College Visit Edition: July 18 2011

Workout notes 76 F, 87 percent humidity; I tried to “run” my 4.2 mile hilly course. I was as stiff as a board. But no piriformis/butt trouble, though it took me 46:01 to finish it.

Then, we went on a 90 mile road trip to see the University of Illinois.

We got a presentation, a campus tour and then a session with the College of Liberal Arts.

What I liked: the bluntness. They flatly said what their entrance criteria was; they pointed out that the incoming student would have to approach the professor during office hours if they wanted attention, and they pointed out that undergraduate “research” would start off at a very small, basic level (e. g. “washing test-tubes”).

When they presented their attributes, they listed “academic excellence” as “number 1″.

But…well, my daughter actually liked the presentation at the much smaller private school better! I liked the larger one, but then again, I am not the one going to college. I’ve already had my turn. And yes; the private school in question is reasonably well regarded academically and would be the MUCH cheaper option for her (ok, me). So it wouldn’t break my heart…

Still, I was ready to apply to U of I….so they must have done their job well.

Posts:
Why treat the banks with kid gloves?

What about the argument that getting tough with the banks would threaten the overall economy? Here the question is: What’s holding the economy back?

It’s not the state of the banks. It’s true that fears about bank solvency disrupted financial markets in late 2008 and early 2009. But those markets have long since returned to normal, in large part because everyone now knows that banks will be bailed out if they get in trouble.

The big drag on the economy now is the overhang of household debt, largely created by the $5.6 trillion in mortgage debt that households took on during the bubble years. Serious mortgage relief could make a dent in that problem; a $30 billion settlement from the banks, even if it proved more effective than the government’s modification program, would not.

So when officials tell you that we must rush to settle with the banks for the sake of the economy, don’t believe them. We should do this right, and hold bankers accountable for their actions.

What about the debt limit negotiations? Ross Douthat says that the Republicans are in retreat. Why? They are getting almost everything that they want in exchange for letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the top.

17 July 2011: Pain in the Butt…and some hot/cool charts!!!

Workout notes it was warm by Illinois standards (85 F, 67 percent humidity in the morning) but I went out to try an 8 mile walk. 35 minutes into it, my butt/hip was killing me. So I decided to walk home (about .7 miles away) after stretching first.

The stretch took the pain away so I finished my walk on the West Peoria track. Was I ever slow; 31:30 per 2.1 mile (5 laps). Oh goodness; but I lasted 2:10-2:12 for 8+ miles.

But the fact is that I am months of rehab away from being able to do long walks that don’t make me suffer for days afterward. BUT I can still run easily, do PT/Weights and swim (in moderation) and the butt/piriformis IS getting better in that I no longer have pain when I swim.

It is just that when I don’t walk, it doesn’t hurt and then I forget to do my regular stretches and hip hikes.

Posts:
Watch this Bill Maher post before it gets nuked.

Climate Change: 7′th warmest June on record

Global Temperature Highlights: June

• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2011 was the seventh warmest on record at 60.94 F (16.08 C), which is 1.04 F (0.58 C) above the 20th century average of 59.9 F (15.5 C). The margin of error associated with this temperature is +/- 0.13 F (0.07 C).

• Separately, the global land surface temperature was 1.60 F (0.89 C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 F (13.3 C), which was the fourth warmest June on record. The margin of error is +/- 0.23 F (0.13 C). Warmer-than-average conditions occurred across most of Russia, Europe, and China, the Middle East, eastern Canada, Mexico, and the southern United States. Cooler-than-average regions included the northern and western United States, part of western Canada, and most of Australia.
The June global ocean surface temperature was 0.85 F (0.47 C) above the 20th century average of 61.5 F (16.4 C), making it the 10th warmest June on record. The margin of error is +/- 0.07 F (0.04 C). The warmth was most pronounced across the central north Pacific, equatorial west Pacific, the Labrador Sea, the equatorial Atlantic, and much of the mid-latitude southern oceans.

Economy
This is a comment about the stimulus that President Obama sought:

Mark Thoma sends me to Jonathan Schwarz making the case that Obama knew perfectly well that the stimulus should have been bigger. I’m not sure that lets his advisers completely off the hook; there’s a big difference between saying, well, the macroeconomic case says this should be bigger, but smaller is OK, and saying — as they should have, and maybe some did — that a weak stimulus runs a large risk of setting us on a path toward a lost decade.

