National Gyro Day!

This holiday was actually on Saturday. I love Gyros! The meat is usually beef, a mix of beef and lamb, or chicken. It’s makes for a great pita sandwich.

This is my wallpaper for September. It's Hibari Kyoya from Hitman Reborn. I did use it a few years ago around this time of year. I think it fits the theme of the High Holy Days the most out of all my wallpapers. With a lit. reflection of himself (it's a time of reflecting on the previous year), seeing himself (a time of introspection and thinking about how to better ourselves for the coming year), and somber expression (it's both a happy and somber/serious time). Although, that's pretty much his normal expression. 

On the regular calendar, this year the HHD start the night of September 9th and go until sunset on the 19th. They're on the same dates every year on the Jewish calendar. 1st of Tishri until the 10th. It's just that the Jewish calendar is lunar. With this coming Rosh Hashanah, the year will be 5779 on our calendar. HHD begins with Rosh Hashanah or our New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. 

The month-long holidays for September are: National Biscuit Month, National Chicken Month, National Honey Month, National Potato Month, National Rice Month, National Cheese Month, National Piano Month. Some are for important causes, some are to make you appreciate things you may take for granted, and some are just for fun. I love all those food related ones! Interesting that it's National Honey Month, considering we have quite a bit of it for Rosh Hashanah. It symbolizes a sweet new year, along with apples and other sweets. 

I upgraded my phone to an iPhone X on Sunday. I wasn’t sure if it was doable yet. I had (still have, but not using now) an iPhone 5c. The 4th anniversary of it was several days ago. (According to facebook.) Doesn’t seem like that long. It was my first smart phone ever. I had a flip-phone before that. I can’t imagine life without a smart phone now. It’s amazing! Like a mini powerful computer. 

My old iPhone had just 16 gb of storage. They don’t make them that small anymore. The new one has 64 gb. So much! Nice, but not sure if I’ll ever fill it up. That’s probably a good thing. The screen on the new one takes up most of the phone, which is quite different compared to the other one. It’s a much bigger phone, too. The keyboard seems bigger and more spread out, which is better. It doesn’t have that lag if I type quickly, as well. It runs faster in general. It also has a much better and fancier camera. I can tinker more with that. I love taking pics, so that’s nice. 

There are few downsides that I’m noticing. If you don’t have wireless earbuds/headphones, you can’t plug the earbuds (it comes with) in and charge it at the same time. They share a port (I think that’s the right word..). However, the battery life is much better than my previous phone. That one wasn’t too bad until just a few months ago. 

Going out of home and looking at apps that are open, closing them out, and going back to home is not as intuitive to me on the new one. Before, you just pressed the home button. Pressing it 2 times for going to the open apps, and one for going back to home. If you wanted to close apps you just flicked them away with your finger. In this one, you drag things up a little and pause with your finger to get to apps that are open. Drag your finger straight up, and you go back to home if in an app or from the lock screen. For closing out apps, you have to press the ‘cards’ for a bit, then you tap the minuses that show up. Maybe I’m just not used to that. I liked the home button. 

Some of my old apps aren’t working well on the new phone. MyColitis won’t even open. They’re all up to date, but I know some of them aren’t compatible with newer phones. So, I’ll have to replace some of them like the MyColitis app. Sad. 

I'm still really amazed by it. It has augmented reality, so that will be fun in the future. The visuals and sound are much better, too. Opening it by just showing my face is interesting. It was annoying at first, but I am getting used to it. 

