Balance

I hinted at what draws my attention the other night on TB’s Radio show.

I have been on an excellent three day period of exercise.   Both running and lifting and it feels very good to get back on track in that part of my life again, but my little green and blue books have not been touched since that happened.

My running hasn’t been very far…or very fast, but five miles is five miles (and about 600 calories) and it is good to have some of that familiar soreness in my body that I seem to crave.

Yesterdays five miles was combined with enough heavy lifting to cause some soreness in my shoulders today…I like that feeling.   

My lifting had been slowed down by an injury obtained during an “incident” with someone I work with occasionally.   It turns out that i am still having some trouble with this right hand.  I only feel it when I am trying to perform a “curl” and it is at the base of my thumb.

Not being a “weightlifter” I am not sure what normal weight for me to use curling would be, but I perform three sets of five reps when I curl any weight.   Usually 80-100 pounds (single bar for both arms at the same time)…it depends on how I feel that day.   Even at this point, the 80 pounds causes me some pain in that hand.   It is better now than when I stopped lifting a month ago, but it is still there.   Yesterday, I was forced to go with 70 and 10 reps…and the discomfort was manageable.

I would really like to come up with a routine, system or a way that allows me to focus on multiple “free time” things at the same time…but looking back on it all now, I see that the increased focus on comedy happened right after the hand injury and now that the hand is healing, I am working back into “exercise mode”.

I guess we are all looking for some kind of balance in our lives…

Scare Factor

So, earlier this morning I got a call from my mom to my cell phone.

This would normally be considered bad news, except she’d tried to reach us last night while I was off watching moon movies with Boy.  And I knew they were hoping their broken AC was fixed on Monday, so I assumed she was just letting me know they were back in business, especially since I called to check in with them in that regard on Saturday.

Actually, it was bad news.

I’m sure most of you know by now that I grew up in a little neighborhood that could best be described as clannish.  We were almost all related in some form or fashion, and anyway had been living together for a generation or three.  We were close.

There was a family across the street from me – my aunt’s adopted brother and his family.  The kids were younger than me, the oldest being a girl, about five years younger.

Her husband just had a massive heart attack this weekend.  As in, shocked him back multiple times and failed.  Broke ribs giving CPR.  Turned blue.  Airlifted to one hospital (out of state, even), had to be diverted to another because of fog.

He’s stable, now, but in critical condition.

He’s thirty-five.

As it so happens, I didn’t really know the guy well, but according to my mom when we were both infants we shared a crib together at the babysitter’s.

I don’t know if he had familial risk factors, but I don’t think he was in the most horrible shape.  (However, being from back home, the idea that his diet was not diabetes- or heart-disease-friendly is a moderately safe assumption.  But I don’t know that.)

Holy shit.  Talk about a wake-up call.