93 pounds down. 7 to go. It feels like hubris to say that.
I should hit my goal of 185 pounds on or about 5/23/2025.
At that point, I’ll eat a little more.
That’s it. That’s the end of my weight loss saga.
At least, that’s the plan.
Category: Uncategorized
Post #2112: Oh, the price of gold is rising out of sight
Oh the price of gold is rising out of sight
And the dollar is in sorry shape tonight
What the dollar used to get us now won’t buy a head of lettuce
No the economic forecast isn’t right
But amidst the clouds I spot a shining ray
I can even glimpse a new and better way
And I’ve devised a plan of action worked it down to the last fraction
And I’m going into action here today.
From: I’m changing my name to Chrysler, recorded by Arlo Guthrie.
Gold blew through $3100 an ounce this morning.
When the stock market is making new highs, everybody steps up to take credit for it.
But gold? Nope. Nobody ever takes credit for a rising price of gold. Given the cheapness and ubiquity of public lies these days, you’d think some prominent braggart would try. But nobody ever tries to own a rise in the price of gold. That’s because a rapidly rising price of gold is never good news. And peaks in the price of gold tend to occur when the 💩 is in the process of hitting the 🚁.
What caught my eye about $3100 is that this has to be getting close to setting a new record for the price of gold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. (In the modern era, where the dollar price of gold has been allowed to float. Post-1970, say.)
If I take the prior price peaks (red arrows I added to the chart above) and use the BLS inflation calculator to express them in 2025 dollars, I find that we’re now just 14% below the all-time high price of gold in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.
So, when Guthrie sang about the rising price of gold, in the context of the 1979 bail-out of Chrysler, following two Arab oil embargoes, the resulting energy crises, two long, deep U.S. recessions, and the near-destruction of the U.S. auto industry with its lack of energy-efficient cars, in a context of persistent double-digit rates of inflation … the price of gold, in real terms, was somewhat higher than it is today.
I’m trying to take some comfort in that. Either things aren’t as bad now, as they were then. Or they aren’t as bad, yet.
Either way: Eat, drink and be merry.
My most recent prior post on this topic was from half a year ago:
Post #2110: Filibuster is a one-directional filter, an apology for Democratic inertia.
This is a brief note-to-self on the one-way nature of the filibuster.
The Democrats in the Congress seem to be getting some grief for not doing much to stop the dismantling/destruction of fill-in-the-blank (the Federal government, NATO, international trade, our system of justice, and so on).
And while that is true, to all appearances, I think it’s mostly the case that there’s not much they can do.
Which brings me to the filibuster, as I understand it. In the Senate, if the majority is under 60%, the minority party can use the filibuster rules to stop new legislation from being passed. Or considered. Whatever.
The operative phrase there is “stop new legislation”. The filibuster allows the (significant) minority party in the Senate to stop the opposing party’s new legislative initiatives.
But suppose stopping legislation isn’t your problem. Instead, in this case, you are begging for The Senate to Take Some Action. (That’s more-or-less what you’re calling for. Which, for the Senate, I think means passing something.) And nothing is happening, despite apparent gross overstep of the Executive.
In the current situation, the filibuster doesn’t do spit for the minority party. The action of the majority can be stopped. The inaction of the majority can’t.
As I see it, Republicans in the Congress have given up enforcing some basic tenets of the Constitution. Which, as with all laws, only really exist if they are enforced, or at least believed to be enforced.
I can only assume that, in exchange, this allows the Executive to do things they (Republicans in the Congress) agree with, without having to pass laws to achieve those outcomes. An ends-justify-means thing, maybe.
The moral of the story is that if the Republican Congress won’t enforce the Constitution — and I think Jan 6 made that clear — those parts of the law that would require the Congress to step up to the plate are suspended.
This is as good an explanation as any of having entered an era where any legal fig leaf will do. Hence the spate of hitherto-unrecognized national emergencies. E.g, Fentany smuggling at the Canadian border justifies a 25% tariff on Canadian metals and machinery. And if that just chops apart the North American car assembly system — except maybe Tesla — then, well, oops.