I was recently harassed by another guy. I mentioned this on fb, but not here. He was rather tall, and it seemed like he was with his wife and kids. This was at the same Safeway as the last 'incident'. The first one was roughly a month ago. Two guys went up to me and hassled me in the parking garage. This time the guy stopped me in the store and was really loud about it. With both incidents they talked about how much they loved my hair, wanted it, and liked how bouncy it was. The most recent one added that it was so 'wild'. I stopped listening to him at one point, smiled, murmured a thank you, and quickly walked to where I was going. First, no one should be treated like this. It was kind of implied that they thought I was a woman, which adds a special layer to it when you're not. Second, why are they so fixated on my hair? Do they want to rip it off my scalp? What's the point? It's not a normal thing for me. So, it's also got me thinking that they're picking up on something that I changed recently. With the first incident, my hair was the same state it's been for a while. With this second one, I have been taking much better care of my hair. That shouldn't mean that I should be subjected to that, though. Why was I harassed by 2 guys before that? Weird vibes I'm sending out maybe? 

I have been trying to be healthier overall lately. I've been showering more often, too. Unless I want my skin issues to act up, I can't take one everyday or go without for a while. The perfect amount of time is every other day. My skin is much more healthy looking and feeling this way. I think my eczema was starting to really come back with a vengeance before I went back to doing it more often. I also have a weird genetic 'disease' that acts up, and my skin's super sensitive. Wahoo! In order to have healthy skin, I have to be balanced and do it on a more regular basis. The best time to wash my hair is once every 3 days. That's a while in between. Most of the time, it's not in sync with my regular showers. If I wait for longer in between, like I was doing, it gets severely damaged, increases in volume, there's a lot more dandruff, and it becomes frizzy. It develops a layer of lighter hair on top that's brittle and dry, too. If it's every day (or every other), it gets super dry and frizzy, as well. With doing it as often as I'm supposed to, it keeps its style, is nice and soft, tamer, smells nice, and more.

I've also been trying to keep track of my exercise throughout the day on MyFitnessPal lately. I'm amazed by how many calories I burn just on big laundry days. Yesterday, I burned 1228 calories. Most of my calorie intake for the day. Only about 300 left. This was taking into account how often I went up/down stairs, minutes cooking, taking in the garbage bin, what's involved with my big laundry days (moving clothes around, running up/down stairs with them, taking my bed linens apart and putting them back on, etc.), playing my clarinet for an hour, doing my other cleaning, etc. It adds up. 

I've started doing sit-ups again. Haven't done them in a few years. It was pretty much as soon as I first felt the colitis symptoms. I'm starting with 5 in the morning and 5 at night. I'll add 5 to both each week, like before. The most I had gotten to before was 95 each. It was kind of disappointing that I wasn't able to make it to 100 each. It'll be interesting to beat that. I think it's best to start small with it, like last time. That way I can ease into doing a lot more. 

I also want to get back into walking regularly. Haven't gotten to it yet this week, since I've been distracted every time. I'm determined to get to it tomorrow. I hope to increase those walks over time, too. Right now, I'll do one 2-mile walk after dinner. Maybe if I can keep it up for a month (every single day), I'll add another 2-mile walk after breakfast. There was a brief time that I managed to do 3 of those. One in the morning, one after snack, one after dinner. Each time there was a different atmosphere outside. The night one is supposed to be around sunset to motivate me. At least, it was at first. The morning one was close to the sun rising. Maybe I'll work my way up to more than 3 of them. However, that might take up too big of a chunk of the day. I might add in running up/down stairs in consecutive sets, as well. Starting with 3 sets of 3. (Go up/down 3 times, rest, 3 times again, etc.) I didn't do that before. All this might make me lose weight even quicker. That's ok. I'm most likely not at the norm weight range yet. Might be close. I'll be physically more fit, which would be good. I won't be caring about how much I'm losing, unless I clearly am skinnier than I should be. It's not about weight loss for me. 

Finished the HelloChinese course. Started Duolingo's Russian course yesterday. I took Russian in college and loved it. Some of it is coming back to me. I don't like that Duolingo doesn't really go over the alphabet. I guess they just expect people to pick it up from the exercises. I looked at a wiki article on the alphabet, and that alone brought back memories. It's overwhelming to see when you haven't gone over it for so long. I now have a Russian keyboard on my phone so I could write out the sentences on Duolingo. That's been interesting to look at. Some of the letters are borrowed from Greek, however most seem to be unique. I remember feeling like Russian as a whole was truly more like a puzzle than the other languages I've studied. Should be interesting to go through their course.

