I just had my gall bladder removed. Like so many things, I really didn't know anything about it until it became a problem.

A few months ago I started having this pain on my right side just below my rib cage. I actually went to an urgent care place once to have it checked out because I'd always heard that right side = appendicitis. And since I'm on blood thinners, emergency surgery is not a great idea for me. But the doc was basically like, "Nah, it's not appendicitis." And that was that. So I asked another doctor and he basically said, it's probably nothing, these things happen.

So I asked ANOTHER doctor, and she finally listened and said we should order an ultrasound of my right side to check the little cluster of organs there. It showed sludge and sludge balls in my gall bladder. Apparently most people have some sludge, made of cholesterol, and it's generally not a problem. But once it becomes symptomatic, there's no returning to normal function. The only thing to do is to cut the fucker out.

It's not that your gall bladder does nothing. It's just not essential and if it's more trouble than it's worth, law of averages says taking it out is better. It's just a storage sac for bile produced by the liver. When you eat fat, the gall bladder squeezes some of that stored bile into your intestines to break down the fat. Then the liver makes some more. Without a gall bladder, your liver just becomes an on-demand bile factory and everything works pretty much the way it did before.

I read plenty of horror stories online about what can go wrong (another reason I haven't been on Reddit since February). But so far things seem normal. I have 4 stab wounds in my abdomen that hurt an appropriate amount for what they are. But honestly the worst pain is in my right shoulder, which is so bizarre, but is apparently from the gas they inflated my abdomen with during surgery. It should subside after I burp enough, so I'm drinking fizzy drinks to facilitate that.

All in all feeling pretty good. Glad I got this done and added the gall bladder to my list of items removed from my lean, mean, human machine.

We just got back from our big 2025 trip to Portugal - Porto, Cascais, and Lisbon. Originally Portugal was nowhere on our radar, but we were supposed to go with a group and they all wanted to check out Portugal. After Daniel had finished planning the trip, they all had to back out for one reason or another, which left just us. But what the hey, let's check out a new country. Then we started seeing celebrities and influencers all hawking Portugal so we got excited.

It was pretty damn good. Daniel is ready to immediately move to Porto, and I wouldn't mind it. It's a little hilly for my liking, but the weather, geography, and people were all amazing. We did a little port wine tasting. I like port as much as the next guy, but it's not my favorite thing in the world. But you had to have some there since that's where it all comes from. We did a little tour/tasting at Calem, one of the big port houses, but we were hung the fuck over so it was a little bit challenging to get through. But we persevered.

The night before, we'd done a day tour with a guide who stopped and had a few drinks along the way. Then we did a 1-star Michelin meal at our hotel. Then we decided to hit up a gay bar our tour guide had pointed out that was just a couple of blocks from our hotel. We were kind of sitting alone sipping aperol spritzes, but then old David emerged and started telling women how beautiful they were, and saying hi to randos, and chatting up anyone who would listen. We ended up meeting some chick from London and her South African boyfriend and partying with them well into the morning. At a certain point we looked at each other and were like, "We have to leave." And we bounced. But I was still wearing her sweatshirt. Oops. It was just a jokey thrift store find she'd purchased that afternoon, so later on Instagram where we'd connected, she said I could have it.

Cascais was a beautiful, little ritzy beach town. Not quite as much to do there but that was fine by us. We took a boat out one day and rode the coast up to Lisbon and back, then out into the swells of the open Atlantic for just a few minutes. Ate lots of seafood, then headed for Lisbon.

Lisbon was super cool, but a big crowded city. It reminded me a little bit of Rome. It was basically erased from the map by a huge earthquake in the 1700s, followed by raging fires, followed by a giant tsunami. So the whole low lying area was planned out and rebuilt, and that made getting around easier than some other medieval towns. We had the second best meal of my life at a 2-star Michelin restaurant, Belcanto. Just a superb 10-courses with outrageously good service. And we splurged on a bottle of Krug (our first), and it was worth every penny!

The other fun part of the trip is that I spent the last 3 months racing through Portuguese lessons on DuoLingo. I always hate being in a foreign country and not knowing what signs say. I dunno. I don't CARE what they say, I just hate not knowing. So I wanted to learn as many words as I could. In that respect, it was a raging success and will be the standard operating procedure for every trip. I am getting started on Spanish for our trip to Spain next year.

On the other hand, I didn't realize I was learning BRAZILIAN Portuguese, not European. And they're different. All of our tour guides were super chill and friendly. And they all expressed that they appreciated the little bit of effort I'd made before visiting their country. But then they all laughed at me for speaking with a Brazilian accent and using Brazilian words. I said, "Você fala inglês?" and they were like "Você?! hahaha" Apparently "você" is super duper formal in Portugal, to the point of being comical/offensive. They use "tu" instead. Brazilian also muddles the constants and Europeans say them like they're spelled, more similar to Spanish. Just little things like that. I think that will be unique to Portuguese though. DuoLingo doesn't even have an option for the European variety, so if we move to Porto we have a lot to unlearn.

Anywho, we home now. Fighting jetlag. Got a few days before we're all the way over it but we worked 3 days this week without any problem. I'm about to head to my StretchLab appointment and see how much flexibility I've lost in the past 2 weeks. Ciao!

A while back I started using an app called Goodreads. I scraped my memory to think of every book I'd ever read and entered it into the app with an approximation of the date I read it. The grand total was abysmal. I realized I had severely abandoned reading in my adult life, which was completely counter to just about every goal I've ever had.

It was also around the time I was getting fed up with social media, Reddit in particular. The other apps have really subpar algorithms, but Reddit is so dialed in. It just sucks you further and further down the rabbit hole. So the first idea of how to combat that was to allocate an hour before bed for reading books, instead of laying on the couch halfway paying attention to some streaming show while I endlessly scrolled Reddit. That turned out to be a fantastic idea that really stuck.

I then made it a Febrehabruary thing to set a reading goal. And from there I set a goal to have read 43 books by the time I was 43 years old. I know that's not a stellar average, but I felt like one book per year sure beat nothing. Well I happily crushed that goal and kept right on going. Granted I'm 44 now, but my total is up to 82.

I'm also really trying to focus on the classics. Those books that "everyone" has read. And sometimes that means I'm stuck with a book I hate. Pride and Prejudice was like that. Man, I could cut that thing down to about 35 pages and make it a compelling read. Other times, I deviate and read some science fiction space odyssey or something as a little treat. And sometimes those two genres overlap, which is always nice. I certainly have a ways to go though. My "Want to Read" list is at 250 books, which at my current cruising speed of one book per month equates to about a 20 year runway. Which is fine, but that list is growing much faster than its dwindling. I suppose I could allocate more than an hour before bed each day, but for now I'm liking this change of pace.

It's so stupid that I have to STRUGGLE to stop looking at my phone. These things are so sinister, but so hard to ditch. Anyway, that's all, leave me a comment and let me know what book I should read next. On a side note, another reason I decided to blog today is because my "This Day In History" has no entry. I've NEVER posted on Aug 23 in my life. How weird is that. Now I have to go edit the code for my website to take that section away if nothing exists. Literally hasn't ever happened before. I wonder if there are any other days of the year where this is true. Oh well, not true for today any longer!