Yeah, I noticed that, too! 
Very excited!
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We are having our first actually cool night in my part of Texas. After an 88 degree day it is going down to the high 40s tonight.
We just may get a taste of fall…
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low 40s… that would cook me in celsius land.
we are at 11 degrees (celsius) and my body refuses to go out into the ‘cold’.
but on the positive side: I got my car back. just a whopping 5k € repair.
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11C(About 52F for my fellow Yanks) sounds nice. Perfect weather for bundling up in my favorite hoodie and socks and for sipping hot tea. Sucks that the local climate has long, hot, humid summers, short, mild winters, and barely any fall or spring to speak of most years for the last decade or two. I feel like this is the first time October has actually felt like October in a long time, and I’m loving it.
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Here (but Naples’s mild climate is well-known, if not even renowned) I don’t have turned on the AC on for the third afternoon/night in a row.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Today was the first day of the season cool enough for me to don my long athletic pants and slipper socks. Took advantage of the nice weather to do some fall cleaning. Also enjoyed a steaming mug of shrimp broth(added a spoonful of shrimp bouillon to a mug of boiling water) during the cleaning and a steaming mug of peach herbal tea with my supper.
Wish I could enjoy this kind of weather all year round.
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Unusually for me, I managed to come up with an I7 extension that makes sense and actually might be useful. Don’t really know how to go about publishing it, alas.
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After putting on a few pounds thanks to my birthday splurging, I’m back down to straddling the 300 pound boundary. Still haven’t gotten a weigh in where all readings are on the right side of said boundary, but today’s readings ranged from 299.8 to 302.x with one of them being 300.0.
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Everybody cheats from time to time. Just stay on the wagon.
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I am happy to report that today’s weigh in gave me a max of 5 of 298.6 pounds. I could be wrong, but I think the last time I was under 300 was before my dad died in 2017. New years is 8 weeks from yesterday, so I’m looking at just over a pound a week to lose to reach my goal of 100 pounds lost in 2 years(I was about 390 at the beginning of 2024). Still need to lose about a hundred more pounds to get my BMI into the healthy range, 70 of those to drop from obese to overweight, but considering my limited options for diet(Starch and dried beans are cheap, fresh produce, dairy and meat are expensive) and exercise(no room or money for equipment, no sidewalks for outdoor walking, no reliable transit to a gym or rec center, can’t reliably do 10 push ups and even walking can exhaust me or put undue stress on my lower back and hips, knees, and ankles) and my family history(my brother is the only one out of me, my siblings, and my parents to never break 300(and both of my parents, me, and my sister all broke 400), but weight is why he was discharged from the military, my sister only beat obesity through the nuclear option of gastric bypass, weight almost certainly contributed to both of my parents’ less than graceful aging and deaths), I’m pleased with my progress over the last 2 years.
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Been a bit, but a lot has happened in the meantime – so here are the highlights:
- I turned 24 on the 30th of October, and had a good birthday, visiting the mountains and getting lunch with my wife. I didn’t think I’d make it this far so everything, despite the struggles at times, is a new opportunity and I’ve been working on seeing it as such.
- It’s been almost 4 months on hormone replacement therapy. 4 calendar months as of the 12th, but I’ll have hit the milestone in dosage as of today. Change is slow but good, and it’s been nice to feel more myself, even if I’m just me with an awful mustache now.
- Work has kept me busy, but it’s been fulfilling and I’ve had a good time working, even on harder days – one of the students I work with drew my wife a picture for us to hang up on our fridge, and the students have been trusting me a lot more since the start of the school year. I may be considered for a long-term position soon, and I’m excited for the prospect of that.
- My wife and I are getting a cat, a stray we’d been feeding for the past few months and who is currently in the shelter (reported her through the proper authorities so we’re not just stealing someone’s cat + it’s unfortunately cheaper than trying to get things figured out with the city and vets on our own) but she should be released to us soon. The apartment has been cat-proofed and I am excited to have a pet again.
