I was preparing a honey-mustard glaze to put on a ham. The recipe called for dijon mustard, honey, and dark brown sugar—that last, presumably, to make it caramelize nicely. The new jar of honey I opened had crystalized rather completely. So I skipped the brown sugar, and just put in twice as much honey.
It was delicious.
Now I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth updating the recipe, given that I can’t expect to have crystalized honey on-hand all the time.
For most of my adult life, trying to use “intuition” to decide on rest days would have been a terrible idea. If I’d let myself say, “Hmm. I don’t really feel like a workout today,” I’d scarcely have worked out at all. Instead, I came up with a schedule, and stuck to it, either well or poorly.
When I stuck to it well, I’d see progress. When I stuck to it poorly, I wouldn’t.
Starting around 5 years ago or so, something changed in my brain: I started really enjoying my workouts.
Partially, it was that they were working well, which is just satisfying. But it was more than that. First, I noticed that I felt better after a workout. Then I started feeling better during a workout. Instead of it being hard to motivate myself to work out, I craved workouts.
People who knew me were mildly disturbed by this. It was unlike me. It was certainly unlike them. I would not be surprised if they began to suspect that I was some sort of pod-person.
Because I wanted to work out nearly every day, I would sometimes wonder if I was over-training (or under-recovering), but that’s not trivially easy to determine in the moment.
I’ve long tracked my workouts, but not really in a consistent way—I’d just write down what I did that day. Sometimes I could look back and say, “Wow. That looks like a serious workout,” and other times I’d look back and say, “Was that really a workout?” But often times it wasn’t clear either way.
Just lately though, I’ve been doing the Mark Wildman workout programs that I mentioned a few weeks ago. That gives me a pretty consistent metric. I’m doing three different programs, each of which has 4 to 7 different levels, each of which can be done with an almost infinite range of weights, but they all have a consistency in design: start with a light weight, work up in complexity, then bump up the weight but go back down in complexity. If you’re consciously attempting to make progress, then it’s pretty easy to make each workout “count” as a workout, while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout.
But while avoiding overdoing it in any particular workout is good, it is possible to do that, and yet get over-trained, simply by doing too many workouts with inadequate recovery.
So, today I went back over my past 3 months’ training log entries. For my first cut at this, I’m just counting rest days. I figure that I want to work out either 5 or 6 days a week, which makes any week where I have either 1 or 2 rest days a “good” week.
In the past 13 weeks I’ve had 1 week with 0 rest days, 1 week with 3 rest days, and 1 week with 4 rest days. All the rest were “good” weeks with either 1 or 2 rest days.
That’s just about perfect. The usual advice is to take a “deload” week every 4 to 6 weeks, so 2 weeks out of 13 being weeks with extra rest just about hits the nail on the head. The one week with 0 rest days was probably just an artifact of rest days falling outside of one calendar week—not a big deal, as long as it’s rare.
Anyway, the intuitive rest days seem to be working well. I’m getting in my workouts, and I’m getting in adequate rest. I guess I can stick with it for a while.
Today’s workout was 2-handed club swinging followed by abs.
The main workout went fine, but when I started the ab workout, Ashley had come upstairs. She found the postures of my workout (hollow-body, plank, etc.) to be very provocative, inspiring her to want to help.
“help”
I made a couple of political donations during the last election cycle. Now, every single day I get an email request for another donation, with some statement along the lines of:
“We are rapidly approaching the first fundraising deadline of 2025.”
But, you know what? I don’t care diddly-squat about fundraising reporting deadlines. What I want to know is what you’ll do with my donation to advance my priorities. Your artificial “deadline” means nothing to me, so as soon as you start talking about a reporting deadline, I stop reading your begging letter, and go on to my next email message.
Jackie and I call this path, along the top of the berm along the north edge of our little prairie, the High Road. There used to be a Low Road (down by the creek) and a Middle Way (in between), but they’re no longer mowed.
The sunrise is just a bonus.
While waiting for the bus to go to my Esperanto group meeting last night, I admired how these clouds were nearly the same orange as the barrels under them. (The water main break is fixed, I think. Now they need to fix the road.)
🎶 These snoots were made for boopin’, and that’s just what they’ll do! / Sooner or later these snoots are gonna boop all over you (do-do-do, do-do-do, do-do-do) 🎶
A group of friends and I agreed last week that the most likely result of the most likely policies coming out of this administration is stagflation.
Talking about it reminded me of the Wise Bread post I wrote All about stagflation, so I re-read that. I think has held up pretty well, even though circumstances (financial crisis followed by a pandemic) meant that things didn’t play out as I’d expected. Even so, I think the analysis of how to produce a stagflation is right on: raise interest rates to bring down inflation, but then panic when it’s clear that you’re in danger of producing a recession and cut rates before you’ve gotten inflation under control; repeat until you have high inflation and a recession.
That is, stagflation is usually the result of a timid Fed, that’s afraid to do its job.
The thing is, the policies that I see coming (tariffs and tax cuts) will produce stagflation even if the Fed does a great job. The tariffs directly raise prices, and the tax cuts (through increased deficits) raise interest rates, producing a recession.
In the Wise Bread article I warn that it’s tough to position your investments for stagflation. The reason is that inflation makes the money worth less (helping people with debts, but hurting people with money), while the recession hurts people with debts and people with investments.
Upon reflection though, I don’t think it’s quite that bad. In fact, it’s really just regular good financial advice:
Basically: live within your means and stay liquid.
Some years ago I came this close to setting up a rule that any email message with the word “webinar” in it be sent directly to spam. I never got around to it, and I guess I’m glad I didn’t, because I just attended a rather interesting webinar on “Fixing Chicago Union Station” by the High Speed Rail Alliance.
Enjoy the poster below, which is very cool, even though unrelated to Chicago.
I told Ashley that she’s “The number one girl in my eyes.”
Then I had to carefully explain that this did not mean that she should boop me in the glasses with her snout.
