In which we ask, wha hoppen?

o, it's been a while since the last post, and I've actually had people check up to make sure that I haven't moved to Chechnya, or been assassinated by disaffected chipmunks, or carried off by the Bald Eagles which infest parts of the locality; none of the above has, in fact, happened.

I've been, um, adjusting to the new reality. Yeah. Adjusting. That's the ticket. I've been adjusting. The adjustment is, like many things, divided into three parts.

Part the First: I  hit town, with the grace of a polar bear falling off an iceberg. I had plenty coming up to keep my mind busy.

There was the deck in the Valley, which is now pretty much done (there's a little tweak I want to do to the blocking, and in a few years it may have to be redone completely, in which case it will be a much better deck...) but it's done.

I hit the gym, and got my weight squared away for the moment. My VO2 max would still get me a non-speaking role on The Walking Dead, but there's always next year.

The Great Tucker visited us, and discovered Swallows and Amazons, and we took a day to go to Historical Sherbrooke, and saw the blacksmith and the woodturner gave him a top, and we got caught in the fog, and rode a cable ferry, and took long enough getting home that we had to stop for junk food, and then had DONAIRS for supper, and almost hit a deer. Best. Day. Ever. (Great kid, Tucker. Miss him.)

Part the Second: It starts to sink in that I'm never going to get back to where I was. There won't even be something closely comparable to what I left behind. This fact hit around early summer. The hitting thereof was not a happy time. I continued to do stuff (woodworking, typesetting, playing cornet flugel, etc.) in a slightly bewildered way. I could still do stuff, but only if I didn't think too deeply about the situation. (Denial: the under-rated coping technique.)

Part the Third: Came the fall, I continued to play in the Brass Quintet, and joined a couple of choirs. I met nice people, and came to like them quite a lot. I have started to get back in the gym. Piano lessons in the new year are a possibility. The guy across the street has noticed my woodworking, and complimented my bench. I'm actually starting to learn some stuff about woodworking. I wrote a couple of pieces of music, and it's been hinted that more would be welcome. So, things are going better.

Except where they're not. Even now, in my "adjusted" stage, I still miss the Happy Pals at Grossman's, and regret with every fibre of my being every the 2000 Saturday afternoons that I could have gone to hear them, but did not. I miss Crusaders Rugby, and the squat sled at Iroquois Ridge Community Centre, and the John Laing Singers. I miss the hock shops on Church Street, and Niagara Falls.

I miss running up to Brampton for lunch with Ken and Ruth. I miss rep cinemas, and cramped little bookstores, and buskers in front of the Eaton Centre, and the Central Reference Library. (Need to know the engineering details of torsion boxes? Yeah, they have a book on that. They have a book on everything.) I miss the second hand stores on Queen Street; I miss Sayal's in Burlington.

More than anything else, I miss the Trafalgar band, and choir, and congregation, and everything about it.

So, it's getting better, for tightly constrained values of better. Next adjustment is realizing it'll never be the kind of better I was hoping for...

It's Christmas. I've been here about a year. Time to start carrying on.

Back to you shortly.

In which silence is broken.

obody will be surprised to hear that there are many things I don't know. Some may be gobsmacked stunned staggered  bewildered a little surprised to realize that I'm aware of how many things I don't know. This ignorance, believe it or not, exerts a braking effect on one of my favourite activities, which is running my mouth. It takes a truly colossal awareness of my own ignorance to stop me, but more often that you'd think, even I am  dumbfounded by my own lack of knowledge. 

The Things I Have the Gall Not to  Know are divided, appropriately, into three parts.


First are things that I'm learning (like woodworking and flugelhorn). On these subjects, I don't say much. Occasionally, I'll pass on what I've learned from others, like the 19/30 exercise, or the joy of knifing layout marks when sawing wood, but usually, I just keep shtum, for fear of missing what someone else is saying, or fear of making a complete fool of myself, or just awareness of the awesome extent of my ignorance.

Second come the things which I don't know, but which I'll learn if I live long enough, like Gaelic, Korean, Double Bass, counterpoint, and amplifier design. Here, the level of my ignorance will almost always keep me to a Trappist reticence, except for occasionally remarking to a bass player, "Gosh, that really is the coolest instrument in the world, isn't it?" Which remarks seldom provoke disagreement from bass players, oddly enough.

Finally, there are things of which I know as little as I can manage, and strive to know less, but which keep impinging on my life, and which provoke a response, however unqualified I am to give it. (Speaking categorically from a state of profound and perfect ignorance is an academic hobby endorsed by the past Oxford Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, so I plead in mitigation the malign influence of my elders and betters in this matter, m'Lud.) 

Today, we will consider a proposal to set off a wave of hiring by means of a miniscule reduction in fees charged by the federal government for UNemployment Insurance. What it boils down to, is that thousands of jobs are about to be created, by giving a number of employers a maximum of... wait for it... $700 each. (God forbid they should do something weird with the EI surplus, like, oh, I don't know, maybe... give it to unemployed people?)

Now, I don't have a masters in economics from the University of Calgary, a fact for which I am extremely grateful. (I find that the hard and fast realities of music theory, medieval history, theology  and brass technique are enough for me. The phantasmagorical imaginations of Milton Friedman et. al.  require a suspension of disbelief that is beyond my powers, so I try not to waste a lot of thought on them.)  

