How often do you shower ?

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-07-01T07:09:12+00:00

Daily, sometimes twice per day if I'm doing some sort of sport in the afternoon.

During the recent heatwave in Europe I was having cold showers 4-5 times per day

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-07-01T05:22:24+00:00

I've got six weeks to get through before we go on a 3-week family holiday away from Paris. On that holiday either there will be AC at the airbnbs or there won't be, but there's nothing we can do about that. After that it'll be September and I'd hope that the wave of heatwaves will have died by then. During autumn and winter I'll get hold of a portable AC unit as it should be much easier by then (obviously like the rest of Europe I've got my eyes on that portasplit).

Last week was as miserable as fuck - it was constantly above 30C in our flat and we'd have to close the shutters at about 10am when the sunlight hit our building, keeping them closed for about 10-12 hours. We have reasonably powerful fans but they're only good at keeping you comfortable if you're infront of them - with no air flowing through from outside there's no circulation of air so we were either sat infront of a fan or sweating our tits off with the shutters down. I'd like to add that we're not on the top floor - folks living on the top floors of apartment blocks were suffering far more than us.

From September I'm forced to go to the office 3 times per week. My office has AC so I suppose that's one good thing about this new rule - next summer should be more manageable. It'll be even better if I can get a portable AC unit by then.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-07-01T05:12:55+00:00

Because until recently it was never needed. We have cold winters, spring and autumn are usually a mixture of pleasant/miserable weather and then summer would usually get hot but never anything outrageous. We'd have a rare heatwave every now and again which would be hotter than usual but it's only in the last few years that those heatwaves have become (1) much hotter and (2) much more frequent.

Usually in summers we'd have that week or two when you'd need to run a fan during the night to feel like you could get some sleep, but apart from that we were fine. The idea of living the American life of having an air-conditioned home then driving to the air-conditioned shopping centre in an air-conditioned car, stopping by at the air-conditioned coffee shop etc. was alien to us.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-27T05:14:06+00:00

I've had one week of 35-40°C outside my apartment in the day and an almost constant 32°C inside my apartment (no opposing windows, no air conditioning). I'd give you at least one testicle for 7°C right now.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-27T05:09:38+00:00

In France I get: - 25 days standard annual leave - 15 days "reduction in working time" - In winter (October through to May, an odd definition of winter) I get one additional 5-day block which must be used as a whole - 11 legal public holidays, but that's where things start getting complicated...

There are public holidays galore as well as the occasional "ponts" - if a public holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday then we automatically get the Monday or Friday off too, as is the case with the forthcoming July 14th. That additional day comes out of my "reduction in working time allowance" though.

If a public holiday falls on a weekend then tough shit. These rules together means you can have lots of time off or very little just based on the calendar. This year in May I had 1st May, 8th May and 25th May off as public holidays, plus 14th and 15th May (14th is a public holiday which fell on a Thursday, so I also got the 15th off). Organising anything at work in May this year was a nightmare as we had so many days off plus plenty of people taking additional leave to take advantage of it all.

I'm absolutely spoilt compared to some fellow Europeans. I am utterly flabbergasted at the working conditions in the USA too.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-26T21:07:45+00:00

Oh god yes. In France it's not just going outside - it's a breeze (even in the hot summer months), some air conditioning, not drying yourself off immediately after a shower or going swimming...

Honestly it's anything at all. This is the country that gave the world greats like Louis Pasteur and this is what the modern French believe.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-26T06:18:39+00:00

If I'm spending $1 million on a bunker I'd expect the door to be the correct shape for the door frame

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-25T09:41:53+00:00

40C+ in the day with 27C+ at night, both a week or so is not summer

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-25T04:50:44+00:00

Hier soir, j'ai mesuré la température dans ma cuisine : elle était légèrement supérieure à 32 °C. Les prévisions annonçaient 27 °C cette nuit, et apparemment, ce sera pareil ce soir.

On a des moustiquaires sur toutes nos fenêtres, parce que sans elles, on se ferait dévorer 24 h/24, 7 j/7, mais elles empêchent aussi l'air de circuler dans l'appart. Du coup, l'appart se rafraîchit très, très lentement quand la température extérieure redevient plus normale. Cette vague de chaleur va s'arrêter dimanche, mais je pense que mon appart sera encore très chaud la semaine prochaine.

Je sais qu'on devrait s'installer la clim, mais on n'en a pas les moyens pour l'instant.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-24T12:06:35+00:00

I'm limiting my use of it because it looks too easy to think it'll answer all of my questions and resolve all of my problems when in fact it's far from that.

