Week One – Averaged Over 10,000 Steps a Day

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Mama Cormier

….I’ve owned my Jawbone Up for almost a year

On August 29, 2014 I uploaded my new Jawbone Up to my iPhone and set a walking goal of 10 000 steps a day and 8 hours of sleep a night. I’ve struggled when trying to reach either of these goals throughout the year. I have reached both of them but never consistently and for some reason when I have a good walking day I don’t have a good sleep and visa versa.

Last week when I started writing about my walking goals I started to achieve them. For five days I walked 10 000 steps or more and I averaged 10 500 steps a day. This is the best week I’ve had since getting my tracking device.

My husband came home from the hospital today. I got a phone call at 7:30 this morning from K asking me to pick him up because he was being released. I quickly got dressed and drove to the hospital only to find K still in his bed. He wasn’t even dressed. He was still waiting for the paperwork to be done so that he could be released.

I walked to the other end of the hospital to get myself a coffee and something to eat. When I returned K had decided to get dressed but we still had to wait for final instructions before we could go home.

By the time we left the hospital and picked up K’s pain medications from the drug store it was almost noon and the day had really started to heat up. The dog and I hadn’t been out for our walk but I knew that we wouldn’t get very far in this heat so I waited till this evening to go for our ‘long’ walk.

I’m glad I waited. I had managed to get in almost 5000 steps just watering the garden, doing laundry and going shopping. I knew that to reach 10 000 steps I would have to do the entire length of the park and back again. It was starting to get dark and I notice a sign warning about the coyotes that are in the park so I decided to stay on the walkways that were more frequently used by the public. It was nice changing up the route and seeing different parts of the park. When we finally got home I had added over 6000 more steps for a daily total of 11 100 steps.

Here are a few of the sights we saw on tonight’s walk.

Walking 10 000 Steps Takes Effort

Posted on August 12, 2015 by Mama Cormier

….but it’s very doable

When I’m at school I normally walk anywhere from 4000 to 6000 steps during the day, just walking from room to room, walking around the yard during recess and walking around the library putting away books. It’s those last few steps to reach my goal of 10 000 steps that takes effort.

Yesterday I found myself doing a lot of errands, using the car. There was a lot of waiting involved and by the end of the day I had barely clocked 4000 steps. In the evening I took a walk around the block with the dog and then I drove to the mall to do a bit of shopping. I parked farther away from the store than I needed to and I tried to walk around the mall after my shopping was done but I had left it too late and the mall was closing. In the end I only walked 5380 steps.

This morning, as soon as I woke up, I put on my running shoes and went for a long walk with my husband and Frances. It was a beautiful morning, even though the sky to the west of us looked pretty ominous. We walked to our favourite park and instead of going back the same way we came we took a slight detour to add some extra distance. When we got home I was surprised to see that we had already reached my goal of 10 000 steps and it was only 10:30. Ideally, now I should be able to add another 4000 to 5000 throughout the day as long as I don’t spend too much time on the computer or with my renewed hobby of knitting.

Here are a few images of what we saw on our walk this morning.

Held Hostage by the Cloud

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Mama Cormier

….all my gadgets stopped working 2 weeks ago

I’m not much for electronics but I do love my iPhone and I use the camera all the time. For my birthday this year my children bought me the Jawbone Up which tracks my steps and sleep patterns and I’ve become addicted to it. Everything was working well until two weekends ago when we went to the AGO with friends to see the Alex Colville show. As you know I take a lot of photos and I was devastated when the camera on my iPhone wouldn’t work. The message that came through said that I didn’t have enough storage.

I tried to delete some photos but it didn’t seem to help. Now almost all of the photos on my phone have been backed up to my computer on IPhoto so I decided to delete them all from the camera. Success. Well for a few minutes and then all of a sudden all the photos reappeared on the phone. I did manage to take a few photos at the gallery but I knew that this problem would reappear.

Later that day I discovered that my Up bracelet wasn’t working as well. It is also hooked up to my iPhone. Again the message was that I didn’t have enough storage.

On Monday, the following day, I made a trip to my local Apple store but they were so busy that I couldn’t get an appointment for at least 5 days. I pleaded with one of the staff to give me some clues as to what I could do. She suggested that I back up my photos onto iTunes.

The next day I took my computer to school and my friend L and I played around with the settings on iTunes. It took a while but we finally figured out that the storage problem was on the iCloud. I had two options. One was to buy more storage and the second was to back up all my photos onto iTunes, even though all my photos were already on iPhoto.

Later that night I clicked the button that said back up to the computer and the ICloud option shut down. I’m not sure that I want anything on iCloud for now but maybe down the road I’ll pay the extra money. I guess the one advantage is that I can access my photos from anywhere if they’re stored in the cloud.

The bottom line is that I can use my camera again and my Up is working the way it should.