just like summiting Everest

Today's titanic, world-shaking achievement took me under five minutes (no not that kind of achievement), and required me to—gasp—turn off my VPN during that time. I went into my PNC Bank account (PNC.com hates VPNs, which it assumes are used by scammers) and redid my billing address (currently set to Korea) to match my buddy Mike's address. When I arrive in America and get my PNC Bank debit card from a local Virginia bank, I want the card to have an American address, to be American. Why? Because some still-benighted American websites act just like Korean websites that don't acknowledge that foreigners exist. Expats complain about this all the time—Korean sites that don't have enough spaces in the name field for long names, or don't play nicely with foreign credit cards, or... or... any number of archaisms and bullshit still existent in this supposedly globalized society. Walmart.com, as I recently discovered, won't let you enter a Korean billing address. Et tu, America? The site's default assumption is that you're an Amurrican using an Amurrican card. Anyway, switching the billing address to a US address means there'll be one less step for me to do once I'm on site in Fredericksburg and able to get a check/debit card via face to face interaction (I tried for years to get a card through the mail; PNC kept saying they'd sent the card, and it would never materialize). So—that's One Big Thing I did today.

Oh—one other Big Thing: since I'm bringing only exercise bands to the States to do my resistance training, I'm busy figuring out ways to remake my current multimodal exercises (kettlebell, heavy club, dumbbell, etc.) into band-exclusive exercises for travel purposes. The transition from multiple modes to bands-only won't be perfect, and some exercises will simply have to be cut, but I'm figuring out ways to make this work as much as possible. Things like bench press, for example, can be done with bands. Biceps curls, lateral raises, bent-over rows, etc.—those also translate over very easily. More esoteric stuff like antirotation exercises can also be done with bands, but core-related moves like kettlebell around-the-worlds or farmer's carries need to be replaced by core-related band exercises. Some rotational stuff done with heavy clubs can, surprisingly, translate pretty easily into band work. So I'm working on that right now to give me something to do in my hotel room. There's also a whole library of bodyweight exercises I can try, but the problem is always my left shoulder, which will remain frozen for the next year or so. Frustrating, but them's the breaks.

Blood sugar on Saturday was 81, then 110 on Sunday, then 124 today. That's not bad at all; I'll have a low A1c in May if I can keep a blood-sugar average of around 120 or lower (under 100 is ideal, but that's a struggle for me). But get this: the 81 was after intense fasting, but the 110 and 124 were after days of eating. That's great news; those scores are still relatively low. It means a real, honest-to-God attempt at keto, a diet I've long flirted with, may actually be possible, coupled with OMAD, or one meal a day, to lower the frequency of blood-sugar spikes (eating anything, no matter how good for you, spikes blood sugar). 

More on this later, but the reason I keep bringing up blood sugar is that it lies at the root of my history of stroke and heart attack. More blood sugar eventually means more triglycerides and hyperlipidemia (both referring to fat in the bloodstream), and more visceral fat (the worst kind—the kind that wraps around your internal organs). Keeping blood sugar down is essential to avoid blockages and ischemia (lack of blood flow because of blockage, e.g., ischemic stroke—what I had). My blood pressure has been pretty low for the past few weeks, so I'm not too worried about that. Blood sugar is key.

We'll see how all of that goes and what I come up with. Meanwhile, I still need to buy contact lenses. This is becoming a running joke.