Still, even a music major can estimate the probability of success in this latest plan. So, as the sun pulls away from the shore, and the latest genius economic action plan sinks slowly in the west, may your humble correspondent suggest a little traveling music?

In which is the end of railing (Pt. 1)

ack in the spring, I put up a railing; This is how it ended up.


The first problem to be addressed was the old railing posts. They looked like they were intended for a railing, as they stuck up well above the level of the deck, but they were in the wrong places, and far too short to be useful. Also, they were in the way. I have a tool that fixes the last problem... and here they are, cut to deck level. 

This creates another problem: there is end grain sitting there, waiting to absorb the rain (and it does rain once in a while here... who saw that coming?) The plan was to cut them down level with the bottom of the deck boards, and put a cap on top. You can see the edge of a Triton router in the picture above. (The Triton is cool. It's from Australia, and works really comfortable upside down in a router table. Yep.)

This is halfway through the routing:

And here it is, nearly all done:

Very easy, and quite easy to avoid slashing up the deck boards on each side. For some reason, they feel a lot different when the bit touches them, so I could go mostly by touch.

Then, I got to this one:

As you can see, the router can't get into the corner. I needed a solution. And I had one:

I'm not sure that there is a lot of use for a two inch chisel in fine woodworking, but it's lovely for this kind of rough carpentry.  To my intense relief, it wasn't particularly hard to sharpen it by hand. Shortly, I wound up with this:

There are many people can do this without thinking about it, but it's very cool to do it for the first time.

Next up was the stairs. Doing stairs the second time will be easier; the first move should be to prepare a level, concrete pad at the bottom, so that you can get consistent height measurements... But in this case... after much frying of brain, I had the risers cut.

Now, risers should be cut out of 2x12's the biggest chunks of wood you can find... 2x10s (seen here) are not optimal, and you can see that some parts are way too thin for comfort. The solution was to scab on some 2X4s like this:

(I think the second riser from the left is now technically plywood, but it's solid.) All that remained was to put on the treads and risers. No biggy.

Next installment: Last railing, putting the deckboards back, finishing touches, and one more trip to the BORG.

In which is furlongs and more acronyms than reasonable.

unning in the Wee Town is interesting. The best training I ever did, I did in Southern Ontario, where there were at least the remnants of a rural grid of roads. Knowing how far I ran was relatively easy, with a ruler and a map. And here... not so easy.

The local roads are laid out in a sort of mangled radial pattern, following the lines of less resistance, wherever they may lead. In Toronto, runs can be planned by "Go to the next county road and turn right." Here, if you look for a chance to turn right and circle back home, you have to run to the next town first. Towns here are spaced out a great distance. (Parts of the province are rural. Other parts would require major immigration and serious infill development to become rural.) Loop runs around here start at five or six miles. So, to run a known distance, I'm up at the track. The track brings in a whole new method of measurements.


Back in the stone age(i.e. the 1970's), as we slowly discovered the world, some parts of it made more sense than others. One part which made little sense at the time was systems of measurement. The imperial system involves multiples of three, and twelve, and sixteen, which had just been discovered to be Too Complicated. (Seriously, the twelve times table? What kind of twisted genius super-race can multiply by twelve? Have we even discovered the twelve times table, or is that the thing they're working on at the CERN Large Hadron Collider?)

The alternative was the metric system. I'm sorry, the Système International. The SI has no commonly used measure of length between something smaller than the width of your little finger, and something longer than your arm, and is now the world standard. There is an undeniable genius to French political culture.

Of course, as with all declarations of new and perfect systems, subversion started immediately. Running tracks are now 400 meters. This is about seven and a half feet short of a quarter mile, which is not enough make a difference in training, or in any racing that most of us are likely to do. So, even though the local track is in meters, my training approach has not had to change since the 1970s. 

What has changed, drastically and fairly recently, is my ability to run. The last time I did any serious running, I measured my training in miles. That's not going to happen for a while. When I first went up to the track, I could run half a mile before I gassed. Intellectually, I know that's not far. Physically, it feels far. How to measure the distance? 

Meters, and yards are not marked anywhere on the ground. Miles and kilometers are discouraging, when you're running fractions of them. Even a lap is a discouraging distance right now. What's less discouraging is a half lap. Half a lap is within about three feet of... a furlong. 

Oh, the furlong. The perfect measurement. Organic. Sensible. Logical. Based on the well-known distance that an ox team could plow between rests. Standardized at 40 rods, the rod being the standard, normal, sixteen-and-a-half-foot long ox-whacking implement; no home should be without one, otherwise you may find yourself with an ox to whack, and nothing to whack it with, and then where are you? Don't say I didn't warn you.

Furlongs are easy to measure on the track. You run from one football goal line around to the other. They're short enough that I can run multiples of them, but not too many multiples to keep track of.

The current running workout is this: 
 Every week or two, do the Foot Journey of Length (FJ/L). (I can't call it a long run, because I'm still walking most of it.) As part of it, see how far or how long I can run non-stop. This is the Distance of Temporary Significance. (D/TSig.)

Two days a week, divide the D/TSig. in half. Run three of them, with a little rest in between. 
A third day each week, either repeat the above, or divide the D/TSig. in quarters, and run six of them, or, spend a Time of Astonishing Length (T/AL) on the the bike at the gym. The bike is useful, in the event of Unreasonable Soreness of Feet (US/Ft).

The fourth day, do any of the above, or repeat the FJ/L. 

When the D/Sig. gets over a mile, I'll rework the workouts, but for now this workout works.