This is classic bad policy-making. And it’s what we get, with an autocrat.
Conclusion
I don’t think the Founding Fathers anticipated having a branch of government simply refuse to defend its legal prerogatives. That is, a Congress enabling the President to do as he pleases.
At the extreme, if the House won’t impeach, and the Senate won’t convict, no matter what, there can be no constitutional crisis. The flip side of which is that any law that requires enforcement by action of the Congress is effectively suspended for the duration, at the convenience of the President.
And for the minority party of the Senate, where filibuster is your main tool, I think you’re just kind of out of luck. You’ll be allotted your time to speak in public hearings. I think the Senate still functions to that extent. Beyond that, it’s a Republican Congress, they seem to be OK with this, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.
Two years of this is locked in. Plan accordingly.
Post #2109: A glimpse of clarity
Dual State
I don’t normally say “you should read this”, but you should read this, in The Atlantic: America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State, by Aziz Huq. That term — the dual state — crystallized a whole lot of what’s been going on.
Read. Or read not. The full thing is behind a paywall.
It’s not something that can be easily nutshelled.
The economic gist is that continued rule-of-law, for the little people, is of great economic value. In essence, it’s increasingly harder to do normal business as civil order breaks down. E.g., Nobody’s stupid enough to turn off the electricity over an ideological difference. So far.
The end product is the dual state. Partly, it’s a place that seems to be governed in a fairly normal fashion (particularly if you are fairly mainstream), but with an increasingly large “other” sphere of government run as if it were unrestrained by law, essentially life at the whim of the King-and-Advisors.
You hope you’re living your life outside of their sphere of interest.
You keep on keeping on.
And you wish somebody could keep that lawless behavior in check.
But if the House won’t impeach and the Senate won’t convict, there can be no Constitutional crisis, because the Congress (currently) will not invoke the powers granted to it by the Constitution.
The Supreme Court doesn’t impeach. The Congress won’t. Ergo, no Constitutional Crisis.
Subscribing. I’ve been doing a lot of subscribing. It’s the least I can do. Or damn near. And occasionally I read something that clarifies the picture.
First they came for the Socialists,
This entire genre of memes can now be classified as common corollary of the dual state.
If, at first, neither the King nor his minions take exception to you, then, presumably, you are OK. At least in the sense of being safe, for now.
You do have to worry, though, if there’s not some sort of internal dynamic at work. To maintain something like this, don’t you always have to have an an enemy. And, as you succeed in cowing/conquering your enemies, don’t you nedd a continuous supply of fresh enemies? At which point, you turn from a simple yes/no safe/not-safe binary, to more of a continuous variable: If there’s an enemies list, and there’s an imperative to keep it fresh, then how far down the list are people like me?
All else aside, the size or extent of that safe space remains unknown.
Putting aside the entire issue of that the unsafe space — the “whim of the King” portion of Dual Government — should not exist.
Canada
I see so much peppy upbeat messaging about what’s gone on in Canada recently.
Au contraire mon frère.
What we’ve seen, mostly, is how people pull together in the face of a common external enemy.
Not sure that’s a great lesson to be offering the folks next door, right now.
Conclusion
The Atlantic article by Huq (above) noted that not all dual states end up in massive wars.
Cold comfort is better than no comfort at all.
Post #2108: AIOMG
As in, OMG, I didn’t realize AI could do that.
If you think you’re having those AIOMG moments more and more frequently, that it is not your imagination. AI is improving and morphing faster than you — or at least, I — would have believed possible.
A month is like a year, stuff that’s two months old is passe. This stuff is improving not at the speed at which software improves, but at the speed of learning.
It’s hard to know where to start.
Join the Borg
After doing my last post, I realized that now I can easily post transcriptions of my own voice recordings. In effect, the written transcription of a one-person podcast. So I'm using my phone like an old-style dictaphone, turning it on and off after I compose my thoughts and come up with a complete sentence. Weirdly, I find that this has much the same effect on my language processing as does using a typewriter. There's a real premium on getting your shit together first and then speaking, and not the other way around.
