Archives August 2025

I have been wanting to lose the same three or four pounds for most of this year and haven’t been successful in doing so. Although I am still pretty active with going to the gym three times a week, playing pickleball several times a week and even volleyball if my body allows it, I still have not been able to keep my weight around 180lbs like I would prefer. It’s funny/odd, last year I had an issue keeping my weight up above 180.

I have done three fasting sessions so far and although they have a number of benefits, lasting weight loss hasn’t been one of them. I used to do at least one hard cardio session per week that ran 30-60 minutes. That used to be running and then later it became road biking but since I moved that fell off my routine. Although my heart rate can get up there playing pickleball or volleyball, it’s not the same.

Then of course we have the logical cause that I normally try to avoid thinking about, I’m just getting older. As you age your metabolism slows, it becomes harder to maintain muscle and weight gain is a pretty common side effect. However if you know me, you know I am not the type to just accept that.

One of the things I am trying to do is make sure I am going to bed with a little twinge of hunger in my stomach. Going to bed after still feeling the effects of a dinner that was too much is not a good thing. I realized that I was either eating more than I should or later than I should so I am trying to modify that. My other historical weakness has been a sweet tooth. It’s well documented the negative impacts excessive sugar has on your body in a number of ways. I have been making an effort to be more aware of my sugar consumption and moderate it.

I’m down a couple pounds since I started trying to enforce these modifications to my routine. As is the case in most things, consistency is the most vital part of any health and wellness plan.

My incision in my head is healing well although it still looks pretty nasty. The stitches come out Monday but I am feeling tempted to try a pickleball session tomorrow to see how it goes. I have been going to the gym this week but avoiding weight training which could potentially put pressure on the wound. I instead have been sticking to stretching, light calisthenics and light cardio. I may try a few push ups and/or pull ups today to see how it feels.

I took Elsa for her annual exam yesterday. While I was there I got a couple meds she takes as well but I still had sticker shock with the total bill of $800 plus. A lot of the costs are associated with labs that are done but my god, it’s sort of ridiculous. The good news is Elsa appears to be about as healthy as a 10 year old dog can be.

Last night I had to fix issues with all three of my printers. The A1 had an extruder jam that I was able to clear pretty easily by taking off the feed tubes, heating the hot end and then using my unclogger tool to force the filament through. When this happened the first time months ago that was how I broke the filament sensor. I now know how to address the issue without collateral damage, thankfully.

The X1C had a piece of filament that broke off inside the PTFE tube in the guts of the AMS 2. It was a bit of a pain getting that tube released to remove the filament but I got it. Finally the P1S was driving me nuts because the roll of white filament I was using was a non-Bambu spool. It would keep binding on me, requiring me to intervene. Once the print on it finished I was done using that spool in the AMS. The good news is I came up with three very cool dinosaur prints.

Last night I actually played some retail WoW for the first time in months. I had a small blitz of play a few months back where I got all of my characters to level 70, the starting level for the new expansion but I never played any of the expansion itself. It’s not really new anymore either as we are at the second major patch release. Anyway there have been a bunch of changes so the first 20 minutes was just me getting my hunter character playable again and figuring out how stuff now works. I am still in the dark about many things and my character felt pretty weak but I was able to at least gain a level. We will see how much time I have to invest in my 20 year old game.

I had a weekend where there was a goal of not doing activities that kept me out in the sun or caused a significant amount of exertion due to the large incision I have in my head. Well the sun avoidance is more of a side effect of the antibiotic they have me on which has a side effect of making me very reactive to sun exposure.

I knocked out a number of projects on Saturday including installing a Panda Status RGB indicator which mounts onto the heat bed of my P1S. It gives you information about a print with a quick glance. It’s a feature that is included with the H2D printer. The P1S now is in it’s final form as far as I am concerned. Even though the X1C is a higher end printer with more features I find myself printing more on the P1S currently.

I also got around to installing a new desktop mic on my computer. I bought it a couple weeks ago, a Steelseries Alias. The Yeti Blue mic I was using is 6-7 years old . I look forward to trying it out on my next live stream broadcast.

Sunday morning I did a quick 1 mile walk on the beach right around sunrise to avoid significant sun exposure. I attended to small things around my place during the day but it was a pretty lazy affair by my standards. I finally completed watching the four seasons of Last Ship, a show I never heard about during it’s original run that started in 2014. It ironically depicted almost a COVID like reality although it was a more deadly example that kills 5 billion people. I found it entertaining although things got increasingly silly as each season progressed. I now can see what else is out there as I felt obligated to see the series through to its completion.

So I went through the day yesterday taking a couple rounds of Advil to knock down the consistent pain in the area where the incision/stitches are on my head which grew as the numbing from the procedure wore off. However even a day later there are parts of my head that are numb. The top of my head on the side where the surgery occurred still feels completely numb. I am not sure if this is just the numbing solution moving to other areas temporarily or something else. I will give it a day or two before I have any significant concern. It was a rather large area that was cut out and they injected me with a lot of the numbing shots, probably the most I ever received.

Walking around last night and this morning I noticed something else. The pain I was feeling in my right leg/knee has vanished. Suddenly I feel fine where as prior to the surgery I was having consistent knee/leg pain for two weeks. Do I have any idea why having skin cancer surgery on my face would make my problematic knee suddenly feel better? Nope but I’m not complaining.

This weekend any athletic competition or hard physical labor is off the table but I have a list of other to do’s floating around in my head that should keep me busy enough.