It’s been a couple months since the last post here. So, in a futile effort to play catch up and to jump start yet another effort (in a countless string of them) to post here more regularly, I bring you bullet points!

• I have once again decided I could no longer in good conscience feed the Facebook beast. I let myself slip back into old habits after making my first such declaration earlier this year before getting reminded why I initially made the decision. Of course, now that I am staying away and making it stick (so far,) along comes Elon Musk and his personal brand of multifaceted toxicity and his Lex Luther-like goal of owning Twitter in its entirety.
• Text from a post I made on Twitter last week: “Of the possible futures avid 16-year-old SF fan me envisioned inhabiting after turning 50, he never imagined living in a toxic late-stage capitalistic state teetering on the edge of true dystopian authoritarianism pursued by a political party overtaken by Christian nationalism.”
• Self-assesment after turning 50 last month: the looming dystopian nightmare aside, I’m actually very happy with nearly every aspect of my personal life right now. As always, there are a couple areas of personal improvement I’m actively working on, but otherwise I think 16-year-old me would be thrilled to have had a sneak peak into the man he evolved into at this age. Embracing my inner weirdo and letting my freak/geek flag fly has only made me a happier person.
• A couple weeks after the mini-vacation, Sally and I made an overnight visit to Staunton, VA, quite possibly our favorite locale for such getaways. We didn’t post anything online during our trip (quite possibly a first for us, but also not surprising given my growing distaste for the array of social media sites currently at our disposal,) mostly because it was “uneventful.” That’s not a damning statement — we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly — but there was nothing noteworthy that hadn’t already happened multiple times during previous visits over the years. Sometimes, what you need when you get away from home is a different kind of familiarity and routine. Staunton is that for us.
• Clearly, I haven’t been making weekly accountability posts. In the past, this typically meant that I started putting back weight again. Not this time, however. I have now taken off all the weight I put on at the end of last year and proceeded to continue past where I was at the beginning of October. As of this morning, I’ve lost 35.2 lb since May 6 (16.8 since the start of this year.) I’m going to defer any commentary about this until I make my next standalone accountability post 11 days from now.
• More in another post later today, or tomorrow. (No, really, I swear it will happen!)

Weight Gained During End of 2021: +14.4 lb
Total Loss, May 2021 – Jan. 6, 2022: -18.4
Loss Since Jan. 6: -5.8

The effort to simply maintain my weight for the last three months of 2021 was an abject failure. I’m not going to perform a public autopsy — the only observation I’m sharing is during that period I didn’t regularly do any of the things that might have kept the gain from being so high.

On January 6, I successfully resumed all the tactics I use when I’m trying to get myself back down to a healthy weight (other than these posts.) It hasn’t been easy, however. It’s taken some serious willpower to force myself onto the treadmill on many mornings, as well as needing to literally stop myself when finding myself looking in the pantry for something to eat when I’m really not actually hungry. I know that at some point I’ll settle back properly into these routines and it won’t take anywhere near as much effort to do the right things. Hopefully, resuming these posts will help bring that about more quickly.

• It feels more and more like that I’m not transitioning from Facebook to Twitter so much as I’m simply going to post here more often. I’m trying to use Twitter in the way that the cool kids are dong it, but it’s not for me — which isn’t a reason to return using Facebook the way I used to. My resolve is only strengthened by the utter shittiness of the mobile web version and that fact that I’m simply never going to load the Facebook app back onto my phone.
• Over the weekend, I discovered that Drunk History UK was available on Paramount+ and the original British version of Ghosts was available on HBOMax. There is no way I will feel any guilt over the amount of joy these discoveries brought me.
• Despite not having made a weekly accountability post yet, the return to exercise and healthier eating is bringing the desired results. I’m actually feeling optimistic about removing by my birthday all the weight I put on in the last three months of last year. More on this on Thursday, when I actually post about this as scheduled.
• It’s now been 26 months since the last haircut. I’ve decided it’s going to be at least another couple before I think about potentially cutting it again. I like the idea that when celebrating my 50th birthday my hair will be the longest it’s ever been. I’m sure the late tees/early 20s version of me would be utterly astounded that such a thing is even possible.