Never mind. What really struck me was this quote from Obama that Schwarz found:

Well, we are still in consultation with members of Congress about the final size of the package. We expect that it will be on the high end of our estimates, but [it] will not be as high as some economists have recommended because of the constraints and concerns we have about the existing deficit.

Aside from the fact that Obama was being cautious about the deficit when he really, really shouldn’t have been, think about how this has actually played out. A weak stimulus together with caution on other fronts, including mortgage relief, led to a weak economy in 2010. This led to a big GOP victory in the midterms. And this led to Republican success in getting the high-end Bush tax cuts extended for two years and quite possibly indefinitely — which will do far more damage to the US debt position that a bigger stimulus in 2009 would have done.

I wonder about this: perhaps getting a larger stimulus would have had the same result on political capital and not only lead to the 2010 losses but also to no health care reform?

This isn’t all that Krugman said; here he refutes the old “we are just like Greece” canard:

So the US has much less debt than Greece. Also worth noting is the pattern over time. Greece ran up debt relative to GDP at a fairly good clip even during good times, while the United States — despite the Bush administration’s best efforts — did not. So America does not have a comparable record of sustained fiscal irresponsibility; we’ve only developed large deficits in response to the crisis, which happens to be exactly when we should be running large deficits.

And that’s not even to get into the issue of us having our own currency.

One more thing: even if you believe, despite all this evidence, that we resemble Greece, what does that say? Fiscal austerity in the face of a depressed economy does little to improve your long-run debt position, and may even hurt it. One thing the advocates of austerity never mention is that it isn’t working anywhere right now.

Wisdom from Republicans (??)

No, I am not snarking Sarah Palin here. Seriously, some Republicans have some interesting things to say.

David Brooks was flamed at Daily Kos for this post, but he does make some correct points here.

Basically, much of the health care expense comes at the end of life, and much of the money is spent after things are completely hopeless (e. g., for the elderly, and for the terminally ill). Yes, this means “rationing” and yes, the shrill will scream about “killing granny” and “death panels”. But is it really worth 100K for an extra month in the ICU while hooked up to a ventilator if that is ALL one can reasonably hope for?

David Frum Presents this chart and points out that workers are getting a smaller and smaller share of the economic prosperity. He sees this AS A PROBLEM. I can’t imagine any Republican being bothered by this!

Worthy of its own post…

16 July 2011 am

Workout notes 3100 yards swim (longest in a long time), 4.1 mile run afterward (painful, at first)

Swim: 5 x (25 3g, 25 5g, 25 3g, 25 swim)
10 x (25 kick, 25 swim) fins, front/side/side
1500 straight: 26:19 (13:16/13:03, 17:38 at 1000)
200 pull
250 of (25 back, 25 breast)
150 fly kick (fins)

run: it was warm, I was already tired, and my right knee (behind the knee) got a bit stiff again (the one with surgery; it has been warm lately)
44:08 was the time; it was 44:50 last week (also after a swim)

It will take a while to shake off the double red cell donation.

Weekly address
A “balanced approach” isn’t always the best approach.

This is what happens when a state doesn’t pay its bills: individual contractors suffer and people lose their jobs.

I have a good friend. Best friend from high school in the mid-80s. His business was shut down today. Just got off the phone and he was in tears. He laid off 12 people, the most who had worked for him 6+ years.

What is this business? He provides Medicaid reimbursed travel from a household to a hospital or health care client. His insurance isn’t cheap. He has amazing vans. His drivers rock.

Yesterday the state of Illinois told him they couldn’t pay him. Oh and BTW, they couldn’t pay him for the previous quarter, services already billed, until maybe September.

15 July 2011 pm Obama’s Presser and al that

I am listening to the President Obama press conference as I type this. I’ll talk about reactions later. I spent the day touring a university with my daughter (who is two years away).

Workout notes
Weights only:
Incline press: 10 x 115, 10 x 130, 5 x 135, 5 x 135
curls: 1 set of 10, 3 sets of 12 with 25 lb. dumbbells
Hammer rows: 3 sets of 10 x 200
Lat Pull downs: 3 sets of 12 x 140
sit ups: 4 x 25 (changing incline)
lunges: 3 sets of 10 (each leg): weightless, light, 45 lb. bar
adductor: 3 x 10 with 170
abductor: 3 x 10 with 170
push-back: 3 x 10 with 110 (each leg)
rotator cuff stuff.
This took about an hour; it was essential.

