Christian ran Lorena up through Maine and New Hampshire to see the leaves, a new lighthouse (Nubble Lighthouse in York, Maine) and chase down a hamburger from a “best of” list in Portsmouth. The leaves were only mediocre but the hamburger and the light house were nothing short of spectacular. I get to suffer through another three days here in Texas without Lorena, but it surely seems like she is having a great time. In the meantime, Christian got a new (to him) Surface Pro tablet that makes me think I want one myself. He got it just in time to take with him to be big conference on the west coast. It will give himself something to do on that six hour flight from Boston to California.
I ran into Granbury this morning to see if I could find myself a couple of books at the Hood County Librarybookstore and to have some lunch at Panda Express. Last weekend I went down to check out the library. It is a nice little community library and I liked it, but the bookstore was the real find who anyone looking airplane and Saturday afternoon novels to just escape for an hour or two of not so deep thought. I scored two of them for a sum total of $4 complete with dust covers! When I was heading out to the car, I noticed an old rock building that turned out to be a grist mill built in the late 1800’s that had been turned into a community art gallery and studio where they teach art classes. I talked to the people in the gallery, picked up a class schedule for Lorena, and headed back out to the car, but noticed a spectacular park behind with art gallery with lots of water a big fountain, bridges, trees, and wide walking paths. I cannot wait to show Lorena.
Oral creatine administration may improve short-term memory and intelligence/reasoning of healthy individuals but its effect on other cognitive domains remains unclear. Findings suggest potential benefit for aging and stressed individuals. Since creatine is safe, future studies should include larger sample sizes. It is imperative that creatine should be tested on patients with dementias or cognitive impairment.1
Christian said I should take a look at creatine monohydate as a possible supplement. Christian and my Ph.D. classmate and old friend, John S. have used it to help with their weightlifting. I need to get back to weightlifting as I get older, partially because it helps maintain bone density, but also because I like it. That might have been a reason to start taking the stuff all by itself, but when I watched a video on creatine Christian sent me, it talked about help for short term memory during age related cognitive decline. I looked into it. It is not completely clear yet, but there seems to be evidence that it helps. So I ordered a bottle from Walmart and am going to give it a try.
Avgerinos, Konstantinos I et al. “Effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function of healthy individuals: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials.” Experimental gerontology vol. 108 (2018): 166-173. doi:10.1016/j.exger.2018.04.013↩︎
AFTER: View from the street toward the front of the house
Work is coming to an end at the apartment building, so the bulk of Lynn’s team has moved up the hill to work on the second remodel project. The first step was to clean up a large amount of debris created during the destructive part of the project. The view on the right is how it is now, after cleaning up the mess. Lynn says he can have it livable by December if we want to be in San Pedro for the holidays. That would be nice, but I am not holding my breath. It might be more realistic to hope for the holidays, but plan for something in the spring. Lynn has one big structural headache to solve to do the things he wants to do with the house. After that, he believes this remodel is profoundly more simple than the apartments. Really looking forward to seeing this project move forward now.
Lorena is totally a machine when it comes to her workouts. She NEVER misses one. She just sent me this image she took at the gym in Christian’s apartment building. Both Christian’s and Kelly’s apartment buildings have gyms with Concept 2 rowing machines. I was trying to figure out how many years she has been rowing and I think it goes all the way back to 2007 when we first moved to Raleigh. That means she has been rowing two to four times per week (sometimes she runs and she used to use an elliptical machine) for 45 minutes to an hour for the last 16 years. No wonder she is so healthy. I read an article a couple of months back that was titled “Exercise is the Best Medicine.” I believe that.
For my part, today I was down over twenty-five pounds when I started my latest health kick. The weight loss has started to slow down some, but that was expected. The one day per week fast and the daily intermittent fasting with long walks really has helped. It was a struggle getting started and it has taken longer than I remember when I was younger, but I seem to be on track now. My blood pressure was perfect when it was taken at the dentist appointment yesterday and that felt pretty good.
Lorena and Christian are having too much fun in Boston. There is no way I want to miss the next trip.The first thing they did is went further north into New England to pick apples, eat fresh-made donuts, and view the leaves. Supposedly, Lorena went there to give Christian a hand while he prepares for a conference where a paper will be published at the end of October, but it surely looks like they are having too much fun for that. The last thing they sent me was this steak and potatoes picture that certainly did not help my diet very much. Well, the whole crew should be here for Thanksgiving, so at least I have that to look forward to.
Work on the remodel of the house on the hill in San Pedro is about to accelerate. That work has been on somewhat of a hiatus due to the need to finish the work on the apartment remodel down below (but still with a great view). With that coming to an end, Lynn has started sending some of his team. Lynn has all the lease paperwork prepared and a list of potential tenants who want to rent the apartments, so he is checking credit, references, and all that stuff with the hope of getting people into the apartments sometime in November. After that, all of his people will be focused on getting enough of the house on the hill ready for Lorena and I to head there for a stay. There are four living areas: 1) Basement, 2) main floor, 3) second floor, and 4) an entertainment terrace on the roof called an azotea with restrooms, a kitchen, and a spectacular view. The hope is to finish the main floor and the azotea first so we can start visiting there while the rest of the place is finished.