Last Saturday, I did my Foot Journey of Length (FJ/L). It comes out to about six miles (thank you milermeter.com!) Of this, I could run about three quarters of a mile nonstop. (thank you again, milermeter!) Now, a furlong being half of a quarter mile, and a lap of the track being a quarter mile, I'm running three furlongs, three times. I've done this on Monday and Wednesday, and today I'm off to the bike, because of the previously referenced US/Ft.

More to come soon: The End of Railing, The Building of a Box, and the Visit of the Great Tucker.
  

In which the dark side calls...

'm not sure how I ended up here. I attended the highland games this weekend, because what is the point of living here if you don't?

     It's been forty years since I attended a highland games. Some things remain constant, and comfortingly familiar: the heat is amazing, the breezes are few, dust is everywhere, and the UV index is at a level that will sear steak.There have, however been changes, which I must classify as good, or the notion of human progress is put into question, and all society's done for.

     Tiny girls danced, often with grim determination, but sometimes with every appearance of enjoying it. The dancing is much more balletic than I remember, and not just in the movements. ALL the girls have their hair in chignons, ALL the girls are in stage makeup, which is dramatic on a nineteen year old, but just silly on a six year old.

     All the competitors, including the one boy I saw, were in Serious Highland Dancing Costume. Apparently the days when a piper would walk over from the band tent, change shoes and compete in a band uniform, no makeup, and hair loose,  then walk back over to play in the band competition have been banished to the memories of old guys.

     The first step of the sword dance seems to have a two-footed landing where there used to be a right-footed landing into a pas de bas. In the opinion of one observer, the new style looks like hell; everything just suddenly stops for half a beat. The elevation in the jumps is much more than I remember, too, which is progress in the heavy events, and I suppose must be progress in dancing, too.

     In the heavy events, little has changed. Large men threw heavy things with determination and some success. The occasional competitor is far less beefy than was formerly common, but even they can still throw a light (16 lb!) hammer halfway down a football field.

     There were nervous moments; who knew that a caber had a significant sail area? The field looked comfortably large, until some of the longer runups in the caber toss. In the end, there were three successful (turned) throws, and much rejoicing. There were no casualties, although spectators around the perimeter of the field moved in a sprightly fashion from time to time.

     In piping, all the snare drummers wear a two-shoulder harness now, as seen in drum and bugle corps, instead of the diagonal shoulder belt. It's supposed to be easier on their backs, but it looks about the same weight as a small Hyundai, so I have to take that on faith. There was not a single drum major sighted over the full weekend. This may be a regional variation, or simple statistical clustering. The standard of playing seems quite variable, but on average, high.


     Now, some of you know that I played bagpipes forty years ago, and may have made some surmises about my current proximity to them. Unfortunately, bagpipes are a woodwind instrument, and make the same impossible demands on my hands as other woodwinds, so there is no return to piping in my old age. But... there was a conversation with a couple of bandsmen.

      Maybe my willingness to double on any percussion instrument I could reach was where the rot got in. Maybe it was my destiny all along to go where I seem to be going. Maybe the irresistible call of  the dark side marked me as its own in my innocent youth, and has been, all these years, not defeated but waiting. Maybe we will never know why such dreadful and frightening changes occur. Whatever the reason, early this week, I will venture out and acquire a pair of drumsticks.

   

In which is railing

or, Return of the Deck.

I didn't take a lot of pictures (well, any pictures) of the first week of work. This is the earliest one, and it's from my dumbphone, so forgive the quality.

This was the end of the first week. The stairs at the far end had been ripped out, by the simple method of picking them up and walking away. They have been replaced with a rose trellis, supporting the massive rambling roses that were planted on each side of the stairs. NOTE: if you plant roses by a walkway, the roses are going to win.

Above is a better view of the trellis, across the romantic vista of stacks of pressure treated lumber. The top half is pretty thin, but the bottom half is way tighter than the code requires, so that's all right.

This is the other side of the trellis, with most of the roses put back up. For a while, I thought I was going to have to chainsaw them down to about six inches, just to get at the deck to work, but it was never quite necessary, and my hands are healing up nicely.

Because I'm not a jerk, I did leave them with a working set of stairs, almost to code. Note the lovely lag bolts holding stuff together. Nothing makes a 2x4 go straight like a 4x4 and a lag bolt. Better than a straight-from-the shoulder talk from a salty but caring Irish priest.

In the background are several pots of plants that my wife planted while she was there. Plants are not my department, until they're sawn into dimensional lumber.

And so, I had to leave it for a week. I was exhausted, I was missing my wife, and my hands hurt more than I could have imagined. On the plus side, I did get the railing well up, and I had learned a lot about decks. More shortly, on What the Cornet Player Did Next.

In which is haste

Or

Which is in haste. Curved space confusion strikes again.


Some things to catch up on , and some excuses for delay.

First, the second blood test came back.

Fasting Glucose 4.4 (down from 6.4)
Haemoglobin A1C 5.1 (down from 6.

Basically, the probability of going blind and losing my extremities has taken  a very large hit. This entailed a visit to Dairy Queen... because if you go out for ice cream, there aren't leftovers in the fridge, calling softly to you in the wee hours of the morning. Or the middle sized hours of the afternoon.  Or the large-ish hours of the early evening, when it's hot and humid, and you've worked kind of hard, and deserve it. (Yeah, I know. Humidity in Nova Scotia. Who saw that coming?)

