I don’t get much sleep. When I tell people that I get to work at 5:30 in the morning most days, they are usually surprised, and often afterwards they ask me when I go to bed. When I tell them, then they are even more surprised. The answer that I give is between midnight and 1am, which is true most of the time. Lately, I’ve been trying to get into bed before midnight, but I still often don’t try to sleep until after the witching hour (?).

I don’t really seem to have a problem keeping up this sleeping schedule on normal weekdays. There is some leeway on the amount of sleep that I get on the weekends, but usually my to-bed time isn’t changing, but rather just the wake-up time. My alarm is set to 9am on the weekends, but I’m also not worried about it being right next to my head most of the time, so commonly I will sleep until 10 or 11 on Saturday and Sunday. I’ve read a few articles that say that you can catch up on sleep, but then again, there are others that don’t believe it.

If I go through and do the math, these weekend sleeps aren’t really balancing out the score though: on an average weekday I will get between 3 and 5 hours of sleep. On a weekend, I increase that to 8 to 9 hours, and sometimes up to 10. Doing the math, that’s only about six and a half hours per day when it comes to the end, still less than the recommended amount of eight hours.

I’ve been confused as to why I can do this for a while now, especially during the weekdays when there is so little sleep time. I’ve read about polyphasic sleep and REM cycles, which suggest that I am perhaps getting a single full sleep cycle in, and it just happens to be convenient for the time that I’ve chosen to get up and head to work in the morning.

Ever the experimenter, I tried napping during my lunch break for about a month last year. I would have my lunch out of the office, and then start sleep now to wake me up half an hour later. I did it because I read that just a short nap can actually improve your mental condition for a long time if you take it during the day. It didn’t work out for me, I just ended up feeling no better or groggier than I did before. Possibly it was because I was doing it in the full sunlight, as there is some evidence that you need to have a dark room for good sleep.

Alternately, I could be actually detrimental some part of my day, penalizing the work that I do in the evening towards my thesis, or making it that much harder to concentrate on the programming that I do on my spare time. Then my lack of shut-eye could be actually hurting my life. It’s just one more thing to worry about, so I usually just keep doing what is working for now, and maybe worry about it later.

Okay, so it’s not December anymore, but the data and charts that I’m presenting in this post are, so it’s still the December report. I am proud to report that while most of the month is already done I have been on track. I’ve been watching what I eat less, mostly because of holiday treats in the office and various social functions, but I haven’t been super off my game, and I’ve been able to make sure I don’t go overboard too often.

The chart still says that I’m losing at 1 pound a week, but the data itself is showing me a lot of red points which I haven’t been really that used to seeing in the last year. I should be expecting to see it a lot more as I switched from losing weight to maintaining in October. The closest I’ve come to giving up the ghost has been 229 shortly before Thanksgiving, and I haven’t come close yet. At this rate it looks like I will succeed with my goal of being below 230 at the end of the year.

The yearly image still makes me look good, with the lions share of the year losing and being on a straight trend downwards, and with the last few months showing the kind of straight across line that I should be seeing when I am maintaining weight.

Exercise has been going as well as can be expected, and I still don’t have a good way of graphing my runs or anything, so no fancy graphs, but I have been improving. My average was 10:17 per mile a month ago, and the last run that I did was at 10:07 per mile, which is not bad of an improvement. I’ve kept on schedule for the interval increases, which means that now I’m running for 2 minutes 45 seconds and walking for 2 minutes still. I think that when I get to 3 minutes and am comfortable, I will try reducing the walking time instead of increasing the running time.

This month I’d like to expand a little on the workouts that I do, and my plans for improvements in the next year. Each week, I run or walk five days a week. On Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, I run the Five Parks Goal Loop, so named because while I am on it, I run past or through Audobon Park, Deming Heights Park, Cavell Playground, Waite Park, and Windom Park. The route itself I would rate as pretty hilly, if only because of the monster of a hill which just precedes the Deming Heights - I took a picture on one of my off days of this 80 foot climb. Lately I’ve been finishing it in about 45 minutes, and when I am consistently finishing it in less than 45 minutes, I’ll be changing up the route so that I am running farther.

So that’s three days of what you might call “training” a week, at about 4.5 miles. On Thursdays, I am starting to do something that I am going to call “run as you like day”, where I run and walk at the intervals that I feel like instead of in the lock step of the timed intervals on my other days. Lately I’ve been going around Columbia park during these, but that might change in the near future as well as I want to be able to shake up the routes every month or so just to keep things interesting. In the most recent one, I’ve been pretty happy with the pace that I kept up. Usually I try to get some longer distances on this run just because, and I have been able to run for almost a mile straight, which is pleasing.

