What I'm doing here

The most eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that my pace of blogging diminished in 2023 and I did not make my 20 posts a month target. OK, in fact only one of you likely noticed, aside from me myself. I could see where it was trending and could surely have pulled it out in the last week, but I decided to let it go because nobody really cares and nobody should really care.

First and foremost, I need to stop caring about little crap like that and need to get back to focusing on what's important, not bullshit little metrics like how much I post, how many points a day I get in DuoLingo (I maintained a roughly 400 points a day pace since I fell into the app's dastardly clutches. Again, with focus and effort I could have dragged myself back up to that target, but for what?).

Overall, I need to let the numbers go, unless they are important. I have and make enough money, within reason I need to not get caught up in tracking that, though it's a nice game.

My weight and my blood pressure are probably numbers to keep an eye on. I went to a party last night at a neighbor's house and ate like a motherfucker because the food was so good. This afternoon I'll get out and burn some of that off and in upcoming weeks I'll dial things down. My nephrologist told me to keep an eye on my blood pressure so I'll work on that. Similarly, getting to be early and sleeping enough should continue to be foci. Giving enough money away and figuring out how to balance between politicians (to help bend the needle of policy and governance back towards reason) and charities (for more direct impact) -- that's worthy of attention.

For now, back to this mystery novel (Elizabeth George's A Traitor to Memory), which at 800 pages clocks in rather unnecessarily on the long side. If I didn't care about the arcs of the characters running throughout the novels on the detective team, the smart thing to do would have been to skip it. But since I see that observing these arcs -- as I had failed to do when I read Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford series in the order in which I found them in used book stores rather than chronologically -- adds to one's appreciation of the books, I soldier on.