I forgot to mention that my Fitbit died a while back — the metal coating on the charging contacts on the back of the watch eroded, and there’s apparently no way to fix it.

I don’t miss it, especially. I liked the heart rate. That was fun. There was a certain pleasure in seeing steps/day, especially when I was crushing it on morning runs.

But while my wife’s found a lot of value in Fitbit, it never really meshed with me. I missed wearing watches, first of all. I like watches. I think they’re neat. I’ve got a lot of cheap but funky ones. Some are original designs, just inexpensively made; others are knock-offs that I literally bought in New York City  from a guy who had a crappy briefcase and ran up to me in Hudson Park by the Statue of Liberty ferry. I mean, that’s just too New York an experience for me to pass up. They’re pathetically, transparently fake. That’s kind of why I like them.

Other things: my calorie tracker, LoseIt, stopped allowing the import of Fitbit data, so the satisfaction of seeing exercise balanced out automatically is gone.

Now that I’m rowing instead of running, the steps/HR combination that made Fitbit work really well for me is gone.

And did I mention that I really missed wearing watches?

I did fine logging exercise manually back in the day, and I’ll be fine now. It’s more about making sure it’s done.

The one major downside is the alarm. A quiet buzz on my wrist at 5 a.m. got me up without waking my wife. The clock-radio we have in the bedroom is great for telling time, but its alarm is more suited for waking up Russian submariners than a subtle way of waking only one person up. So I’ll have to figure that one out.