Sundays are my day where I am really giving myself a break, because it’s between two “training” days, which means I don’t want to strain the system too much. Usually it’s the same route as Thursday but I am very restrained, walking almost the whole route. I usually end up trying to keep a pace which is under 12 minutes a mile though, which I consider to be a fast enough walk to get the heart rate up. On Tuesday and Friday, I have actual rest days where I don’t exercise at all.

In summary form:

• Monday: Interval running, 4.5 miles
• Tuesday: Rest day
• Wednesday: Interval running, 4.5 miles
• Thursday: “Run as you like”, 4.8 miles
• Friday: Rest day
• Saturday: Interval running, 4.5 miles
• Sunday: Walking day, 4.8 miles

Every week this ends up being about 23 miles total of running or walking. I’m hoping in 2012 to increase this to about 25 miles a week so that I can make my goal of 100 miles a month. I don’t actually have to that much because of the extra few days beyond 4 weeks in a month, but I will probably be doing it anyway, because I like my interval running to last between 45 minutes and an hour, and lately I’ve been under 45 minutes so I need to make the route longer.

I don’t know if this is a great training program, but it’s been the one that I can keep to for the last few months, so I am happy with it at least, and I’ve been improving my times. As the weather gets colder, I have had to gear up in order to avoid freezing my extremities off. Next time, I’ll be writing about how I keep warm.

As the new year dawns on us, lots of people like to take the time and make some resolutions, or plans for changing habits throughout the year. Usually I will make a few of these, and historically I have been pretty bad at keeping them. I’m pretty sure that this is not an uncommon phenomenon.

Last year I made one grand resolution which I had many paths to success at. It was something which I believed would make a big difference in my life - I wanted to make more money. Usually something like that would be considered not really fodder for a new year’s resolution, but it wasn’t just greed which was driving it. I could see potential and skill that I had, and I knew that I could do better for the both of us. I am happy that I actually succeeded in the goal for the year, and I think that both Diana and I are happier for it.

This year I have decided to take a different approach, and make a bunch of small changes which will hopefully add up to a better life overall. Partially this is because I was thinking for the last few days about how 2012 is convenient for splitting the year, due to our calendar system dividing 12 into somewhat equal months.

So I’m taking the theme through all the resolutions this year. Most of these are small, but some will be more difficult to accomplish. Some are things that I want to do, and some are things that I think I need to do. So because I’m taking the theme all the way, I have twelve resolutions for this year, in no particular order.

Read 12 books

In the past few months, I’ve acquired both a e-ink reader and a tablet. There isn’t any excuse for not carrying around at least one book with me and getting to reading it. The list of books which I will read is mostly fiction and just for entertainment. I’ve noticed that I like to read though, and there is definitely a big pile of books to read. This is quite a modest resolution, only one book a month, and I think I should be able to get that done.

Lose 12 pounds

Last year, I had a focus on weight loss, which I’ve reported progress on monthly. It wasn’t a resolution as much as something that I wanted to do for myself. I was pretty successful in 2011, losing almost 80 pounds over the year and feeling better about myself. About a month ago I switched from a focus on weight loss to a more fitness-related goal and maintaining the weight that I had taken off. This goal is more about keeping the weight off than it is about losing those few extra pounds, but I do want to still be on the right trend.

Work 12 hours a week on my thesis

It’s been a long time coming, but one of the top things on my list for this year is finishing my Ph.D thesis. I have a clear path to the end, and I want to defend it this year and get on with the rest of the things in my life. To this end, for a while I’ve been working on it at least one hour a day for every day in the week. It’s working, and I’m making progress but it is slower than I want to, so I’m going to increase the amount of work that I’m putting into it, and spend one full day in the lab as it were getting the work done.

My justification for the 12 number here is that I still want to work on it every day of the week, but I also want to get a full day in, so this is one hour every weekday, except for one day which I will put in at least a full eight hour day of work.