With Lorena gone, I drove over to Granbury to check out the Hood County Library situated not to far from their historic town center. I LOVED it. It is a small library and probably more of community gathering place than a place to check out books, but they have an excellent little bookstore where you can buy books, very inexpensively, that people donate to support the library. When I went back there, I met three retired volunteers working there. They were very friendly and, just when I got there, they were all heading out to the parking lot to look at the eclipse with the special dark sunglasses you need to be able to do that. They asked me if I would like to see it, too, then kindly lent me a pair of glasses to take a look. That sight is ALWAYS amazing to see. On the way out of the library, I stopped by the desk to see if it was possible to get a library card even though we do not live in Hood County. They said, sure, but I could only check out 5 books at a time for three weeks and I could not use any of their online services. That was GREAT, so I got one and am quite pleased with myself.
On the way home, I picked up some gas and then bought a diet coke and a Kroger chicken breast for lunch. That was a good thing, too, because it got me out of the house. When Lorena is gone, I really get unmotivated (a bad thing) and this just taught me the lesson that I need to find an excuse, no matter how feeble, to get out of the house at least once every day. I did not have much of a plan when I first got up this morning, but now I have new good stuff to do.
I am envious of Lorena eating in Sommerville, Mass. at an Italian Restaurant in Davis Square named Posto. That is always our first stop when we visit Christian in Boston. I am sitting at home eating canned soup and wishing I was there with them. I think they are headed up to Maine to do some leaf watching tomorrow.
Lorena’s new Garmin Vívoactive 5 GPS (31st anniversary) watch arrived just in time for her trip to visit Christian in Cambridge for the next week and a half. I get to stay home here in Texas in my office and work. It is an AMAZING watch. I got my Garmin Instinct several years back with a black and white screen. Her watch has a longer battery life, more features, cost just a little bit less. I have to say I am envious, but I also have to say she deserves it way more than me. She still runs four and a half miles two times per week and 8k+ meters on the Concept 2 rower two times per week. She definitely will benefit from the fitness watch. It connects to her phone, keeps track of everything and is really quite fashionable, too.
For posterity, I put together a final inventory of classes and research credits that appear on my transcript for my Ph.D. program. I learned a lot more new stuff than I expected when I started the program. Honestly, I enjoyed every class. The professors at School of Natural Resources professors at University of Nebraska were really great at there jobs, not only in terms of knowledge, but in terms of willingness to make accommodations for a very non-traditional, remote student and of great good will.
Transfer courses
CS 3416 Computer Networks–3 credits (UTEP MS transfer)
IE 3552 Design of Experiments–3 credits (UTEP MS transfer)
IE 3557 Applied Computer Simulation–3 credits (UTEP MS transfer)
IE 3562 CAD Graphical Elements–3 credits (UTEP MS transfer)
IE 3560 Computer Vision–3 credits (UTEP MS transfer)
SYSEN 601 Systems Engineering–3 credits (TAMU transfer)
University of Nebraska courses
AGRO 884 Water Resources Seminar–1 credit
BIOS 952 Likelihood and Bayesian Ecology–3 credits
I am very grateful to be married to Lorena. The picture at the left was taken in 2009 in Raleigh, shortly after the kids started college at Wake Technical Community College. It is mind boggling how fast the time has flown. One of the things for which I am most grateful is how much we still love to do things together and how much we are on each others’ side. Probably the greatest constant between us has been our efforts to keep Christ first in all of everything we do. We do not always succeed, but we work at it consistently and if there are measures of what is good in a marriage, this is number one for both of us.
I am grateful to my professor Troy at University of Nebraska–Lincoln for having funded the tuition and fees for my Ph.D. studies. It was especially kind of him because they were much higher than normal due to the fact that I do not live in Nebraska so he had to pay out-of-state tuition. In addition to that, special arrangements had to made because I was a full-time student with a full-time job enrolled as an on-campus student, but taking all my classes online. Every semester there was a hiccup with the tuition due to these special circumstances. The hiccups never got ironed out until after the Payment Due Date so we always got accessed a late fee which had to be waived after it was demonstrated that it was the fault of the financial department. The last semester held to form. The last late fee was waived yesterday. The only thing left now is to wait for some commencement instructions to arrive via email and to attend the commencement.
Lorena and I walked Fort Worth’s spectacular zoo as part of our three-day, 31st wedding anniversary celebration with more still to come. Of course, now that we are in Texas, red meat is an even bigger part of our celebration ritual and it was a very big part before we got here. We do really love that zoo. There is something new to see every time. We truly love to be together and do stuff. Next year, we hope to be doing this in Mexico, maybe at the new house on the hill.
