The New Coffee Room

I’m sure he did, the question is whether he remembered it.

In my experience in the US most hotel gyms (of the chain type) have dumbbells up to 50, a lonely bench or two, a tall pulley machine for doing the myriad things you can do with one of those, and a long line of treadmills. I usually see most people on the treadmills, maybe me and another middle aged guy using the weights. Unless I go in the afternoon, then it's just me.

Some of the higher end hotels that are huge AND near large city conference centers have really impressive gyms. They look like a regular gym without the barbells (must be a liability issue). Vegas hotels also have some impressive gyms.

I visited some German friends decades ago when they lived in Treviso (they long since moved back to Germany). It doesn't get a lot of tourists, and they took me to a lovely restaurant that had its own vineyard. My buddy said the first time he went there he ordered a coke and they practically kicked him out. The only beverages they had were water, wine, and grappa. That's when I first had grappa. I had it a few times on that trip but I don't think since.

Yeah, I don't approach if they're chatting. More common here is people taking unreasonably long phone breaks between sets. When I nicely ask 'how many sets do you have left'? that usually speeds them up. It certainly does speed me up.

True, that.

@Mik said:

Yeah, I wondered about the travel. Makes it tough.

I generally try to keep up my exercise when traveling. For example with the boy on the west coast, I purposely chose hotels over Airbnbs so I could have gym access (I don't always do this but given the weight loss I wanted to this time). Of course their gyms sort of suck usually, but they're better than nothing.

Tomorrow I'm off to Thailand and my Bangkok hotel has a gym. We'll spend four days at a resort in Krabi that doesn't but they do have bikes and I'll go for long brisk walks in the morning.

I should add that, with the exception of the second half of December when I was traveling and sick (lovely combo), I never stopped my 7 day a week gym routine. Yet I lost lots of muscle mass and experienced a material reduction in the weights I could push-pull-bench whatever. It doesn't matter how much protein you ingest if your intestines won't put it in your damn blood stream.

Transplant meds suck, prednisone's downsides are well known (though I seem to be fine with it), tacrolimus (prograf) destroys your kidneys over time to the point where many end up on a dialysis/transplant path, and mycophenalate (cellcept) wreaks havoc on your intestines. This is a story of the latter.

Cellcept can cause direct injury to the intestinal lining, to the point where it mimics celiac disease when biopsied. This is because the same mechanism by which it inhibits lymphocyte synthesis (a type of white blood cell) can block intestinal epithelial cell development.

I've lived with this to some degree or another for 10 years, which is why I buy loperamide (Immodium AD) by the gross. But I've gone through several episodes where it goes crazy, leading to the loperamide being ineffective, then chronic diarrhea leads to malabsorption issues which leads to significant involuntary weight loss.

My weight the week of 9/29 to 10/4 averaged 178. On the 24th of February I weighed 149lbs. That was at the end of the day, in the morning I was probably at 146-47.

The entire month of February I was counting calories, and averaged over 3000 calories a day, and was still shedding weight. I just couldn't absorb the nutrients I was consuming.

It took just a couple days after pausing the cellcept for my BMs to stabilize. My weight then started a pretty decent upward trajectory. Here it is in pictures:

(That low point is north of 150 because these are weekly averages)

Anyway, when I showed that to my transplant team last week there was little doubt that the cellcept was the cause.

In the last 7 days my weight has averaged 165 (at night) and I have consumed, on average, 4000 calories daily.

I hope to get back to 175 by sometime in May.

Then I need to wean myself back onto Cellcept. Starting with a lower dose and moving up from there. Welcome to transplant. But as LuFin would say, it beats the alternative.

We will never forget your refusal to give us help we don’t need in the war we already won.

Presented without comment.

Saw that. Crazy how that car flipped around like a toy.

Interesting ‘pressure index’ created by Deutsche Bank doing a kind of technical analysis on the TACO trade.

I thought about that but I’m sore that’s a multi hour wait too from all the people who figured out they can feign a broken foot and ‘skip’ the line.

I’ve gone through the wheelchair method before when I was really sick. It was pretty slow overall in normal circumstances even through you skip the security line. You go to a waiting area, wait in line for a clerk who enters your info into a system, then sit and wait for your guide. Can’t imagine how busy that system is during these times.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi: "The fact that they are now talking about negotiations is an admission of defeat; didn’t they claim unconditional surrender before?

So why are they now mobilizing their top officials to negotiate?"

@Renauda said:

@jon-nyc said:

Well it’s clear the administration is negotiating with somebody there. Sounds like the people he’s talking to don’t have suppprt of some or all of the IRGC. If you recall he said he didn’t want to give a name so that the person didn’t get killed.

It’s really hard to know what’s going on now.

Maybe the Iranian equivalent to Rudolf Hess?

Exactly.

Big news if it holds.

https://apnews.com/article/social-media-addiction-trial-la-5e54075023d837ccdc76c4ca512e925d

I assume Iran war. It’s off brand for him, reporting says he counseled Trump against, yet he’s going to have to defend it.