Run/Walk 1,200 miles

This is in the same vein as my other fitness related resolution, but it’s a bit more ambitious. I’ve been running and walking for exercise and to stay fit for the last few months, and I want to continue that for the next year. This number represents 100 miles in a month, which should be possible because that’s only about 25 miles a week, or 5 miles a day if I am exercising for 5 days a week like I am now. It’s only a little more than what I’m doing now, and it’s a nice round number which pleases me. It may be a bit difficult to keep doing this when I am getting to crunch time on the thesis work or when I am on vacation travelling but I feel like I could make up for those days in the long run, so to say.

Blog 12 posts a month

This should be pretty straightforward. Three posts a week should be doable, especially when I have some things already put in place in order to get some stuff. Not all of the posts are guaranteed to be on the base0.net blog, because some of them might be movie or TV reviews, and I would put them on the wherestheclicker.com site. I still have a bunch of easy posts in the form of the Big Bang Theory Opening posts anyway though.

Publish 12 Android Apps

It’s been a long time where I have wanted to start publishing Android Apps in to the market and get some of my ideas into the world. This goal might be the hardest one for me this year, because I am going from zero to one a month. I believe that I can do it though, and I think it will be a good way to expand my skill set a little more. I’m not coming from nothing though, I have some code started on a couple of apps and a lot of ideas for ones which I will be pulling from.

Meet 12 new people

I’ve been going to a couple of networking events approximately monthly for a while now, both ruby.mn and lately also the AUG.mn user groups. Historically I have been shy and somewhat reserved at the events though, and really I want to expand my group of professional and personal contacts which is the reason that I started going. This year I want to meet at least 12 people from these groups. There are also minnebar and minnedemo events throughout the year, and various other geeky events, so this shouldn’t be too hard as long as I get over some of the social anxiety that I experience.

Watch less than 12 hours of TV each week

I’m an avid TV watcher, and I really sit down in front of the thing and try to pay attention to the shows that I watch. Lately it has been taking a lot of time and I haven’t really been enjoying the shows as much as I feel like I should. I am going to try to limit the TV to the shows that I actually enjoy watching. This one should be somewhat synergistic with the other goals, because reading, programming, and working more on the thesis are all ones which take up free time which is currently probably going to television.

Inbox 12

My email inbox represents something that I look at a lot throughout each day, and I carry around with me on my phone. I want to keep the list of things on a single page, which I’ve been able to do for the last few months, but I want to extend that so that I have less than 12 things in the inbox at any particular point in time, which I hope will get rid of some mental clutter.

12 Dates

I always want to spend more time with my wonderful partner Diana. This one is pretty straightforward - just go out on a date night once a month. I’m trying to decide if built in ones like Valentines Day, birthdays and other holidays count. Probably not. Dinner and a movie is fine, but I’m hoping we can do some museums, theater shows or other things that we both enjoy for these too.

Meditate 12 minutes a day

In the past, I’ve experimented a bit with meditation for relaxation and some contemplative time. I should be able to find at least 12 minutes a day for some type of meditation. Usually I go for just mind-clearing and breathing, and that can be done almost anywhere.

Call my parents 12 times

One of the things that I’ve been unhappy with myself in the last year has been how much I’ve kept in touch with my family. I want to call and keep them in the loop on things, and talk to them about what’s going on so I can stay connected, but I have been busy or used some other excuse. I think that this is a doable goal, which is important, and it’s also something that I want to make time for.

So there we go, it’s 12 resolutions for 2012. 12in12 is the uncreative name that I have given for it, and I hope that I can do all of these numerically-themed things this year. I’ll be reporting back on things as the year goes on, and I’m also tracking a number of them on beeminder as it makes sense to do so. Some of them are not really suited to the site, but here are links for the ones that I’ve setup so far:

• Lose 12 pounds
• 12 thesis hours
• 1,200 miles
• 12 blogs
• 12 hours of TV
• Inbox 12
• 12 mins of meditation

It’s been almost a month since October’s update, and there are a lot of exciting things happening. I’ve been working pretty hard at keeping track of my weight as well as kicking my exercise into high gear and doing something akin to training.

In terms of diet, I’ve been completely lax on what I’ve been eating, but I’ve been working pretty hard at keeping an idea of how many calories I’ve been eating though. I’ve been watching and recording exactly what I eat for most days, and according to the BMR rates that are available basically everywhere I am eating at about 500 calories below the rate to maintain weight. While my goal is to maintain weight, I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t going to start gaining again, and ensure that I stay below 230. So far, it’s been successful, as you can tell by the chart.