I’m still attempting to get a hang of Twitter. I knew well before deciding to migrate away from Facebook as much as possible that the two services are designed to be used in different ways. Because of this and a couple other important reasons (not the least of which is friends and family who make Facebook their online home,) closing out the Facebook account and leaving the site altogether anytime soon is exceedingly unlikely…

Speaking of Facebook, Meta’s algorithms decided to place an ad for men’s compression boxers in my feed this morning, and I nearly laughed myself off of the treadmill. They’re “built for performance and function. With a design that slims all body types.” (It’s even funnier when watching the accompanying video.) At just a little over eight weeks till my 50th birthday, and as someone with zero plans to make any efforts to look younger than I am, everything about the product is simply not for me. It’s good to know that despite all the information Meta has on me, they lack the ability to properly figure out what products might get my interest. But, they did finally stop showing ads for holsters for concealed guns, which I’m actually rather thankful for…

Finally, in a rare instance of joining in with what all the popular kids are doing, I started playing Wordle last week. I’m not sharing my results like so many others, but so far I’ve figured out each of the first six words for the day.

There are a number of different items to post about, and I could easily make a couple them the subjects of long, in-depth posts. However, a pressing need to maximize some surprise time all to myself this weekend means everything is just going to go into one super-sized info dump…

I’ve completed three books this year already, but that looks more impressive than it really is. Those three books were actually novellas, and the three of them combined likely contain less than ¼ of the text contained in one of Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. The current book: To Kill a Mockingbird, which somehow was never an assigned book in any of my high school or college courses…

Although I haven’t made any weekly accountability posts yet, I returned to my healthy eating and exercise regimen after the holidays ended. Given that’s been a couple weeks now, I’m not going into detail about why the attempt at maintaining my weight for the last three months of the year failed spectacularly. Suffice it to say that at the start of this month, my weight was over 15 pounds where it was at the start of October. The weekly accountability posts will resume on Thursday of next week…

My transitioning away from Facebook is well underway. Facebook did me a kindness by making the mobile version of their website an absolute nightmare to use on either Safari or Firefox for iOS. The sheer crappiness just encourages me to finish the switch to Twitter and this blog more quickly. I’m sure in Meta’s eyes, the nearly broken mobile web interface is a feature rather than a bug — they want me to use their app so they can gather information about me more easily and efficiently. However, I’m not playing that game anymore. I was willing to put up with/ignore an awful lot of Meta’s outright evil behavior and business practices until their absolutely ineptly programmed bots and AIs decided to punish me for the most asinine of reasons. Unfortunately, there are a number of people whom I wish to continue to interact online with who really only have an online presence on Facebook. So, there’s a good chance I don’t actually delete my account and continue to access it in a browser dedicated solely to using the site, just so that I can continue to interact with those friends and family…

One of the best developments of 2021 was the launching of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 streaming channel. On Thanksgiving, I was able to locate it on our living room television, and it’s now my go-to channel for mindless, comfort television watching. But, more than that, I’ve also managed to use it to watch a few episodes that I haven’t seen since I started tracking my MST3K viewing. This isn’t easy, as there’s no online schedule (at least, one I’m aware of) to inform you what’s airing and when. However, the channel consistently starts a different episode at the top of each odd-numbered hour. So, when there’s enough time, I can watch a full episode with the aid of subtitles — a feature not included on the DVDs from the show’s original run on Comedy Central and Syfy. Given my hearing issues, subtitles are gold…

Because of the Omicron variant, I’ve essentially been housebound since Sally and I returned from our trip to Staunton a few days before Christmas. I’m hopeful (maybe even a little optimistic) that this wave will have subsided by my 50th birthday in March. We’ve already made plans for being in Philadelphia for three days to celebrate it, with the highlight being a small birthday celebration at a favorite haunt in Old City, just a couple blocks away from our preferred hotel…

Finally, it’s time for me to take down the Lego Christmas display and put something new up. Given that it will likely take me a couple weekends to disassemble it and properly return all the components to where they belong, I have a little time to figure out what I’m going to build next. Frankly, I have so many ideas for future Halloween displays that I may just run with one of them simply so to make use of them in a more timely manner.