Second, I'm hurting in new ways, because I've taken up a new, and I hope brief, career in (very) rough carpentry. 

A few weeks back, Sue and I bought a house in Kentville. We're renting it to my son and daughter-in-law and their son, Micah (AKA Howlin' Mouse the Bluesman). It requires some changes to make it a little safer. The one I'm working on now is the railing around the back deck.  

"But Bob," you cry. "Granted that you are the Suzerain of Profitless Arcana, what do you know about building decks?"

And comes the answer: "A hell of a lot more than I knew three weeks ago."

I went down on the first of June, and came back on the ninth. At that point, I had removed the stairs on the north side (by the simple expedient of picking them up and walking away with them. You see why I thought the deck needed a bit of work?) The north side is now a rose arbour. (Note: If you want people to walk there, DON'T PLANT ROSE BUSHES. Just don't, okay? The two species are happier in a long distance relationship, for values of long ≥ three feet.)

By the ninth of June, there was a railing on the east side which pretty much meets code. There were steps on the east side which will meet code when I get hand rails on. There was a vague impression that somebody had been pounding nails into random parts of my body.

Now, a week later, I'm heading back to do the south side. There will be pictures.

In which I'se strong in the finach.

Cause I eats my spinach.

A long delay, in which blog posts have been written, but not posted. The process of adjustment to my new life continues, 

and sometimes thoughts get a bit darker than I want to put out in public. (I don't know who all might read this blog.)

    The thought of the day concerns Eggs Florentine. (Man, I'm coming to like spinach. It's like salad you can cook.) I tried this yesterday, poaching an egg in a silicon egg poacher. Since it's made of the same stuff that really good oven mitts are, I thought it might take longer to cook than I was hoping for... and I was right. Also, the egg stuck, so it rated a fail.

     Plan B: got a microwave egg poacher. Poaching eggs in a microwave has never been a great option, because the yolks cook much faster than the whites. Still, I figured that if they did it right, the plastic might heat up and cook the whites from the outside in, and all would be lovely.

     Nope. It would not be true to say that you could play golf with the yolks. They're too smooth, and a bit too small. About right for ping-pong, however.

     Plan C: Marry somebody smart, and steal her method. The next trick will be to 1) butter the poacher before the eggs go in; 2) separate the eggs, and cook the whites for 30 seconds before you put the yolks in. 3) add the yolks for another 30 seconds or so, 4) Open the poacher, and hope that this worked.

     Unlike the Ping-pong Yolk Conundrum, the amazing spinach-water conjunction has been definitively solved. Draining spinach is a drag. If you try decanting out the water, by the time you tip the bowl far enough to dump the water, the spinach starts falling out, and I'm trying not to use that kind of language. The answer, of course, is canned tuna fish.

     Not that I eat tuna fish any more. I started getting taller every time we had a heat wave, so it looks like there really is a mercury problem with it. But they do sell strainers for tuna fish (is there really anybody who doesn't just use the lid?) and with these, and diligence, you can drain the spinach without dumping it in the sink. (Take my advice, and buy your diligence in the 64 oz. cans. Otherwise, the price is ridiculous.)

     Music for the moment: Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz show. She's gone now, but her show is great.

     Coming soon: results of a follow-up blood test, and a follow-up fitness test; news on the house, and even, perhaps a sketch of the workbench,

In which things get intense, arguable madness ensues...

For the last few weeks, the weight loss has been kind of stuck. Certain changes must be made. Here they go.

     First, the weight workouts have been changed, again. They have the gall to be divided into three parts. The first part uses some intensity, in the 8-10 rep range. Second is a volume section, which uses 50-75% of the weight in the first part, for many, many sets. The third part is the small stuff, mostly rehab for shoulders and knees.

     I'm using two workouts. The first is leg presses, bench presses and seated rows. The second is deadlifts, military presses and pulldowns. With the exception of deadlifts, these will all happen on machines. Deadlifts may well get swapped out for more leg presses, because of a weird cultural thing at my gym.

     Most gyms I've been in are based around machines. The free weight section (if there even is one) is tucked away at the back, and is nearly deserted. Everybody wants to use the machines, with that sweet, sweet, shiny chrome that makes everything better.

     My current gym is about 25% free weights (by floor space) and the rest is a bemusing variety of machines, most of which isolate one muscle at a time. So far, so expected. But about 80% of the people at any one time in the back doing free weights, while the machines stand mostly idle. I've seen squat racks that were constantly busy before, but this one is actually being used for squats, instead of shrugs or curls. I feel like a rarely privileged and fortunate anthropologist, given the chance to see an ancient folk ritual in the same class as the Minehead Hobby Horse but I can't really afford to

wait an hour and a half for a chance to do three quick sets.

     Besides the waiting time, I'm still having issues with my left shoulder, so squats are off the menu right now, and I'm doing leg presses, instead.  And leg presses hit 270 last week! Rows were 120. Bench presses were a gingerly 60, with minimal problems. The first two weight will go up five pounds at a time until I hit a sticking point; bench presses will slowly sneak up at a lower speed.

     The second workout is aerobic, and that now means running. I burned 600 calories yesterday, but more importantly, I did nearly five minutes of real, no-kidding running. This has prompted a spasm of "I just gotta try this.."

So, I'm going to set an actual goal for running: a ten minute mile by the end of July. That'll be about twice as fast as I usually go on the treadmill. We'll see whether it results in this

 Or this.

