The mountain spring moon is a sliver, 7% of full, close to a transition to new moon. And what do we have? A snowstorm that may produce 1-3 feet, that’s FEET, of snow. Based on what it’s doing right now that might be a low estimate since, according to the forecast, the snow has until tomorrow evening to fall.
And, in other news. I had a distracted day yesterday but today I’m back to normal. Slept fine both nights. Whatever comes, comes. Kate’s a great source of support.
Been distracted today. Not highly anxious, but finding it hard to focus. Which is not good for doing Latin. This will pass. I have an appointment with a urologist on April 27th and my new PSA numbers will come in today or tomorrow. More information.
Kate has said, long before I began hearing it everywhere, “It is what it is.” True. No amount of fretting will make the reality any different. Still. It is my reality and it is, at least potentially, my mortality.
I’m recording this more for myself, for later. A peg to measure reactions. Not unaffected, but not depressed, sad, worried. Distracted. The best word.
That new habit? Already changing. Figured out that drinking lots of water during my afternoon workouts made my night’s sleep get interrupted. Often enough to be annoying. So, I moved my workouts to mornings, starting this morning. Several positives came into focus in addition to having the whole day to get rid of excess water: cooler, a good thing for summer days. Leaves afternoons and early evenings free. An endorphin boost in the am is good. No sun coming in through the loft door makes the TV easier to see.
So, I have to rejigger my schedule again, accounting for the first hour of the day as exercise, then breakfast. Thinking about that now.
Tonight Kate and I will go into Denver to Dazzle Jazz for an evening of jazz in classical music. A good mix for us since we’re classical music and jazz fans, about 5% of the musical audience according to a DJ from KBEM in Minneapolis
I just reviewed the first pass at the light and shade study. We may not have many options for vegetables. I’m going to repeat the study in a month with better defined areas and more systematic spots for taking the pictures, make them uniform from hour to hour.
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.
