Tag: nanowrimo

I Wonder of Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is Still a Thing?

November 2, 2020 5 of 8

Yay! My first medical article, I think.

This post is brought to you by still more blanket unraveling. The blanket is king-sized and while trying to work out the best way to do this, I’ve only unraveled about 0.9% of the blanket. By my estimation, the original blanket (minus the hem, which I just cut off, because life’s too short for trying to unhem a 10-year-old blanket with a seam ripper) is 56 square feet (5.2 square meters) and I still have 50.25 square feet (4.67 square meters) of blanket to unravel.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, since those 5.75 square feet are a fringe, I’ve only unraveled half of that area. So I think I may have only unraveled 0.045% of the blanket.

So I’m thinking “at least I’m getting my NEAT on,” which made me wonder if the science is still good on that.

Looking at the PubMed abstract of an article (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)) from 2002, which may be the original article defining NEAT, I see that this article has been cited in 33 articles total, four articles of them in the last year. Two of the 33 articles were clinical trials.

While I believe that health is more important than waist size and these pages don’t necessarily follow that belief, I also found this page from Harvard Medical School and this page from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. So I guess the NEAT thing isn’t completely out of favor.

Time for another Gratuitous Amazon Link. This is another choice from the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas. This one was good, but really creepy. Our protagonist, Ines, is invited to Catherine House, a school that doesn’t consider itself to be a college or university, but which takes the place of one. The course of study at Catherine House takes three years, and their students are forbidden to leave the grounds during that time. And, of course, as with all of these kinds of books, there is a secret at Catherine House and Ines cannot leave it alone until she finds out what it is.

Home from My Errands

November 2, 2020 4 of 8

I went to the seamstress’s shop and dropped off my purse. I’m getting a new lining with the internal pocket and everything for a very good price. I hope her work is as good as it looks like because I will promote her services to all and sundry if it is.

Then I went for a walk and played Pokemon Go for a couple of hours. I also started a new (slightly imperfectly implemented) project. As I think I mentioned earlier, when Evelyn and I went walking with the dogs this summer, it was hot. Like hot-hot. Like “surface of the sun” hot. And the dogs weren’t fans.

So we’ve been looking for the most shady paths to take. It’s all pretty subjective, though. I mean, “Hey, that place we went walking last week was pretty shady.” So we go there and it takes X amount of walking in the sunshine to *get* to the shady place.

After I dropped off my purse, I hit the Leon Creek Greenway. While I was walking, I took a picture every 10-ish minutes (I missed one and took it three minutes late, so the picture before that was 13 minutes before and the next one was 6 minutes after). I stopped right after my sixth picture and the next time I have time to walk on the greenway (mid-November, probably), I’ll start from where I took that picture and then take pictures every 10 minutes.

This was the most shade I photographed on this outing. We’ll see what happens in future trips.

Then I’ll do the same thing on the Salado Creek Greenway and make movies of each greenway and see which areas of each seem to have more shade and next summer (if there is a next summer), Evelyn and I will take the dogs here.

Now, as I said, this is imperfectly implemented. Ideally, I’d take these pictures from, like 11 am to 1 pm or something, but I enjoy having a job. I don’t have the time to visit the greenway every day during that two hours in order to get a perfect view.

So, the shadows will be longer in some pictures and shorter in others. Maybe if my dad wins the lottery, I can buy a drone and zip the drone down a greenway at noon on a weekday during the summer when there aren’t many people on it and get one perfect shot of exactly what the shade on the greenways look like at noon.

But for now, as long as I’m doing this with shoe leather and a cell phone camera, we’ll get what we get.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link this time, we have The Authenticity Project, by Claire Pooley. Julian Jessop, a fairly well-known artist, decides that most of our problems stem from an inability to be honest about our true selves. So he writes his truth in a notebook and leaves it in a coffee shop, inviting the person who finds it to do the same and leave it somewhere else. In the course of the book, six people find the book, and then they find each other and their lives become more intertwined. I really enjoyed this one and hope that by putting this here, someone else will also find it and enjoy it like I did. This is the Kindle edition.

I Need to Get Moving

November 2, 2020 3 of 8

I got up for-me-extra-early today (8:30) and tried to knock out some words, but I’ve found a new YouTuber that I like (and then found a new one, who really is new — she only has two videos so far) and wrote a post, then watched some videos and unraveled, then wrote another post and watched some videos and unraveled.

I mean, these will all be useful later this month, when I write about these YouTube creators and about the blanket-rebirth project (which really needs a name), but it’s not helping me get my daily stuff done.

