The Jewish Grandmother I Never Had

My Apple watch arrived this week. After waiting so many weeks it figures it came on my busiest week when Russ was in Portland. Since he is my IT department I was lost and did not have the time to sit down with my computer and watch what feels like hundreds of videos on every aspect of this new machine.

I have two main interests in getting the Apple watch, one as a replacement for my fitbit and two as my new wallet with Apple pay. Out of the box I was able to set up the fitness tracker without the aid of my IEEE husband. For all you non-geeks IEEE stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, don’t ask me was the difference is between an Electrical and Electronic Engineer.

After picking my sex from a list of three, yes other is one of the choices in Apple watch, and telling my truthful weight and real age I was thrilled that my watch did not comment. There are three goals in the activity tracker; move, exercise and stand. I am still a little confused about what the difference is between move and exercise, but I guess more tracking for me is better than less.

I was asked to set my goals for these three activities. The default setting for exercise was 30 minutes a day, since I had no idea what this thing considered exercising I just left it that way. The stand goal was to get up for at least one minute in every hour. Seemed small to me, so I kept it. The move goal was measured in burning more calories than you do just at rest. The goal was 350, that’s like a piece of good smelly cheese so I upped it to 1200.

The activity tracker also counts my steps and since I come from the fitbit world that is the number I am most familiar with. Before I was going to give up my fitbit I wanted to make sure my watch counted in a similar way. Not that I know my fitbit is right, but if one device thinks I am walking 3,000 steps and one thinks 5,000 I know something is wrong.

I am happy to report that my watch and fitbit were fairly similar in my steps counted so I am going to try and just wear the watch for a while. The one thing I find interesting is the stand monitor. I could have been standing up for four hours straight and then go to a meeting where the polite thing to do was to sit and in 55 minutes get a buzz on my wrist with a message telling me it is time to stand up for a minute. The damn thing does not care how long I stood up before, just that I need to stand up for at least one minute every hour for 12 hours a day.

“Oy vey”, my wrist would buzz, “Get your ass out of your chair.” It was like the Jewish Grandmother I never had. “What good is standing for one minute?” I want to whine at it. “Don’t ask, just do it. It’s good for you.” My Jewish Grandmother watch tells me.

For the record I never reached a move goal of 1200 calories. What was I thinking? I lowered it to 750 today and that is a good stretchable goal and also is a good meal’s

worth of calories. If I get anymore whining from my watch I’ll report back, I wonder what it’s going to say when I try and use it to buy something expensive. “Your Uncle Morty could get that for you wholesale.”