The chart says that the 500 calories that I was below the maintenance calories weight is actually accurate, according to the trend line. However, I think that I’m not going to change my diet goals until 2012 rolls around. Partly because it’s the holidays coming up and that causes a bunch of extra eating that I can’t really track, and also I’m not really sad about still losing some weight at the lower rate that I am now. I’ll be happy to eat some less in order to make up for some of the awesome pumpkin pie that is the sign of the season.

Speaking of eating a lot at occasions, I am trying to eat more intuitively lately, attempting to get a good gauge of when I am full and don’t need any more food. I’ve tried a few times now, and it’s been a bit hit and miss. Some times I will eat a lot less than I should, and be overestimating the calories, but I am just not hungry or something. Usually those are the days where I was actually eating less in preparation for knowing that I will have an unknown amount of food later in the evening. Other times, I will still be hungry, or at least have a hunger feeling, and then I will be eating more than I actually need to. One time I actually ate to the point where I felt sickly overfull. I’m trying to learn to listen to the body signals so that I can train myself to eat without watching every single calorie. I’m going to try to do it more throughout the holiday season, because it is definitely the season where there are a ton of these events where you can’t exactly ask for a recipe or nutrition facts.

This month, I had my yearly checkup at the doctor’s office as well. There was only good news in the experience, and every person that I met was complimentary and seemed happy. The receptionist said that I lost weight because of the difference in pictures on my license. The doctor’s assistant who took my weight, blood pressure and height was entering the stats into the computer, and she asked “You’ve lost 26% of your body weight in the last year?” kind of quizzically. The computer was actually alerting her that it might have been a typo because it was a large change from the last year, she showed me the screen. Finally, the doctor himself was highly complimentary and asked about how I lost the weight, and used the word “impressive” to describe the weight loss a bunch of times.

Speaking of the doctor’s visit, I got some weird looks at the office because I was there in a running outfit. I took advantage of the relative location of the office in order to get a run in that wasn’t one of my normal weekly runs, and took this route home. Running has been my main exercise goal since I started focusing on it more intently in the last month, and I’ve been rocking it out over the last month.

While I stated last month that I was going to start focusing on exercise instead of diet as much, I didn’t expand on how I was actually going to get it done. My current training plan is focused around cardiovascular interval training, with a goal to run some 5km races without stopping under 30 minutes in the spring of 2012. In order to increase my endurance, I do a fairly simple routine, of a 5 minute warm-up walk, followed by a set of intervals where I walk for 2 minutes, and then I run for some amount of time. Right after I finished my last report, I was running for 1 minute 45 seconds. Every two weeks, I increase the amount of running time by 15 seconds, which means that my most recent runs were for 2 minutes 15 seconds.

As I run for longer, I am getting faster as well, probably just because the percentage of running time is going up. I’ve increased my time on the standard running route from almost 50 minutes to almost 45 minutes, which is a big deal for me, because 45 minutes is a threshold point for me to shake things up a bit. This is getting a bit long, so I think I’ll make it one of the topics for next month.

Lately the e-ink and eBook readers have been gaining popularity, and the price war has been heating up, with Kindle dropping to $79 and Barnes and Noble following suit with price cuts. It really is the next stage in the book reading experience with finally the electronic readers being in the “buy it to try it” price range. Diana and I both have e-ink readers and I like mine so much that I am actually considering getting another one before this one is even a year old. The e-ink is really nice on the eyes, and it’s nice to know that I can toss it in the bag and always have someting interesting to read. The Kindle itself is enhanced completely by Instapaper which is a kind of way to port the tldr reading on the web to a format where I’m actually more apt to sit down and go through it. It also has the advantage of splitting the content from the ads most of the time.

Because I like to read books on the Kindle for many reasons, usually when I am surfing around and I see a book recommendation, I’ll check it out and see if it’s available for the e-readers that we have in the house. As Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and ad-hoc e-ink reader reviewer noted recently, the library advantage of Amazon has been going away recently.

