Early on day 4

Yesterday was mildly rough.

My garmin watch erased my commute home. Eh. Part of the whole reason I started keeping a "measured life" spreadsheet was so that I would rely less on apps, devices, etc. from other parties to track the sorts of things I want to track. Anyway, it was snowing all day long, which just made both commutes more interesting. I stopped on the way home at a japanese/korean grocery store in search of nuruk (which I didn't find) and koji (which I did). While at work, I took advantage of the availability of a slow cooker and a reasonably accurate thermometer to gather some information that should be useful when making black garlic. I added about a quart of water to the slow cooker and turned it to "low". After several hours, the temperature stabilized at almost exactly 80C. A similar experiment with the "warm" setting yielded around 60C. So my black garlic experiment is more or less planned out. I will seal whole garlic bulbs into a couple of the clip-top glass jars I have, add them to a pool of water in the slow cooker, and set it to "warm". I'll check the temperature for the first couple days to make sure it's staying stable, and keep checking over the course of time to make sure there's always water in the dish itself. The only real question now is where to put the whole contraption.

I also got in touch with a few bike shops and should be getting my hands on a few old internally geared hubs soon. I rather enjoyed rebuilding the one I'm currently using, and I think rebuilding a few more would be a reasonably good use of time. I also gave some checkouts via zoom for work, did laundry, went on a medium-length walk, and accomplished various chores. My blood ketones yesterday morning were at 2.5, and my blood sugar was down to 71. I'm probably out of ketosis now, though, because I had a milkshake in the evening. I had been feeling moderately run down all day, and was already down to 87.1kg yesterday morning. That's an absurdly fast rate of weight loss, and I can't attribute it just to water; I've been consistently well-hydrated for a long time now. I don't particularly mind being out of ketosis; my goal isn't to be in ketosis, it's to lose fat while gaining (or at the very least maintaining) muscle mass, and ketosis is simply one way to help achieve that. I just need to maintain myself at a reasonable but not excessive caloric deficit and get myself squarely below 87kg. Once I maintain that for a few weeks, while at least maintaining my strength training performance, I can go get another scan.

I also received some seeds in the mail yesterday; luffa, a couple different peppers, a red-necked bunching onion, and a korean variety of melon. Makes me wish I had a garden.