieved stress, and gave more more time for exercise. I also used the Lose It app to track calories, though my use was perhaps a bit unorthodox.
I did not set a calorie goal. Lose It is never 100% accurate and the level of activity I do will always vary. So what I did (and still do) was weigh myself every morning. I learned from this that if I ate about 2200 calories a day, I’d neither lose nor again. Above 2600, I’d gain; 1800 or below caused a small loss.
I aimed for small losses.
If I lost too much, I ate more that day. I did not want to lose weight too quickly because I don’t think that’s healthy. I’d also let myself plateau for days and sometimes weeks to help my system “know” where I want to be. I think that’s important too. If I can get my body “set” at a weight, it tends to stay there without much attention.
Then I’d cut back a bit and drop a few tenths of a pound. That’s all I was looking for, just a minor drop repeated for a few days, then I’d let it plateau again. Rinse, repeat. Nothing rushed, nothing drastic, no hunger pains, no agony. Just a slow, steady trip down.
And here I am, happy as a slimmed down pig, if that’s a thing. I’m 30–30, old as at least some dirt, with a wrinkled neck and some deeper smile lines.
Apple Has Fixed More of My Gripes and One of Them is Really Funny They do pay attention to feedback Photo by OSPAN ALI on Unsplash As much as I am an Apple Fan boy, sheeple, sycophant, fool, or whatever else the Android guys would like to call me, I do have my gripes. Some of my gripes could be fixed by third party apps, some by third party hardware, but I prefer to stay foolishly trapped in the Apple ecosystem as much as I can. Anyway, a little bitching and moaning can be therapeutic, right? A couple of years back I put some of my complaints out into the world. I’m an Apple Fan, Except When I’m Not There goes my Special Sycophant Status In addition to that, I pleaded with Apple at their feedback page. I do that with anything Apple does that annoys me, whether I tell the world or not. You should too. Product Feedback We would love to hear your comments about any of our hardware and software products. Send us your thoughts. And, unbelievably, Apple has fixed, or will soon fix, quite
And Apple has been preparing this for a long time Apple recently announced a new “Business Essentials” product for small businesses. It’s available for free as a beta right now, but final pricing will be from $2.99 to $12.99 monthly per user. That pricing doesn’t include AppleCare support, which they say will be available later. So what is it? Basically, it’s an MDM (Mobile Device Management). Apple bought Fleetsmith, an MDM company, in 2020 and it seems that Fleetsmith software is the base of this offering. What’s an MDM? If you have used Screentime for yourself or a child, that is a limited form of MDM. Screentime inherited some of its features from the Parental Controls feature that Apple introduced in 2009, so Apple is no stranger to this technology. Both allow control of a device, limiting the software used, settings changes, and little more. A full MDM extends those features and provides central management. Apple and Business Apple is not unaccustomed to working with businesses,
Reconstructing My Paternal Grandfather Things our parents tell us that might not be true Anthony Lawrence (Pcunix) HISTORY Beardsley Lawrence Senior with his sister Marianna, family photo Note: I recently wanted to update this story, but couldn’t because apparently I had accidentally deleted it some time ago. Fortunately, I had copied the text elsewhere. Here it is again, with updates. References and citations are at the bottom of this story. Beardsley Lawrence Sr. was my paternal grandfather. I met him only once, when he was dying in a Boston Hospital. I was five years old or younger. I cannot remember much more than my father introducing us. I took his hand and he said something like “Good to meet you, young man.” Was that visit from a dying man’s wish to see his only grandson or simply something my father felt he should do on what may have been his last visit with his father? I do not know. My Aunt Ann, his daughter, told me that when her father was diagnosed with spinal cancer his
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