Lynn continues to work hard on the apartments in San Pedro. He planted a two trees in front of the building a couple of weeks ago. It rained pretty hard for several days last week which helped the trees a bunch. He has been putting a lot of work into the entertainment area on the terrace at the back of the house and in completion of the last two apartments, also at the back of the house. He did not send me pictures of those, though, because he wants us all to see it after it is finished. I will be talking to him about the business aspects of the development a little bit later today. He has a long waiting list of people who want to rent one or more of the apartments, but he also has a serious investor who is evaluating whether to buy the place or not. He said he would love to have it full of renters before he buys it so the rent/buy decision is not one we have to consider.
Back in the late 1990’s I worked for a company named ESI on a new product. There were problems with the product and I worked many hours, often through the night to resolve them. I was in a small group and was the only one who could do the work. I am not sure my boss even knew I was doing that. But my friend Frank, who worked in a completely different department on the other side of a very big building saw. I was getting pretty down about it and was not sure I would ever resolve the problem1. Right in the middle of all that, Frank showed up with a bottle of Duck Pond Pinot Noir wine from Dundee, Oregon, just up the road from where we lived, gave it to me and said my efforts were not going unnoticed. I appreciated that beyond words. I am not sure what year was the vintage, it might have been 1995, but it was amazing. I liked it so much that I asked him about it later. He told me that Duck Pond had always made a great bottle of Pinot Noir being located in the red hills of Dundee, but for some reason, that one year was just off the charts better than anything they had done before and it had not yet been discovered by the wine snobs. That weekend, I went out and bought a case of it. It took us several years to finish the whole case and every bottle was as amazing as the one Frank gave me. Lorena and I found a bottle of the 2021 vintage so we could share it with the family. We have no idea whether it is as good as the first bottle, but the memories were worth the price of purchae.
With a little help from Frank and Mark, I eventually worked it out. ↩︎
Lorena and I are celebrating our 31st wedding anniversary this long weekend–I have Columbus Day off from my work. That actual anniversary is not until after the weekend, but we thought we would get a head start on it. We are both trying to stay on our health kicks so we have to plan carefully. There is so much stuff to do in Fort Worth that it is pretty hard to decide. Lorena has been wanting a fitness/GPS/smart watch so she picked one from the Garmin website and I got it for her. I love my Garmin Instinct and have been using it for several years now. Hers is a LOT better. I have a lot of years left in my current watch and there is no reason to buy another other than they are WAY cool and the battery life just keeps getting better. I think I am going to have to wait until I retire, then God willing, I will upgrade.
Now I am heading out for my workout before we go to Fort Worth.
My latest health kick started a month ago on Christian’s birthday. Today I weighed in at a little over twenty pounds less than when I started. My Body Mass Index has dropped from 36.6 (obese level 2) to 33.6 which is obese level 1, a little less than half way just overweight. My eating is significantly decreased in quantity and increased in quality. My exercise is still a pain in the neck, but not painful. I am walking 2.5-3 miles, four days per week, but hope/plan to increase that. My velocities are up from when I began so that is good. The short term goal is to get to under 200 lbs. before my graduation on December 15 after having navigated the Thanksgiving holiday without gaining it all back.
A new book titled Unearthing the Bible: 101 Archaeological Discoveries that Bring the Bible to Life arrived a couple of days ago. I ordered it after hearing Titus Kennedy be interviewed about Egyptian evidences for the Exodus. I briefly leafed through it and it looks really good. Lots of pictures. Right now I am listening to another interesting interview about some of the archaeological discoveries that seem to say something about the historicity of Jesus. Fascinating stuff. I bought the book from ThriftBooks.com.
Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not? And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.
Matthew 9:14-15 (KJV)
I have used the excuse that I do not have time to eat right and exercise for way too long. The latest excuse was that I got fat because it was too hard to find the time to exercise while I was in school full-time while working full-time, too. That was not only not true, but no excuse at all for eating badly in addition to not getting any exercise. About a month ago, I decided it was time to quit making excuses and get my weight and health under control. I am currently walking 2½-3 miles four days per week. I think that is fine and I enjoy it, but I want to add some weight-lifting to the mix as soon as the stars align and I can both afford the weights or a gym membership. That is a topic for another time because my focus has been on getting my eating habits under control.
So, a month ago, I made some radical changes to my diet with the idea that I would maintain a low caloric intake (< 1000 calories/day) long enough to get myself down to a normal weight, normal being defined as the level below overweight and obese as defined by the CDC. At the same time I had been reading about the health and longevity benefits of fasting (e.g., Eat less, live longer? The science of fasting and longevity). I have also started doing a fast day once per week last week and am going to try to stick with that for the duration of the weight reduction part of this program. I do not seem to have less energy than before now that I am acclimated to the limited number of calories per day, but will see if that changes over the next few weeks and adjust as needed.
If/when I get down to wait, I hope to remain on a restricted calorie diet with intermittent fasting after I investigate it a little more. Longer fasts of a week or two a couple of times per year seem to have some benefits, too. I just need to remember:
But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.