President Obama Press Conference; he speaks for 7 minutes and then takes questions for about 30 minutes. Basically: any serious package has to include some revenue (taxes). He is right, of course.

Don’t expect the Republican political leadership to accept the fact that government spending can, in fact, help from the demand side. Robert Reich explains:

Recently I debated a conservative Republican who insisted the best way to revive the American economy was to shrink the size of government. When I asked him to explain his logic he said, simply, “government is the source of all our problems.” When I noted government spending had brought the economy out of the previous eight economic downturns, including the Great Depression, he disagreed. “The Depression ended because of World War Two,” he pronounced, as if government had played no part in it.

A few days later I was confronted by another conservative Republican who blamed the nation’s high unemployment rate on the availability of unemployment benefits. “If you pay someone not to work, they won’t,” he said. When I pointed out unemployment benefits couldn’t possibly be the cause of joblessness because there are now about five job seekers for every job opening, he scoffed. “Government always makes things worse.”

Conservatives accept principles like many accept a religion; their beliefs are basically non-falsifiable.

Now as far as 2012 goes: Mr. Obama’s reelection situation is not parallel to Mr. Clinton’s situation in 1996:

So will Barack Obama pull a Bill Clinton? His real problem is one Mr. Clinton didn’t have to contend with: a continuing terrible economy. The recession in 1991-92 was relatively mild, and by the spring of 1995, the economy was averaging 200,000 new jobs per month. By early 1996, it was roaring—with 434,000 new jobs added in February alone.

He needs to fight for jobs.

Other Political
Here is more BS about Freddie and Fannie causing the mortgage crisis: the people who pushed this falsehood knew what they were doing:

Mike Konczal reads the Democratic report on conduct at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (pdf), which has some fairly shocking evidence about Peter Wallison, who has been pushing the clearly false line that Fannie and Freddie were actually leading the charge into high-risk lending.

As Konczal says, all of this stuff relies on a form of three-card monte: you talk about “subprime and other high-risk” loans, lumping subprime with other loans that are not, it turns out, anywhere near as risky as actual subprime; then use this essentially fake aggregate to make it seem as if Fannie/Freddie were actually at the core of the problem.

But was this self-conscious? Do these people know what they’re doing?

Yes.

Wallison was serving as a member of what was supposed to be an impartial commission examining the facts. But:

…on November 3, 2010, the day after the mid-term congressional elections in which Republicans took control of the House, Republican Commissioner Peter Wallison emailed Republican Commissioner Douglas Holtz-Eakin: “It’s very important, I think, that what we say in our separate statements not undermine the ability of the new House GOP to modify or repeal Dodd-Frank.”

Facts, schmacts: we need to game this politically.

That doesn’t mean that everyone who gets something wrong is lying. For example it turns out that then Senator Obama’s story about his mom fighting with the health insurance companies while she was dying with cancer were false; it turns out that she was fighting with the disability insurance company. From fact-check.org:

But according to the Times, Scott writes that Dunham’s dispute wasn’t over health insurance coverage at all, but rather over a disability insurance policy. Such disability policies aren’t covered by the new health care law for which Obama was arguing.

New York Times, July 13: The Cigna disability policy, according to Ms. Scott, allowed the company to deny a claim if a patient had seen a doctor about the condition that caused the disability in the three months before employment. During that period, Ms. Dunham visited a New York gynecologist. When Cigna obtained the doctor’s notes, it learned that she had formed a working hypothesis that Ms. Dunham might have uterine cancer, Ms. Scott wrote.

The doctor ordered up a series of tests, and Ms. Dunham submitted to most of them. “None of these tests indicated that I had cancer,” Ms. Dunham wrote to Cigna, according to the book.

After several months, Cigna denied the claim.

Scott, who calls Obama’s version of what happened “abbreviated” in her book, told the paper that she found no evidence that Dunham encountered similar challenges from Dunham’s actual health insurance provider.

Nicholas Papas, a White House spokesman, did not challenge Scott’s account, which was based on actual letters Dunham had written to CIGNA, according to the Times. “We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account,” he told the paper. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago.”

