Working on Latin today. A plateau pole-vaulted. For the first time, I worked from the text in Perseus alone, writing nothing down, looking up words in the usual click-on-the-word style with Perseus, but assembling the translation in my head, then typing it into my Evernote file for Medea and Aeson. This is the private equivalent of sight reading and I’m becoming facile at it, at least in Ovid.
If you were here in the room, I’d ask for a high five. This feels like a culmination, a passing through one of the key doors on my way to the amateur classicist tower. Still a good ways to climb, but I’m far beyond the half-way point. Amazing.
Another positive note. After each night’s sleep and each nap, I get a reading on my resting heart rate thanks to my Basis watch, my 2014 birthday present. Before leaving Minnesota I had my resting heart rate down to a 62-67 bpm average, leaning more toward 62. Which is pretty good for a guy in his late 60’s. After being without exercise for almost two months, I began again last month and my heart rate showed up in the 70-73 range and stubbornly stayed there. Just when I had begun to get frustrated with it, it began to drop. Now, I’m running 67.
This night, a heavy wet snow. Woke up to three inches of thick white covering the deck. As I do each time it snows, I clear the deck first thing, even before getting the dogs. This is important because the snow compacts in front of the door and the dogs track in the snow from the deck. The stone floor can become slippery beyond our long entrance rug. Clearing the deck fixes most of that.
There was, this time, less snow on the driveway than on the deck. It doesn’t matter out there much at all since today will be 47, Saturday 57 and Sunday 65. The snow will be gone, probably by later today, certainly by Saturday.
I went for my first mountain hike yesterday, following the Upper Maxwell Falls trail into the Arapaho National Forest. Even though intuition told me I would need my Kahtoola spikes, the day was sunny, almost 50 so I put on my Keens, grabbed my backpack with water, compass, map and journal and drove the mile or so to the trailhead.
Where I promptly fell, slipping onto my butt. Sigh. Pay attention to yourself, I said. To myself. Hiking poles, which I had also considered, but left hanging in the garage right next to the truck, would have helped, too.
This is a popular trail and the love it had seen over the last few weeks had created stretches of the trail that were solid ice almost the width of the trail. Fortunately there was crunchy snow just off the trail so that walking on it I could make it some ways back into the woods. About 3/8’s of a mile in, though, the trail turned steeply up and narrowed. This section was not ice, but solidly packed snow that had melted then refrozen. May as well have been ice. In the gear I had for the day that was not passable, so I turned back.
Maxwell Creek burbled under its lacy ice and snow covering. There was an off trail path across the creek and up to a mostly snowless outcropping of rock, a small cliff and several lodge lodgepole pines (above). I wandered over there and began my nature journal sitting back against the large pine.
This is, I think, still on Shadow Mountain though my USGS topographical maps have not yet come in the mail.
Also near the Upper Maxwell Falls trail
This was an exploratory hike, one to assess what I would need when I begin making this a regular habit and for that purpose it worked just fine. Lessons: snowshoes would have worked. To hike in these conditions spikes on the boots plus hiking poles make sense. I’ll need a good pair of winter hiking boots. Learn more about the compass and its use with maps. I need a better back pack and a small camera to take along would be good, too. The nature journal will be another pathway into becoming native to this place.
As I wrote the other day, the combination of spring weather, settling in to the house and acclimatization have made me eager to get out in the woods. And so I have started. This coming winter I’ll be out there with snowshoes and spikes, poles and pack. Now that spring and summer press against the remnants of winter it will be hiking boots, poles and pack. Couldn’t be happier. Like a long running vacation in the Rocky Mountains.
OK. There are certain things, call them small trials, that come into everyone’s life. Today we’ll discuss getting hiking boots for the men’s size 7, wide foot. REI had “nothing in that size.” Just called Custom Foot in Englewood, an outfit that specializes in, well, custom fits and they said, “Well, we’d like to help you, but we can’t stock that size just waiting for you to call.” This was said in a sympathetic manner with a deprecating, sorry about that chuckle. End result. No boot.
So I’ve started looking at the world of custom made hiking boots. The advantage with these boots is they fit. And if there’s some problem, they’re fixed. Couple of disadvantages. Time to get them. Couple of months, maybe more. Price. They vary but they’re about twice to three times the regular boot. Of course, these will likely be my last hiking boots. Unless, of course, Vega eats them as she did my Timberland boots, but at these prices I’d be much more careful with them.