Over the past couple months, there have been more than a few things I intended to jot down in the little leather journal I purchased at the New York City public library, but my laziness got the better of me in a number of different ways. So, I now need to do a giant info dump here on the blog because, frankly, I don’t want to get a sore, ink-stained hand from the amount of writing necessary at this point. Preamble finished; away we go…

• As part of traveling to Kansas in the beginning of November for my brother’s funeral, we needed a rental car to get from the Kansas City airport to the small town where he lived. Having not rented one in years, I was surprised when informed that I needed to go to a particular lot and simply pick the car I wanted from there. When I discovered that renting a Kia Soul was an option, I immediately found one and left the lot in it. Yes, I love driving my own Soul so much that when given the choice to drive something different, I simply didn’t want to.
• The following week, Sally and I took the Acela to New York City for our weeklong 10^th wedding anniversary celebration. The trip could not have gone any better. The weather was perfect for early November – highs in the 60s and plenty of sunshine – and because it took place nearly a month before the Omicron variant fully reared its ugly head, we never once felt like we were taking any real risks in any of our walking around the city and dining. This was made possible by two factors. One, we didn’t go to Florida, as we were initially planning/hoping months previously, simply because of the mind-numbingly psychotic attitudes to public health and safety demonstrated by state and local officials throughout the state. Conversely (and the second factor,) New York City had proof of vaccination mandates at all restaurants, and just about everyone we saw seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously. Since we live in an area where you can readily encounter the maskless freedumb fighters, it was a pleasure to spend nearly a week in a city where nearly everyone seemed to care about the common good.
• While there was so much about the trip that we loved and will treasure, the highlight of the New York trip was taking the potion making class of The Cauldron down near the financial district. In fact, we enjoyed both the class and atmosphere of the pub so damn much that we returned there a few days later, on the actual date of our anniversary, for our proper celebratory dinner and drinks. If there was anything similar to the Cauldron near our home hear in Northern Virginia, I’d almost certainly be a regular.
• Taking the Acela back-and-forth to New York was a key component in making the trip so enjoyable. Seriously, taking the train between New York and Washington is so much more comfortable, relaxing and just simply civilized than any of the other ways to make the journey. Mind you, we chose the added expense of the Acela (as opposed to a regular Amtrak train) because of the special occasion the trip was celebrating. However, given how infrequently we go to New York, maybe it’s a choice we continue to make in the future.
• While on the Acela on the way back home, it was hard not to notice just how close to the water much of the railbed is. Both the Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay are going to rise quite a bit in the coming decades thanks to the effects of the global warming. It seems exceedingly unlikely that Amtrak will be able to continue to use those tracks without spending tremendous amounts of money to either elevate them, move them, and/or build dikes to keep the water away.
• This year’s holiday Lego display is much more low key than efforts over the previous years. I’m happy with the final result and will post the usual pictures to Facebook sometime very soon. However, while it took a number of hours to build everything for the display, it really isn’t much more than a cluster of buildings and an array of minifigures positioned throughout. There’s no special touches this year – no Borg carolers, for instance – but I made it a point to include Krampus, because no holiday display of mine will be considered complete without him hiding menacingly somewhere in the scene.
• As noted in my 2021 Books Read/MST3K post, I considered reading a bunch of short novels and standalone novellas in an effort to pad my total books read for the year. Although I didn’t go through with that plan, I did decide to briefly employ that tactic to start off 2022. As a result, two books are now finished. I’ve now moved on to my classic for the year: To Kill a Mockingbird.

That’s it for the moment. I’m sure I’ve already forgotten items I previously wanted to note. Hoping, but not resolving, to be better at this sort of thing as the year progresses.