neonleonb

My blog no longer lives on LiveJournal. Instead, find it here: http://leon.barrettnexus.com/blog/.

This transition means I'll lose track of LJ friends somewhat, but it means I'll own my own data. It's been aching to be free for a while now, and I'm glad I can finally help it achieve its dreams.

I just got my cholesterol, glucose, percent body fat, and all that tested. It's pretty good, but not amazing. I did this once before, and here's the comparison.

Measurements are in mg/dL:

type	2006-11-20	2010-09-23
Cholesterol	130	176
Triglyceride	64	<45
HDL	41	45
LDL	76	not measured because triglycerides were so low
glucose		92
percent fat		16.1%
blood pressure		120/80

The doctor said my HDL should be higher, but with the really low LDL, it's not a problem. The total cholesterol is way up, but I guess the reduced LDL makes up for it? More exercise and healthy fats would likely help, but it's not worrisome. Likewise, my glucose looks good, no sign of my family's hypoglycemia. My body fat percentage is high in the "fit" range (13%-17%), and far away from the "athlete" range (which ends at 13%).

In other words, I'm a fairly healthy young person. More exercise would be good for me, but I didn't get exercise over the summer and I'm restarting now at Google, so it's not surprising to hear that.

 I'm doing a medical blood test thing today, and it requires fasting for 10-12 hours before. But I wasn't hungry 12 hours before, so I'm actually fasting for 15 hours, and it's awfully annoying. Man, hunger makes it hard to concentrate.

It probably doesn't help that persistence has paid off in my newfound exercise of swimming (Google has those "infinite" treadmill pools), so yesterday I was able to swim until I was tired, rather than until the drowning sensation overcame me and I had to stop. It turns out that breathing more than once every 4 strokes makes it a whole lot easier. I think that breathing frequency will have to be a goal to work up to.

 I was all set to give blood this morning, but apparently my Argentinian travel makes me ineligible. Most of Argentina is fine, but Iguazu Falls and Corrientes (home of the capybaras) are at risk for malaria, so I need to wait a year.

I'm a bit disappointed. There goes my good deed for the day.

I just donated money to help hire an orchestra to record some out-of-copyright music (Bach, Tchaikovsky, etc.). The scores are old and out of copyright, but any new recording is copyrighted--but these folks will release it under a Creative Commons license, so it'll be free to share!

You can donate too, here: http://kck.st/cOYVCM

Caely came on a second hang gliding trip last weekend. She didn't fly with me (I'm not rated for tandem flights), but she got some really good pictures.

She got me preparing for launch.

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Her prize picture was of me actually launching. It's great!



Here, I fly around.

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(Unfortunately, I didn't take up the camera, and so there are no pictures of her. I'm a bad boyfriend. Here's an extra picture of her from another time.)

About the last thing I did in Argentina was to take a bicycle tour of Tigre. We took a train, biked around, and then took a boat ride. On the way, there were some fantastic views of the whole city, whose downtown high-rises look splattered against the shoreline.



The boat ride was through the river delta. There was again amazing contrast, this time between the hulking rust of industry and the still-successful amusement park.

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After all my sightseeing, I did some sightseeing in Buenos Aires and did a little more tango. I took a few more tango lessons and tried to dance at a milonga, but it was really hard for me to work up the nerve to dance with people. My dance suckiness was compounded by my language barrier, so I only danced with one or two people in both the milongas I went to.

But one of the dances was a joint dance, with music alternating between tango and rock. It turns out that the Argentine dance of "rock" is very similar to swing, though not pure east coast or lindy. (Their floors get so crowded it turns into a slot dance, which I found out only by breaking the customs and annoying people.) It was nice to dance a dance I was good at, but it was frustrating that people don't change dances every song there. Instead, many people keep a partner for the whole set, and I suspect some of them only dance with the one person they came with (!).

But the sightseeing in Buenos Aires was better than the dancing. I re-loved the architecture



and saw the crazy suspension bridge (with shape reportedly inspired by a tango lean/lunge sort of thing),

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Getting to Mendoza sucked. See, I had planned my trip to Ibera at the last minute, because I'd hoped to see capybaras at Iguazu. Then, when it came time to get my bus ticket from Ibera to Mendoza, it turned out that because it was a long weekend for Father's Day and Flag Day, all the buses in that direction were booked. After experiencing some extreme frustration, I eventually went via Buenos Aires (way out of my way), which cost me about 1 day spent only traveling back and forth.

Anyway, once I was in Mendoza, I did a wine tour and a "high Andes tour," which was really just riding in a van up into the Andes, on a fairly major road to Chile. It was lots of travel, but we stopped and saw incredible things. For instance, sunrise over a lake in the lower Andes.



The air was really warm at this point, because it was a hot wind coming down out of the mountains, warming as it descended. However, apparently storms always follow that hot wind.

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The first glimpse of capybaras we got was from our boat. We saw ones that were far away and active, and close but lazy.



We also saw capybaras as we walked around the park.



They're really unafraid until you get within 5 feet or so.

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