Dictation is nothing new. Anything voice-activated or with speech-to-text capability already does this. My TV remote does this. Everybody’s phone does this. And so on.
And it’s not as if I haven’t tried this in the past. But the speech-to-text function in (say) 2013 Microsoft Word left a lot to be desired. I tried to integrated it into my business, but it was so error-ridden as to be worse than unusable.
Whereas this current generation of AI-driven speech-to-text produces perfect transcriptions. Or, if not perfect, then about as close as one could possibly hope for.
And it’s a different thing to do it for my own self, for this purpose. I’ve already had somebody knowledgeable tell me to try this, if for no other reason than to offer the consumer a choice of format. But I never thought I might substitute talking this blog, for writing it.
What I’ve done above is a bit different because I did it dicatation-style, not podcast-style. That is, the transcript is meant to be used as-is, with little or no editing, as a written product. This requires taking the time to compose and speak in complete, logical sentences. So I’m not sure how much time this saves, relative to writing it out from the start.
But it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to practice doing that, every once in a while. That is, thinking before you speak. Not in an attempt at censoring myself, but merely in an attempt to speak coherently, instead of the usual logorrhea.
Transcribed podcasts, by contrast, are meant to be interpreted as conversational English. Even when consumed as a written transcript. There, the transcription is not intended to read as if it were … written, if you get the drift. Even if you take out all the uhs and ers, it’ll be as non-linear and piecemeal as conversation is. Even the best off-the-cuff speakers will break many rules of written grammar.
The death of knowledge-worker career paths for middle-class upward mobility.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with a fellow who's deeply involved with AI. And the one thing we agreed upon is that AI is going to kill entry-level positions and mid-level positions in the knowledge worker industries. I think this shuts down a common path to upward mobility for the current middle class. And for sure, it ain't going to do anything good for Vienna, VA property values, because we are in the middle of a knowledge worker area. What this does to the value of an education is anybody's guess, but my guess is that it reduces it on average substantially with all the knock-on that implies for the U.S. education industry.
This is AI replacement theory, in a nutshell, first discussed in:
And the whole operation is now driven by firehoses of money. Those firehoses deriving from the elimination of (forerly) paying, staffed junior positions. The work model moves from Principal and junior staff, to Principal and some AIs. The first person to be able to claim to eliminate or reduce job X, Y, or Z can grab some of the savings from elimination of those (paying, human) jobs.
This, not unlike any other labor-saving invention, ever. It’s just that, in part, it’s labor that I used to do. This time they’re coming after my job. If I still had a job.
Conclusion: This seems like the final shredding of the U.S. middle class.
My brain is having a hard time adjusting to the fact that it is now largely obsolete. I am not alone in this feeling. Just today, my wife commented that many of the jobs she held, earlier in her life, will be all-but-eliminated by AI.
I note, parenthetically, that the rapid, flawless transcripts (in plain text, above) are from TurboScribe, which costs $20 a month ($10 if I’d commit to a year). Practically speaking, unlimited use.
There used to be a profession of “transcriptionist”. I can recall it taking week(s) to get the transcripts back from monthly public meetings. I haven’t checked, but I’d bet that’s a thing of the past.
Intellectually, I get it. I grew up in the pre-calculator era, when arithmetic was done with paper and pencil. Those arcane skills have been essentially useless for decades, and I have not overly mourned their loss of relevance.
Intellectually, I realize that professions wax and wane in their economic importance. E.g., the fraction of the work force engaged in broad categories such as agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and so on have changed over time.
Of late, I’d say that the urban information worker, broadly defined, was King.
And, AI may not de-throne him, but for sure, it’s going knock down the population employed in that “industry” a peg. Anybody who makes their living doing the grunt-work of knowledge work — the junior attorney, the research assistant, the para-this or para-that — I’d expect that a lot of those jobs are going and they’re not coming back.
By contrast, I draw a sharp distinction with robotics. I’m guessing that anybody who actually (in whole or in part) handles solid objects will be OK. An AI-equipped robot is still a robot. I don’t expect (e.g.) robot electricians any time soon.
