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After a year of quarantine, I’m back at the gym doing the Stronglifts 5×5 workout!

Videos of Stronglifts Workout A and Workout B

Here is a grab of the Stronglifts 5×5 program from the webpage in case it goes offline. All the formatting is messed up so I strongly recommend you just look at the original page: Page grab: StrongLifts 5×5_ Get Stronger by Lifting Weights only 3x_Week

Thanks Schuyler for showing me the workout and proper form!

For my northern California friends…
With wildfire season warming up, here’s a tip… Rather than spend big bucks on air filters that will take up lots of space in your closet most of the year, get MERV 13 or better air filters for your furnace. Putting those filters on a fan also works very well. 2 years running we spent $20 on furnace filters instead of $300+ for dedicated filters and they kept our home feeling like a refuge from the wildfire smoke. I’ve written more tips over the past few years on my blog.

Your local hardware store likely has filters for you. Last year, a neighbor here on Nextdoor suggested I get furnace filters from filterbuy.com and they worked out very well :-)

If you own an electric hybrid car, consider getting a $40 400 watt inverter and extension cords so you can power devices in your house with your car in case of blackout. You can plug into your cigarette lighter and get about 180 watts. Or find the 12v battery terminals and get a lot more. Investing in a $40 inverter probably won’t power your house’s fridge but could help a lot! And it’s a good, easy, productive, first step, that will get you thinking about what you -need- to power in a blackout. Especially seeing as a home generator costs $2-10k+.

Here’s a video of someone who is running their whole house from a Prius, an inverter and transfer switch. Think of a Prius as a 1000 watt generator.
– $1,000 transfer switch, professionally installed
– $300 1000 watt sine wave inverter
– $200 power cabling
– Prius

Wonder and joy!

(this montage is from way back in 2018)

Cistus Victor Reiter in our backyard. Picked out by Abigail at Annie’s Annuals. :-)

From my backyard :-)

ISO good music for our 6-year-old. Recently our family has been loving Jim Gill on Spotify. In the recent past we’ve loved Tom Chapin, Laurie Berkner, the A Year With Frog and Toad soundtrack, and the indomitable Raffi.

In the past 2 days, I’ve gotten some 40 spam calls and 10 spam texts about getting medical care. I’m thankful that my phone is filtering most of it out but… yow, is this going to be the new normal?

I visited The Mystery Spot in Santa Cruz last weekend, some 35 years after my first visit! Instead of my parents taking me, I took my wife and daughter. It was both hugely nostalgic and and a lot of fun! Our guide, Chris was awesome!

I’ve bought my 3rd phone on Swappa.com in 3 weeks. I’m kinda over it. But third time is the charm, right?

My old phone, a Pixel 2 had this one quirk that I didn’t notice for the longest time: the audio on recorded videos is very quiet. EVERYTHING else works and I couldn’t find a fix for the audio problem so… buy a new (to me) phone!

Pixel 4… I realized it didn’t have fingerprint unlock, only face unlock. Face unlock doesn’t work when you’re wearing a mask and… ugh, I would much rather that the phone unlocks when I push the magic button and not when it sees my face.

Pixel 3… the top speaker didn’t work. So I could do everything except take phone calls with it. So, a smartphone that did everything except “phone”.

Pixel 3… third time’s the charm, right?

[Update 5-2-21] [Sad Trombone] The third phone is a fail. Some kind of image stabilization problem when recording videos. Blah!