I’ve thought about my weight over the past few days and decided to look at a few pictures. I had not realized that I had lost about 20 pounds over the last several years. This was all intentional and I’ve shed about 7 of those in the last six months—due mainly to daily exercise including planks.
Planks are good
As a consulting psychiatrist, I thought I was getting plenty
of exercise running all over the hospital, up and down stairs and whatnot. The
trouble is that it’s stop and go, fireman-type activity that often isn’t
sustained over much time.
I’ve got a few pictures of me before I lost my paunch. It’s
funny that I’m not climbing 20 or 30 steps and getting a couple of miles or so
on my smartphone step counter—yet I’m probably a lot more fit off the job than when
I was on. That could also partly be from not eating quite as much for lunch
when I’m not working.
Retiring has overall been better for my health.
It just occurred to me while writing this post that a couple of the pictures might not make much sense. They were taken during a Psychiatry Department Residents vs Faculty matball match and picnic several years ago. If you don’t know what matball is, you can find out more about it here.
I didn’t play, but I suppose that’s obvious. Maybe it’s also why Faculty lost.
We’re just a bit on the sad side today. The robin chicks are gone. It’s another empty nest and sort of the story of our yard over the last month or so, what with the loss of the house finch and cardinal chicks before this.
It’s a hard life for every creature. On the other hand, death in our own yard is always counterbalanced by the triumph of life elsewhere on earth.
That doesn’t make it any easier. I’m reminded though of a
quote attributed to Sydney Harris:
“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’”
Sydney J. Harris
I’m pretty sure he never, ever actually asked that question.
Well, it has been about 3 months since I opened this blog. My YouTube channel needed an updated channel trailer, so I’m posting it here as well. Why not?
I was surprised at how long a minute and a half channel trailer took to make, even with the aid of video editing software (maybe because of it, partly).
In my situation, a channel trailer is sort of a mini biography. It’s hard to compress a career into a short clip that takes about 5 minutes to upload to YouTube–after a few hours of what was essentially cut and paste.
As you can gather, my path is changing. Over the next 12 months, I’ll be half off and half on the consultation-liaison psychiatry service. That’s according to the terms of my phased retirement contract.
This is really a re-introduction, of course. I’m slowly evolving–not in any big way. I’m still a geezer.
On the other hand, I have found that I’m much more comfortable being on some kind of schedule. I still get up early, only by about an hour later. I generally arise between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. That may seem very early to some.
I eat less when I’m off service (which I’ll call “retired” for simplicity). That’s probably why my trousers fit more loosely.
I need to have something to do. I exercise daily, for about 20 minutes. I do mindfulness meditation and yoga. I blog. I photograph and film, mainly birds, which I post to YouTube.
The only reason I ‘m not a disaster in the kitchen is because you generally can’t get me within 10 yards of it unless I need a snack I can immediately eat (like an apple). I still don’t cook–not really. It’s embarrassing.
I trim the lawn and by that, I mean just around the walkway edges and some of the garden margins. I don’t mow the lawn because my wife does a much better job, by mutual agreement.
I’m not a gardener. I’m a garden appreciation expert. That means I watch gardening that is done by others.
This is just a quick post updating the saga of our robin family in the front yard crabapple tree. It looks like all 4 chicks are alive and kicking so far.
The parents are very protective. The male robin won’t fly away unless I’m just close enough to touch him. The female is about the same.
It rained for about an hour or so before I could get out to
the crabapple to check the progress of the robin hatchlings. Yesterday there
were two unhatched eggs but there was a definite hole in one of them.
There are now 4 hatchlings, although the biggest one looks
pretty sluggish—and appears to sport a fair-size blister on its butt.
It’ll be at least a week before they look like anything but
a light snack for a crow. They’ll get to that little dinosaur stage a few days
beyond that. It’ll take a couple of weeks before they fledge—at least the ones
who survive. This would be the first time I’ve been able to get video clips.
Last year I got snapshots for a little slideshow.
Baby robins last year
I was surprised at how close the parents allowed me to get.
I could have reached out and touched them.