I'm hoping for the first option.
    
     Finally, I've realized, again, the truth that you can't outrun a bad diet. My one indulgence is almonds. I've been eating too many of them. Reluctantly, I have to cut them back. I'll miss them.

Onwards!

In which there are gigs.

our gigs, to be precise.

I was asked by the Local Anglican Cleric to sing the Exsultet at the Easter vigil. When other people hear me sing, I expect bad things to happen, but for her I would do anything, of course I agreed.

     First problem: no voice. Hadn't sung in some months, had to practise like a fiend, didn't want to, but got around to it eventually, voice was coming around.

     Second problem: L.A.C., hearing me practise, told me that she really, really loves the Exsultet, and wanted the full (three or four page) version, not the short version I've been doing for the last several years, in my Little Presbyterian Home in the West.. O... kay.. I can do that. Just barely.

     Third problem: on the Saturday, I went to try it in the church, because acoustics. It was pointed out that the Sursum Corda is set to different music in the Exsultet (at least the one that I had) than the Anglican church usually sings. So, I whip over to the Book of Alternative Services (Presider's Edition) to get the tone that the congregation might know. Whoever typeset the BAS decided in his wisdom to print the Sursum Corda in a different notation than the rest of the Exsultet...

     It all goes okay on the night. The church is tiny, so my voice holds out, barely, and nobody throws anything.


     Meanwhile, back in my Little Presbyterian Home in the West, a very good friend of mine gets landed with the Exsultet on Easter morning. She has stage fright. (I sympathize!) She worries about it. According to multiple witnesses, she absolutely nails it.

     The third gig is Easter morning. No organist, so hymns are played by a guitarist and the cornet player. It doesn't go too badly, although, on the last hymn, when I nail an F#, I'm so astonished that I gargle the next bar completely.

     Finally, I got an email from the guy who runs the local brass quintet. His French horn player has retired, and I have a shot (until they get a new one) at playing the part on flugel. Of course I'm going to do it.

In which are tests, and cooking, and a flailing moment of creativity

My lovely wife out of town overnight, so I'm messing with music, doing laundry like a baus, and it's time for a blog. 

     As mentioned, I went and started a workout with a VO2 max test. It was up about 3 of whatever it's measured in. That's likely due mostly to weight loss, but higher is better, however you get there. (Yay!)

     Next up that day was weights, and it's getting tedious. Dumbbell deadlifts start the day, and at 60 pounds (x10x10) would just about do to end it. It's not a lot to deadlift, but there's a pretty good range of motion with dumbbells, and I'm also lifting a lot of me.

     Still, pressing on, never say die, there are leg extensions and then either pulldowns or T-bar rows. Generally, that will fry me to a light golden brown, so sprinkle a little lemon juice on me, and put me on a plate, 'cause I'm done. 

     On days when I'm really far sighted, I hang around and do shoulder work. This is problematic, because the shoulders are problematic, and tend to clank when asked to do full-range work. The sets therefore are on the lat raise machine, at ludicrously small weights, or some subset of the Jobe exercises, at even more ludicrously small weights. Still, they're working, and I can occasionally do bench presses very carefully, with no problems. 

     The imminent return of the bench press (and its cousin, the military press) are devoutly hoped for, as I'm running out of exercises. At the moment, I'm trying to avoid isolation exercises (the one-muscle-at-a-time approach) because it's too hard to keep up intensity like that. Unfortunately, compound exercises break down into Squats, Deadlift, Pushes and Pulls. Generally, you combine squats and deadlifts at your peril, so I need the pushes back!

     On the cheerful side, it's only another week until I change up the programme again, and I may make a somewhat radical change, which will relieve the boredom a bit.

     Anyway,  you were promised some cooking, and here it is, the simplest and best breakfast ever, the Spinach and Jalapeño Omelette. 

Grab as much (washed!) spinach as any sane man would put in an omelette. Grab the same amount in the other hand. Chop it all up. 

Get about three slices of hot peppers (I've been using pickled  jalapeños) out of the jar. USE. A. FORK. because touching jalapeños is a really bad idea, don't pay attention to me, let your hangnails explain it for you. Drop them beside the spinach, and cut them up, without touching them. 

Beat two eggs, (or three, if you're living large) with salt and pepper and tabasco sauce. 
Get a slightly oily pan rilly, rilly hot, and in rapid succession: 

• Pour in the eggs.
• Shake the pan to move them around a bit, so the liquid stuff flows under the cooked stuff.
• Sprinkle the spinach around
• Scrape the jalapeños into the eggs with the knife. 
• Just before the eggs are all cooked, roll the whole thing onto a plate. 

Some people will think it's boring to eat the same breakfast every day. If it's boring, you're not using enough jalapeños. 

And the weird burst of creativity: The Local Anglican Cleric has asked me to do musical stuff at Easter, as the organist will be away.  There's little stuff written for solo brass, and little of that little is practical at the current level of technique. 

     The Bach cello suites have been arranged for trumpet... just not this trumpet. Lightning midnight raids on the historical treasury of plainchant have produced the beginning of a little suite of Easter music, but it's not going to be ready. There really was nothing happening until: 

     About 10PM last night, Lasst Uns Erfreuen started running through my head... as a slip jig. Now, that's one variation... There are a couple of other possiblities... and it was done. The theme, plus three variations, without resorting to diminutions, which I can't play any. Composed entirely in the lilypond text editor. Set for any solo instrument in the treble clef, or my old buddy Andrew on trombone. (Available as a PDF upon request.) It's a kind of rudimentary thing, but it works. The L.A.C. likes it. We have a prelude. 