Of course, some right wingers have pounced on this claim as evidence that Obama “lied” and this lying was somehow related to pushing for a policy that we didn’t need (see the link from The Legal Satyricon).

No. This is an example of a lie:

It was fitting perhaps that Ronald Reagan died on the eve of the D-Day celebrations. Unlike other Hollywood actors such as Jimmy Stewart who gave up tinseltown to fly for the US army air force, Reagan remained an actor, not a doer. Later in life, before Alzheimer’s disease cruelly felled him – he called the affliction “riding into the sunset”, another Hollywood cliché – he would tell Israeli politicians that he remembered seeing the liberated concentration camps at the end of the second world war. It sounded good, but too bad that he was not wearing a uniform at the time but was working for a documentary unit.

Mr. Reagan hadn’t left the United States!

And as far as fighting over coverage: yes, insurance companies canceling policies of those who got very sick is a very real problem; here is a whole collection of articles about this practice.

But we all misremember things from our past.

Political Fun
At at least one theater, Sarah Palin’s movie wasn’t exactly a big hit. One person stayed for the whole show, two people showed up but walked out 20 minutes into it when they realized it wasn’t an action movie, and one couple showed up toward the end to “make out” and then left.

Frogs and Toads
Read about the “most wanted” frogs and toads (and other amphibians); that is, amphibians that were/are thought to be extinct. Among them are the rainbow toad and a type of frog whose tadpoles grow to froglets inside the mom’s belly.

Religion
I admit that my “evolution” from “believer” to “liberal believer” to “atheist” passed through a “don’t take the Bible literally” stage. But then I found myself twisting the Bible to back up what I already thought; that wasn’t good either.

I suppose that a believer might view the Bible as a sort of scrap-book of what people thought at the time.

14 July 2011 workout

Workout notes 3.14 mile run in 29:47, over 1 minute faster than yesterday even though it was hotter today. Hmmm, at this rate of improvement I’ll be world class in 16 days; then again between 29 and 30 days, I’ll be violating the Theory of Relativity.

Then I swam; 10 x (25 drill, 25 swim), then 15 x 100 (100 pull, 100 swim, 100 fins) done in a minimum time to change equipment style. Then 200 off strokes to cool down.

Some young woman in a black bikini kept challenging me (waiting until I got to the wall to take off) and, well, it didn’t go well for her. It probably wasn’t my imagination as she changed lanes to get right next to me.

Toads and Economy

Personal note: I am having trouble waking up early. Part of the reason is that my 10 pm bedtime is later than I am used to. Oh well; I don’t get to spend nearly enough time with my daughter and I am enjoying it. But I am working out; I just need to be diligent with my own yoga. And yes, I’ve been working out (running, restarting walking, weight lifting and swimming)

Posts

Frogs and toads: this little beauty (Rainbow toad) was rediscovered recently!

Surf to the link for details.

Debt Limit Ceiling Details
Via the Los Angeles Times, here are a few highlights (much more there):

What happens then?

If Congress has not raised the ceiling, the Treasury cannot borrow more money. Because tax collections are less than the government’s obligations, the government would not legally be able to pay all its bills.

What about just paying the highest-priority bills?

In August, the government is expected to collect about $172 billion in revenue and will face about $307 billion in bills, according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. So, in theory, the government would have the money to pay a little more than 55% of its bills during the month. But which bills to pay? Interest on existing debt comes to just under $30 billion, Social Security checks are $50 billion, Medicare is another $50 billion, payments to military contractors for weapons, fuel and other costs comes to $32 billion and salaries for active-duty military personnel come to about $3 billion. Add in unemployment benefits ($13 billion for the month), and the government would already have run out of money without paying a single civilian employee or running any of its domestic programs, including courts, disaster relief, national parks, veterans benefits or welfare programs.

Would picking and choosing among programs be legal?

No one really knows. It would certainly be challenged.

Administration officials have warned of economic chaos. What’s the basis for those fears?

The federal government has been able to borrow money at very low interest rates because investors around the world look at U.S. government securities as a very safe place to put their money. If the government’s ability to pay its bills came into question, the people who buy bonds almost certainly would demand a higher interest rate. That would ripple quickly through the economy. In a letter to Congress and the president Tuesday, the Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce and other business leaders warned: “Treasury securities influence the cost of financing not just for companies but more importantly for mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and student debt. A default would risk both disarray in those markets and a host of unintended consequences.”