Sena mentioned seeing small birds flying out of the Colorado Blue Spruce on the other side of the front yard. I looked long and hard before I found anything that resembled a nest. Frankly it looks like something that could have been in use last year.
Another nest?
On the other hand, I also noticed the branches shaking in
that tree later in the afternoon. And I recall seeing a chipping sparrow streak
out of there, perch on the crabapple and chirp at me—nervously.
Yesterday, we noticed 4 eggs in the Robins’ nest. They take
about 14 days to incubate and it just so happens time’s up today.
Right on cue the eggs started cracking this morning. It
takes all day and it was well after 3:00 PM before there was the tiniest
pinhole in the third egg. Two chicks were squirming around when I finally
called it a day around 4:30 PM.
This will have to be continued…. Hope it’s not raining tomorrow.
We were out working hard in the garden today–or at least Sena was. She was very busy planting Black-Eyed Susan and other things the names of which I can never remember.
I usually just take pictures and make videos of her garden. It’s a lot of fun watching her. But that’s not all I do. Sometimes I carry bags of mulch.
She has been devoted to gardening for over 17 years. It began with cultivating our back yard. I labored cutting out weeds by the dozens–until I found out it was Vinca. I think another name for it is creeping myrtle.
She gave me permission to film her usual planting posture. You’re welcome.
It can take a while longer than you expect when you do a system reset of your computer. I’m still trying to get my software reinstalled. You know, it’s not very funny when you get the message that all of your apps are going to be expunged and the long list you see on the screen is followed by the promise that (not to worry) this list will be available on your desktop after the reset, so you don’t have to remember it or try to copy it down.
That’s a bald-faced lie; don’t believe it.
The best example today is my quest to track down the software for my Webcam. Since it got wiped during the reset, I navigated to Logitech’s web support page thinking I would just re-download it from there.
Wrong. The only software listed were updates that either didn’t work, were not applicable for what I wanted to do with them, or were incompatible with my video editing software. No kidding, one of the apps recorded audio but the video editing software could not play the video.
Now I knew that the software for my particular version of the Webcam was old but it worked with Windows 10. None of the other new apps did, which was ironic.
I couldn’t find the old app on Logitech’s site at first. In a roundabout way, by googling and sitting through a YouTube that displayed one of Logitech’s web pages, which was not really obvious at first–I eventually blundered onto Logitech’s web page where I could download the old rickety software. It was at the bottom of a long list of apps only a couple of which were compatible with Windows 10.
But it worked with my video editing software and, unlike the new software, didn’t give me annoying messages in big red letters suggesting that my nearly new computer didn’t have the resources to run it.
I like the Webcam part of making videos because it allows me to do things like put my talking head into a PowerPoint presentation, like the one below:
I realize that’s work-related and I’m supposed to be retiring. However, just before I did all that hunting for the old Webcam software, I had been out in the yard with my wife, me trimming the edges of the lawn while she mowed. I also applied grub control granules with a drop spreader. That’s actually about just as much exercise as a moderate jog around the block.
Finally, the explanation for the picture of the hummingbird feeder above. Today we retired it, which fits the theme of my life in a way. For one thing, it’s a pain to fill that thing with sugar water (which I have to mix each and every time, 4:1 water to sugar).
The other problem are the pesky carpenter ants which climb all over it. I know there are ways to prevent that–sort of. On the other hand, hummingbirds have to deal with them all the time in nature, don’t they?
How do hummingbirds usually defend themselves against ants, anyway? Maybe they need to take martial arts classes. They could also use their brains, which proportionally are larger than ours, by the way. They’re smart enough to come up with a clever argument to persuade ants to scram: “It has been documented in numerous scientific studies that sugar water makes ants explode.”
Our hummingbird feeder is now just another decorative object in the garden.
Well, I spoke too soon yesterday after following complicated
instructions to fix the File (or Windows) Explorer Not Responding” issue. The
fix didn’t stick and I wound up doing a system reset after all. It took up most
of my day, which is a long time to grind my teeth.
Not that I have a lot going on in the off phase of phased
retirement. But I could think of better things to do than reset the computer.
