70

No I'm not. Not yet. Not for a while. A long while.

Today was 70th blood donation. It wasn't the routine same old, same old. They sent me an email this morning with instructions to have a good breakfast and get a good night's sleep. Nothing like after the fact instructions. Then they wanted me to fill out the questionnaire on line. Except the link didn't work. Probably every other person in Canada donating blood today was trying to do the same thing. Then you have to create an account. I wasn't in the mood to do that first thing, so I ended up having to do it on a tablet on site. That part's fine, aside from the tablet being slow.

Then waiting for the interview. Turns out the tablet has all the questions, so all the nurse does now is take your blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate, then labels the implements of donation. This was a long wait.

I ended up using my right arm because I don't like waiting. The nurse missed the shot and they end up throwing all that stuff away. Then wait for a left arm chair to open up, then wait for them to go through the procedure to get a new bag and needle and such. Good thing I wasn't in a rush.

The actual donation part is easy and the fastest part. I admire their efforts to streamline it, but really, what I want is the grocery store 12 items or fewer line. I've done this a whole bunch, I know what's going on, I'm married and haven't strayed, no risk complications, nothing new since last time, now stick the damn needle in me and let's get this over.

Which leads me into a rant. This whole creating an account on line thing is getting out of hand. I don't even know to the nearest dozen how many on line accounts I have. I have a list in a secret highly secure place, but I don't think it's complete. All too often I create an account away from that list and don't update it. Oops. Later this leads to rage and frustration as some place I've never heard of tells me I have an account, and I end up going through the reset the password thing. Usually this happens when I'm in a rush, which gets me THIS close to a complete melt down.

It was bad enough when you had to carry a special card, one for each place. Then I drew the line. I started telling retailers that if Rogers could set up a database that remembered what DVD's (back when there was such a thing as rented DVD's) I'd rented, and when their bonus points kicked in, and prompted the clerk to tell me I could pay for it with the points, or take some of the cost off, or go get another for free, they darn well could too, and they could shove their loyalty card where the sun don't shine.

If they've got my name, address, and the phone number I give to people that I don't want to talk to, they can also remember whatever bonus points I get. I shouldn't have to show them a card, or keep track of the points myself. Apple is really good at this. I called one time to ask about repairs to the iMac, but wasn't sure if it was still under warranty. Before I finished the question the guy I was talking to knew the date of purchase and everything else relevant about the computer, and me.

Plus the whole password thing. Tell me true, how many passwords do you have? Do you really use different 6-12 character passwords with at least one numeral and one special character that is not your name or email address for every single on line account you have? Of course you don't. You either use a service you trust, or you have your computer remember them for you, and heaven help you if it gets stolen, or you use the same password for several accounts.

One of my tasks this set of vacations is to go through my secret list and update passwords. My plan is to group them in several tiers. A bunch of the low importance, low usage sites are going to get the same password. My banks have long hugely complicated but easy for me to remember pass phrases about 30 characters long. Those are fine, or if they aren't there is no hope. Then there will be a few sites that are some combination of important or used a lot that will get a unique moderately complicated pass phrase. Should be fun updating all this.

There's got to be a better way. We've been taking the first steps towards having our phones recognize us without having to type a password. It would be nice if there was some way of having the phone know it's us, and then it reassures the remote site, and we get on with whatever the business at hand is. There's still some work to be done on this front. The fingerprint to get into my phone fails about half the time, more after a swim. Maybe we should be letting the phone look at our eyes.

Tuesday, nice 7 K run, 45:12 for a 6:26 pace. Nice evening for a run, just letting my legs do what they want. This morning was a swim, 1 K 19:30 long course, taking it easy, dodging a floatie that was briefly in my lane. Wanted to water run with Katie but her lane was a gong show of floaties and breast strokers. Fortunately a life guard told us they had just opened the deep bath tub. It was that warm. Wow. Good thing we didn't want to swim laps.

Ran and chatted. She is the second person all excited about planning my build to doing a fall marathon. I think they just like making plans. I was going to wing it, gradually building just the way I have been, but I've been told you can't do that for a marathon. There has to be a plan. With intervals, hills, speed work, fartleks, long slow runs, and I don't know what else. What do I know?

Here's another garden photo. I've been putting nature photos on Facebook every day, trying for a different one here. I don't really have the camera equipment to capture bees, but when you shoot lots of flower shots, and get a little bit lucky, you get this. We have at least 3 species of bees in our garden, and I think I've got photos of all of them now. I have to wait till I get the photos out of the camera and into Lightroom to see what I've got. Still figuring out and trying to streamline this workflow thing.

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And another for you, just to see how it looks on the blog itself. This is a rain chain.