COVID…oh my
As it turns, I’m not immune.
I managed to avoid COVID since the beginning. Yesterday it caught up with me.
On Thursday I felt fine and had no known contact with anyone exposed to or suffering from COVID. Yesterday, Day 0 as these things go, I woke up feeling off, a scratchy throat, runny nose, aches and pains, and the start of a headache.
I decided I’d test myself as I had kits around. The results came back positive and strongly so.
I notified my employer and the folks I’d been in contact with. Then I called my doctor. Actually I ended up talking with a nurse twice, then my doctor. The long and the short of it; I was prescribed Paxlovid. I did some research and made the decision that, given my risk factors, it was the way to go. You might not feel that way. That’s okay with me too.
By nightfall my temperature was up to 103F and my O2 had dropped several points. Worse, I had a massive headache. I don’t recall ever having one this bad.
Luckily, I’d shopped earlier in the week. Even luckier, I’d cooked up a lot of bone broth. There isn’t much I really needed, so it was off to bed.
I woke up every two hours or so. This never happens to me. I was always able to sleep again. Thank goodness I was able to breathe as deep breathing, exhaling more slowly than inhaling helped a lot.
Finally, at my 3:00 a.m. wake-up, I took some Tylenol. I’d been holding off to let the fever do its work. By 3:00 a.m. it had come down on its own.
All of the treatments, Paxlovid taken early, bone broth, sleep, hydration, and Tylenol must have worked because this morning I felt much better.
My temperature is down, my O2 is up, and my headache is minimal.
I don’t know how long this will last, but I’m encouraged as I don’t feel anything like last night.
That’s it for now!
Omigosh…so big…so not carnivore
I was chatting with a friend last night about what I used to look like at my heaviest and before my hip replacement (a direct result, imho, of metabolic abuse). I was very active and still am, but that just goes to show that getting a lot of exercise doesn’t necessarily qualify one as healthy.
The shot on the right is from 2012, I probably weight 260 lbs. and had just finished bicycling down the Oregon coast over the course of a week. I would have that hip replacement a year and half later and go mostly low-carb. I’d lose that weight, then put most of it back on, while remaining mostly low-carb as my sensitivity increased and yes, I cheated from time to time. I did manage to keep my A1C in line thankfully.
The second shot is from a couple of months ago. I’m probably 185 in it, just as I am today. I’d been carnivore for almost a year at the time. And, while I’d had my knees replaced as the damage over the years was just too much, I’m still pretty darn active.
I love the memory of that earlier picture, it was a wonderful trip. I really, really, really don’t care for how I felt back then or what I looked like.
Eating for a friend
I ate this one for a friend!
A good friend of mine woke up late today and needed to get out of the house before he had a chance for anything besides coffee. As I had some sirloins dry brining in the fridge, I told him I’d be more than happy to enjoy a steak for him so he didn’t need to worry about that this morning. Hopefully, he’ll return the favor and eat one of his ribeyes for me this evening!
All the best!
New Instant Pot…Yes!
I noted the other day that I was looking around to see if I could get a bigger Instant Pot to use for making larger batches of bone broth more easily.
Amazon Prime Days is on and yes, they had a pretty good deal on one of the eight quart models I was checking out.
It should be arriving on Saturday and I plan on making more bone broth just as soon as possible!
Today’s meat sale
Our local Safeway put sirloin on sale today. I usually buy whatever steaks they have on sale. Lately, it’s been either sirloin or NY strips. I got a couple of nice packs today, the largest and most evenly cut they had.
Any price on the label is before applying the digital coupon, which lowered the price to $5.97/lb. That’s not too bad here on Oahu!
You can see the package and then all four steaks laid out with Redmond’s Cherry Smoked Salt for dry brining. Yum.
New Instant Pot? Prime Day?
I’ve been using my old Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1 since 2015! I didn’t realize I’d purchased it that long ago.
It works great, even after all this time. As I’ve documented on this blog, I’ve been making chuck roasts and bone broth fairly regularly of late.
The problem isn’t this Instant Pot has worn out, it’s that it might be too small for me these days. It’s a six quart model which is the really the standard size. Heck, it’s the recommended size for most folks.
But…
Since I’ve been making bone broth for myself, I’ve discovered that I’m having to make two batches when I might be able to get away with just one. I’ve also had to make chuck roast in two batches as I just can’t fit enough in this one.
So…
With Amazon Prime Days tomorrow and the next, I’m thinking it may be time to upgrade my game. I can definitely pass this one on to my a good friend and I’ll even teach him how to use it. But what should I get?
