Doubting Thomas Blog

Archive for the ‘exercise’ Category

Instead of making resolutions, I’m writing down plans…well, not plans exactly, but stuff that I want to do.

I think most of these ideas are feasible. What do you think?

1. Finish the house we started in 2009. I’d like to incorporate green technology, but we’ll see.
2. Get back to running my favorite seasonal business, The Buffalo Bike Taxi Co.
3. Go to more pro baseball games than we did in 2009. I’d like to see my first major league game. In Toronto. I know what you’re saying…someone my age has never seen the MLB in person? Nope.
4. This one is related to #2 above. I will lose a little weight and continue to improve my cardiovascular health. Riding The Buffalo Bike Taxi Co, it would be nearly impossible to gain weight.
5. Do more writing, even if it just more-frequent posts on this blog. I do want to get back to real writing, though.
6. I’d like to learn to speak another language. I studied French in high school and college, so I remember some of that, but “Quiero aprender a hablar español de este año.” (Without having to use Google Translate.)
7. I have a bunch of audio cassettes that I want to convert into digital files, so that I can actually listen to that music. (Younger readers may want to ask their parents if they have any audio cassettes in the basement that they could look at.)
8. I say this every year, but this year is different (partly because of the divorce). I want to spend more time with old friends. I have not ever visited my friends Jesse, Rich, Craig, or Greg at their houses.
9. I’d like to buy an electric car. A Tesla Roadster would be nice, but I would “settle” for a a hybrid Fusion.
10. We live near a lot of water, so I’d like to make sure we get the canoe wet a lot this summer. The Buffalo River is a lot more scenic than you’d expect.
11. Another thing I’ve wanted to do for years, but somehow haven’t found the time to do, is ride my bicycle across New York State. The Erie Canal is a great way to go.
12. I want to take the boys camping, somewhere that they’ll never forget. I think the Adirondacks would be great.
13. We’ve been attending church more regularly, but this year, I would like to make it such a standard part of our life that the boys don’t resist going, when they are at my house on a Sunday. But here’s a problem I haven’t figured out how to resolve: I like three different churches, but I can’t go to all three on the same Sunday morning. Ultimately, I think it will be better if I am more actively involved with one of those three churches, doing things besides just attending morning church services.
14. Many of these things can be done, and some should be done, with family. Baseball, bicycling, and church, for example. This year, I would like to have time to visit my family members at their houses, but also to make the house we’re working on large enough for everyone to gather here for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

What about you? Will you be doing any of these activities?

Everyone who has ever completed a marathon seems to have a sticker on their car that says 26.2.

The person who got this license plate must not like the idea of putting stickers on the car.

I was lucky to have friends in town for a mutual friend’s wedding this weekend. It’s amazing how many people I know from “the old days” that I’m not in touch with anymore, even though they are good and decent people… we just don’t make the effort to drive to faraway cities (or to the West Coast, for that matter).

The men I talked to were mainly all dads, and I think the consensus was that we take trips mainly with or to family, so other trips to see friends are squeezed out of the schedule. I mentioned to another friend the other day that I’m trying to get all my friends and family in one place, something I called “Total Thomas Convergence” (or TTC for short). I have a few great friends in Buffalo, but in fact everyone I know is extremely busy, as is my little family, so we rarely have social time with grownups who are not immediate members of our family. (Fortunately, the grownups who are immediate members of our family are also good and decent people!)

We did end up having a little bit of a pool party, too, because we had a few people who were in town for the wedding come over. The thermometer in the pool said 80, but none of us who went in the water felt that was an honest reckoning. In fact, one swimmer was sure it was 80 Kelvin, not 80 Fahrenheit.

And I did manage to finish the steps up to the deck before the guests arrived. After they left, I finished the railing and the gate on the deck, so it is now as safe as could be. I have a little more to do on the deck, however, including a handrail for the steps. I’m also going to do a little wiring, so that there is an outdoor, grounded power outlet for the pool filter, and I’ll install a motion-sensor light on the peak of the garage to shine down on the pool. (The web-cams are already installed, but they are not infrared cameras, so the lights will come in handy at night.)

When I went to the ski shop on Saturday to return the boys’ season rentals, I discovered that ski country still had plenty of snow, and I whined to the ski shop owners that it would have been great to have one more day of skiing. Naturally their response was “come back tomorrow, you don’t have to turn in the skis today.” I called my wife to make sure nothing was planned for the next day, then packed the skis back into the car and gleefully drove home.

I also called a friend of mine who recently told me he was interested in skiing with us next season, and he agreed to meet us at our house at 8:30 a.m. the next morning.

The weather was perfect, and at first the snow was perfect, too. But then the temperature went up, and the snow started getting mushy. I think the reason my friend had a bad fall is that he hit some slow snow on a turn and couldn’t get his balance back. He did something to his knee and will be on crutches for a few weeks.

But my friend is still enthusiastic about skiing and insisted that me and boys keep skiing while he rested in the lodge–he hoped to rest a bit and join us after a while, but his knee was in bad shape.

The boys and I kept skiing and occasionally stopped into the lodge to check on my friend throughout the afternoon. It got warmer and warmer, and we started getting uncomfortably warm, so while we rode up the chairlift, we unzipped our coats a little and took our gloves off. Once, I was holding my youngest’s gloves for him, and when we got off the chairlift, I thought I had given him both gloves, but I had lost one of them.

We skied down the slope, trying to follow the chairlift so that we could find the glove on the ground, but part of that slope was closed due to poor conditions, so we didn’t find the glove on the ground.

When we got in line to get back on the chairlift, I was looking around to see if someone had turned it in for us, and there were a couple gloves, but not the one I lost. After we got on the chair, however, we discovered his glove ON THE CHAIR. So it turns out, that of the 119 chairs on that lift, we happened to ski down the hill and wait in line with just the right timing to get on the same chair. What are the chances? Is it 1 out of 119? Or do you have to decrease the odds because of the number of people in line ahead of us?

Those are our two stories of luck; one of us had good luck, one bad luck.

I remember hating going to the gym when I was in college, but my roommate talked me into going with him for a while. It’s boring. It’s not that I don’t enjoy exercise, but standing still is so boring. On our elliptical exercise machine at home, I listen to music to make it less boring, but it is still pretty dull. For a few weeks, the battery in the clock by the exercise machine was dead, so I didn’t really keep track of how long I was exercising. But now that I put a good battery in the clock, it seems to take a lot longer. Argh.

But not all indoor exercise is boring. Yesterday we went ice skating on an indoor rink, and that was pretty fun. I managed to not fall down at all, which believe me was a surprise, since it has been a year since I skated. One thing I will do before I skate again is buy some skates. When you rent, you gamble that you’re going to find a good pair in your size, and yesterday I lost that bet.

So tonight after work, I plan to put a small shelf right in front of the elliptical machine so that I can watch DVD’s on the portable DVD player that we got for long car trips. My friend Dan loaned me his Heroes season 1 boxed set, so I’ll use that for a couple week’s worth of 42-minute workouts. After that, I may have to get the Lost DVD’s, because I missed a lot of those episodes.