More strength training, following a video from FitnessBlender. (That was a good tip!)
I’m getting used to the idea of following a video instead of a live instructor. It has its benefits. The flexible timing, of course. And I can take a break to run to the loo when I need to without missing out. I can skip back 20 seconds to re-watch the instructions so I can get that angle right.
Photos I took earlier today, when I had daylight, are nowhere to be found. The SD card is empty, the “Unprocessed” folder on the computer is empty, and I know I haven’t worked on them. Mysterious and worrying.
I’ll retake the photos tomorrow. No big deal. There was only a handful of them.
But this incident serves as a reminder for me to appreciate the habit of emptying the SD card every few days, and the importance of a robust backup system. I don’t want to be one of those people whose phone dies or computer crashes or Google locks them out of their account, and they lose all their digital memories.
I have three copies of my original RAW files: on a hard drive that sits on my desk, in the cloud, and on a separate hard drive stored elsewhere. That separate hard drive used to live in the tretton37 office, but now that I never go there, it’s moved to Eric’s workplace. It comes home once a month or so, gets that month’s photos, and then goes back to the office. If the house were to burn down together with the primary hard drive, and the external backup service somehow were to not deliver, then I’d still have this hard drive.
In addition I have JPG exports of every photo on yet another separate hard drive. I have them to make it easy to browse photos together with the kids, but they do provide a kind of backup as well. And the blog is a fifth backup in a way. It doesn’t have all my photos but if all the other sources were lost somehow, the blog would still have thousands of my photos.
I have the same three backups of the database for this blog – local, off-site, cloud. I have no idea how easy it would be to restore the blog starting from zero, so I hope I never need to use these backups, but it is good to have them.
My photos and my blog are important to me, and I would be devastated to lose them all.
Tuesday is rest day. I went out for a brisk walk. Rain was hanging in the air but it never started raining for real.
I aim for at least a half-hour, but when I’ve walked fifteen minutes I tend to feel like I’ve barely started and I’m just getting my steam up, so I usually keep going for another while before I turn back towards home.
I went out for a lunchtime walk and came back to find an unexpected window cleaning in progress. We do have an agreement with a company for general cleaning every other Tuesday, so I wasn’t entirely shocked to find people there. And when I took a closer look, I recognized the guy hanging halfway out through the window, so they were actually cleaners and not burglars.
Usually the extras are planned and announced in advance, which would have given me some time to clear the windowsills of plants and to move my mini-office. Now I ended up working in the kitchen. In the cold kitchen, because half the windows in the house were wide open. At least I had no important meetings scheduled for this afternoon. Trying to hold a technical interview surrounded by people with buckets would have been awkward.
Monday is strength training day.
I’ve gotten some good recommendations for workout videos, so now I have a whole queue to pick from. That’s working quite well.
My slim but carefully selected set of weights is also working well. If I was at a gym, I might use a wider range, but it’s not a bad thing to be forced to use weights that are slightly too heavy. And I have not yet run into any situations where the 18 lb weights would be too light. My shoulder muscles are puny.
Ingrid cooks dinner at least twice a week, to earn extra money that she saves for the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea in 2023. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, open for scouts from ages 14 to 17. And an expensive one. Ingrid has been planning and looking forward to it and saving up money for it since last summer. We even have an Excel chart where we follow up her savings and compare the total to a target line. She was going to try and get a summer job as well, but covid-19 put an end to those plans.
20 km and six hours of walking counts as a workout in my books. I didn’t keep a close eye on my heart rate but I definitely walked fast enough to get hot.
Sörmlandsleden stage 16, there and back, 10 + 10 km.
Walking the same stretch of the trail there and back again feels somewhat boring. But even though I considered all sorts of variations, I couldn’t come up with any better alternatives. With all the restrictions in place I can’t use public transport to get to and from the hike. I could ask Eric to drop me off and pick me up again, but so much driving for just a one-day hike would feel like wasting his time. I could do a longer hike with an overnight stay but with the short daylight hours I would spend way too much of the day in my tent in the dark. So I just made the most use of those daylight hours: got up at 6:30, left the house at 7 and was out walking shortly after 8. By the time I started driving home at 16 it was near dark.
The day was fine and sunny and pleasant for walking, even though the sun barely got high enough to reach me. I knew it was there, though, and I could see it gild the treetops here and there. And the mere presence of bright daylight and a blue sky did a lot to cheer me up.
The ground was sodden and muddy everywhere after the recent rains and the footbridges (which are many on this part of the trail) were incredibly slippery. I fell down once quite painfully and decided to be more careful. There’s a certain way to walk on slippery surfaces with some reasonable speed still, rolling from heel to toe, never pushing away. But as soon as I don’t think about it, I forget and revert to a normal brisk walk. After falling again for a second time, hurting my bum and unpleasantly jarring my whole spine and head, I crossed them very, very carefully.
For some reason that made sense yesterday when I was packing, I left my macro lens at home. I think I didn’t expect anything photo-worthy at this time of the year. It’s all mostly rotting leaves and brown grass.
That was a mistake. I walked past some really odd-looking funguses thriving on all that rotting vegetation. I know I could have taken better photos with the right lens.
I also spotted the remains of a dead animal right next to the path. I first noticed the tufts of coarse gray hairs spread out a few paces. Then a vertebra, then another, and then many more bits and pieces, including both halves of the lower jaw. All were clearly old and thoroughly cleaned by scavengers big and small, so the ick factor was very low.
A cervid of some kind, clearly, with a jaw like that. Moose? Deer? The jawbones were quite large, as long as from my fingertips to my elbow, so perhaps a moose?
Bones remaining intact after a long time are no surprise, but I hadn’t expected hair to last so long. It makes sense, though. Hair is tough, made to last for a long time on your body, and it’s not digestible (other than by fungi and bacteria).
Now I had to go google about the decomposition of hair. I found out that human hair can take two years to decompose, and is considered a problematic type of waste. I also found an article specifically about microbial decomposition of keratine which was mostly too technical to be interesting to me, but I did learn from it that:
Another late night walk.
My knitting basket is overflowing with nearly-finished socks. First I knitted one pair, to give away. Figuring out the sizing took a few attempts, but the second sock went fast because I now had the pattern worked out for this exact size and this exact yarn.
Well. If the first sock is the time-consuming one and the next one goes fast, why not make more of those fast ones? I have the pattern now, and I have one more skein of the exact same yarn, so let’s be efficient and make use of this! I know more than one person with size 42/43 feet who might benefit from a pair of sturdy woollen socks. Actually, most people in this part of the world probably would.
The second pair will be for a secret Santa gift exchange at work. They’ll have some nice tretton37 styling in duplicate stitch, i.e. embroidery that looks like knitting (maskstygn/can’t find the Estonian name). I’m excited about doing the embroidery so I’m all focused on finishing the second sock in this pair and getting started on the decorations, and putting off the much more boring work of weaving in the yarn ends on all the finished socks. 3 socks 99% done, 1 sock 90% done, not one 100% done.
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