The thing that annoys and confuses me lately is that the Kindle price is most often several dollars more than the cost of getting a paper copy delivered to my door. Let’s look at the same books that Marco looked at:

Book	Kindle	Physical (new) & Type
Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs	$14.99	$17.88 Hardcover
Steven King: On Writing	$12.99	$10.88 Paperback
Nicholas Sparks: The Best of Me	$12.99	$10.19 Paperback
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex	$9.99	$9.48** Paperback
David Simon: Homicide	$9.99	$8.98** Paperback
Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore	$11.99	$10.85 Paperback
George Carlin: Last Words	$9.99	$6.00 Paperback
Thomas Sowell: Basic Economics (4th Ed.)	$17.68	$19.99 Paperback
Scott Berkun: Confessions of a Public Speaker	$9.99	$11.55 Paperback
Michael Lopp: Being Geek	$9.99	$16.48 Paperback
Steve Hagen: Buddhism Plain and Simple	$9.99	$9.60 Paperback
Don Norman: Living with Complexity	$14.72	$16.47 Hardcover

In more than half of the 11 cases where you can buy the book on the kindle, it is actually cheaper for me to get a new physical copy that I can carry around, and more importantly, I can give away or resell later. These aren’t even the most aggregious that I have seen in my searching, since they are skewed toward some newer books. If we really want to go crazy, some of these books are available at the bargain price of $.01 (plus $3.99 shipping of course), which is less than half of the cost of the Kindle book if I’m willing to get it in the horribly used state of “Acceptable”. Something is wrong with this model - it is encouraging me to buy the book in a form which is less convenient for me, certainly more cost to the publisher, worse for the environment, and most paradoxically at more cost to Amazon itself.
Amazon doesn’t like this of course, most of the ones where it’s cheaper to get the copy physically have displayed prominently This price was set by the publisher. It’s becoming clear to me that once these lower prices start making e-readers more ubiquitous, the competition isn’t the Kindle versus other readers, who have all almost have a price parity nowadays, but versus the physical copies of their own books.

Last Monday, Google deployed a redesign of Reader.
The Internet was not happy. There are a bunch of problems with the new design in my opinion. The design takes up too much space with headers, not enough space for content, and forces anyone who wants to share to use Google+, jumping out of “the flow”. People are rebelling, even going so far as to build a clone of the previous version and offer their services to fix it. Aside from the problems with the new design, though, Google’s Reader has issues, and they were broken far before Monday.

The biggest gripe that I have with Reader is the performance. For what looks like a basic page, it’s remarkably easy to overload your browser with it. I regularly use Reader to browse through thousands of articles at once. Because of the infinite scrolling feature, the reading pane can get very long, and even the best browser can start cranking the CPU cycles. With the old design, I would reflexively hit the “R” button (to reload the page) every hundred items or so. If I didn’t, it would freeze up and sometimes crash the browser.

Not that it’s much better in the new design either - performance is at least a hundred times worse than it was before. In addition to the infinite scrolling, they decided to add a bunch of other new features. The page itself pegs one of my CPU cores with less than 15 stories on the scroll list, and reloading easily can take half a minute if I don’t catch the slowdown fast. The worst offender seems to be related directly to the new Google+ sharing feature. Every story has a “plus one” button attached to it, and takes a round trip from the browser to plusone.google.com to find out how many other surfers pressed the little colorful button. For the company which invented SPDY, there is something wrong with expecting a browser to round-trip hundreds of times just for a glorified counter. I added the domain to the blackhole in my computer’s /etc/hosts file and the new design got faster immediately. I’m still reloading easily every 50 stories though in order to make sure that the browser doesn’t crash.

I’m no javascript application expert, but it seems like the major problem is the length of the reading pane. One solution which I think could be tried is to remove the large selection of ‘read’ stories from the page completely. It is a method that Cullect used when it was in service, and it worked well. It was user-triggered then, but I think it might be possible to make the removal of stories that you are far past automatically in the same way that stories are added automatically just slightly before you get to them on the page, making the infinite length page a little less infinite in length, and making the performance a little more tolerable. For bonus points, make it possible for me to have only one story visible at a time, and load the next or previous story on demand when I use the magic “j” or “k” buttons. After all, the browser is going round-trip to Google’s servers already.

Got quite a ways behind on these, again. I’m cheating on the last one, because I somehow didn’t take any interesting pictures.

I’ve been a bit lax in the updates on the diet that I normally post monthly. I have some good news to report and then a new challenge for the future. The hard part starts now.

The last two months have been a continued vigilance of what I am eating, and how much I am eating specifically, and my weight has been reflecting it. I didn’t reach my goal before the vacation that I was hoping for in the August update, but the first international travel that I made after this whole thing started was a lot more comfortable this time than it was before. The airplane seats were marginally more comfortable, and there was nothing that I was really regretting about the whole thing. The seats are still too small for me, because I am a tall as well as a big guy still.