Along the way, I also took my Symbicort and ate breakfast, so those are useful, obviously. Today I was planning to go to a seamstress that one of my coworkers uses to get a new lining put into my black purse (it’s a black lining and it’s a nightmare to find anything in that purse) and to get started on a project to determine which of the greenways has the most tree cover (almost said “shade,” which sounded wrong).

It’s now noon and I’ve got to get my showering done and try to figure out what’s going on with Pimsleur Czech on my way to running those errands. I’ll post Czech, the errands, etc. later.

This posts’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for Crossings by Alex Landragin. I enjoyed this one, which is about people who lived in a Polynesian culture hundreds of years ago and where the members of the culture can switch souls with others. Our two protagonists were lovers and they lost each other and now the woman has been hopping from body to body trying to catch up to the man and there’s another order you can read the book in which supposedly also makes sense, but I must have been doing it wrong, because it made less sense to me that way. At any rate, the link is to the hard copy version, because I don’t know how the alternative sequence would work in Kindle. Maybe it’d be easier. I don’t know. I enjoyed the book but not enough to buy the Kindle version, too.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite — WTF?

November 2, 2020 2 of 8

So for some unknown reason the biweekly events in HPWU have been quite a bit harder lately. The other events are kind of more of a challenge, too.

I mean, I can get that as your central player base gets stronger, keeping the challenges pretty easy may cause them to lose interest, but then there’s the casual players like me and the newbies. I finally finished the most recent brilliant event but if I succeed at the weekend event, I’ll be very surprised.

And I’m not the only person who feels that way. During the first brilliant event for October I was, like, I need to up my game on this . . . game and went looking for information and found a lot of people complaining. A number of them said that they used to be gung-ho about this game but now they just get their ten coins for the day and stop.

I think I know that feeling.

I’m not ready to give up yet. but that time may be coming. A new brilliant event starts tomorrow. Let’s see how I feel in a week once that’s over.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time. The Bone Shard Daughter is another Fantastic Strangelings book club book. Like A Deadly Education, it’s the first in a series but is also a self-contained story. It took me a while to get into this one, probably because it jumped around so much. We started with one character and then after a few pages went to another and so on. It took me quite a while to really get a feel for what was going on. I really enjoyed it once I did, though. This link is to the hard copy.

I Have a New Hobby

November 2, 2020 1 of 8

Okay, maybe it’s not technically a hobby, but it is a long-enough-term project that if I end up developing an enjoyment of it, it might count.

Back when I was married, I would get very hot under heavier beadspreads. I would end up sleeping on top of the covers with a thin blanket, rather than under them. I would even develop a rash that looked like a heat rash.

So, once I was single, I went out and bought a big white cotton blanket and dyed it blue-green to coordinate with my bedroom. The blanket was kind of small, so thinking that I might have shrunk it when I dyed it, I bought another in a different color and just left it. I don’t know if I was right about the shrinking but it was larger.

Gratuitous photo time! I’m going through my old photos looking for any that I can edit into something useful. As you can probably tell, this is the Lincoln Memorial. My next two gratuitous photos will also be from my 2010 trip to DC. I wish I’d gotten some better photos of, i think it was Tian Tian. Oh, well. I’ll do what I can with what I have.

Now I’m forgetting. There may have been another blanket along the line that I tossed after I lost Velcro, because as he aged, he needed to pull himself up onto the bed by his claws.

Anyway, eventually I got this kind of sage green blanket, which was also bigger than the teal one. I used this one for *years.* It started to fall apart and I just turned it so that that part wasn’t where I was sleeping and kept going.

Well, I finally gave up on it recently and while I was thinking how much space this thing would take up in my garbage can (it’s huge!), I realized that it’s made of discrete pieces of yarn and decided to unravel it and use that yarn to make a new blanket.

I had no idea how much work would go into unraveling this blanket. I’ve been working on it on and off for a couple of weeks now and I barely have anything unraveled.

I’m probably going to have to will this project to my grandchildren.

I used to knit in front of the television. My new hobby is going to be unraveling a blanket while watching YouTube.

I’m staying in a hotel on Thursday night, so maybe I’ll bring it with me and take a picture and then when I’m in a different hotel on Saturday, I’ll take another picture and see if there’s any progress at all.

Gratuitous Amazon Link! For this post, my book is Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh. After a seven-year absence, Brosh returned with this book and while I hope she doesn’t disappear for seven years again, this was worth the wait. This one is the Kindle version.

The Trials and Travails of A Language Learner

November 1, 2020 4 of 8

Okay, today’s language learning hurdle wasn’t actually too bad from a global standpoint, but it did set my savings back a bit.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m attempting to focus on specific languages for a couple of months at a time. June and July were Spanish, August and September were German, October and November are Chinese, etc.

