I've Been Drifting

6FPS V6#1: January 6, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Scheduling note: I’m shipping this issue out a week early because I want to get the new year off and running, and I was motivated to get it written early. Happy new year!

I hope you had a merry holiday season, and I hope 2025 will be a good year for you. I ended up 2024 with a quiet month, but I find myself looking forward to 2025 as a chance to push myself forward and further again.

Adding this to the list of no-no’s

After my Rapid Unplanned Vacation, we headed hard into December. I more or less lost a week to mostly sitting and sleeping before I started having any energy at all, but we got the tree and decorations up more or less at the normal time, and since the weather turned very cool and very damp, we settled in and just hung out together watching hockey and taking it easy. December, for us, is a good time to just stop worrying about other things and relax these days

Except my migraines got really fussy, so I was struggling to manage it from the time I came back from the hospital until Christmas day. This got me thinking about what could be triggering it, and many times, it’s some food item the migraine is sensitive to. I kept trying to think about what was different from my normal diet, and kept coming up blank.

And then I had a quick “oh, no……” because there was one big change to the diet: we had switched our desserts every evening to using the various christmas goodies we’d received or purchased: various candies and cookies that were on-hand for the holiday.

And this year, many of the cookies were dipped in chocolate.

Looking it up, it turns out around 60% of migraine sufferers find chocolate affects their migraines.

So, guess what has to go on my “should not eat” list? Sigh, because I love chocolate, even though most of the year, I eat very little — it’s one of those treats I give myself once in a while.

And, of course, when I stop by a coffee shop like Starbucks, my go to is a mocha.

So I guess I’m not a latte drinker, although I’ll be doing some experimenting to find a new go to.

While I wasn’t annoyed at giving up caffeine, this one is frustrating, but at the same time, I’m happy to have made the connection fairly quickly. And like diabetes, figuring out what works and doesn’t in your diet and managing that is a key part is keeping things stable and life livable. I’ll figure out my options. One thing that was clear as soon as I made the connection, FWIW, is that I’m a lot more sensitive to chocolate than caffeine. Of course.

Decaf Tea update

Bit of an update on my trials with decaf teas. I got a number of nice suggestions after last issue, and thanks to all of you for sending off your thoughts. A couple of tea companies were recommended, and I decided to give New Mexico Tea Company a try, since I know a number of fairly serious tea drinkers who swear by it. They do a number of decaf black teas, a decaf chai and a decaf green.

I have been drinking their decaf English Breakfast for the last week, and I’m rather happy with it. I’m actually getting a good tea flavor out of it. I just ordered a couple of other of their decaf blacks (Decaf Breakfast and Decaf Ceylon) as well as their decaf green tea and I’ll give them a try before deciding which blend I like most. They also do a decaf Irish Breakfast that’s currently out of stock that I want to try as well.

My go to downstairs in the home office is to have three teas available I use based on my mood: a black tea, a green tea and a peppermint herbal. I’ll usually brew hot in the morning when it’s cold and damp (which here in Washington it is a LOT much of the year), and I keep a pitcher of tea iced that I’ll drink in the afternoon. The first cup or two I normally drink with milk, and after that I drink it black, and the iced teas are all unsweetened.

It’s going to be interesting to see which blends work best both hot and iced for me — and yes, not all teas ice well.

But thanks to your suggestions, I have hope that I can continue drinking tea that just doesn’t make me sad. The number of blends I’ve tried since this switch that either had zero flavor, or nasty aftertastes was just depressing. It’s nice to have found one that tastes — like tea, and even tastes like tea when I drink it with milk.

I admit I was so unhappy with the poor quality of the teas I’d been trying that I found myself on Amazon pondering buying a coffee maker. Thankfully, that won’t be necessary.

End of year birding

Some days life cooperates. After weeks of cold rain and other complications, on the 24th I had to go run an errand, and it was actually sunny and rather pleasant. I’d seen on eBird a couple of interesting birds near where I had to go, so I side tripped over there. Much to my pleasure, I got to the park, found the flock of Canada Geese on teh ball field, and inside the flock were both two Greater White-fronted geese, and three cackling geese. Never even got out of the car.

Then, to close out the year, I went out birding a couple of times. At one stop, after two years of them hiding every time I came into sight, I finally added Black Oystercatcher to my county list. There are a number of these birds in the county year round, finable at 4-5 locations, but despite multiple tries, this bird has been a nemesis — until now.

These late birding outings added 3 county birds to end the year (now at 140 species), beat my 2024 number by one at 132, and ended the birding year on a positive note. Of course, on Jan 1, all the year lists go to zero and I start over, but that’s part of the fun.

There’s a continuing Rock Wren I’d really like to chase if I get the chance. Not a lifer, but a really nice county bird to add that’s been around this winter. If I don’t get it by the end of the year, I’ll go chasing it again in January.