The low-carb diet itself has gone completely out of the window lately. I wasn’t even trying to keep it while I was on vacation, and I kind of kept not keeping it after we returned from the vacation. I have still been keeping track of my calories when I can, and trying to overestimate when I can’t keep track of what exactly I am eating. It continually is a struggle, because Diana is a great cook, and we have a comfortable enough life that we can go out to eat at least a couple of times a week. These meals are really fun to go to, but are the hardest to budget for on my diet because rarely do they include nutritional information on the menu, and most likely not even on the website for some of the more local places that we like to frequent. The calorie counting is doing okay for me still except for these types of meals that I can’t keep track of. If I have some warning that I’ll be having one of these “untrackable” meals, I’ll try to eat significantly less throughout the day to make up for it.

The big news for this month is that I’ve succeeded at my first stage goal for weight loss. I now weigh less than 230 pounds fairly consistently over the last few weeks. This means that I am 110 pounds lighter than when I started focusing on weight loss almost 22 months ago. Right now, I’m planning on making this a stopping point in my weight loss, and trying to maintain my weight at this stage until the end of the year at least. This means that I will be upping my calories, and actually eating more, and also replacing a bunch of my clothes as they were getting comically large on me at this point. I’ll still be tracking my calories as closely as I can. I’ve been promising a more up to date picture, and some of them leaked out last month during the vacation, but here is one from today, juxtaposed with one from last summer - not exactly the start of my diet, but close enough.

That looks pretty good, partially because I was actually eating in the first picture, but I can’t really find a better “before” picture for myself. The before and after pictures are available in full size too. I’m also wearing my new jeans in this picture, which are size 38. Compared to my old size I’ve lost about 10 inches. The shirt I’m wearing is a size Large, and the before picture I’m wearing a 3XL shirt. It’s pretty great, but feels strange when I’m wearing clothes that are so small now.

So I’ve decided that I’m done trying to lose weight, and will try to maintain my current weight until the end of the year. I’ve started already by increasing my calorie budget by 500 calories. Technically that’s still a diet, because I was cutting 1000 calories below BMR before, but I don’t want to overshoot and start gaining weight again. I’m going to keep it at this level and then reevaluate whether I am losing or gaining and adjust as necessary.

More importantly, there is another goal that I will be focusing on from now until then is my fitness. I’ve been exercising all through this diet trek in order to give myself some headroom on calories, but now I’m doing it in order to get a bit more fit. My first goal is focused on running. I’ve been running around the neighborhood, keeping this running course so that I can measure my progress. I’ve been getting faster lately, with my best pace being 10:30 per mile which was just about a week ago. That’s about a minute per mile pace gain since August.

Last month I ended up skipping the update, mostly because I was just lazy, but this month the graph looks good. Last month looked pretty good as well. You can see some of the stability at the end of the graph once I hit the 230 goal that I have been working towards. I’m hoping that I can keep that line straight or going slightly down in the next report that I end up posting.

The yearly graph still looks great. There are only a couple of extended red areas, which both correspond to vacations. These graphs have been keeping me on track, even though I only look at them once a month. The daily deficit is based on the best-fit line that is shown here, and fed into my idea that I shouldn’t be too hasty to increase back to the BMR.

So there’s my first intermediate goal met. If I am still at or under 230 at the end of the year, I’ll claim victory and re-evaluate my health and my goals for my body for the 2012 year. I’m still somewhat not happy when I look at myself, but my fitness goal I think might help with that a bit by reshaping my body a little more instead of just making it smaller. If you’re interested in tracking my progress, feel free to follow me on dailymile or runkeeper.

Got quite a ways behind on these.

It’s almost a week after the events of this post happened. The last day in Paris was mostly spent not in Paris though. There wasn’t a lot of time in the city on the last day because of various travel concerns. We woke up at our “normal” time and did our last bit of packing and a sweep of the room before we checked out. We went straight to the RER, because Diana was rightfully worried about getting to the airport on time with the addition of the train travel and all the stuff surrounding that.

We got to the airport on time, and then there was the big line at the gate (apparently there were a lot of people flying Iceland Air that day). We got to skip the line thanks to us checking in the day before - even though we couldn’t print the boarding passes, we could still skip and just check in bags. CDG Terminal 1 is really nice once you get to the final gates, and it seems to be set up in a nice way, where there are a lot of little nodes of nice plush areas which have about five gates each. Once we finally found our gate, we sat down and had breakfast, a croissant and apple pastry, which weren’t as good as the other patisserie stuff that we had, but I can’t expect much from airport food anyway.