One of the thing that I’ve been doing is attempting to understand my phone games in each of these languages. Only, when I made my list of languages: Spanish, German, Mandarin, Italian, and Czech, I realized that my games aren’t available in Czech. So I decided to stack Mandarin in my games and Pimsleur Czech in the car and Duolingo Czech.

I put Pimsleur Czech on hold from my library and checked out Pimsleur Lithuanian (because I may qualify for Lithuanian citizenship and so why not?)

Only when I attempted to listen to Pimsleur Lithuanian using my old cell phone and my bluetooth speaker, I missed whole syllables. So eventually I figured out how to get it to come out right, I realized that this is too challenging for something I was doing just to fill in time while I waited for a different challenging language to become available.

So I switched to Pimsleur German and, aside from it being really strangely formal — I mean, they’re inviting each other to their homes for drinks and still calling each other “Sie”? — it mostly just awakened stuff that was already in there somewhere.

After a few days, I checked in on Czech and discovered that I’d missed it. They let me get back in line right behind the person who had it out then and I went back to German and checked in until the other day, when it finally became available again. I tried to listen to it this morning and, remember what happened when I first downloaded Lithuanian? Where I was missing syllables? It’s happening with Czech.

So now I’m racking my brain trying to remember what I did to make Lithuanian work way back a month ago. Hopefully I’ll figure it out pretty soon, because one Pimsleur lesson is $0.60. That’ll go a long way towards bolstering my savings for my modern languages degree.

Well, if all else fails, I can always turn the volume on my phone way, way up and also close my windows. I would very much prefer to get my bluetooth speaker to work, though.

It’s 11 pm now and I need to think about getting to bed. Time change is really not my friend this month. I didn’t get my eight posts in, but just maybe I’ve made my 1,600 word count goal, though. We’ll see once I post my Gratuitous Amazon Link.

The Gratuitous Amazon Link for this post is a goodie — A Deadly Education, by Naomi Novik. It’s a fantasy story about a wizarding school in a world that’s overrun by little evil critters. It’s the first in a series, but it’s also a standalone story all by itself. I’m reading it as part of Jenny Lawson’s Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, and I think it’s my favorite so far.

Writers’ Block

November 1, 2020 3 of 8

So I just had a long conversation with Evelyn and came up with a number of things to write about. And now I can’t remember one of them.

So here’s my list of topics:

  1. travel
  2. writing
  3. reading
  4. crafts
  5. “content creators” (i.e. YouTubers, podcasts, etc.)
  6. medicine (I’m a medical librarian, after all).
  7. adventures in cooking
  8. walking
  9. pets
  10. games
  11. languages
  12. childhood trauma (because why not)

This looks like a good place to start. I can pick eight of these every day (I don’t know if I’m going to really go into my childhood demons or not here in public. But God knows it’d be a fertile topic. I could ramble about that for pages.

This list is just off the top of my head. In future posts I may take this list and rank them from most to least useful. Or maybe I’ll just randomly choose one based on my mood. We’ll see what happens as the month progresses.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! Using my latest idea, to go in reverse chronological order through my Goodreads list, next up is The Tower of Nero, the most recent book in the series (is there a term for a series of series?) that Rick Riordan started with The Lightning Thief. I’m never sure if I should do this as a Kindle edition or hard copy. I opted for Kindle this time. If I ever get a critical mass of readers who do buy these books, I’ll crunch the numbers and see which goes over better then edit as necessary.

My Reading History and My Goodreads Account

November 1, 2020 2 of 8

It’s funny. My handwriting is pretty bad and I get handwriting fatigue pretty easily (this is not a side effect of typing so much — I’ve been shaking my hand to help alleviate the fatigue since long before I ever touched a computer). And when we have multiple bottles of a script to fill at work, there’s a way to set the computer up so that it automatically prints out that number of labels, with “1 of x,” “2 of x,” etc.

There are a few medications that don’t generally have that turned on, like ibuprofen 800, because we don’t usually dispense an entire bottle. So, if I got, like, 180 tablets (we have — I got a script for 270 of them once), I would hand-write the sequence on them. Since my hands tire so easily, I write them “1/6,” “2/6,” etc. and do you know how long it took me before I had to resist the temptation to reduce those fractions?

Anyway, preparatory to using 240 of my 274 books in my Goodreads history as Gratuitous Amazon Links, I’m cleaning up my read dates. So many of those 274 books are things that I read before Goodreads, so I won’t be able to use that tactic on a bunch of them. And, since I’m working on a Nancy Drew reread project, I guess I will be able to try to sell you a copy of The Secret of the Old Clock.* It has a read date.

I guess I’m going to do some rereading, or try to remember which of these hundreds of books I read on or around their release dates and I can fake it. Or both. Probably both.