Finished Anjaan on Netflix recently. They ended it on too much of a cliffhanger. I hope Netflix gets the rest of it. Went back to watching Hinterland. It's a Welsh detective series. I remember watching a couple of episodes in the past, but when I went back to it Netflix said that I only watched the first episode. Watched half of the 2nd one yesterday, and it looked familiar. That's ok. It'll get me oriented again with it. Each episode is roughly 90 minutes long. Longer than most shows I watch. There are only 13 episodes in total, though. 

Finished watching Isekai Shokudou or Restaurant to Another World. It was pretty good. The food looked amazing! Better than food in real life. The animation was high quality, too. The fantasy side to it was quite interesting. Their dragons seemed different than most. It was interesting how much they focused on them. Essentially, 2 dragons guard the restaurant in the other world as if it were one of their treasures. The darkness-based dragon became a waitress in order to watch over it directly. (The fire one tries to watch over it from afar, although she does order a lot of curry for takeout.) She was curious at first, since she lives in space. Humans would die when she was around, hence the reason she decided to isolate herself. Like the other dragons, she can transform and appear elf-like. When the dragons normally do this, they prefer to be naked. They can make clothes seemingly out of thin air. She was forced to do this during her first visit right away. She tends to speak telepathically, but was working on physically speaking through her mouth. This scared the customers at first. They seem more like aliens than dragons. Apparently, the chef's great grandmother was a warrior elf in the other world. She suddenly was trapped in our world, and decided to make it her own. She opened a restaurant to welcome people from the other side. Not sure how or why she didn't go back to that world after that. So, the chef has some connection to it. He doesn't have any special powers. He seems to only know that his grandfather and father were the previous chefs. He's just kept it going. After his father passed away, it was mainly just him keeping it going. Then, a demon and that dragon showed up to help and became waitresses. Still don't know how that door to the restaurant from the other world came about. It'd be interesting if there was another season.

17th of Elul

Finished the Feelings unit for Chinese. On the only speaking section, I got my highest score ever. A 4.3. I mostly get in the high 3's. I think the highest score you can get is 4.5. I didn't think I would be that great this time. Some of the new words were rather difficult to pronounce. Although, one of them was kind of fun to say. That was: 越来越 or yuèláiyuè. Has a sort of rhythm to it. It means: more and more. Sometimes it's added to certain things like words related to feeling something, and adds a -er and -er to it. So, when it's with the word for 'sad', it turns into 'sadder and sadder'. The Feelings unit is the last one of their course. I'll try to catch up with the review stuff. There are 182 words/grammar points at the moment that it says I should review. Quite a lot. I might go over the characters, too. So, I'll be done with Chinese by tomorrow or the next day. Then, it'll be time to move on to a new language. Exciting! I wonder how many languages I can stuff into my head? I'm just too curious about learning this stuff.

Read more of the manga, Alive. Han's ability is to kill people than take over their body. She has all their knowledge and can blend in well. She can essentially become anyone this way. Interestingly, I think she only took over one woman, the rest were men. Makes me wonder if she felt more connected to them...She was finally caught and killed before she was able to escape to another body. There's another power user nicknamed the Poet. He can control and manipulate others just by touching them. He apparently has part of the 'heart' in him, and is stronger than he appears. He's terrified of men, though. He let the military observe and run experiments on him, as long as they locked him up. At first, no one understood why he wanted to be locked away. They thought it was in order for him to protect others. It seems more likely now that he wanted to hide. Everyone's after him now. He's supposedly a big key to everything. He mumbles a lot, and the military thought he was mentally unstable, but a lot of it makes sense to them now. He wasn't spouting nonsense. Yukie tells Taisuke that when they find the main 'heart' (the one Hiro is encased in at the bottom of the ocean) he should absorb it, and go into an 'eternal slumber' to seal it off. He's the perfect 'vessel', and she thinks it's the only option they have. Taisuke essentially is going to wait and see what happens. If it truly is the only way, he'll do it. It's getting even more interesting. 