The flight was mostly full, but we did a good job of selecting our seats in order to maximize the possibility to have a row to ourselves - I chose the aisle and the window seat in a single row which left the unhappy middle seat, and there wasn’t anyone there after the plane filled up. One thing that has been nice in both directions is the plane seats. It is probably slightly because of my weight loss over the last year, but also it seems like the Iceland Air over-seas flights have more room between the seats. At any rate we got our own row for the flight.

The layover in at Keflavik Airport was pretty short, but we had to go through a whole maze of gates and stuff. It is interesting because they have to corral the people who are headed out of the EU, but they still have all of the gates on the upper levels, so they end up making us go downstairs just to have us climb up the stairs again, and walk in the same hallway except separated by a glass partition. It could be very disorienting, making the airport seem larger than it is. We picked up some dinner while we were there though, just packaged sandwiches from the café, and our last calorie-laden drinks that wouldn’t have any corn syrup for a while.

On the second flight, I managed to snag an exit row near the front of the plane, but miraculously it still had the normal non-stationary seat armrests, which meant it was easy to fit into and not uncomfortable for either of us. I think that they just crammed these two seats in row 8 when they discovered that they had the space. There wasn’t any reading light or air though, so they would be pretty bad for someone who couldn’t sleep on a overnight flight. The entertainment on Iceland Air was not bad in either direction. I watched The Adjustment Bureau on the way out and What Happens in Vegas on the way back, as well as some random TV shows. Mostly I ended up reading books on the Kindle though, which has increased it’s value in my eyes after reading on a plane - it really is so much easier to read and bring on travel, I recommend it if you take at least a couple flights a year and normally read, because there is no page turning and the page is nice and big but it is very light. I would seriously consider one of those DVD rental service type of things where you rent them for the flight, but kindles with books loaded up instead. That’s probably not allowed by the Kindle user agreement and DRM though.

In the last couple of days of the trip and over the last few days, I was thinking about how I seem to be taking two different types of vacations lately. The first type is the kind that we took here, and has a similarity to the trip to Portland last year. They are the type of destination trip where we want to see a bunch of things. Paris was very much a busy vacation, with so much to see that it was impossible to see everything in the same trip even given the six full days that we had. The second type of vacation is the type like when we went to Kauai for our honeymoon, where we want to really just get out of town, go somewhere beautiful, and then relax in a chateau or on a beach for some time.

The different destinations are telling of the type of vacation that most people are taking to that locale, including the types of activities available. Paris is in some ways the ultimate “busy” vacation – it seems like it would be possible to take an entire year of vacation there and still never see everything that there is to see. There is something about the city that makes it just have so much to take in. Most cities would qualify for a good location for a “busy” vacation. Most of the “relax” vacation areas are geography-dependent in some way, because they are in a tropical locale, where it’s just that much easier to relax and enjoy the weather. They are also more situated towards coasts than other places, because it’s just that much more relaxing, I guess. The types of things that you would do on the “relax” vacations are more likely to be physical, like swimming, surfing, snorkeling, hiking. The types of things on “busy” locations are more likely to be cerebral in nature, looking at museums, visiting historic sites, and taking in art and culture.

While some people seem to take more of one kind of vacation than the other, I am thinking that I might want to try to even them out for a while. Paris was definitely a relaxing vacation, because it was different from the ordinary and a joy to see and experience a foreign country, but I can’t say that it was more relaxing than a beach for a week, or hiking around some foothills. It is hard to say that I like one more than the other. Another thing is that both of the types of vacations tend to have a time limit for me. I don’t think that I would enjoy staying in Paris for two weeks for example, because I would just not be able to process it all. At the same time, I end up getting antsy and wanting to get some stuff done when I stay too long at a relaxing locale.

I’m thinking that this dichotomy between vacation types is the reason that sometimes people can get to the point where they need the “vacation from the vacation”. Maybe the best way would be to schedule something busy for the first half of a trip, and then relaxing for the second half? When I travelled to Greece, the first half of the week was in Athens, which is definitely a “busy” location, and the second half on the island of Kos, which is beach-laden and mostly a relaxing locale. It might have been the perfect combination.

For now though, I am working back into the swing of things, and almost catching up on the work that all needs to be done since I have been gone. The next vacation I think will be “relax” though.