Coming up: Flame-throwing fingers and frozen toes start out the battle to regain time! Will our heroine ever make a scheduled appointment? Will she fall through the time loop and out the other side in her attempts? Our hero trains on the other side of dead, passing the threshold of no return and getting a little lost. Will his tachycardia spell doom or mere diversion? Will the other gym rats press charges when he falls into cozy somnolence on their persons? White manna from heaven falls and ices the land, covering all regrets and imperfections, while on the other side of the world, bespandexed superheros fight for country and rhinestones. And pantless princes pilfer ancient ruins in quest of inert pulchritudes. Will the authorities arrive in time to thwart his wild trip?
Slalom on if you dare, gentle reader...
Tootsie Tots and the Second Stab at A Very Busy Day
My very busy Monday was an exercise in distemporitis, a bit of which lingered over through "Tuesday" before leaving a slight aftertaste well into Wednesday's hump apex. But the week's not over, by golly, and there's time (time, that tricky little minx) to have myself at least one very busy day.
Today I have yet another shot at this Physical Therapy nonsense for starters Of course, there was that prior ambiguity about whether my follow-up appointment was yesterday or today (resulting in only minor vehicular endangerment at the behest of the cell-phone's strident screech). And of course, given the confusion over 8:10 versus 8:00 last time, I'm not entirely confident that I won't show up exactly at 8:00 a.m. to discover that my appointment card has said 7:50 a.m. all along!
I'd better go early, just in case. And since I skew early regardless, this likely means that I might as well just head over there immediately with a sleeping bag. I'm sure they will open eventually. Just because we're having record cold temperatures with a brio of windchill - just because my feet get numb just looking out the window (yes my feet look at things, don't yours??) - doesn't inevitably mean I'm doomed to turn into an irredeemable Adellasicle before I am rescued, revived with hot coffee, and informed that my appointment was actually the first Tuesday of May 2021 at 4:37! To mitigate the gelid toesies, I have these little heater pouches to stick into my shoes. I don't know how people put them under their feet, but if I leave one on the very top of my toes, it manages to be too hot and uncomfortable in minutes! Which, in hiemal weather, actually is just how I'd prefer my feet to be. Flaming feet melt snow and ice, gosh darnit.
Besides, my husband's an engineer and all. I'm sure he can whip me up a whole new set of hands and feet which will majorly improve on the original anatomical specs. Like new arch with reduced pain-function. And fingers that shoot fire! Or, being more practical, coffee from one finger, tea from another, and seltzer water from yet another. Maybe champagne from my pinkie.
Should I survive my PT excursions, I am slated to drop in at work, continue on to the gym, brush off my sheen of musk and exudations on the drive to lunch with my financial planner, then to a meeting with the same financial planner, aaand end up with a nice check-in back at work before running home and taking out the pantry full of detritus.
I was originally also slated to go back to my massage-assassin for another death-match, but have chosen to defer. I am likely to preemptively defer the gym today as well. I've felt a low-level lurgy (likely the final side effects of my distemporitis exacerbated by the looby-lady pills, but one can't be too careful in flu season), which probably does not need to be left pullulating in public locations.
Knocking out two of the imbricated obligations in this sloshing day hopefully shall suffice as sufficient sacrifice to the god of maunder and muddle.
Good luck to me, and good luck to all you happy readers out there. We are slaloming straight to Friday, I promise!
Snowish Day!
It has been unseasonably chilly and dry these past few days. The weather models continue to shift about like callow naifs at a ritzy fundraising auction. Reference to "snow" has passed in and out of use, promising and then snatching back all promises of snow while still unripe and unsavored. But tada! We ended up with a lovely frosting of the white stuff this morning. My weather app refuses to accept this, and maintains that it is cloudy, but I know better. I think I know better. I don't think that I've taken any sufficiently major hallucinogens in the last few hours... Well unless quinoa does it. I've long harbored suspicions about quinoa, really. Keenwa? Really? Sure, you mean space-cous-cous! I dig it. Keen, indeed, man.