Also, I’m looking at some of these books and cringing because OMG, so they won’t be Gratuitous Amazon Links.

Oh, and it turns out that only 94 of those books have read dates, so I’ll be doing a lot of rereading and/or estimating. Eeek.

*Look! A not-so-gratuitous Amazon link! We’ll be seeing this again later this month, probably, when the pressure is on for me to post and I forget that I already posted this one.

Warmup Post NaNoWriMo 2020

11/1/20 1 of 8

I don’t know how long this is going to be. I’m not even sure what it’s going to be about. Maybe I’ll just ramble for a couple of hundred words and then post. I know that I’m normally up until, like 1 am or whatever most nights, but I’m already pretty punchy and will probably go to bed soon.

Do I need to do any laundry tonight? That’s a good question that I should research once I’m done with this.

I think that my first post once I’m actually, you know, awake should be a real introduction post like I did in 2015 when I started this blog and then once I finish it and polish it and whatever, I should take Facebook up on the credit that they’re always offering me to promote that post. And if there’s no offer like that now, I guess I’ll wait until there is an offer like that.

It kind of sucks that the first day of the first year in a long time that I’m really putting the effort in on NaNoWriMo I have to work. It’s a short-ish day, though, starting at 10 am and ending at 6 pm. I’ll have to throw together post 2 of 8 during breakfast. Unless I oversleep, in which case I’ll just have to punt.

I should probably try auditioning some more speech-to-text apps. Then I can write while I drive when I need to. I guess that would count as writing, right?

Ack! I just realized that if I’m going to write 240 posts, I need 240 photos and 240 Gratuitous Amazon Links. Maybe I can press my Goodreads account into service here. I’ve shelved 270 books and I’m still digging more out of my subconscious. Maybe I can post 240 of them in reverse chronological order by date written. Well, kind of a hybrid chronological order would be better, I guess. The book that I just finished last night was Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. The one before that was Tower of Nero, which relies on things learned in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the Heroes of Olympus and the first four Trials of Apollo books and skipping those would be counterproductive.

On the other hand, the posts aren’t going to be read in any particular order, so would it really matter which order I post the books in? I don’t know. It’s almost 12:30 am and I’m not thinking really well at the moment.

This would mean, of course, that the very oldest book I’ve ever read (right now the oldest books I have there are the first three Nancy Drew mysteries) would never be a Gratuitous Amazon Link this month.

Thinking of my Goodreads account, I just realized that I’m really far behind on updating them. I just took a break to update. And so now my Read shelf has 274 books on it and so now I have a bunch of Gratuitous Amazon Links lined up, but not anything like 240.

First up, the most recent book I’ve read, Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. It was published in 2012, and there are eight more books in the series so we’ll see how this goes. I really enjoyed this book and some not-quite-spoilery things I’ve read make me think that I might enjoy the rest of the series.

Maybe I’ll write about it later today for my first book blogging post for the month.

Now, let’s see how many words I’ve racked up so far.

Word tells me that it’s 592. That’s a respectable number. Not nearly enough for today, but enough before bedtime.

I’m Starting to Get Nervous

I was really nervous on my way in to work this morning. Not about work, though. About NaNoWriMo. I think I like my plan of attack — eight short posts a day, on various topics including travel, parks, books, cooking, etc.

And, of course, on November 3 and 4, I should have a pretty good topic in the presidential election. If Trump wins again, I should be able to rant about that for quite a while, and if Biden wins, I wonder how many words I can get out of pleased astonishment.

Also, if Trump wins again, I’m going to be sucking on a shot of my dad’s Harvey’s Bristol Cream, so we’ll see what that does for my output.

Gratuitous photo time. This is what I’m pretty sure is the original Espada Dam in the San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. I’ve been walking down the River Walk and I reached this part last time, but totally forgot to take a new picture. This is from 2009; it probably looks pretty much the same now, in all honesty.

I’m going on a short road trip on the, like, 7th and 8th. I’m not sure exactly how it’s going to work, since “my” dog is being spayed on the 6th at my vet’s office. I might take her with me, since she needs to be watched to keep her from overdoing and opening her sutures. How better to keep an eye on her than to have her seatbelted loosely in the back seat of my car, which I am driving?

Well, I’m using too many November words here in October.

I think I might just be able to do this this year.

Wish me luck.

Ack! I was in the process of posting this when I realized that I forgot my Gratuitous Amazon Link. I almost panicked, going, “Oh, my gosh! Which book am I completely going to fail to sell them this time?” Then I realized that Allie Brosh’s second book, Solutions and Other Problems, has already been released. So go forth and don’t buy this book, either.