How quickly might impact be felt?

Very fast. The Treasury has $100 billion in securities that come due on Aug. 4. Normally, Treasury would “roll over” the debt — sell new securities to pay off the old ones. But if the bond markets are chaotic because of fears the government will not be able to pay its bills, that process could be much messier, and more expensive, than normal.

The negotiations

President Obama apparently has had enough. I’m not sure that he actually cut the negotiations short, but he did set limits to his patience.

Yes, the Republicans really are as loony as they appear to be, at least according to Jonathan Chait:

This last weekend, Ross Douthat argued that Republican intransigence on the deficit was not really evidence that the party had lost its marbles. The party, he postulated, was shrewdly attempting to maximize its leverage. Douthat’s argument hinged on the premise that Republicans had to account for the fact that any budget deal would come with future tax hikes when the Bush tax cuts expire:

The White House hasn’t made spending concessions just because the president wants to campaign as a deficit cutter next year. It has made concessions because it knows that taxes are already scheduled to go up when the Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of 2012.

If Obama gains a second term, Congressional Republicans will have to choose between a deal that lets the top rate go back to 39 percent (a $700 billion tax increase over 10 years) or no deal at all (a $3.8 trillion tax increase). Obviously, this dilemma won’t exist if President Mitt Romney occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But Obama’s re-election is the more likely scenario, meaning that any deal struck this summer comes with a very large asterisk attached: *Includes tax increases to be named later.

My TRB column, which suggests that the Republicans are in fact nutty, points out that this premise is false:

Press accounts reported that Obama, distressingly, proposed to make future revenue increases from the Bush tax cuts’ expiration—the tax hike Douthat warns will happen later—the source of the revenue in the deal. In other words, he was willing to bargain to get something he could have gotten by doing nothing if he wins reelection. What’s more, Obama offered to prevent any increase in upper-bracket tax rates in 2013, as long as Republicans agreed to close tax loopholes to make up the revenue. That is the deal Republicans refused—a deal to lock in the top-level Bush tax rates, while raising more revenue from a cleaner tax code, while getting Obama’s sign-off on large-scale cuts to entitlements.

Meanwhile, the evidence that’s leaked out about internal Republican deliberations suggests the Republicans are not shrewdly trying to maximize their leverage. They’re just barking mad. Robert Draper’s profile of House Whip Kevin McCarthy peers in on the House caucus’s thinking about the debt ceiling:

The freshmen have not been shy on this subject, either. McCarthy informally polled them when they first came to town in November for orientation. All but four of them said they would vote against raising the ceiling, under any circumstances. Then McCarthy (along with Ryan and the House Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp) began conducting more listening sessions. The whip recognized that it would be counterproductive to lecture the freshmen about the economic hazards of not raising the debt ceiling. He also realized that it’s one thing to pass a budget — which in the end is a nonbinding political document — and another thing to throw America into default. And so McCarthy has urged them to consider raising the ceiling under certain conditions and thus to view this moment as a golden opportunity to force significant changes from the White House. “We all ran for a reason,” he tells them. “What’s most of concern to you? What is it that we think will change America?”

As a result, the freshmen have begun to move away from a hard “no” on raising the debt ceiling to a “yes, if.” In the conference room, several freshmen have said they’ll vote to raise the ceiling only if the president agrees to repeal his health care legislation. Or if Obama signs into law a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, after all 50 states have ratified it. Or if he’ll agree to mandatory caps on all nondefense spending. Or if he’ll enact the Ryan budget. The whip writes down all their ideas on a notepad.

I believe that many of the tea party freshmen really are nuts and Mr. Boehner knows this.

As far as Constitutional Amendment to do things the Republican way (California has such an amendment; it isn’t working so well there)

Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offered what may be the most concise summary of conservative constitutionalism ever spoken — America must rewrite the Constitution to force conservative outcomes because we the people consistently elect lawmakers who disagree with McConnell:

The time has come for a balanced budget amendment that forces Washington to balance its books. If these debt negotiations have convinced us of anything, it’s that we can’t leave it to politicians in Washington to make the difficult decisions that they need to get our fiscal house in order. The balanced budget amendment will do that for them. Now is the moment. No more games. No more gimmicks. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check. We’ve tried persuasion. We’ve tried negotiations. We’re tried elections. Nothing has worked.