I made a slow cooker quinoa peanut stew last night of which I am quite proud. As always, I mostly started with a recipe, and then changed virtually everything about except that it included quinoa and peanut butter. Oh and some broth. Those were the basic ingredients that survived. I substituted sweet potato for regular potato, which reminded me that sweet potato and peanut butter lended itself exquisitely to cayenne, ginger, and cinnamon; and hell I put garlic and onion in everything, so why not add the mix of garlic, jalepeno, onion, and cilantro I made earlier in the week. And h-e-quadruple-hockey-sticks, lets thicken it up with some flax meal and why not some lentils too. Always a relief when nothing bursts into flames or ends up tasting like burnt tires, because nothing is guaranteed in improv kitchen.
I've realized it may also be time for a pho bowl for Andrew. Our little 10 ounce bowls are thimblefuls for my man's stomach. The chili bowls are an improvement, but can be burdensome to navigate, and are still insufficient for his heaping portions. I've recently been serving up his nutrient mound in a rather large pyrex bowl and have been tempted to bring out the actual casserole or mixing bowls for him. A nice 50 ounce pho bowl, though, would add some class back into our evening repast. Also, he likes the little spoons.
Anyways, while tasty, I do not believe my soup had any lasting psychogenic effects other than a burst of gustatory bliss. As such, I do rather believe we've got snow in 'Hamstertown.
And a good day for it too. We have a hustle-bustle of a day at the office, but the external appointments have fallen by the wayside under a happy dusting of frigid oblivion. Fortunate, this, as my distemporities continues to flare up. Yesterday, I am relieved to report I made it to my PT with time to spare and plenty of coffee to soak my frozen-toes in before the inevitable ice-massage at the end of all the poking and palping. But that was about it as far as making things goes. My lunch and financial plannings succumbed to illness.
Today, a few more white chapped knuckles in an office that fluctuates 'twixt ice-box and boiler room. Doors will open and slam more rapidly than farcical theater would require. Pratfalls may occur. Papers shall flurry with the snow outside. And then, we shall be done!
Dun dun dun dun...
I think I can taste the weekend already. Or is that the left over memories of peanutty quinoa? Either way, I'll have a mixing bowl full pronto, please!
As is our weekend custom, I perennially arise at 5:00 a/m. to marinate in morning for a good hour and a half (at least) before rousing the loris. I do value my morning chirp-a-chirp time. Before the sun rises, but after the throb and throng of reveries have faded, there's a sacred submersion beneath the oppressive throng of reality. It's as if the world has let its pretense drop a tick during a long yawn and stretch, allowing its true character to transude through the cracks. The morning bird is much like a wary traveller stumbling upon Diana in her bath. Although mornings have yet to turn me into a stag or set hunting dogs on me, there is a jouissance to transgressing the silent space of wee hours.
Nothing so peaceful as creeping from bed at 5 a.m., and piercing the veil of somnolence with a fine-point needle. Stepping in tune with the shallow respiration of the house, falling into the gaps of the ticking-tocks of far off clocks. A time for my thoughts to unfurl tentatively, palping the contours of this waking life nonsense, while I open settlement talks with the oncoming day. By sunrise, a thoroughly iron-clad contract will be negotiated and entered in the celestial archives, if I'm lucky.
... or I could stumble out of bed, start the coffee and throw on speed skating. I'm not entirely sure what's going on except somebody just won or lost a medal and the British announcer is very excited. I believe he just said "bloody hell" in his dulcet drawl.
I love the NBC livestreaming, as it appears to sidestep that utter pomposity and anserinity of American sports commentators. Often live broadcasts supply the far more colorful international scene (we amuricuhns prefer to sleep in). I have a fondness for the British newscasters. They always have this genial casual quality to their sportscasting. Makes me feel like I'm burbling a brew at some local pub that serves crisps and features a cameo from Simon Pegg and pals.
I'm a huge fan of the Olympics, although I rarely watch it on primetime. While I am hardly a regular sportsfan, give me any intensive coverage at 5:00 a.m. in the morning of a strange sport I've barely heard of and I'm sent. I like my sporting events like my literary experiences: all encompassing, insanely immersive, and full of arcana, pageantry, and superheros making contorted concentration faces while endued in eye-searing synthetics.
Now something - "really brilliant stuff, I just wonder" - is happening according to the bloke broadcasting these things. I'm getting quite excited. Oh no, they didn't pace themselves, so they won't challenge the leaders, but it's still a "very good race" between the two racers. Oh but wait one of them might still be in medal contention. Bell lap! (Yes, I have learned from Andrew's track cycling, that bell lap signifies the lap in which all the racers must don a suit of several thousand jingly bells and roll themselves across the finish line). Ooooh cute dude in orange moved up into second!
