How did the summer disappear? The pool is too cold for swimming, but the weather is divine. We’ll be having spritzes and apps on the deck soon. With Aaron off to college, and Joey commuting to school + working a lot at his new job, we’re effectively empty nesters.

I reflected yesterday, en route to Bellview Winery after a late lunch at Sharrott, that the familiar pattern of diversions of our lives have gradually reemerged, in an unsurprising way, to what they were before we welcomed the kids into our lives: shopping, nipping out for something to eat and drink, and domestic futzing around.

We were also reminiscing about all the fun things we’ve done as a family over the years, and the crazy, hyper-local, mostly free adventures I’d take them on when they were little. I saw the same brownies at a farmers market that I got for the boys after our first summer in Ocean City.

There are many more to be enjoyed, too, which is a joyful thought indeed..

Witch

Witch by Many Tricks Software is an alternative to the Mac’s default command-tab app switcher. It’s an ingenious utility that allows you to create a number of different kinds of switchers, and in my case, I was interested in making a Safari tabs switcher (although I still think Launchbar might be the best solution for me).

macOS’s default switcher is great, and as I discovered before, there’s a bit more to it than meets the eye. Pressing on the up or down arrow key while selecting a running application from this menu will show you the open application windows and hide everything else that’s running, and along the bottom row, shows recent documents.

Witch does something similar: invoking the app switcher shows a menu of running applications, but you can style the list such that it’s vertical, for example, or tabs from right to left (a test, perhaps, of a person’s sanity), and more.

Most salient, however, is Witch’s ability to search through your stable of running apps. Let’s say you’re using the excellent Bike outliner to take some notes, and you do a web search to understand a feature. In this situation, you have an app named Bike running, as well as a Safari tab or two with articles about Bike. Invoking Witch and smacking the escape key allows you to search for the phrase “Bike” and see all of it. That’s a pretty simple example to illustrate the feature.

You can create multiple “actions” in Witch and assign them to different keyboard shortcuts. I have a second action that shows only the frontmost app’s windows in a vertical array. It’s perfect for switching and searching Safari tabs.

MacSurfer

Way back in the 90s, when I was in college, my dad’s browser homepage on his enviable Centris 650 was MacSurfer. It was emblematic of that era’s webpage design: a white page, mostly text, very low rez. But it was the source for curated Apple News, and it became my homepage for a long time, too. I eventually replaced MacSurfer as my homepage with Google Reader (tuned to the Apple tag group).

And it’s back. Eric Schwartz interviewed the new owner, who has resurrected the site. It’s been a welcome return to a curated news page; I love my RSS collection, but this is fun, too. I’ve always appreciated how the page is organized

Starting Over

Being a beginner is fun. You’re expected to make mistakes and you improve quickly. Contrast, though, with “Expertise is not a Tombstone.”

Starting over has a similar charm, with caveats: you remember your past progress, have experienced the law of diminishing returns, but get a chance to start over in a quasi-noobie frame of mind.

I started rowing back in 2014 I think, and logging my efforts some time in 2015. I swapped out rowing for strength training in the late winter of 2016 after reading an article on the Art of Manliness about the Stronglifts 5×5 program. I purchased the app and followed the program and was very happy–even impressed–with the progress I made.

You can’t possibly do Stronglifts for much longer than six months or so. If you can put in the time, you go from zero to hero pretty quickly. I started, for example, with a 45-pound squat and finished the program with 305 lbs.

Once you reach that point, your body can’t recover from the serial work sessions at Stronglifts’ pace, so you have to back into a different program, which for me was Wendler 5/3/1. Wendler’s model backs you down to doing the four core exercises (squat, deadlift, overhead press, and benchpress) once a week, which is much less volume than Stronglifts.

I continued to make slow and steady progress using Wendler, almost reaching a 400 lb squat. But serial injuries (some back pain from deadlifting, should pain from overhead presses, and eventually some IT band issues from squats that were so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night) led me to slowly excise some of the movements from my routine. And then, in December of 2022, I started rowing again. A lot.

Rowing is a great exercise, engaging more of your musculature than walking, running, or cycling. I had been thinking about adding in the bench press and squats again, not necessarily looking to get back up to where I was before (at my current body weight, I’m not sure that’s even possible, and I’m well into being 50 years old now).

I’m just going to use paper logs instead of an app to make sure that I’m tracking how much weight I put on the bar. I’m starting off plenty heavy for a person who hasn’t been lifting for a couple of years, but well below my old PRs. My understanding is that you don’t exactly start over physiologically after a break; your body remembers your previous level of fitness and capability, and you can expect to reasonably return to a previous level of strength.

Part of my motivation is to add some muscle for aesthetics, sure, but I also want to juice my basal metabolic rate. I lost close to 90 pounds all told, but I’ve added about 10 more back on since last fall into winter. I’m less strict about how much I eat and drink during special occasions, but I have to be mindful about things, too. You don’t lose 90 pounds overnight–it comes off slowly, with deliberate effort. They can come back, too–not overnight, but slowly, with mindless sipping and chewing.

Another move I’m keen to add in is the kettlebell swing. I have a 25 and a 50. I did a bunch of swings yesterday and today, and except for a little twinge in my back from my deadlifting days, it felt good and surprisingly hard. It’s an interesting contrast: I can row at a slow pace and not get winded at all, but there’s really no way to do kettlebell swings at a low intensity. If you’re swinging a 50-pound ball of metal, it’s all or nothing. I’m writing them down on my paper squat log and I did 100 today after a 20-minute row.