30 Down

Posted on October 16, 2018 by Dan

I’ve mentioned the weight loss project I’m doing. I hit 25 pounds lost relatively quickly, which made me feel great. The last month has felt like one huge plateau, but looking at it, I did lose.

Today’s weight is 345, so 30 pounds since my heaviest in January 2018. The most recent 5 pounds took about 4 weeks to accomplish. I’ve been walking on average a mile a day, with some days having 2 miles, and some days having zero.

I’ve been keeping my calories at the appropriate level to lose 2 pounds per week, according to the calculation in MyFitnessPal. The thing is, that app doesn’t know me. It doesn’t know my hormone levels or body composition. It makes the recommendation based on simple math.

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Boat Diagnostics

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Dan

The slow process to become a shade tree boat mechanic.

The boat has issues and it has been brought up in a couple of posts, here and here. The first issue the engine not idling properly and having generally poor performance. The second is the oil dripping out of the lower, indicating bad oil seals.

The engine on the boat is a Mercury 1150, inline 6 cylinder 115 shaft horsepower 2-stroke. I’ve been researching this engine, and it was made from the mid 1960’s to the late 80’s. Mine is a 1988, which I think is the last year of production. It has distributor-less ignition, with a coil pack for each cylinder. It has three carburetors, one for each two cylinders.

What I understand is that, at the time, this was the best performing motor in it’s class. It is also the motor that requires the most maintenance and adjustment to keep it running at that level. The other motors, notably from OMC (Evinrude and Johnson), are more reliable and require less hands-on time to keep on the water. To be honest, I wish this was an OMC.

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Blog Update

Posted on October 11, 2018 by Dan

The big issue with having a hobby blog is having time to do the hobbies to blog about.

I’ve been working on the boat problems as time and weather permits. The rainy weather has made things very difficult. I hope to have a blog post up soon about it. I do wish I had time to script up the work and set up to shoot video of it. Some still photos will just have to do.

Now that I think about it, I’ll split things up into a couple of posts. Hopefully it will be interesting.

The weather is turning here in beautiful Kentucky and Autumn is here. The season is moving away from outdoor activities, so I’ll have to come up with a few things to do indoors. I do have an aquarium project that I didn’t get started last winter, so expect some posts on that. Perhaps I’ll work on the basement workshop space and get it organized. There is also some work to do with Plex, and perhaps a NAS storage server, or maybe the other servers I bought a couple of years ago and didn’t get set up. I’ve also got some equipment to set up to reload ammo for the guns I don’t have time to shoot.

Truly, time is the enemy. There are so many things I want to do and want to share, but I work full time and we are raising a couple of kids, which take time to do it properly. Long ago I had wondered what I would do when I retired. Wondered that I would be bored. Well, I can honestly say, if I had a windfall of money, I’d have plenty to keep me busy until the day I pass from this earth.

Huh, I just had a blog post pop in my head. I’m off to write it.

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