I finally saw a fox sparrow on the property this morning, so my winter bird set is now complete. Varied thrush finally arrived, a few weeks late and only two so far, been a weird feeder winter.

But overall, been a nice birding year., with hopes 2025 will be better.

I had hoped to get to Ridgefield NWR in December for a couple of days of birding but because of everything else going on, it couldn’t happen. I’ll look for a reasonable weather window in January to go spend 2-3 days birding Southern Washington and explore the Columbia River gorge a bit.

This I learned: Tiny earpod tips exist

I have never loved the fit of my earpods. I do get a good seal, but they never felt as comfortable as I expected, and never seemed as secure. I decided to do some experimenting and picked up a few different third party options. While exploring these on Amazon, I realized there were some firms doing even smaller tips than Apple’s XSmall size, which is what I’d been using.

It turns out that my best fit seems to be the XXS size from one of the vendors, a bit smaller than the smallest one Apple uses. The fit still doesn’t seem as secure as I’d like but it was the most comfortable and most secure. A few vendors go even smaller: Amazon searches for “earpods tips XXS” or “earpods tips SSS” will get you in the neighborhood if you’re curious.

New iPhone and Watch — thoughts after a few months

I’ve had the iPhone 16 and iPhone 10 for a couple of months now, so I thought it was time to offer some thoughts after using them on a daily basis.

Overall, I’m happy with both. I like the image quality coming out of the camera is quite nice, but I haven’t really pushed it too hard yet. It feels like a small upgrade from the iPhone 14, plus the macro feature, which I’ve used a few times and it’s blown me away. That makes the upgrade worth it, but I need to work with it more.

Battery life is amazing, much improved over the 14. The new camera control button is — fussy — and I don’t really love it. I need to spend some time tweaking the settings to try to get it to work better for me. The shift from a mute switch to a mute button, which is right above the volume buttons, causes me to mis-register on all of the buttons, so I’m changing the volume is the wrong direction rather often. But overall, I think it is a worthy upgrade.

The Apple Watch 10 upgrade has been interesting. Early on, I was having some battery issues with it, but the .1 update resolved them. Now, battery life on it is much better than my Watch 9. it took me a bit to get used to the tweaks to the user interface, but haven’t changed my muscle memory, it works well for me.

One interesting change that I noticed immediately was that my exercise number went up by about 40%, despite my activity levels not changing. This simply seems to be because the watch is sampling data more frequently, which is a gripe I’ve long had about the watch — it wasn’t really great at recording exercise time if you don’t religiously start workouts (which I don’t), and with Watch 10, it seems that they’re comfortable enough with a finer granularity here. I’m quite happy to see that.

One other thing I noticed that I had to watch for a while was my step count. I realized there were times when I was seeing steps counted when it made no sense (for instance: one night after an enthusiastic petting session with Hunter, I found I’d put on 140 steps). After watching this for a week or so and comparing my step data with data from before I updated, I’ve come to the conclusion that this has been going on at all, but I never noticed it until the change in exercise minutes made me pay close attention. So this is a non-issue, other than it gives me an understanding that there’s likely some overcounting in the numbers, but if I’m trying to watch trends or compare counts over time, the step count can tell me if I’m doing more walking or less, even if the absolute number might have some slop in it.

And FWIW, my step count for December, between the hospital stay, recovery, lousy weather and the fussy migraines, is going to be in sad panda territory. But in the last week or so, I’ve finally been pushing it upwards again…

Dragon Age: Veilguard

I did finish Dragon Age: Veilguard. It took me about 76 hours of play time. The final boss challenge itself was a very cinematic fun of battles that took me almost three hours across two sessions to complete, and I found the entire game quite enjoyable.

There is a side plot involving one of the companions where they realize they’re non-binary, and this is handled with nice sensitivity. There is, of course, a big fight between them and their mom, which is ultimately resolved as the final resolution of their quest line. Very quietly, they also end up in a relationship with another of the companions.

One of the things that are part of RPGs these days are romances, where the lead character (aka “you”) has the option to build a relationship with another character in the story. One of my criticisms of Starfield was that the romance setup felt very much as if it’d been written by a 12 year old. In Veilguard, I found it a lot more subtle and mature, but at the same time, it was woven into the story at times in small ways that really impressed me.

Overall, I really fell deep into the story and appreciated how it played out, and I came back out after the ending satisfied with both the game and its story, and how I played it. Will I replay it? Probably, at some point. Not right away.

Next up for me is Civ7, which releases in February. Until then, I’ve dipped my toe back into Witcher 3, a game I’ve enjoyed but never played deeply or finished — because Witcher 4 is coming down the road. I don’t like the battle mechanics of Witcher as much as I liked Veilguard, but it is an interesting story to follow and I’m enjoying having dropped back into the game.

See you next issue!