     Postlude.... hmm.. Something's trying to occur to me, but it's not here yet.

      Finally, the kind-of-good news. I hit the weight loss plateau about three weeks ago. It seems to have come to an end. Onward and downward!

In which we stay on the train too long, and end up in Crazytown...

This week, I went looking for advice on losing weight. I was shocked by what I found. 


     With my background, when looking for training advice, I inevitably start with weightlifting sites. With these, you need some patience and judgement, but you can find good information out there. Some, like bodybuilding.com, are a mixture of fairly good advice, occasional bad advice, and a lot of advertising. (To be fair, it's run by a commercial mail-order supplement company.) 

     There are some unexpected gems like muscleandstrength.com, even ironmanmagazine.com where you can find useful routines. (Iron Man, I'm glad to see, still has a column by Joe Horrigan, who writes very good sense about how the body works.) 

     For pure strength training, you can find sites about the Stronglifts programme, or Madcow, or (for the truly insane dedicated) routines with names like Sheiko and Smolov, and even Smolov Jr. There are still other sites which treat weight training as a pure expression of joyless rage; they may have good information, but life is too short to bother.

     What weightlifting sites don't have is useful diet information. Too many of them recommend vast quantities of supplements, and few of them are oriented toward losing weight. Their recommendations run largely to pharmaceutical diet aids, which tend to be either ineffective, overpriced,  or dangerous, or some unhappy combination of all three.

     So, y'r ob'd't correspondent takes a new bearing on his gyro-stabilized prismatic compass, and goes looking for strictly diet oriented information. Two of the best articles for my particular immediate purposes I found in general-circulation newspapers, here and here.

     I also found an interesting response/rebuttal to the Newcastle diet, with a headline that *ahem* does not reflect the content of the article, and content which diverges creatively from facts previously published. I shall not link it, because it's a sad bit of rubbish, but mention it as an example of the  noise that comes with the signal in this kind of research.

     Plunging on through the jungle, machete flashing over his head y'r ob'd't cartographer hacked through endless tangles of useless information 

("Eat a well balanced diet, and engage in moderate exercise, but not too often.")

 as well as some very small nuggets of useful information. 

     There's a lot of railing against fad diets by  serious nutritionists, for broadly defined values of "fad". The  serious nutritionists all preach moderation and restraint, and fear of failure (because failure is so much worse than not trying, right?) and fear of possible side effects (because obese people aren't already up to the Plimsoll Mark in possible side effects, right?)

      One superficially promising web site (which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) publishes a thumbnail recap of the semi-infamous Sacred Heart diet. Whatever its origins and failings, it contains an interesting soup recipe. 

2 cans of crushed tomatoes, 
3 large green onions, 
1 large can of consommé, 
package of Lipton soup mix, 
a bunch of celery, 
a pound of green beans, 
2 pounds of carrots, 
2 green peppers, 
chop it up, cover with water, turn it into soup.

Well, fair enough, that won't hurt anyone, might have to try it...

     Encouraged, I wander on through the site, looking for what else may be there and find advice, like: 

• Don't eat between 7 at night and 7 in the morning. (Good idea for most people; prevents the mindless eating as you get tired at night, which messes up your sleep patterns, and can get through a lot of food that you don't even enjoy.)
• Stay up at least three hours after your last meal of the day. (There are many opinions both ways on this, but it doesn't hurt, and some people find it really useful.)
• Weigh yourself twice a day. (Doesn't work for me, but whatever floats your boat.)

And all that's cool. Some good advice, some kind of iffy, better than most I've found. Good reason to keep going, right?

     Then... suddenly, in the same post: Good advice, useful strategies, insightful tips on ... how to hide bulimia and anorexia from your family and friends.

Wot?

And now, my friends, we're in crazy town. As always, researching on the Intarwebs is like panning for gold. You'll find gold, but you'll also find a lot of gravel and beaver crap.

     That's it for the moment. Off to do a VO2 max test, and see if it detects life. Next time, the melodies of Wm. Byrd, and the making of chicken salad from chicken, um, feathers.




    

In which a shadow is poked...

ith my son contemplating the buying of a house, some parental reflexes kicked in, and I had to have a look at it first. I learned some things.

First, the highway system in the province ain't hardly my friend. Its surly standoffishness manifests in a number of ways. The trip to Halifax, for example, takes about two hours, if you're lucky. The trip goes over Mount Thom. Mount Thom is the place where you are not lucky, and you crawl in terror through monsoon, blizzard, fog, jaywalking moose and werewolves. If you are lucky, the road is dry, the sun shining, you drive with your head on a swivel like a Great War fighter pilot, trying to figure out what you've missed: Tornadoes? Flash floods? Army maneuvers? Landslides? Volcanoes? Randomized speed limit enforcement?

Second, they build very small houses better than I remember -- at least some of them.

Third,  if you're going out at omg:15 in the morning, lay everything out the night before, including tools, because you're not going to be at your best and brightest. As you stumble out, wondering just how far you can reasonably go before calling for a Tim's stop, you will not think,

     "You know what I need? A couple of screwdrivers and a circuit tester or two. That's just what m'sieu's ensemble requires this morning. And a natty step ladder. Maybe a fashionable carpenter's level. And a boldly rustic rafter square..."

