A Trip to Vancouver
In this post:
A Short Trip to Vancouver
Last weekend I had the opportunity to join my wife on her business trip to Vancouver. It was a short trip – just three nights (Thursday night, all day Friday/Saturday, returning Sunday morning). I have been to Vancouver before, just 4 years ago, in July 2018. I had a phenomenal experience 4 years ago, and walked pretty much everywhere.
This time it was a bit different. I had some goals to check out several book stores – in the end I only got to MacLeod’s on Pender, and some place called “Book Lovers” in North Vancouver. MacLeod’s was great – somehow it didn’t trigger my anxiety of being in enclosed places, but I guess it was because there weren’t many people in the shop at the time. Contrast that to the vendor’s market I popped into in North Vancouver, where there was a very large space but packed with too many people. I couldn’t handle it.
One thing I made sure to do was to go to places I didn’t visit last time, and one of those was indeed North Vancouver. How I never took the Sea Bus 4 years ago, I don’t understand. But I sailed across this time and was amazed by such a simple thing. What was pretty neat was seeing the mountains disappear – once you’re in North Vancouver you can only see the mountains to the west, and even then only if you’re uphill without any condo buildings in your way.
All in all it was fun, despite such a short trip. One last note – we were able to take in a Vancouver Canucks game, vs. the Minnesota Wild. Vancouver is not a very good hockey team; but the experience was fun. It was our first NHL game in another arena. We have always watched the Ottawa Senators at the Canadian Tire Centre. Rogers Arena seems so small in comparison – and yet somehow they fit 18,000+ in there.
An Interesting Observation Using Mastodon For a Month
I realized last night that over the last week and a bit I haven’t been very active on social media (other than some automatic twitter updates from GoodReads). Before the “vacation” (I would only consider 3 and a half days of being out of town as being on vacation) I was also posting fairly heavily on Mastodon; but I haven’t even been posting there very much either.
That’s not the interesting observation though. What’s interesting to me is that using Mastodon has changed how I’m using Social Media in general. For one, I fully recognize I am using it less. Fewer posts on Instagram, and a whole lot less on Twitter. I am being very selective in what I post there, and in general I find myself opening Twitter a lot less often. That in itself is not that groundbreaking a revelation, but what I realized yesterday was the reason why I haven’t been checking in as much.
On Mastodon you can set up filters to weed out posts you don’t want to see appear on your feed. You can set the filters to either not appear entirely, or you can set it up so that a little update shows you that there is a post you’ve filtered out – giving you the option of clicking on a little link to view the post. For a little while I would click on the “show anyway” link to expand the post to see what I was missing out on.
But lately? I haven’t bothered. I think I am just going to set the posts not to show up in my feed at all. What using Mastodon has done for me is learn to completely replace FOMO (fear of missing out) with JOMO (joy of missing out). I used to keep up with Twitter to make sure I saw everything and didn’t miss out. Now, I don’t worry so much about it. I missed two days’ worth of tweets? No big deal. Probably not worth thinking about.
OK, maybe it’s not all that interesting…but it is to me. I enjoy the community I’ve found on Mastodon and what it’s done to rewire how I think about social media in my brain.
Weight Loss Update – Woops!
I thought my last update was going to be the last of the year, but it turns out I have a few more opportunities to hop onto the scale than I originally thought. Fun fact – the hotel I stayed at in Vancouver actually did have a weight scale! I didn’t use it, though.
This morning I did use the scale – the first time since December 2nd – I jumped up from 240.7 pounds to 244.5 pounds. Hmm…woops! That’s not the number I thought I would see after 13 days.
Thinking through it – that means I would have had to consume approximately 13,300 extra calories in that 13 day span. That works out to about 1,023 calories per day. When I first thought about the scale jump I thought that it would be a little unrealistic that I really ate all that much more over 2 weeks…but it’s possible. Maybe not 1000 extra calories per day, but there could have been some really heavy days in there.
I’m sure I ate a lot of extra food while I was in Vancouver, and I know that I likely ate with my eyes on a few days while away from home. So, maybe a gain of 3.8 pounds isn’t exactly accurate, but I am sure I did gain some pounds.
I’m going to address this by switching my calorie target to lose 0.5 pounds per week in Cronometer (by the way, I decided to buy the premium version for a year after using the two week free trial). I don’t really care too much about losing a pound between now and the New Year – it’s just a recognition that I’m going too far in the other direction, and just need to temper things down a little bit.
And actually once we hit the 23rd, I’m going to switch it back to “maintenance” levels. Gotta enjoy myself some Christmas and New Year’s food.