Womens March

I sent out an e-mail to some friends to let them know I am coming to visit. One of them sent back a photo of the Womens March that she was participating in Seattle. It is really awesome to know that on yesterday's 2nd Anniversary of the Womens March was even larger than last year and was celebrated around the world.

Seattle Womens March (photo by Janice)

I put the miniature anthuriums out in the planting bed by the papayas. I want to take them to the Big Island, but since I am going to Seattle first, they'll have to wait until my next trip. In the meanwhile I need to split & repot nearly all of them.


I also checked on the status of the papayas; it's been about 9&1/2 months since I transplanted them. There are 2 that are almost the size of ones you can find in the grocery stores. I'll have to keep an eye on them and pick them before the bulbuls start making holes in them. The last papaya tree still hasn't started to set fruit.

The 2 largest papayas are almost the size ones you can find in the grocery store.

It's only been 3 weeks since I got the Fitbit but I thought I would do a review now, a week earlier than I said I would. I have the Fitbit Blaze, which is worn like a watch. I have been using the basic features of the Blaze, like the step counter, distance tracking, calories burned, and minutes of exercise activity. It automatically tracks your heart rate as well as how much sleep you got & the amount of time you spent in the different stages of sleep. There is an app to enter food you have eaten to track the number of calories you have taken in, then it compares it to the automatically calculated calories burned based on your activity level. You can set whether you want it to help you monitor how many calories you need to increase or decrease to meet your weight goal. You can also track your water intake as well as weight loss or gain. And it also tells time.

One of the things I like most about the Fitbit is the automatic counting of steps each day. The default setting is for it to note whether you have reached 250 steps each hour. At 10 minutes to the hour if you haven't reached 250 it vibrates & gives you a readout of how many steps you have done & how many more you need to do. The default is to remind you for 8 hours from 9 am to 4 pm; over the last 3 weeks I increased mine to remind me for the maximum 14 hours from 7 am to 9 pm. The default number of total steps is 3000; at 250 steps per hour, that amounts to 2000 steps. I reset it for 12 hours which would result in a total of 3000 steps. Last week I easily made it to 3000 steps so I increased my goal to 4000 steps. And found something I don't like, it doesn't assess your progress going forward from the new goal; it went back to the previous weeks and said the goal was not reached.

Oh, no! 220 more steps needed! I made it! (There is no bpm because its off my wrist.)

The Fitbit Iconic has more features than the Blaze. But right now I haven't figured out all the features on the Blaze, some seem to be frivolous. Some look like they are made to appeal to people who are very competitive (the Challenges that compete with family & friends), others are solo hikes where they show you Google Earth style panoramas as you reach certain points. Just to be clear, the part on your wrist is the monitor, the rest of the stuff is on your Smartphone that links by Bluetooth to the monitor.

Happy Belated Birthday to Sheryl & Maki-san!