 No, I'm not going to think that in the morning. In the morning, I don't think. All thinking must be done the night before.

Fourth, there are drywallers out there who are vastly worse than y'r ob'd't correspondent. (Try to bury your incredulity in thanksgiving. Bad drywalling seldom kills anybody. While these guys are drywalling, they're not doing electrical, or plumbing.) 

I've had a long think about The Ceiling Incident, and I've concluded that if the prospective buyer or his agent can poke a finger through your drywall seam, the damage is not the fault of the prospective buyer. Or his agent.

Actually, this incident has been puzzling me, and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure it out.

There is, in the hypothetical new house, a badly installed ceiling fan. (I say this without fear of contradiction, as I am an expert on the incompetent installation of ceiling fans.) Leading to the ceiling fan is a funny shadow on the ceiling.

Now, the point of looking at something before you buy it is to find out what you're buying. So I stared at the shadow for a while. Then I poked it. Then my finger went right through. There was a little escarpment

Escarpment, not exactly as illustrated.

in the ceiling drywall, that someone had tried to hide. And questions started to percolate through the solid Pre-Cambrian rock beneath my skull.

First question: how in the name of Birch Bark Canoe Patches did I stick my finger through a drywall seam? I've made some bad drywall seams in my time, but I've never had one that bad. Eventually, after much contemplation I realized the depths of half-assery we're dealing with here.

This was the initial problem.

The normal way of fixing it, used by most multicellular organisms, is to smooth out the problem with drywall compound, like this.

 Then you add drywall tape to hold everything together, like this.

Then you alternately smooth the whole thing out with drywall compound, and sand it, and smooth it, and sand it, and so on until it looks good, or the guys with the butterfly net take you away, whichever comes first.

What the genius that did this repair decided to do, was, apparently, this.

 Which looked superficially okay, until y'r ob'd't correspondent came along and did this.

So the obvious solution is to get in there with a stepladder and a load of drywall compound, rip out the patch, and do it properly. A bit of mesh tape, a bit of Sheetrock 20, a bit of low-dust compound, feather it out to, oh, thirty, maybe thirty-six inches on each side, sand a bit, should look okay. Perfectly easy, don't know why they didn't do it right the first time...

But here's the big question: What caused the escarpment?Why doesn't the ceiling fan mount touch the ceiling anywhere? Was it just incredibly incompetent hanging of sheetrock? Or is there a bigger problem?  Is there a romex cable run between the joists and the drywall? Is there, Gawd'elpus, a cracked ceiling joist? A chest of pirate gold? A family of obese racoons, watching Jerry Springer, and arguing about whose turn it is to get more chips and diet Pepsi?

Now I know how Mike Holmes feels.

The rest of the weekend was more straightforward: Drive down to Country Harbour through not-quite-freezing rain, drive back, talk to Second Son on Skype, blow a little cornet, watch Foyle's war with Sue. (Have you watched Foyle's war? 'Cause you really should.)

This morning back to the gym, possibly to explore the joys of circuit training!

In which the Strangeness and Contrariness of Life faithfully manifest themselves.

ith the machinery of weight loss running smoothly, the appearance of a monkey wrench was inevitable. In response to  the call of its ancestral destiny, a monkey wrench duly showed up. And the manner of its arrival was thus. 

     Assorted studies have revealed that one the necessary conditions for catching a cold (perhaps the only truly essential one) is dehydration. Your common mucous membrane is quite happy with its job of slipping the occasional stray rhino-virus on its way, as long as it is sufficiently hydrated. (The membrane, not the virus. I don't know if viruses are happier when hydrated, and face it, nobody cares, because nobody loves a rhino-virus. The way that they reproduce should make it clear that rhino-viruses are not even attractive to other rhino-viruses, and I'm not surprised in the least. But I digress.) One of the problems of the training programme I've been on, is that you sweat. A lot. There is a fix for that, which oddly enough consists of drinking water by the gallon. Still for various reasons, (the taste of the local water is one) a couple of weeks ago, I got nicely dried out, which the local rhino-viruses took as an excuse to roll up and start squatting in my sinuses, writing graffiti on the walls, throwing all night raves, and never cleaning the bathtub. Overall, not good tenants. 

     "Okay," said I, "I'll just carry on as I was." Which I did... until late last week. At that point between exhaustion, bad sleep, and lack of food, things took a turn for the worse. By Thursday, the viruses had started to file badly written court documents asserting adverse possession of the sinuses on the left side of my head, and I wound up mostly in bed for about three days. 

     Good news: I live in a civilized country, where one can purchase codeine over the counter. This greatly relieves the, ahem, discomfort associated with raving viruses in one's sinuses. 

     Bad news: I can't take ephedra based decongestants. Which would have helped, a lot.

     Good news: Doctor Who is on Netflix. Which helps, more than I would have imagined. 

     By Monday, I was back in the gym. I did about half a workout, and found myself looking for reasons not to go to sleep on the floor, beside the squat rack. This was taken as a sign that it was time to go home. I finally got a really good night's sleep, which also helps. 

     Today, in celebration of the temporary and anomalous lack of blizzards, I went for a walk. Allow, y'r o'b't correspondent, at this point, a small divergence to rave about one of the greatest websites in the world: http://gmap-pedometer.com/ This is a development on top of Google maps, which allows you to track the distance you walk (or drive or run, or bike, or whatever.)  It will give you a number of details of your walk, including the elevation changes and, a calorie counter! So, even in the absence of The Cardio Machines, there is impartial evidence of a 750 calorie workout.

