Blue corn battered black cod with brown rice. Batter is half blue corn, half all-purpose flour, and has paprika, black pepper, thyme, and just a touch of cayenne pepper.
2026-04-30 13:27
Tag: Photography
My recovery needs seem to be rising
I have been meaning for a while to write about how I seem to need more recovery from exercise now than I did five or six years ago. Back in 2020 I could do a hard workout one day, take one rest day, and then come back and do another hard workout. This year I seem to need more rest days to recover. A couple of times recently, I seemed to need six days to recover from a hard lifting session or a long run.
When I mentioned this to my family I got back a chorus of variations on “Getting old sucks.” And it is entirely possible that my recovery capability took a dramatic hit between age 60 and 66. But I didn’t want to just assume that it was aging. I wanted to see if I could figure out if that was actually true.
(I mean, I know that there are a bunch of other changes between than and now that might make a difference in how much recovery time I need. One is that I walk my dog a lot. Although I don’t count those walks as “workouts,” they are still physical activity that requires some amount of recovery. I didn’t have a dog in 2020. I walked plenty then too, but I didn’t go for a long walk every day. Probably only once a week did I walk as far as I do almost every day now. Another is that now I’m trying to train for sword fighting. Those training sessions aren’t usually extremely intense, but sometimes they are, and they’re also somewhat unpredictable, meaning I can’t always line those sessions up with days when I’m ready for a hard workout. Plus, they’re fun—which makes it much easier to end up overdoing it.)
Fortunately, I have my workout logs from 2020—starting right before the pandemic, when I rediscovered the fact that consistency beats intensity when it comes to exercise, and then from the couple of years after that, when the ongoing pandemic meant that I didn’t have to do anything else, and could just exercise as much as I wanted.
I have at least two ideas about things I might do to analyze this:
- Look at the logs. Is what I’m trying to do now (that seems to take so much recovery) more than what I was doing then?
- Replicate those workouts. An experiment I could do is just take a few weeks and do roughly the same workouts I did back in 2020. If that goes well, then maybe my recover capabilities haven’t gotten worse. Maybe I’m just doing harder workouts. Or anyway, workouts that are harder to recover from
So, I did take a first look at those logs, looking to see how much exercise I was doing for the first 30 or so weeks starting right before the pandemic, and how much recovery I was getting. I remember thinking at the time that I should aim for a workout every other day, accepting the reality that I’d occasionally miss a day, and end up hitting about three times a week, which seemed like a good goal. It turns out that, during this period of initial consistency, I was getting in almost three workouts per week as intended: 2.89 ± 0.83 workouts. The numbers showed a slight upward trend, with a few weeks with 4 workouts and almost none with just 2 in the last few weeks.
So that’s a first thing to try: Exercising roughly every other day, rather than overdoing it for several days and then needing several days to recover.
Every-other-day isn’t the only good workout schedule. Since I like working out, I kind of like exercising almost every day. Separately from that test, maybe I can come up with a six-day-a-week schedule that doesn’t overdo it: Just one or two exercises per day, focusing on different muscles, different body parts, and different energy systems from one day to the next.
I have so many things to try! (Along with trying not to overdo it.)
Fencing mask
Most members of my HEMA club have painted their fencing masks in some way that’s meaningful to them.
I had long wanted to do so, but the thing I wanted to paint—the face of a sloth—was going to require at least three shades of brown, which I feared might be difficult to find. But when I finally went and looked on Amazon for acrylic paint markers, I found a set of acrylic markers in 12 different shades of brown!
I ordered them, they arrived yesterday, and I have painted my mask:
My brother confirms that I have met my goal:
2026-03-24 09:3
Just a few days after the equinox, and already you can see that the sun is rising north of due east.
2026-03-17 13:49
Ashley is pleased with her new toy, but perhaps not as pleased as Jackie. 🐕
Bread with all the gluten
When I was 2 years old, I was in the hospital twice with digestive issues, and came out with a diagnosis of celiac.