Since 2015 many companies have jumped on the bandwagon with these multi-cookers. I own a Ninja grill/air-crisper and am happy with it so I suspect their multi-cookers would be okay too.
I’ve given it some thought and I really don’t need a Wi-Fi connected device. It’d be fun, but I want to be sure I have something that won’t need tech updates any time soon. My Instant Pot has been fine since 2015 and I’ve never once thought it would cook better if I could look at my phone.
So it comes down the eight quart models, or maybe the Instant Pot Rio Extra-Wide coming in at 7.5 quarts.
Or maybe the eight quart Pro…
I guess I’ll just have to wait for tomorrow and see what the prices are. And just because I like my Instant Pot doesn’t mean I wouldn’t consider a different brand.
Making more bone broth
My friend John has been the recipient of some recent attempts at making pot roast in a variety of ways. I’ve also been shopping for him and picking up beef bone broth from a local outlet for regeneratively raised beef: forage.
But they’d been out of bone broth for a while and I’d tried making a batch for myself. It was very successful as I’ve documented here.
John texted me with a question and a picture of some bones he’d found. Would these work?
Somehow I knew what was coming.
So here I am, making more both broth.
This sequence follows the bones as they are blanched and roasted in my air fryer. I did have to split the bones into two batches to fit them all. I’m hoping that this will work when I do the pressure cooking as well. I guess I’ll find out!
Today’s meat…sale…and dinner
I headed out to Safeway for the regular weekly coupon sale. This week, they had bone-in NY Strips on sale. I picked a couple of packs up in one section of their meat area. I then checked the place where they often keep more sale meat. When I looked back, they reloaded the first place I’d checked. I swapped for bigger packs!
That’s the first package. The steaks look good with nice marbling.
The second package looks just as good. I’d forgotten to make an image before I put Redmond’s Cherry Smoked Salt on them. The first batch got a different blend of their smoked salt.
Both packs will now dry-brine in my fridge for a few days. I’m fasting on Saturday, so it’ll be at least Sunday before any are eaten.
In the meantime, I’m having the cowboy ribeye I picked up the other day for dinner tonight.
Before cooking but after dry-brining.
After grilling indoors on my Ninja DG551, the steak looks a little charred. but it’s perfectly medium rare inside and quite delicious
My Meditation Story
I wrote an article for our employee newsletter about my meditation history and our 10-minute meditation group.
Aloha everyone! I’m Robert Harrison (the other one), and it’s been my privilege to facilitate the employee’s 10-minute meditation community meditation sessions since January 2020. We practice various insight and mindfulness techniques twice a week over WebEx at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Everyone is always welcome to join us.
I’m amazed it’s been going on as long as it has because when this all started, it was a one-off sitting held for a department moai event. For those of you who’ve been at my workplace for a while, you may remember moais – small social support groups we learned about through Blue Zones.
The team I was on then planned to hold our monthly department event for my department, where I’ve worked for almost twenty-four years. We decided that having a healthy salad with ingredients from the Rooftop Garden and a short office yoga session would be perfect. I chimed in and said I’d also lead a short, 10-minute meditation sitting. And so, it started.
I was a little nervous about leading meditation, something I’d not done much of then. I’d learned one form of meditation as a child when my dad took it up to help with his migraines. I did practice a little back then, mostly to emulate my dad. And, as I was involved in theatre in high school and college, I did practice a bit to calm my nerves before hitting the stage. In my forties (I’m sixty-five now), a renewed interest in my health led me back to meditation and a much deeper practice. I’ve never been trained, but I’ve been sitting regularly for years, working with and learning from meditation teachers.
The moai meditation went better than I expected. My co-workers asked if we could do it again the following week. I agreed. Yikes! This led to hunting for locations around our building for our sittings. Folks also asked if they could bring people from other departments. Sure.
Then COVID hit hard, and, as many of us remember, we went home. At about the same time, Our enterprise moved from one internal video system to the current WebEx system. The older system didn’t have the bandwidth to allow employee-led events, but WebEx did. Someone asked if, just maybe, I could lead meditation online. Soon, we were up and running.
We added a second weekly session and came to our present form. Weekly, on Tuesday, I send out an email with resources and announcements to the more than fifty community members. We sit online at 1 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, often with a dozen or more attendees. The sessions are recorded, no faces but mine, and posted to our WebEx Team Space for those who can’t attend.
I’m grateful for the support my department and many executives and employees have given to our little community… and, of course, for our community.