What’s happening is this. The cardboard has diminished. The moving in has slowed, acceptable for now, with another spurt to come once warmer weather sets in. The garage, for example. The acclimatization process seems to have peaked, not totally comfortable all the time, but close enough. Sunshine and warming temperatures have given me the itch to get out and start exploring the two National Forests that abut Conifer: Arapaho and Pike. But I need decent boots. Of course, I don’t need them to just get out and wander around a bit, but if I want to do any extended day hikes, I’ll want good quality boots.
Prep days. Yesterday reorienting my workouts, today moving back into Ovid with the Latin. Prep is important but I find I want to hurry through it, press on, get to the real stuff. But, it’s all real stuff, isn’t it?
When doing the Latin, for example, I want to work fast, translate easily, get it. But, most often I have to work slowly, translate with difficulty, struggle to understand.
In the MOOC I’m taking from McGill University the current section is on physical literacy. An amazing insight for me. Literacy in the alphabetic, language based world, yes. Numeracy in the numbers based, mathematical world, yes. But physical literacy? That is, learning basic moves and physical actions that can later be strung together to play a sport, keep one fit, teach us how to fall, no. The idea never occurred to me.
It apparently surfaced in the 1930’s in America whereas numeracy only emerged as an idea in the 1960’s. It’s not surprising, I guess, since the move from the farm to the town and city was weighted against the old, physical ways that had existed since hunting and gathering gave way to the neolithic revolution.
Perhaps, come to think of it, becoming native to this place is a component of physical literacy, a tactile spirituality. As we move less and less, we interact with the natural less affectively, less often, less well. Perhaps play is a big component of becoming native to this place, wandering aimlessly in the woods or by a pond, in the mountains, on lakes.
Anyhow, I’m excited about this idea, a human trilogy necessary for a satisfying life: literacy, numeracy and physicality.
Spent the morning tweaking my exercise regime. I’m taking a MOOC, Body Matters, from McGill University and it got me thinking about stuff I’d left out of my current routines. Then, I read a book (sampled) by Gretchen Reynolds, the excellent health and fitness columnist for the NYT. Plyometrics. I’d left them out this round. I change my routine up every once in a while, just to keep things interesting.
Plyometrics used to be called jump training. It involves explosive moves like jumping, doing an obstacle course of low hurdles, jump-rope. It adds bone strengthening, agility and balance to endurance, cardio-for which I do high intensity intervals, and resistance work for which I do a mix of exercises from outfits like Core Performance and P90X and old trainers.
Just ordered a wooden plyo box, 12x14x16, that will give me three different heights for squat jumps.
I didn’t start exercising until I was about 40, but I’ve kept at it pretty much since then, varying levels of intensity, at gyms and at home, with trainers and without trainers. Sometimes I’ve had healthy diets, sometimes not so much. But staying with it has been such a mantra for me that it is now easier to continue than it is to stop. After two months of no workouts due to the move, I was eager to get back to regular physical exercise.
That’s not to say, as Kate points out, that I did no physical activity during that time. I packed and unpacked, moved boxes from here to there, broke down cardboard and removed it from the house, set up all manner of things and did all this, once here in Colorado, while acclimatizing to 8,800 feet.
Even so, I like my workouts. In my new gym space. And I’m glad to be back at them.
BTW: I’ve also started using a nutritional supplement highly recommended by exercise physiologists, and I’m not kidding: chocolate milk!
New workout regimen. High intensity and resistance work MWF. Slow cardio and core work TThS. Slow cardio and core went fine today. Yesterday’s HI and resistance, harder. But it will come back. Slowly, slowly.
Just ordered Eliot Coleman’s book, Winter Harvest. It’s about the only way we can grow vegetables here, use covered beds. Gotta learn some stuff before we try to implement it. Gonna let the bees rest this year. Montane gardening will be enough of a new challenge for one year.
Becoming native to this place will happen like my workouts: slowly, slowly.
62 here yesterday. A record warm spell for Denver, not sure about up here on Shadow Mountain. Kate and I went out in shirtsleeves, looking at plants in the front, trying to decide what they were. Bearberry, I think, or kinnikinnick, which it turns out is used as a tobacco by Native Americans. A small, evergreen shrub that lies low to the ground, kinnikinnick is a ground cover I tried to grow in Minnesota but could never make last. It grows on the edge of Montane forests where it’s sunny. Just where this is.