Practiced my clarinet for an hour. I played a couple of advanced Mozart pieces, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and some of the advanced solo classical pieces. I'm surprised how much I can fit into an hour. That's good, because I can make the 'rounds' through my books faster. Therefore, get to repeating pieces sooner, and improving on them more quickly. I can tell that I'm already improving quite a bit since I restarted practicing on a regular basis. Feels good. I might try to find and listen to some of the pieces at some point. To make sure I'm getting it more. Maybe at some point I'll post Youtube vids of me playing. I hate seeing myself on video, so it might just be the sound and some text. I can have people critique it and/or learn from me. That'll be cool. Although, Youtube might not be the best for critiques, considering there are a lot of trolls. I can critique myself through listening to it, too. I've recorded myself playing in the past, and played it back. I could pick up a lot of things from it. 

For cleaning, I did the usual cat stuff, my toilet, and the bathtub. I've decided to get back to cleaning for an hour. I probably did closer to 45 minutes, but that's not bad. I figured that my left shoulder is healed enough. I just hope I don't strain it again. That was the only thing keeping me from it. I decided to try something a little different for the tub. I normally use Comet and water, scrub it all with a sponge, then rinse with more water. It works, but it's tiring. I used Shower Scrubbing Bubbles this time. I don't know why, but I've felt reluctant about using Scrubbing Bubbles products. I let it sit for several minutes like it suggested. The smell was (and still is) nice, and the sound of the bubbles was interesting. They said you could wipe it off with a rag/towel or rinse it off. I rinsed it off using the shower head. It didn't completely lift off that way. I wiped the scummy parts with a paper towel, and it came off easily. Next time, I'll use a towel instead. Tomorrow, I plan to use the Scrubbing Bubbles on the shower walls, faucet/shower head (and other similar spots), and on the vinyl inner shower curtain. I had been wondering for a while about how I was going to clean that inner curtain. It's looking pretty scuzzy towards the bottom. I was surprised to read that Scrubbing Bubbles works on that, too. 

I was going to finally tackle that Dark Healer's head. Then, I blanked on his hairstyle...I'm noticing a rather boring pattern for most of my characters' hairstyles. I want to change that up, too. So, to get more ideas for it, I searched for styles. I came close to finding my 'vision' of him, before I got tired of looking. I'll look into it again tomorrow. I will get to drawing him again at some point.

Went back to watching D.Gray-Man. That was on hold for much longer than Kujira was. Probably a few years. I still remembered a lot of it. I'm roughly halfway through the old series. That one is 103 episodes long. That series originally aired in 2006 until 2008. It's rather old now. However, a new series that's a continuation of the old one originally aired in 2016. Quite a long time in between. I'll probably watch that after finishing the old series. It's much shorter, too. It's a surprisingly dark series. Especially with the last episode I watched last night. Someone commented with a pic of one of the most brutal/disturbing scenes as it was in the manga. It was even more so. Allen thought he saved Suman, but Suman's mind died while his body still lived. Ever the hopeful, Allen thought for sure that he'd find a way to revive his mind somehow. Suman was drooling and staring blankly, which added to it. As soon as Allen reached out to him, one of members of Noah (essentially the strongest demons) appeared behind him. He clapped, said goodbye, Suman, and Suman's upper body burst into butterflies. In the manga, it was an explosion of blood and guts everywhere. Maybe they had to censor it? The emotional rollercoaster with that was bad enough. Allen looked like he was going to mentally break at that moment. He finally 'saved' him, went through excrutiating pain with his arm, was pushed to his limits, saw townspeople die in the process, he kept telling Suman that he'd bring him back alive so he could see his family, and suddenly Suman 'explodes' like that. Feels like all that was wasted. He did get Suman's 'innocence' before the demons got it at least. Although, with one of the strongest ones showing up, and him clearly not able to fight anymore... He might lose that. 