As a final Vienna Lemma: Areas that benefit greatly by the presence of many information workers will likely be adversely affected, economically, by the next phase of the AI revolution.
I bet property prices around here are going to take a hit. To some small degree, from the first round of attacks on Federal employment. But more generally, Vienna is like the epicenter of housing for an affluent information-worker-centered workforce.
We’ll see. It takes a lot to rattle the housing market in this area. Even in 2008, when the housing bubble collapsed (and nearly took the U.S. banking system with it), real estate prices in Vienna were merely flat-ish for a few years.
At any rate, a significant decline in real estate prices would be interesting, for at least the reason that it hasn’t happened here (in Vienna, VA) for a long time.
Maybe we’ll finally see the end of the tear-down boom. But I’ve predicted that several times before.
Post #2105: From Citizens United to Citizen Musk.
The perfect post to write on a drizzly, overcast day.
I woke up grumpy this morning and have seen no reason to change.
From Citizens United to Citizen Musk.
I think there’s an obvious line to draw between the first, and the second.
If you step back from it, Musk effectively bought (partial) control of the Federal government for a mere quarter-billion dollars. Which, when all is said and done, is pocket change for a guy with a net worth in the hundreds of billions.
So … if that’s now OK … aren’t there a whole lot of other similarly-well-off people for whom that amount might likewise seem like a trivial investment? If nothing else, you can’t take it with you. No shortage of uber-rich old people in this world.
And so, this morning, my bet is that the current odd regime — Trump/Musk whatever-it-is — is just the first.
Eventually, I think the Supreme Court will figure out that what they did, not in theory, but now in actual practice. They put the Government of the United States up for sale. Not just to the current whatever-it-is Trump/Musk thing. But the likely string of similar ones that will now replace it, as ownership of the Federal government changes hands.
The technology has been proven, so to speak. Do you have a strong personal interest in the direction of Federal government? Is that direction radically different from the direction it is taking now? (Answer: Yes, because if not, you’d work through the existing government, not remake it.) Do you have a spare quarter-billion to spend? Do you have a Dr. Strangelove-ian uncontrollable Hail Victory! urge?
I think a lot of people might qualify, based on the first three questions, anyway.
And, like America’s Cup, it only takes one or a few of the super-rich, every four years or so, to keep the game going.
So, just at a time when AI has supercharged the effectiveness of propaganda, where disinformation is already rife in an America stupid enough to get its “real” news from social networks …
The Supreme Court opened and allows this pathway to control of the Federal government.
And … yeah, that’s going to turn out to be a bad thing.
But we’re stuck with it. With Trump/Musk, and its similar successors — until Citizens United is reversed. As I see it.
Until that time, anybody who thinks he can fill Musk’s shoes seems legally welcome to take a shot at it.
So, I say, think of Musk not as the interloper, but as the pioneer.
And have a nice day.
Post #2104: Ninety pounds and still a loser.
My weight loss has now reached the point of being boring. To me, I mean. I’ve always been able to bore other people with it.
In any case, as I pass 90 pounds lost, two months after I passed 80 pounds lost, all I need do is rewrite the prior post, plugging in the current numbers.
This morning I weighed 205 195 pounds. So I’m calling it 80 90 pounds lost, in just under a year and a half, since I embarked on this course back in September 2023. My BMI is now just under 28 over 26. If I can lose another 20 10 pounds, I’ll finally make it to the upper limit of “normal” weight.
Otherwise, I just seem to have settled down to a sustainable routine.
I have posted on this topic before.
This post summarizes a few more things that I didn’t expect from losing that much weight.
1: Wardrobe turnover speeds up as you get thinner.
Socks, gloves, and hats are the only clothing I retain from my obese days. Everything else has gone to the thrift shop/rag bag. Underwear, outerwear, and all that fits between. And shoes, as my old shoes were both too loose and too stiff-soled for a lighter me.
At first, passing along my now-oversized clothes was kind of exciting. It wasn’t merely the positive reinforcement. It felt a bit risky to get rid of my 2XL stuff. The promise being that I’d never again need it.
