Here’s that three berry granola — “sweet strawberries” and “bold blueberries” and plain ol’ no modifier needed “cranberries” — that I tried yesterday. It was maybe almost too sweet. So, today, I added raisins. The raisins helped.
So now I’m wondering if raisins should be added to the list of highly versatile foods that make most anything better. Should they?
Right now the list is bacon, honey and … maybe raisins? Their universality is probably ranked in that order, too.
Anyway, tomorrow’s new granola is the fourth in the series, the final new variety in this first round of the experiment. The key ingredient is the humble, yet exotic, blueberry.
Today, I did the first-of-the-month computer chores. The Desktop needs to be cleaned. And so does the Download folder. I updated the website’s spreadsheet, which I only get around to doing every four or five months or so. It’s more satisfying that way, watching the hits climb more quickly.
The original version of this spreadsheet was just one column of monthly data points, but this is a column recording almost 20 years of numbers, and has become unwieldy. So I broke this up into years. It’s easier to do pointless comparisons that way.
For instance, now I can easily see that 689,000+ visits rolled into the site last year. (For reasons that will always escape me.) Last year was my best year yet! And my third consecutive years of a half-million plus. I can quickly see that 2021 was better than 2022. I guess everyone got busy again when they stopped pretending Covid was behind them. I can also see that I’ve been over a quarter-million every year of the last decade. And my three best months all took place last year, October, July and November, respectively.
Would you like to know which January was the best January of all time around here? Last January, of course. January 2024 was the third best January. And now I can determine all of that at a glance because I spent a few moments formatting the cells of the spreadsheet to include commas.
All of those things I learned in a class somewhere along the way in high school or college are coming right back to me.
Speaking of statistics, spreadsheets and numbers that don’t matter to anyone but me — and to me, only barely — it’s time to tabulate what I did on the bike for January. This chart represents simple mileage accumulation.
That red line shows what I did in January of last year. Last year was my most prolific year in terms of miles. And January 2023, the output ever so humble, was my second most prolific month ever. (Bested only by November, of last year …) The green line represents a simple projection: the mileage I’d accrue if I rode 10 miles a day.
The blue line is reality. As you can tell, I’m well above the 10 miles per day average, and charging toward the 2023 trend line.
I wonder what this ridiculous little chart will look like at the end of the year.
I don’t have 11 more months of photos from our recent trip to Cozumel. But I still have quite a few that we’ll see together. And, then, I suppose we’ll just have to go diving again. Maybe she’ll breathe on the next dive.
But, before that, another filefish on the Palancar Reef.
Here’s some coral that is, sadly, dying.
Staghorn coral is some of the fastest growing coral in the western Atlantic, up to eight inches a year, and there have been some encouraging restoration projects underway. While we’ve lost a great deal of their population in the last 40 years, there is some encouragement that they can repopulate, with careful attention.
Here’s another great stoplight parrotfish, or, as I like to think of them, the inspiration for 1990s sneakers.
If I knew anything, anything at all, about that industry, I would absolutely start a line of shoes that were reproductions of reef fish color schemes.
I call this one “Sand.”
I’m not sure why I took that, but it’s near the end of a shallow dive, and there was nothing there. So, you see, it was a profound statement on a day without diving.
Is it time to go diving yet?