I'm also close to finishing Isekai Shokudou or Restaurant to Another World. It's a comforting and peaceful series. The food looks amazing! A door to the restaurant appears once every Saturday in a fantasy world full of elves, fairies, demons, dragons, dwarves, royal humans, etc. The restaurant is from our world and is 'Western-style', yet they do have other cuisines. It's interesting to see the people from the other world show up, their stories, what food they order, and their reactions. At first I thought it opened up to many different worlds, but apparently it's just one other besides ours. They even showed a map of that world in the last episode I saw. 

Anjaan finally had a reincarnation themed episode. I thought there'd be one much sooner. Especially for an Indian supernatural show. It had a sad ending this time. It started with someone going to a police station with a bag of bones. Saying it was his and that they needed to find his killer. Turned out the person he thought he was the reincarnation of was real, and everything he said was true. They did figure out the killer, at least. I won't spoil the ending. 

I'm trying to be even more balanced with my nutrition today. For the last couple of days, I've been 'off' with a lot of it. I try to plan almost everything out the night beforehand. (Except for dinner usually, because that changes so often. I sometimes plan it when there are leftovers.) I might revise it throughout the next day. Turns out I'll be just 3g over for my carbs. Yay! I'm usually way over that. Protein will be close to 2/3 of what I should be getting daily. 90g is what's recommended. That's a lot better than usual. I managed to pack 38g of it into my lunch. I think that's the most I've had in one meal, and it was really filling. Not sure if I'll ever make it to 90g in one day, though. I'll keep trying. I'm low with my sugar for the day, which isn't good. Fiber is really low. I usually do better than that. I'll end up with just a little more than half of what's recommended for fat. That's unusually low for me. The interesting thing is that my macros section is a lot more balanced than I thought it would be. It's hard to balance all these things and shoot for 1400 (right in the middle of my range) calories for the day. Despite that, I'm making more of an effort with it. 

Lemonade Day!

This holiday was yesterday. Lemonade's really nice on a hot summer day. It probably would have been good yesterday. I haven't made it in a while. For mine, I usually use lemon juice first to about a 1/2 inch in the glass, then add some sugar (roughly 1/2 as much as the juice), then fill up the glass with however much water I want. It helps mix it up more this way. I still end up stirring it afterwards, just not as much. Sometimes I use Splenda to cut down on calories, however it gets a weird aftertaste. 

It was also Cupcake Day. I'm starting to like those more. I just didn't think much of them in the past. It's nice to have a little individual serving of cake, though. It's cute. They come in many sizes, too. The ones from Safeway are amazing, but huge!

The air quality is pretty bad today, too. It's a bit more in the red unhealthy category than yesterday. I can see more of the smoke from looking out the windows. Some of it has seeped inside, but it's not nearly as bad as outside. My gut's not liking this either. It seems upset. Rosie seems a bit worried about the smoke. She knows it's not normal. It's also expected to reach close to 90 degrees. When it's that hot with an unhealthy air quality, it's oppressive. Makes it hard to breathe or do much. It still looks like things will be a lot better starting after tomorrow. I hope that's true, it improves, and we stay with normal clean air. We're also still in a drought. Hopefully, we'll get some rain soon.

Last night I watched an episode of the Indian supernatural detective series, Anjaan: Special Crimes Unit on Netflix. I'm really liking this show so far. It's interesting to hear so much English interspersed with the Hindi. Hindi sounds and looks cool. I might try that on Duolingo in the future. I've heard and seen it before, but I think this is the first show I've watched where they speak it and show it written out. I've mostly just seen/heard it in movies, which are brief. Duolingo recently created a course for it, too. They show a lot of cultural aspects as well. I love learning about other cultures, so that's been a treat for me. 