And whose idea was it to embark on a crusade to instigate
yet another Microsoft debacle—Windows 11 or 12 in the pipeline? After grinding
my teeth a bit more, I dug into the web a little more deeply. I was relieved to
find out that this was a rumor only, according to a news story about a week
ago.
I think reporters do that just to get your dander up.
I can remember hassling with tech support on the phone for
hours after I got our first computer and tried to cope with Windows 95. Thank goodness
I missed Windows Bob, which I had never even heard of until yesterday.
One of my earliest memories of Windows 95 mania was a TV
news spot showing a long line of customers at Best Buy clutching their godforsaken
copies of the cursed operating system—and when the register opened, a guy
leaped up to the counter, obviously ecstatic to get his treasure first.
And from then on, it was one disaster after another, with every iteration of Windows crashing our machine or prompting calls to tech support with wait times often exceeding half an hour or longer.
Remember all of that? It’s no different now. And there’s no compelling reason to switch back to Mac.
Oh yes, I started off with a Mac when I started working at the hospital as an assistant professor. That was on the advice of one of my senior faculty teachers. I soon learned that, with all the support staff in the administrative office using IBM PCs, it didn’t make much sense to push through with a Mac, no matter how much I liked it.
Now, after all these years pounding on the PC, I don’t think
I could get the hang of the Mac OS—although I have considered going back many
times in the past few years, especially since yesterday.
I’m in the off phase of phased retirement right now. It
reminds me of the consuming question, “What are you going to do when you’re
retired.” Coming to terms with retirement is not a one-step thing.
It’s probably easier to think of things I’m not going to do. I can think of at least a couple of books I’m probably not going to finish reading: “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” by Paul Starr and another title I rather not type but the picture of which I’m not squeamish about showing.
Deep
Also deep
I’ve already read a new book by Dave Barry, “Lessons from Lucy,” which is about coming to terms with getting older. And I’m going to reread a book I read years ago, “The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams.
Wise booger jokes
Autographed
Worth re-reading
I read the Hitchhiker’s Guide and lost it in one of our many
moves. I bought a new hardback copy a few days ago and just restarted it.
I can’t remember when I got The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide. It was published in 1986. Around that time, I had graduated from Iowa State University and could not find employment for about a year. It was a difficult time. Anyone who has been through something like that might understand how hard it could be to retire.
I’m not going to write another work-related book. Editing a
multi-author book was too much like herding cats. And as one of my friends put
it, once you’ve done that, you ask, “Now what?”
I’m still checking my office email every day. You never know. It’s FOMO, I realize; on the other hand, there are still legitimate work-related things I need to do and some have deadlines.
This makes me think of my YouTube video, “A Day in the Life of a C-L Psychiatrist.” It’s a little tough to come up with something like “A Day in the Life of a Retired C-L Psychiatrist.” Of course, there would be nothing connected with psychiatry in it.
My day in the life after C-L Psychiatry?
I’m reminded of an exchange between Men in Black agents J
and K (2nd sequel) after K is deneuralized out of “retirement” to
return to the active job of defending this little green planet from aliens.
Agent J: “So what was it like on the outside, not doing this
every day?”
Agent K: “It was nice; Sleep late on the weekends, watch the
Weather Channel.”
My life is more or less like that, except every day is a
weekend day…sort of. And the Weather Channel has gotten way too political for
me.
I watch Men in Black reruns. I wait for the garbage truck.
How does that guy know exactly where to brake in order to operate the automated
side load mechanical arm grabber? I carry my POS camera on my belt. You just
never know when an opportunity for great snapshots might arise. I trim and edge
the lawn boundaries. I vacuum. I fold the fitted sheets, Hondo. I really don’t
cook; I stick frozen pizzas in the oven and make microwave popcorn—not very
often, Slick. I exercise and do mindfulness meditation and yoga. I take clothes
out of the dryer and put away. I dry the dishes and put away. No, we do not use
the dishwasher, pal. It’s about coordination and timing.
I realize that I might sound like Agent K. But I’m more like
Agent J—still a rookie around the house and in the yard. This is going to take
a while.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 