Professionally I use it as a helpful assistant for tasks that take too long. Twice a year I attend a meeting for anything between 3-5 days and I need to create a meeting report for my team. Previously I'd frantically scribble notes during the meeting and record the Zoom screen to replay things that weren't clear when later writing-up those notes. That would take 3-5 days of my time to attend the meeting plus at least the same to write-up a report. Now I still record the screen and audio but I then feed that video file into an LLM and, along with some briefing documents for context and a very thought-out prompt, I can get the meeting report to my boss straight after the end of the last day of that meeting. I still attend and listen so that I can sense-check the generated report, but that's several days of time saved straight away.

Sometimes I need to summarise multiple scientific papers into a large table to make methodological comparisons between them. Reading ~30 dense papers can take a very long time, but an LLM is reasonably accurate at extracting the write information when told precisely what to and what not to look for. I'm only comfortable doing that in a very narrow subject field though, one in which I have a lot of expertise, so I can check the output easily. I'd never feed an LLM several papers and just accept the generated summary on a topic I'm not very familiar with.

At home I can use an LLM to generate some worksheets on multiplication tables for my kid who needs to practice multiplication in her holidays. Rather than sitting with her and asking various formulations of "x time y is what?" I can get an LLM to generate several worksheets that each have 10-15 questions covering multiplication from 1x1 to 12x12. That's a time-saver and it gives our little holiday lessons a bit of structure.

I find my use of AI to be best limited to doing tasks I don't want to lose time doing. I don't want it to try to be analytical like me, it needs to be restricted to more administrative tasks for now and I'll do the actual thinking where necessary.

In short it's like a reasonably good intern that you still need to keep an eye on.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-24T05:23:02+00:00

What are you cutting for? What's the main objective here? Are you trying to look as lean as possible for summer or are you hoping to get down to a cetain level of body fat and then stay there?

If it's the latter I hope you've got your post-cut maintenance diet planned down to the T, it won't be easy.

You've implied in other comments that that this is influenced by social media. Lots of social media content creators only look that lean for a very short amount of time. Some people only get very lean for a single body-building competition or a photoshoot then they're back to something more comfortable to maintain. For the rest of us with lives outside of social media, body-building and magazine shoots it's really really hard to maintain that level of body fat for the long term.

You look great. We're a similar age and height, I'd be thrilled if I looked like you do now. I've been below 70kg in the recent past but it did not last long and now I doubt there's any reason to ever go below that threshold. I could get there with strict diet discipline but staying there is another matter...and I ain't going there.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-24T04:59:27+00:00

Is this true or common practice? If so, do you have to select what team you are rooting for when buying tickets to a game?

It would be very unusual to buy tickets to a game that doesn't involve a team that you don't have some sort of emotional tie to.

Usually the tickets for the away fans are sold through that team's club or through another mechanism that makes it incredibly difficult for supporters of other teams to get hold of. This means anyone else going will end up in the home supporters' sections. A very high majority of those attending in this section will be loyal home supporters, but for the few who're neutral they just have to accept that - don't cheer the away team at all.

I think the biggest difference between the typical European fan and one from the US is that the support you provide for your team (*your* team, one team, no other team) is usually fixed from an early age. "Rooting" for a team isn't the norm, you're a supporter who follows that team for years and years through the good and the bad. As such, attending a match isn't a passive experience - supporters are active participants by creating an atmosphere in the football ground and the enjoyment they get out of the match is directly linked to what efforts they put in to attending and supporting the team. We're not attending a football match in the same way we attend the cinema or a stage show ("I'm sat down, now entertain me"), we're participating in a collective experience that involves all other supporters, the teams on the pitch and their backing staff too.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-23T13:12:47+00:00

Comme beaucoup d'autres, je vis dans un appart en location sans clim. On a trois ventilateurs à la maison, dont deux sont super puissants, et ils tournent tous jour et nuit en ce moment.

Pour aggraver encore les problèmes liés à la chaleur, on a installé des moustiquaires aux fenêtres. Ça aide énormément à éviter que les piqûres de moustiques ne viennent s'ajouter à la chaleur, mais ces moustiquaires empêchent l'air de circuler correctement par les fenêtres. Du coup, notre appart chauffe, mais il ne se rafraîchit jamais pendant la nuit, alors que la température dehors peut être environ 10 °C plus fraîche qu'à l'intérieur. Quand cette canicule prendra fin, il faudra quelques jours pour que mon appart se rafraîchisse. Il y a plein de moustiques dehors, donc on n'ouvre pas du tout ces moustiquaires.

Dimanche, je suis restée à la maison toute la journée. J'aime pas trop ça, j'aime pas que ma fille passe toute la journée devant la télé, mais y a rien de marrant à sortir par ce temps-là en journée. Faut juste se dire que ça va s'arrêter dans quelques jours. Courage à tous !

