A link showed up on my Facebook news feed with this article , talking about the all too common practice of doctors pushing stents treatment  that don’t actually save our live for people who don’t need them.  I happened to have been listening to this podcast earlier today talking about the same thing when it comes to prostate screenings, cholesterol medicine, etc.  Both try to address the “why” of these things to varying degrees.  There is the cynical “because there’s money in it” or “the Doctors are too arrogant/too busy/too brainwashed/too much in CYA mode.”  I’m sure those elements play varying degrees case by case but I think there is more of an overriding reason we get these treatments, and that’s because we want them.

I’ve been a huge convert to Linux Mint and Ubuntu for several years now.  In the last year I went so far as to be running Linux as my bare metal OS on both my work laptop and home desktop.  I’ve never had an update for Mint or Ubuntu get so borked up that the UI refused to function properly…until now.

“Getting fit” is often synonymous with “losing weight” in most discussions.  Back when I was setting up this blog for a long term eating style experiment I was in pretty good shape.  My strength training was a bit of a crap shoot but my cardio was as tuned in for me as it had ever been; I ran my first (and to date only) marathon at the end of that planning period.  I therefore didn’t see it as a weight loss experiment but as a fitness and longevity experiment.  I therefore sought to quantify my fitness in as concrete a way I could.  What I came up with was holding myself to a military fitness standard (link ).

Yesterday I had a tongue in cheek conversation with a friend about our resolutions.  He asked me what my resolutions were for this year.  I stated: “To not exercise, eat continuously, and try to add thirty pounds of fat…I’m trying the reverse psychology thing.”  Knowing my penchant for trying new things it isn’t totally ridiculous that he took me literally, but I quickly corrected that notion before I got a call from one of my family members asking what the hell I was thinking about.  I used to do resolutions, but I don’t, that doesn’t mean that the roll over of the calendar isn’t a good occasion for me to double down on trying to dial it in.

I never heard of Yohan Ferrant’s “do nothing” bread until the post showed up showing pictures of another member’s experiment with in back a few days ago.  I love no-knead bread, and the it sounded like this was very much like the NYT recipe but without yeast and with whole wheat flour.  I decided to follow the recipe exactly as stated on The Northwest Sourdough Blog’s article on the topic (link ) and video here .

When I first started baking bread from the New York Times “no knead” recipe and the Tartine book I used a modified dutch oven type of configuration.  I didn’t actually have a dutch oven, so I had oven safe bowls and a frying pan.  I got good results not not exactly the look I was going for: I didn’t get the tearing or the oven spring.  I’ve experimented with several ways of adding steam to the oven, using cast iron dutch ovens et cetera to try to get those perfect ears.  What I really needed, it seems, was a better size dutch oven and to keep it simple.

October 16, 2016 , when I got back from my honeymoon, I said I was going to be emphasizing a fitness focus by looking at using a goal accountability report card.  Really this is getting the tempo for doing these things more into 2017 and beyond.  Work and life took my eye off the ball but it didn’t stop me from actually keeping the report card.  What’s the point of an accountability exercise if you only do it when you know you are going to score well?  That’s like only going to the doctor when you are healthy.  The sobering reality is that right now I’m failing on my five goals, but I didn’t need a report card to actually tell me that.