Anyways, I thought it would be hokey, so my expectations were low. I was pleasantly surprised. The only thing I haven't liked, so far, is that they killed off someone who I thought would be a main character by the end of the 3rd episode. She was a very likeable character. It was a rather big twist. There's a new woman that might replace her, though. Haven't seen much of her, so I'm not sure how I feel about her. The side stories that are connected to the main mystery are very interesting in themselves. Everything has to do with a yellow-eyed demon-like character, Vanraj, and the main character, Vikrant. Vikrant's a detective. Netflix has 15 episodes, but looking at the wikipedia article, it actually has 65. Maybe they'll put the rest up in the future. It feels like I'm nearing the end, yet I've only watched 5 episodes. Should be interesting to see how it unfolds.

Watched 2 episodes of Gintama last night. I was behind a few weeks. 2 because of the awful internet connection at the hotel, and another because I was reluctant to continue watching the final season. It's my fave anime, and to think it's ending soon makes it hard to watch...I'll catch up next week with it. They implied that a major character was going to die, hence another factor to not wanting to continue. Turned out that he might be ok. However, a different character died. One I wasn't expecting. Everyone hated him when he first showed up, and he was a real jerk back then. This story arc has really changed him, and they actually made me tear up while he was dying. Gintama's good at making people hate a character, and turning them into something more. They're usually not 'evil', just misunderstood. Deep down they can be good people. The creator is a genius at character development, as well as other aspects. I don't think I could ever truly like the real 'bad guy', Utsuro, of this story though. He truly seems evil and doesn't care what happens to others. He seems to want to destroy planets, including Earth at the moment, because it's fun. He technically can't die, and has been trying to find ways to kill himself. The longer he lives, the more bored he feels. I like that they're showing characters we haven't seen in a long time, too. Each one has had a hand in trying to save Earth. 

Also, last night I caught up to One Piece again. (There's a new one today that I'll probably watch tonight.) The mochi devil fruit eater is annoying. Luffy doesn't seem to be landing any hits against him. Brook and Chopper are turning into hard candies, but Pedro may have saved them. He killed himself with a bomb to kill the candy devil fruit eater. If he dies, Brook and Chopper will return to normal, and the ship will be free. I didn't want Pedro to die...Even if he wasn't in the story for long. He was cool. It was a big enough blast that it sent the ship flying, Big Mom was blasted, and nearby fleets were blown up, too. Probably won't kill Big Mom, but she may be wounded. The only problem is the mochi guy, and luring Big Mom out to sea now. 

Ended up burning 928 calories yesterday. Roughly 62% of my calorie intake for the day. I was surprised by that, but again it wasn't a 'normal' day. I didn't do the added stair climbing, but ended up climbing stairs 15 times. If I had done the extra ones it would have been 24. That's a lot. I burned 270 calories alone with the natural stair climbing. That's close to the amount of one of my meals. So far today, I've burned 353 calories. Not bad considering I've done a lot less things than yesterday. 

Got to studying more Chinese today. I hadn't played the game for today before. It was on spelling. You choose what letters (pinyin) go in the blanks for a word, and if you get it right they turn into coins that fall into a pot. I was correct with the spelling for all the words. The only thing I messed up on was one tone for a word. They noted it, but marked the word correct. Sometimes it's hard to remember the right tone. Especially if it's an up or down one. They look similar. I finished the In the Office unit. The speaking part was frustrating, but I didn't mess up too badly. Ended up getting a 3.4 out of 4 for the all speaking lesson. Doing Business is the next unit. 

Read more of the manga, Alive. Not sure where this one's going, but it's certainly intriguing. They all lost the 'Heart of Akuro' (and Hirose who's inside) when the ship that was carrying it sunk. It's still 'alive', even if it might be at the bottom of the ocean now. I'm not sure what Megumi's situation is now. She's taking care of the people who kidnapped her 2 years ago...Doesn't seem right. 

Got to practicing my clarinet. Probably was not the best time considering it was around 80 degrees outside. (We don't have ac at home.) After that hour of practice, I was sweating like crazy. I don't regret it, though. Played some jazz and mostly Irish tunes this time. Wasn't too bad today, either. A few mistakes, but I'm working through them.