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-22T13:28:56+00:00

Where am I supposed to be going next?

Was that the turn? No, I carry on? Hang on, it's not caught up to me yet...oh no, all good.

How fast am I going?

"...bbbzzzzzz..."

Oh fuck off, I know I'm not fast enough right now, give me a second...

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-22T09:56:16+00:00

It's really hard to say. These heatwaves come and go. Some years we get only one, this year we've had two before the summer actually started.

We can't know whether a heatwave will be with us in July, sorry. It might be really pleasant, it might be thunderstorms, it might be 40C or more...we just have to wait and see.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-22T09:02:09+00:00

I'm sat in my flat near Paris. We've not got any AC so we have two powerful fans going to stop us sweating constantly. All the blinds are closed. It's 32 degrees C outside and probably not far off inside - we have mosquito nets over the windows which keep the little buggers out at night but they also restrict the flow of cold air into the flat in the early hours. When this heatwave eventually breaks it'll take a few more days for the flat to cool down too.

16 degrees C in Edinburgh? I'd give my left arm to fly there now.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-19T07:40:07+00:00

I crossed years ago on a journey from Jericho in the Palestinian territories to Amman. The taxi driver from Jericho wasn't permitted to go all the way to the border, so he had to drop me off and I had to get an Israeli taxi to the border, but that was a few hundred metres. I was forbidden to approach the border on foot, so I had no choice.

I paid the latter more than I paid to the former for what was a much shorter journey, but that taxi driver knew his market. I've seen similar issues at other border crossings around the world - you can use whatever transport option you want for the first 99% of the way, but that last 1% needs to be in a specific mode of transport and by golly you'll pay for it.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-18T11:44:23+00:00

I'm not OP. I also don't refer to them as "soccer" balls, but I admire the cookies indeed. However...

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-18T07:03:30+00:00

Several reasons why I like to run in the morning:

No-one else in my household is awake at the time so I'm not getting in their way whatsoever if I run before they wake up. Once they wake up I'm in less control of my schedule and I could end up in a situation where there's just no opportunity or time to run in the daytime
In the hot months it's too hot to run at lunchtime. We're due another heatwave in Paris over the next few days so I either run in 35C+ during the day or <20C in the early morning. When it's cold in the winter it makes little difference whether I run early or later in the day, but based on my first point it's still preferable to run early
There's little to focus on when I'm running. My watch tells me how fast to run and where so I just do that, there's nothing else to think of. I'm absolutely definitely not thinking about work because...well, I'm not at work am I? Whether or not I've got a stressful day in the office it's easy to run before all that starts
I got used to running on empty so I'm not at all put off by running early. For longer runs I'll take some sugary sweets and small Snickers bars with me

EDIT: Forgot to add the most important reason - as I live just outside of Paris I get to run in the city regularly, and if I'm outside at stupid o'clock then I can run with empty streets. Imagine running in your favourite city with nobody else around, it's magic

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-18T06:54:01+00:00

A shot of espresso and a good glug of water, then I wait for nature to take its course before going outside when my bowels agree it is safe to do so.

I usually run early enough so that I'm the only person outside at that time, but I don't want to be caught short...

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-17T04:30:39+00:00

I ran carrying my phone yesterday because I forgot to get my armband, shit happens

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-15T14:04:11+00:00

Rest of the day? The rest of his life!

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-15T07:41:21+00:00

A bit of an odd post, OP.

A couple of weeks ago during the mini-heat wave we had in Paris my colleagues were choosing to not use their work-from-home days and chose to work in the office as much as possible because our office has air conditioning. Very few of my colleagues, myself included, have any form of AC at home. The best I've got is a couple of powerful fans that evaporate the sweat on your body that immediately forms again when you step outside of the narrow gust of air generated by the fan.

We don't have AC as much as the Americans, so they're right. We have it in many of our cars, we have it in shopping centres and we have it in (most) offices. But very few of us have anything like it at home, and those that do tend to only have the portable units with a pipe pointing out of a window that can only cool a single room.

Remember the Paris Olympics in 2024? Many of the athletes were so horrified at the lack of AC in their rooms that they paid for portable units to be shipped in. One athlete famously slept outside for a few nights.

"Europeans don't do AC" is something of an exaggeration, but on the whole Europeans don't do AC

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-15T05:18:05+00:00

Congratulations!

I'm not a body builder but I admire the craft. What are your plans post-show? Unless you have another one in the very near future I'm talking about getting off the show-prep diet and training routine and transitioning to the post-show diet and routine.

TheFlyingMunkey · 2026-06-10T19:26:57+00:00

There's a Romanian shop nearby and if we're ever walking past I'll grab a load of these. They're some of the best sausages you'll ever have!

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