But it’s edging into pain-in-the-(less-voluminous)-butt territory. It seems to me that, far from settling down as I near my target weight of 185, the pace of change has sped up. I’m getting rid of too-large jeans that I bought new, maybe half a year ago. Ditto for putting holes in belts that I know I’ve modified recently.
Turns out, that’s not an illusion. A little simple (?) calculus shows that, for a constant monthly weight loss, your reduction in waist size speeds up as your waist gets smaller.
Formally, model the male torso as cylinder of fat, of radius R. Belt size is the circumference of the cylinder, 2πR. Your weight is proportional to πR2H, the volume of the cylinder of height H. Calculus tells us that the derivative of weight with respect to radius (d(πR2H)/dR = 2πRH. That is, it’s proportionate to your belt size. So, if I lose the same amount of weight every month, I have to lose more inches off my waist at a lower belt size, than at a higher one. Bottom line, between where I started (46″) and now (36″), if I continue to lose weight at a constant five pounds per month, I now have to re-size my clothes about 25% more often (46/36 =~ 1.25).
It’s not a huge effect, but it’s dead opposite of what I expected. I expected the changes to slow down as I approached my target weight. But, in fact, if the weight loss occurs at a constant 5 pounds per month — a consequence of aiming for a roughly 500 calorie deficit each day — wardrobe changes speed up a bit as I get thinner.
That’s just a consequence of there being less of me, to contribute to the five-pounds-a-month weight loss.
2: I enjoyed my last gym workout.
I recognize the above as a properly constructed sentence.
But I do not recognize it as anything I was ever likely to say. Nor, to my certain knowledge, had I ever said anything remotely like that in the past.
Until my last trip to the gym where, after doing some token weight-lifting, I did the ultimate old-guy thing. I spent an enjoyable, low-intensity hour on the elliptical, sweating in time to the oldies. Courtesy of:
Anyway, between the weight loss, and the obvious beneficial knock-on effects on (e.g.) the bones of my feet, being in better shape, and eating adequate protein, I’m feeling pretty chipper, physically.
I’ve never hugely disliked going to the gym. I’ve been doing it all my adult life.
But this whole enjoying-the-workout thing is a new one on me.
Conclusion: Sometimes boring is good.
I have no diet secrets to offer you. At this point, I think there are no diet secrets.
Weight loss is all about calories eaten, versus calories burned. From that standpoint, all calories are equal, and it makes no difference what you eat. Only how much. There are no magic weight-loss foods.
Your new diet is forever. If I go back to eating as I used to eat, I’ll go back to weighing what I used to weigh. With the obvious-but-needs-to-be-stated corollary that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as you get there.
Your tastes will change. Or, more properly for me, my cravings changed. I’d heard people say that would happen, but I absolutely did not believe it until it happened to me. I still like all the foods that I used to eat, back when I was fat. But I don’t eat them now. And, importantly, I don’t miss them. I don’t crave them.
Slip into your new diet slowly, by identifying and correcting the worst dietary faults first. For me, this started with eliminating booze. Once I was sober, then my habit of eating “starch bomb” meals (e.g., bowl-of-pasta) was clearly next up on the had-to-go list. So that went. And so on. Until I eventually got to how and what I eat now (mostly salads, fruits, whey protein, lean meat, non-starchy cooked vegetables. And cheese.
But that’s me. A life without cheese is a life not well-lived.
But you? You eat whatever and however you want, as long as you keep within your calorie limit. And, eventually, you’ll get smart enough to avoid the foods that make that hard for you to do that. You’ll figure out what works for you, over time. You evolve your own diet.
Lose two ounces a day. Aim for no more than a pound a week weight loss. Use an on-line calculator to determine your daily calorie needs as a sedentary person. (See below for accounting for exercise). Subtract 500 from that to get your daily calorie target. Eat that many calories, roughly. Assess the accuracy of that estimated 500-calorie-a-day calorie deficit by crudely tracking your weight and monitoring your level of hunger.