This was in the very early 1960s, when nobody knew diddly squat about celiac, and there were no gluten-free baked goods, and no indications on labels or menus that all kinds of ordinary things in restaurants and grocery stores had gluten in some form or another. My mom did the best she could to avoid giving me things with gluten in them, and taught me to explain to people who were trying to feed me that I couldn’t eat wheat, oats, rye, or barley.
I think nowadays people think that oats don’t have gluten, but we didn’t know that then, so we did our best to avoid all of them.
I ate this half-assed gluten-free diet until 1976, when went away for 6 weeks to a National Science Foundation summer program. I was living in a college dorm and eating in a college cafeteria, and found it too difficult to follow my diet. I found that my digestion was about the same as before, and just quit worrying about staying gluten-free. (Until I got married, and my wife thought that, if I had celiac, perhaps I should avoid gluten. And it was much easier in the 1990s to find gluten-free food.)
Fast-forward another decade or so. Blood tests for the antibodies to gluten became available. I got those tests done, and discovered that I’d never had celiac.
So, one thing I like to do these days is hark back to having to avoid “wheat, oats, rye, or barley,” and subvert it, by baking bread that contains wheat, oats, rye and barley.
Which I did today:
Artist Date, March 2026
In the years that I was particularly suffering from season depression in the winter months, I found various things that helped. (Click the SAD tag to see various posts on the topic.) One thing that was kind of in the middle in terms of both value and effort was taking myself on an Artist Date. (There’s an Artist Date tag as well.)
Lots of different things can quality as an Artist Date, of course, but I usually used the term to refer to going to someplace (anyplace) that I found inspired me. At the top of the list, because there’s already art, which helps me get into the right frame of mind, is to go to an art museum or an art gallery. But almost as high is going to a natural area, or some place like the Japanese Garden at Japan House.
I haven’t been particularly depressed this winter, but the Krannert Art Museum had an exhibit of textile art that Jackie wanted to see, so we decided to make an artist date of it. On a whim, we added the Conservatory, which has a greenhouse with a bunch of tropical flowers, and is always nice to visit in the winter, because it’s warm and sunny. (Sunniness, of course, depends on the sun being out.)
It’s hard to get a good picture of the art museum, except by just taking pictures of individual works of art, which I don’t like to do (out of courtesy and for copyright reasons), but I thought this one was valid:
There was a term (that I have already forgotten) for having numerous paintings covering the wall, rather than a spaced array of individual paintings.
And this one was produced as part of the WPA’s Federal Arts Project, by artists who were paid a modest wage to make art that belonged to the government (and all such work is copyright-free):
As I said, I wasn’t really depressed, so it didn’t so much matter that the Conservatory greenhouse gave us a clear view of the complete lack of sun:
Still, I’m feeling just a little inspired.
Another Valentine’s Day feast at home
Ten years ago, instead of taking Jackie out to a restaurant and sitting with a bunch of other couples wanting to overpay to order off a “special” Valentine’s Day menu, I decided it would be more fun to cook her my own little feast.
As my inspiration, I reached back to October, 1991, and the very first meal I ever cooked for her. (She was threatening to go home because she was tired, and I said, “No! Stay here! I’ll fix dinner! You can just take a nap and I’ll do everything!”)
Some of the details have varied (the flourless chocolate cake was new maybe 4 years ago), but rock cornish game hens and long-grain and wild rice have always been there.
2026-02-02 09:32
Although it has gotten a bit sunny now, it was very grey at dawn and for a good hour thereafter, so I think we are guaranteed an early spring.
I couldn’t be bothered to take a boring picture of the grey, so instead here’s a picture of moonrise from yesterday’s last dog walk:
2026-01-26 12:16
Jackie and I started baking sourdough long before the pandemic, baking a loaf pretty much every week since the early 1990s.
Today’s loaf: citric acid, ascetic acid, salt, diastatic malt powder, olive oil, honey, oats, bread flour, prairie gold whole wheat flour.