Had the Geowater folks here yesterday testing our water from various spots in the house.Looking mostly at corrosivity and radionuclides. We have a radon mitigation system in place so the latter is not out of the realm of possibility. Corrosivity will test the ph of the water, specifically to see if our well is the source of the acidic water in the boiler.
Started my exercise regime yesterday evening. Painful. I have detrained aerobically and in terms of resistance, plus there’s the effect (complicated) of altitude. I started over after a 7-week layoff during our cruise and this is about the same length of time away, so the difficulty getting back to it is familiar, if not welcome.
Up in the loft again after feeding the dogs this morning. A bright, Raphael-esque pink paints the clouds I can see between the lodgepole pines.
Yesterday I came very close to getting all my books stacked by rough category and I will finish today: American studies, emergence/Lake Superior/climate change/science/, art, philosophy, war, aging, weather, bees, classics/mythology/ancient history, poetry/spirituality/religion/renaissance, literature, Asia, Latin America.
Once done with that task I can move on to filing. That will involve moving some files out of banker’s boxes and into my horizontal file. Many of my files, including all my novel manuscripts and research, will stay in boxes. A convenient place for them will to be created.
The congestion has decreased considerably and will decrease a lot more after the filing is done.
My two large rubber mats for the gym area won’t arrive until mid-month, but when they do that will allow me to finish off the workout area. At some point Jon will get started on the built-ins. This whole process will take a good bit of time, but the end result will be wonderful.
The move has occasioned some changes in long standing habits. In Andover I regularly went to bed at 11:30 pm, getting up somewhere between 7 and 8 am. Since the move happened close to the change from daylight savings to standard time, I was able to move my bedtime back to 9 pm with little effect. That means I now get up between 5:30 am and 6:00 am.
It is, for example, 6:15 am here now and I’ve been up since 5:30, fed the dogs, got the newspaper and come up here to the loft for some work time. It’s not actually work quite yet, but I’m developing a new habit, working in the time after I’ve fed the dogs. Working in this time helps me delay breakfast until after 7:00 am, another new habit. This one involves eating only between 7:00 am and 7:00 pm.
So far this latter new habit has allowed me to maintain my weight at 153, almost 20 pounds lighter than my heaviest in Minnesota. I lost the weight, most of it, in the move, a combination of stress, physical exercise and my low carb diet taking hold.
Kate, too, is at an all time slim, down to 115. The move has been good for our BMI. I suggested to Kate that we’d both lost weight because people are just fitter here in Colorado. Irony aside the emphasis on fitness here does reinforce good eating and exercise habits, something I like. Yes, these are my choices and I’m responsible for them, but it helps to have societal support.
No post yesterday! Uncommon. Got too wrapped up in doing stuff.
First instance. Drove over to Conifer III (we have three retail areas, this is the one furthest south on 285, but closest to our house) to see an eye doc about my glaucoma. Due to a screw-up (mine) with the prescription I’d been out of my eye drops for a couple of weeks and, not wanting to go blind, got an appointment. Jennifer Kiernan, doctor of optometry, is a late 30’s woman with a common sense approach.
We discussed the fact that my pressures, 15 and 16, were normal without the drops. She looked at my retinal nerve, “Hmm. Suspicious.” She says the current move is toward no drops, using a very tiny stent to drain the pressure. “But, medicare will only pay for it when it’s done in combination with cataract surgery. Let’s see how bad your cataracts are.” Not too bad, as it turned out. “Let’s keep you off the drops, see you in a month.” Sounded good to me.
Back at home Kate and I came up to the loft and entered her drugs in medicare.gov. This was in preparation for our appointment at 3:30 with John Downing and Larry Seligman. We needed advice about the maze of plans. Larry recommended the very plan that we had considered on the medicare site, so we signed up. Here’s the good news. $0 premium. Weird, I know, but there you are. Larry said it was a very popular plan, no complaints, and it looked like a good fit. Besides, it’s only until 2016 under any circumstances. We needed to get this done because our U-Care coverage expired January 31st.
After that we asked Ophelia (our Garmin) how to get to the exhibition space where Jon had five works on display. This is the annual show for Aurora art school teachers and is held just off Colfax Ave on Florence, deep in the heart of Latino Denver. Jon, Jen, Barb (Jen’s mother), Gabe, Ruth, Kate and I were there. The whole family. That felt good.
Back home. With no thought for a post. I guess that’s probably a good thing.