It’s worth noting just what McConnell is asking the American people to choke down. Senate Republicans’ so-called “balanced budget amendment” does far more than simply requiring federal spending to equal federal revenues. It makes it functionally impossible to raise taxes by imposing a two-thirds supermajority requirement — a provision closely modeled after the California anti-tax amendment that blew up that state’s finances. It would also require spending cuts so steep that it would have made Ronald Reagan’s fiscal policy unconstitutional. Ezra Klein rightfully labeled this plan the “worst idea in Washington.”

What an @sshole. Here is a better idea: let the south and the Appalachian states from their own republic; they can pass any laws that they like. Maybe our northern wingnuts will flock to this new conservative paradise!!!

Humor (sort of): this Salon article gives a handy translation to the wingnut political rhetoric. Here is one example:

What they say:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, explaining why there will be no “real solution” to the debt problem.

“After years of discussions and months of negotiations, I have little question that as long as this president is in the Oval Office a real solution is probably unattainable,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor.

What he means:

As long as the president of the United States — a Democratic politician who has already agreed in principle to bigger cuts in Medicare and Social Security than any previous Democratic occupant of the White House — as long as he continues to refuse to unilaterally give in to every single one of our demands, we will continue our policy, established on the very first day of his presidency, of opposing with all our force everything he does.

Remember that these jerks feel ENTITLED to govern and to get everything that they ask for.

So, while many think that the President came out well in this, some on the left think otherwise. Here is a pessimistic view by Robert Reich, who properly warns us that nothing has been done about job creation.

One tax “loophole”: mortgage interest deduction is popular though its use is mostly by those households of 75K or more per year:

The deduction lowers the taxable income of American homeowners by allowing them to deduct mortgage interest from their tax bill. In 2009, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the mortgage interest deduction cost the federal Treasury more than $80 billion, making it not only the largest subsidy provided to homeowners, but one of the most expensive tax expenditures in the American tax code.

According to data from the Internal Revenue Service Income Bulletin and the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, wealthy taxpayers are substantially more likely to claim the mortgage interest deduction than low- or middle-income taxpayers. In 2009, more than 75 percent of Americans making $100,000 or more claimed the mortgage interest deduction. On the other hand, barely one-quarter of middle-class Americans in the $40,000 – $50,000 income bracket claimed the deduction. In part, low- and middle-income Americans are less likely to claim the deduction because they are less likely to be homeowners. Of those who own homes, taking the standard deduction often makes better economic sense than taking the mortgage interest deduction.[...]

But not only do the wealthy disproportionately claim the mortgage interest deduction. They disproportionately benefit from it, as well. Twenty percent of tax filers report an income of $75,000 or more. In 2009, these tax filers reaped 60 percent of the financial benefits from the deduction. Tax filers with an income of $20,000 to $40,000, on the other hand, make up 23 percent of all returns. They pocketed less than 9 percent of the benefits of the deduction.

But often people look ahead and say “when I get into that bracket, I’d like to be able to do that”. Sure, few have a prayer of making it to 250K per year, but many have a realistic shot at 75-100K.

Daily Kos: Stephen Colbert explains the debt ceiling fight

Daily Kos: Stephen Colbert explains the debt ce…, posted with vodpod

msnbc video: Hostage negotiations over debt ceiling

msnbc video: Hostage negotiations over debt cei…, posted with vodpod

13 July 2011 noon workout

I’ve decided to try noon-ish workouts for right now.
Today: 3.14 mile run in 31:01 (9:52 minutes per mile; 10:20 mile one and then it got faster…sort of) followed by a 2200 yard swim.

The run was uneventful though it just doesn’t feel free and easy; my legs are too weak for my upper body.
Swim: alternate 25 3g, 25 swim, 25 fist, 25 swim for 500 yards.
alternate 25 kick, 25 swim (fins) for 500 yards; I did the front, side, side rotation for my kicks.
5 x 200 on the 4 swim (this one was more accurate than my last one as I could actually SEE my watch:
3:31, 3:26, 3:27, 3:24, 3:23 (1:43.1 average per 100). These are always a bit slower than my 100′s.
200 cool down.

I am getting there.