And orange wins! Go Netherlands. And, since Andrew's power color is orange, I feel like I've won, myself.
And that event, whichever it was, has concluded, so I'm on to moguls qualifying. Several flashbacks of accidentally stumbling onto the unbunny slopes during a stab at skiing. I've gotten air, you know... I even landed it... for a few seconds before falling. Oooooh and something's "gone awry" as a competitor demonstrates my approach to moguls quite handily. Except she gets up a lot faster than I do. And oh my has the hour passed so quickly? It's nearly time to cede my supremacy of morning and share with my spousal unit.
I think today's loris-rousing will involve british men and women hurtling down mountains...
Arch Olympic Sofa Surfers
This morning, my Olympic munchies appear to be a mix of speed skating and ladies' ice hockey. I'm promised there will be ice skating coming up. There's a theme of sports in which people dress up in funny costumes in cold arenas, and which are particularly compelling because there's a chance they may fall on their bespandexed tooshies and/or break into a full on brawl. Just need curling to complete that set! All I know is that the announcer may be regrettably not-british, but he has winningly floppy ears and a sort of weathered-dork-doofus-brother-of-Paul-Ryan look that pleases me.
Today I am feeling the Olympic exertion. Watching all this live streaming nonsense is not for the weak of heart or easily fatigued of muscle! Or perhaps it was the weight training effort I finally reached after Andrew recovered from his chest-buster "threshold test" of doom. A "threshold test" has to do with heart rate training, which my engineer husband naturally tracks and calibrates within various margins of error. As any one who's worn a heart rate monitor has grocked, the little formulas that are posted at the gym based on age are... inaccurate. (Sometimes we use more colorful words than inaccurate) At least, I would hope so, since I have routinely exceeded my "maximum heart rate" and Andrew basically trains in excess of dead if the formulae are correct.
So, the "threshold test" is all about the "lactic threshold" which also signifies the point where the body shifts from aerobic to anaerobic. It's important to know where this is. I won't attempt to explain why. Just trust me on this. There are explanations from intense athletic sorts if you're curious. Usually these will involve creative formatting and at least three colors of font. Also the threshold moves about a bit during training.
The best way to test this would be to draw blood samples while exerting oneself. I'm relieved to report that Andrew has yet to set up his blood draw and store bike kit. Nor does he have a gas-exchange cart. So his Bible instructs him to do kind of a more ad hoc test involving going as hard as he can for about a half hour - the average of his rate from there can be used as a shorthand for his lactic threshold and from there, he can calculate his max, etc. Basically, it's another excuse to wreck himself on a bike. He chose to go as fast as he could straight up a mountain yesterday. If we are to believe his heart rate monitor, his highest recorded heart rate was 217. We are not to believe his heart rate monitor, however, since both of ours suffer from ague during cold weather and can churn out totally bizarre results (Andrew believes it's a static electricity thing - I think they just dislike being out in the cold and are whining).
So... basically the result is highly suspect and might have been useless, except he got to kill himself charging up a mountain.
Andrew was a little out of sorts after his effort, so he got lost on the way home and then wasn't really quite up to full-sentence-formation for a spell. We deferred on the gym a bit for fear it would end poorly with him passing out in another lifter's lap and all the awkwardness/police intervention that comes with that. But we did go eventually. The gym is quiet at 2:30 p.m. on a Saturday, believe it or not. Library hours for the YMCA, I suppose. Not a single baby birthed in the free weight section.
We tried quite determinedly to watch snowboarding replays last night, but it got far too complicated, since NBC apparently won't let you skip ahead or pause, and we are not of the sitting-still ilk. I eventually blustered up and switched to Psych.
As mentioned, today there will be a paucity of Olympic obsession, since we will be busy watching a prince without pants make sexual advances at an unconscious woman... oh romance is not dead. That would be Sleeping Beauty, incidentally. She actually doesn't spend that much time asleep in the ballet version. Not too many sleep-dance sequences.
Before that though, I'll nurse my wee aches and let NBC unfurl its manic swirl of game snippetry. I've hopped from Russia and Germany to a flower ceremony to Japan and Sweden, and I'm promised a luge medal ceremony. I'd better break out the gatorade here!
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