- I’ve been drawing more as of late – working on finishing up an entire spread for a zine/art book that should be coming out soon and also making a serious effort to learn to paint digitally instead of my typical line/render process, which is a little more difficult with my nerves these days. I can post some of my art in a reply to this but there’s been an insane improvement from last year to present, and even across the last several months.
- Writing has been harder than usual but I’m working on some small things, mostly an old project about a post-apocalyptic new wild west. I’m not optimistic about having something for Spring Thing, but the prospect is still enticing.
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Happy birthday, and congratulations on your marriage. 
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It got down into the 30sF last night and isn’t supposed to get out of the 40s today. As a result, I’m currently bundled up in my favorite hoodie(though I haven’t pulled out the rope belt I made from some medium-heavy yarn to hold it closed(the hoodie is open front without buttons or a zipper) and the hood is down) and two pairs of socks(normal socks for extra insulation, slipper socks so I don’t skate on the linoleum(-like) material of most of the floors in this trailer. Also plan to make hot earl gray to go with my lemon pepper shrimp rotini and beans for lunch.
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I reached a milestone today. I’ve been bad at art my whole life, so when I turned 40 last year I decided I wanted to work on art in my 40s (just like I accidentally did writing in my 30s and math in my 20s). I didn’t expect to get very far, but I’ve made a lot of progress, and this week I sold my first painting! I already got a payment for it and just now I shipped it with UPS. It feels like I’ve come a long way!
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My wife and I adopted a cat! We’d been feeding her as a stray for some time (since late August) but she is legally and officially ours now! She’s a charming little creature (her name is Sparrow (she is what she eats, or at least tries to eat and then returns to you a mess, as my wife and I learned earlier this summer)) and she enjoys the finer things in life like trying to eat plastic, stepping on my keyboard, stepping on me, and yelling while she steps on me in an attempt to escape with plastic she would like to eat.
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Surprised you haven’t called her Plastic :P
Looks like a little void in the middle of the photo. Very nice.
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Very adorable cat!
I have been spending a lot of time revising and too much time not revising and watching Starkid musicals instead, but I’m now officially halfway through my GCSE mocks! Feels good to say that. And I know I’ve said this before, but after this is all done, I’m cutting my hair. 4 years worth of hair out the window (hopefully not literally, that would be a mess) but it’ll be fun to have a new haircut!
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I was going to post an image description, but I gotta be honest with y’all: the cat is literally a pitch-black void shape in the middle of a bright photo of a room’s floor, with two adorable eyes staring out of the darkness. There is the slightest off-black hint of inner ears and a collar is barely visible under the black fur.
This is one of those things that gets exaggerated in cartoons, but this kittykat is doing it for real.
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Today I learned about the git stash command. So many team workflows make so much more sense now.
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Adorable sounding void cat… I’m reminded of a cat named Smokey my family had nearly 20 years ago who liked to curl up in my mother’s slow cooker when the ceramic liner wasn’t in it and a few photos I took of it in the slow cooker with my first digital camera(not counting flip phone cameras or the Gameboy Camera I had as a preteen)… where the cat ends up with massive, glowing pupils that look kind of like Aang’s eyes when he goes into the Avatar State… I suspect the effect was the result of low ambient light so dilated cat pupils and the camera’s flash reflecting off the back of the eye(part of what gives cats superb nightvision is they basically have a mirror at the back of their eye that reflects light that passes through the retina back onto the retina to give the photoreceptors a second shot at detecting the photons… that and their slit pupils can dilate nearly as wide as their eye sockets to let in more light in the dark, but I feel like the cat pupil bit is more widely known than the reflector bit, and when I took those photos, I had no idea why the cat had spooky glowing eyes in photos… I think I still have those photos, but everything in my /media/sda/Images/Photos/Cats directory has the kind of useless, numerical file names digital cameras give stuff by default and I can’t be sure stuff that isn’t innocent cat photos hasn’t landed in there by mistake in the 13 years since I went blind, so I’m a bit hesitant to just upload the whole folder.
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