You’ll get a lot of dieting advice on eating specific foods, and avoiding others. Some diets want you to exclude entire food groups (e.g., no carbs, no fat, etc.).
That sort of extreme skewing of your food mix may work for you. But what works for me is eating a balanced diet, with just three twists.
First, everyone agrees that you should avoid “starchy carbs” or “refined carbs”. I’ll agree, to the extent that any servings of that need to be kept small. So, I still eat bread, but only in the form of the occasional 100-calorie slider roll. But I no longer eat pasta, even though that was a mainstay in my obese days. In any case, large portions of simple carbs mess up your metabolism. An hour later and you’ll be hungry again, metaphorically speaking.
Metabolism-wise, having a big portion of some high-glycemic-index food is not doing yourself any favors. Doing that routinely, even more so.
Second, savory “ultra-processed” foods — I’d guess Doritos are the poster child there — I cannot have in the house. Because, even after all this time, I’ll binge them if they are around. Hilariously enough, artificially-cheese-flavored rice cakes fall into this category. Rice cakes? They are only 45 calories each, but I end up inhaling them if I start eating them.
Compare that to, say, a nice, savory cabbage soup. Even though I make a fine cabbage soup, somehow I seem to have no trouble, whatsoever, stopping after one bowl of cabbage soup. It’s tasty. Sometimes it’s borderline delicious, in a cruciform-vegetable kind of way. But it just doesn’t hot-wire my brain and light it up the way the artificial cheese flavor does, in those rice cakes.
So, I respect my limit and just don’t go near the stuff.
Third, as noted, I use whey protein powder as a significant source of low-calorie protein. Otherwise, with so few calories available daily, to meet the USDA protein recommendation, I’d have to eat nothing but meat. More-or-less.
In particular, I have found “protein pudding” (the Jello variant) over frozen berries to be a mainstay of my diet. It tastes like sweet chocolate ice cream, but provides as much protein as a serving of meat. I also put the flavored stuff in my coffee, in lieu of milk or other coffee creamer.
I offer no apology for resorting to these artificial products (whey powder, Jello sugar-free pudding). Without them I’d have a hard time meeting both my daily calorie maximum (~1700 calories) and my daily protein minimum (1 gram protein per KG body weight).
Beyond that, I just eat in small amounts. Space those out over the day. Absolutely standard diet advice. So I eat three or four small (300-calorie) items (e.g., salad with salad dressing), plus three or four 100-calorie snacks (e.g., an apple). Plus however much cheating I feel comfortable with that day. And makeup calories for any extra burned at the gym. All with an eye toward eating an average of about 500 calories a day less than what I need to maintain my weight.
Exercise calories are accounted for separately, as I do it. On days when I exercise at the gym, I eat to make up for those additional calories spent. (But note that you must net out your basal metabolic rate from whatever calorie count you get for a given exercise. E.g., if I burn 600 calories in an hour on the elliptical exerciser, I get to eat an additional 400 calories of food that day. The 200/hour slippage is the calories I’d have burnt in that hour merely by being up and about — calories already accounted for in the “sedentary calorie need” calculation done at the very start.
Practically speaking, this adds a whole new dimension of “bonus” to exercise. I get to eat more, on a gym day. Not hugely more. Ideally, only as much more (in calories) as I burned at the gym.
And that’s it. No secrets. Aim for slow weight loss. No alcohol. Avoid large servings of anything with a high glycemic index. Eat lots of fruits and non-starchy vegetables. Get plenty of roughage.
Lift weights to keep up your muscle mass as you diet. Eat a gram of protein a day per kilogram of body weight.
In hindsight, all I’ve done is follow standard, mainstream dieting advice.
But only as a last resort.
Post #2101: Anyone who is surprised when we no longer have free elections is not paying attention.
This is just a note-to-self.
And it’s just a simple matter of logic.
With all the broad new powers being claimed by the current Republican President, and the purge of the military (including the JAGs), the FBI, and our national security apparatus …
… do you really think they’re going to let those new powers fall into the hands of a Democrat?
And so, if our excursion into South American-style goverment-by-oligarchy somehow proves unpopular with the masses, it’s pretty much a given that free and fair elections are history.
