Seems Like Work

6FPS V7#11: November 10, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Daylight Savings time has ended, and sunset today is 4:45PM. Welcome to the big dark.

I was talking to an old Apple friend who also now lives up here in Seattle proper, and asked him what the big difference was for him. His answer was “seasons”. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but he’s right. Growing up in Southern California, seasons were basically a thing we joked about, and even in Silicon Valley, it more or less boiled down to the wet season and the hot season. Here, especially with the huge difference run sunlight between Summer and Winter, seasons really happen, and for the most part, I love it. Although to be honest, I would also love to see us do away with the twice a year time change.

As part of moving into fall and getting ready for winter, we had the sprinkler system turned off and winterized, and the folks who maintain the fountain came out and cleaned it up and made sure it was working well. And with that, as far as I can tell, we’re ready for the next few months.

Which, if the last month is any hint of what’s coming, will be cool and damp. We’ve had a few nice rains so far, including one going on as I type that’s dropped over 2” in the last 24 hours and will continue on for a while longer. I know all the trees really appreciate it after some warmer and dryer than usual summers.

We saw our first Fox Sparrow of fall under the feeder, so it’s definitely the time when the winter birds are arriving. Out around the area, the winter birds are arriving, and I’ve seen my first Horned Grebes of fall as well as a small group of Pacific Loons, and I’m looking forward to seeing the winter birds arriving in force.

The Mariners fell short against Toronto, and Toronto lost out to the Dodgers by literally one base, and the baseball playoffs this season were fun and interesting to watch. But now it’s hockey season, and the Kraken are playing really well, and I’ve been very happily surprised to see how much better the Sharks are so far this season; rebuilds can be painful but are a necessary evil in pro sports if you’re not a team with unlimited budgets like the Yankees or Dodgers. But the Sharks feel like they’ve found their next goalie and have turned the corner on getting back into being competitive for the playoffs. I think it’s going to be a fun season.

A Nice Milestone

A thing I’ve been working on but haven’t talked about until now has hit a nice milestone. Back in July when Covid caught up with me, one thing it did was push my weight up a few pounds, and I hit 335, which pissed me off. This had been while I was working hard to up my step count and exercise to see if I could walk some of the weight off, which after a couple of months was clear wasn’t happening.

So, I decided it was time to fix the diet and cut the calories. I went with one of those new and trendy high tech high tech things — the food diary (using the MyFitnessPal app), and it quickly showed that I was eating way too much at lunch every day. Some fairly minor tweaking and in two days I’d removed about 400 calories a day from a typical lunch. Along the way I shifted to much higher quality carbs, and now I’m typically eating 100% whole wheat bread for the morning toast and sandwiches. I was able to cut my daily calories 2900ish to 2300 or so a day without in any way feeling like it was a diet, except for giving up the ice cream, even though it was “only” about 100 calories a night — for not.

(as an aside, the Yassoo frozen yogurt bars are only about 90 calories each, and are really well flavored and highly recommended)

Since then I’ve been losing about 4 pounds a month, and this morning I checked in at 222, or about 4% of body weight down. I’ll note that the trip I took in September was after I made changes and I tried to stick to things on the road, and successfully lost weight while traveling, and I’ll take that as a nice in.

Dropping 13 pounds in two and half months is nice progress, but I have a long way to go. It’s a nice milestone, though, because I have finally started making the shift from 3XL clothes into 2XL — and having to start replacing things that no longer fit because they are too loose is a really nice feeling. I ended up clearing out the closet of all the clothes I haven’t worn since moving to Washington, and it was full of 4XL and 5XL items, and dropping off three bags of that at Goodwill was a good day.

At close to 320 pounds now, I’m at a weight I haven’t been since I was 40, so I’ve lost 25 years of added weight from my body. From my all time high of 412 pounds (ugh) I’m now a full 90 pounds lighter.

My short term goal is to keep the weight loss going through the holidays, which, since my migraine has me chocolate free, should be easier this year, but the last few years hasn’t worked out so well. In the longer term, I’m looking at 280 as my goal weight, because that’s what I weighed when I was 30. Once I hit that weight, I’ll recalibrate and see what weight I’ll want to chase — probably in the 220 range, but for now, I want a goal that’s visible and attainable, not well over the horizon.

An unexpected but pleasant surprise in all this is that my insulin usage went down a lot. I’m using about 12% less today than in July, with overall lower numbers (my daily glucose number is down from 175 to 150). All of which makes me happy, and will make my next chat with my doctor a pleasant one.

So, yay me!

This I learned (weird facts that might be useful to you department)

A couple of things that I learned this month that might actually be interesting or useful to a few of you.

First, in cleaning out the closet, I had a couple of boxes of insulin syringes I didn’t need any more, since my doctor moved me to the pens last spring. I finally decided to get rid of them, and since I can’t exactly donate those to Goodwill, I took them in when I went to drop off my sharps. It turns out, though, that they can’t accept them back with the sharps (for various reasons). What they suggested was brilliant and something I never would have thought of: they ended up being donated to the local Humane Society, who can use them with the animals they work on. So if you ever have something like this you aren’t sure how to discard safely — this is a great option

The second thing I learned is that dishwashers have filters, and filters need to be cleaned. We found that out because ours stopped cleaning the lower rack properly, and so we found and brought in a local tech to sort it out. I’m convinced he knew the problem before he walked in the house, but in practice, the water spinners rotate based on water pressure as they spray. If the filter clogs up enough, the water flow decreases, and the pressure isn’t enough to spin them, so they only spray the rack above where they stopped.

So, remember to clean your filters more often than every three years. I now know that, too!

A Few Thoughts on Apple’s Sleep Monitoring

It’s been a couple of months since I started wearing a watch at night to enable Apple’s sleep monitoring, so I thought it was time for a quick update.

Does it work? Absolutely. The things they’ve been able to figure out how to do continue to amaze me.

Have I learned anything? This is more nuanced. The answer, I think, is no. Instead, what it did was confirm to me what I already knew: that in general, I’m sleeping pretty well. One thing about it that does annoy me a bit is that it really feels I should be sleeping longer than I do — I average 6.5 hours a night of sleep time, and I consistently wake up after that time without an alarm, and Apple really wants me to be an 8 hour sleeper, which I haven’t been for many many years. But that minor nagging aside, it was nice to get my perception confirmed.

Will I continue wearing a watch at night? For now, yes. Long term? I don’t know. I know at some point I need to commit time on the stationary bike, but I haven’t yet actually convinced myself to do it — see above where I noted my walking didn’t move the weight needle, and I know I’ll get to get exercise better into the equation to sustain the losses as my weight continues to decrease. If/when I do start hitting the bike, it seems like a good time to swap watches and wear more of a sweat proof band while I do, and let the daytime watch recharge, because it’s consistently down around 20% at the end of a full day, and I know if I add more workouts to the mix it’ll be headed into low power mode a lot.

But for now, thumbs up on the sleep data and I’m glad I am doing it.

My Latest Lego build

Behold, my latest lego build — they released a couple of fun Christmas kits, and this is the first one (the other is going to happen later this month).

See you next issue!