Saturday Bag o’ Boldface*

I skipped taking photos on the walk this morning. Dogs on a bench, dogs tied to a tree, dogs hooked to a fire hydrant, dogs in the blurred background of a wristwatch selfie … I post photos like that all the time, and if skeptics choose to believe I took them months ago rather than today, why bother trying to convince them otherwise? But I ramble. Here are the pups relaxing after their outing.

Mister B, on the right, looks like a possum when he stretches out, tail straight, muzzle white with age. A road kill possum, specifically, but I’m only teasing when I call him that. He’s slow and lazy these days, but still in good health, and oh by the way hopping through the doggie door once again. The wheelchair ramp I thought he might need is on hold. He’d probably refuse to use it anyway … if dogs are anything, they’re conservative, leery of change.

Donna’s off to her annual sewing guild retreat next week. She’ll be at a resort on the outskirts of town from Monday through Friday. I’ll be home alone (unless you count our chronically-unemployed 49-year-old daughter, but since she knows if it were up to me she’d be living in her car I expect she’ll stay mostly out of sight).

So I follow this guy on Twitter, the son of a famous actor, who tweets on everything from celebrity gossip to Israel to politics and is consistently bright and entertaining. Out of the blue, one day last month, he announced he was posting from the emergency room, hooked up to fluids. Several hours later, he explained what had happened: he’d been vomiting so much from Ozempic he became dangerously dehydrated and collapsed.

Well, hell, I’m on Ozempic too. My red line is well this side of vomiting; one hurl and I’m done with the stuff. The only way a prole like me can score an Ozempic prescription is to have type 2 diabetes, and I’m already taking metformin for that. If Ozempic turns out to cause serious side effects, I’ll just have to continue relying on metformin. Hardly the end of the world. I shouldn’t generalize, but it’s my impression that people with money go to the head of the line for Ozempic, whether or not they have type 2 diabetes. They just tell their doctor they want to lose weight, and presto. Truth be told losing weight’s my primary goal too, and the goal of everyone else I know who takes it.

Per the schedule I’m on, my weekly dose is now double what it was, up from 0.25mg to 0.5mg, a level where people typically begin to experience side effects. So far, I’ve experienced loss of appetite, mild abdominal soreness, and constipation. The current dosage runs for another month, at which point I’ll have to see my doctor before she prescribes the next dosage level, which doubles again to 1.0mg. If the side effects don’t get any worse that what I’ve already experienced, I’ll be on the stuff for the long term, and at some point should be able to stop taking metformin.

The loss of appetite, though … that’s a good side effect, right? I’ve already lost some weight, and Donna says more than a few inches as well. The abdominal soreness went away after a few days and hasn’t come back. TMI? I know a lot of people are Ozempic-curious, so you can expect me to continue posting about my own experience with it.

When it comes to wristwatches, I like a clean and simple dial. No clutter, not too many markings or scales or sub-dials, minimal numbering or none at all, complications limited to a date window, easy to read at a glance. These three definitely fit the bill, the Orient on the left most so. The Seiko on the right comes close, but I could do without the diving bezel and day of the week window. The Torgoen in the middle has an extra hour hand, but it’s a pilot’s watch, designed to track local and Greenwich mean time, used by aviators and mariners (and astronauts) to log time — a complication, but a necessary one.

I also like bold colors. The Seiko on the left is another GMT watch, this time with the 24 hour scale on a rotating bezel, so it’s somewhat complicated. As is the Pagani Design diving watch in the middle, but damn I love all that red white and blue (less so the extra crown or stem on the left, which has no function other than to mimic the helium release valve on an Omega Seamaster, the watch it’s modeled after). The Seiko on the right is a cheap one, and the day and date don’t quite line up — my one complaint with that one.

But I also like chronographs, and with chronographs come complicated and cluttered dials. I’ve never used one to time anything, not even in flight where timing is a frequent necessity (I always used the clock on the instrument panel instead), but chronos look impressive as hell on the wrist and therefore I have a few. The Timex on the left has an inexpensive quartz movement; the Breitling in the middle is my one “luxury” Swiss automatic; the Pagani Design on the right, in which you can see the reflection of the cell phone camera I used to take the photo, is an Omega Speedmaster lookalike, and like the Timex powered by a quartz movement. Although these three are mostly black or white, they approach the colorful watches in my collection in boldness.

Sorry. I do tend to get carried away talking about wristwatches. I’m still learning the watch nerd vocabulary, and need the practice!

Stay fresh, cheese bags.

*You didn’t ask, but the title of this post refers to boldface emergency procedures, the ones aircrews have to memorize and execute lest lives and aircraft be lost. Since I was planning to write about the bold faces of my wristwatches, it seemed like a natural tie-in, but one I now realize needs some explanation.