I would say, plan for the future accordingly.
In any case, I’m just putting down a marker, with this post, in case somebody is somehow surprised, three and a half years from now.
Post #2097: Ripping thrifted CDs.
One of my local thrift shops had a two-for-one sale on music CDs. A dollar a disk, for any music CD on the shelf.
I decided to gamble a few dollars.
I got more than I bargained for, in a good way.
Ripping thrifted CDs. One part nostalgia. One part entertainment. One part psychotherapy.
Zero parts algorithm.
Post #2096: Fire and fat, on a snow day.
Snow day today.
No need to shovel it, is my guess. Rain and above-freezing temps should take care of it in short order. Streets are already clear, as shown.
This, in contrast to the last one, where the snow and ice hung around owing to the much colder weather.
It’s shaping up to be just a short-lived covering of the snow-sleet-rain-freezing rain-drizzle delight that is “wintry mix”.
It’ll soon be gone. Let it be. Plus, I don’t much feel like shoveling.
Part 1: Fire
Wood. Think of it as natural gas’s costlier, stinkier, noisier, whinier cousin. Just in case you were thinking how lovely it might be to heat with wood.
Sure, wood is a perfectly usable home heating fuel, if you’ve got an appliance to burn it in. Which I do, in the form of a modern fireplace insert.
But I thought over the pros and cons, and in my situation, I decided against burning wood for home heating. For a lot of reasons.
But now I’m back to burning firewood, to heat a part of my house. In the burbs.
When, in theory, the same part of my house could be heated quite nicely with gas-fired hot-water baseboard heat. Run off a 95% efficient boiler, yet.
Heating with wood, in the circumstances as described, is every bit as dumb as it sounds, from any number of perspectives, including but not limited to cost, outdoor air quality, indoor air quality, convenience, noise level, waste disposal, required routine maintenance, and so on.
In this context, wood has maybe three saving graces. The big visible fire in a modern glass-fronted wood stove looks nice. As a fuel, it has lower carbon footprint than natural gas or (in my area) electricity. (The wood I burn was atmospheric C02 just 10 years ago, on average, based on a typical 30-year-old tree limb or trunk in my firewood. But due consideration must be given to the (very large, very brief) atmospheric warming effects of the resulting soot emissions.) And, third, it’s robust emergency heat.
I’m burning wood because my gas-fired baseboard heating system is busted. And that system, alone (no heat pumps) heats the ground-level (den) of the house. A pipe in that hot-water baseboard heating system froze and burst, during the recent cold snap. Not the first time this particular pipe has done so. But until I feel like peeling the siding off that corner of the house to get to it, that system is going to stay broken.
In any case, the fire inside a modern glass-fronted wood stove is a practical thing of beauty. Looks nice, and your toes can get toasty in front of it. But all things considered, out here in the ‘burbs, I think it’s best to treat it as an occasional luxury. And, rarely, use it as true emergency heat.
Or, as I’m using it now, heat when you have no reasonable alternative.
Wood heat is both a chore and a health burden on you and others. Burning it all day, every day, makes little sense in my circumstances.
Part 2: Fat. A brief essay an aerobic exercise after significant healthy weight loss, for a 66-year-old guy.
Thanks to 80 pounds of weight loss, I can now do some aerobic exercises “like a younger me”, so to speak.
This has a tinge of the surreal to it, because I still feel like an old man. Practically speaking, the only way in which I feel lighter is when going up and down stairs. Arguably, my joints hurt less now (than they did when I was obese). And my feet. But in general, the whole apparatus — my muscoloskeletal system — still creaks and cracks and groans and aches. As does, metaphorically, the rest of me.
The upshot is that you kind of turn back the clock …
… but only on your level of fitness.
The jalopy runs faster after a tune-up. But it remains a jalopy.
Objectively — and not exactly a high bar — for any sort of aerobic or strength-to-weight exercise, I’m a lot more fit now than I have been for decades. But I still feel like an old man.
Never dealt with that combination before. I can’t find any one word that quite describes the experience.