     Based on this, y'r o'b't correspondent can be pronounced "Back to normal," for vaguely defined values of normal. The weather is also back to normal (for here.) When I click on the weather network, it just says, "Honestly, now, do you really want to know?"

     The inability to work out did not put any weight back on me, I'm happy to see. 

     While it's good to be working out again, and will be better when I can drop the intensity below "Kamikaze pilot on three-day meth binge," my musical situation is really strange. There's no band to play in. I still practise, and might arguably be getting better, but even so, there's a strange feeling of, "and then?" I miss the Trafalgar Players more than I can say.  

     The same malaise, (aggravated by the pernicious interference of gravity) affects the realignment of the studio. I've just about figured how to make it all work, but question keeps coming up, "and then?" 

     More dispatches to come, on the road to finding out.

Because it's all about accountability. (Until it's all about something else.)

his is the first post in a new category, which will be of interest only to people in a similar medical situation, but it does put my efforts on an undeniable public platform.  I'm hoping that this will make it harder to blow off workouts.

     Today was aerobics day. Started on the treadmill for 20 minutes. (The club will not allow you to do more that 20 minutes at a time on the machines. Faut pas chercher à comprendre.) 

     Then, on to the elliptical for 20 minutes, which was exhausting and painful. I haven't figured out how to slow down on one of those things.  On the treadmill I was doing around 500 calories per hour, which is plenty right now; on the elliptical, the least I could do was over 600. Next time I'm on those machines, I'll have to investigate further.

     Back on the treadmill for another 20. This put me up to about 475 calories burned. Over to the bike! 75 calories worth on the bike.

     The original plan (and I insist on calling it that) was to do another 20 minutes on the treadmill, but I was already up to 550, which is a modern era record, so I bagged it at that point and staggered home for a bowl of lettuce.

     Next week I'll be over 600 calories in a workout, which will put me back to where I was three years ago, although it will be taking me about 50% longer. (Who was the pitcher who said, "I throw as hard as I did 20 years ago. It just takes the ball longer to get there?")

     Tomorrow I wrap up the first cycle of German (sic) Volume Training and bid farewell to the leg press for a while. The new workout will be built around deadlifts and pulls, with some pressing and squat variations. The aerobic workouts will continue to be built around tedium and exhaustion.


     One question, if anybody knows: How many calories does it take to wish they would stop running the same vershlugginer hockey highlights for hours on end, and put the curling on? Because I did a lot of reps on that.

    

In which history repeats itself, this time as farce.

esterday was moving day again. You know how it goes: almost all the cardboard boxes are gone, you've started to feel settled, and then it hits you: Everything's in the wrong place. The bed is right where the morning sun will hit you in the eye at 5 AM. You'll never be able to mount the dresser on the mirror, because it's under a window. (You know - the one the sun comes in in the morning.) You put the desks in the wrong offices.

      Moving a four-poster bed is fun. It's easy. We didn't even have to take it entirely to pieces. (Might have been faster if we did.)

     The piano quite clearly belongs in the other corner. That corner over there, with the particle board bookshelves, that weigh about 400 lbs. And have about two hundred DVDs and CDs on them, plus several shelf feet of music. But that's where the piano obviously belongs. You just have to move it past the armchair. Not sure where the armchair is going to go while you're doing that, but no big deal, you have to get it out of the way anyway. How else will you get that desk downstairs? And the other one upstairs?

     And the stairs take us to the basement: (The fire pole project being temporarily on hold.) Ah, the basement. There are actual storage shelves down there. Just have to be able to get to them past the boxes of tools. (While you're sorting that out, keep an eye open for the one labeled  "Do not Crush." It's the vaguely trapezoidal one.)

     But I have a dream! Some day I'll get this just the way I want it...

     Did I say yesterday was moving day? I lied. Every day is moving day until I get this crap sorted.

In which a milestone is reached, (maybe two), a feast is eaten, and a damn fool mistake is made.

o, I have achieved a milestone: this morning, I weighed in at 240 pounds. I'm not sure when I last weighed this much. My children may remember me at this size, but they certainly don't remember me well. This is approximately 20 pounds off since the 12th of February; 31 days, just about four and a half pounds a week.

     Immediately relevant question: can I maintain this rate? I think so. In the past month I've gone through two time changes, which is a big deal in itself; as someone with precarious sleep patterns, like the old lady in David Copperfield, "I feel it more." The next two months I will, according to all signs and portents, remain in the same time zone. Better sleep should mean less hunger, and less eating, and better (in this case, crudely, more ) training. 

     Now, my starting weight is a bit vague: it could easily have been anything from 258 to 262, but I'm taking the average. 240 is therefore a nice round number, and calls for a celebration. In my case, I went down to breakfast and had two! (2!) cups of decaf, and extra lettuce! Then, gorged with this gluttonous start to the day, I hobbled Quasimodo-like to the couch to flop out and read Elizabeth Moon for a while.

     (Elizabeth Moon is, in her own right, several perfectly adequate reasons for a celebration, but that's another story, and a celebration for another day. In any event, I'm running low on lettuce.)

     So, asks the sharp-eyed reader, why does y'r o'b'd't correspondent do his comic bell-ringer imitation on such a glad day? The answer, my friends is, "stupidity." Those who know me well, please, at least try to look surprised.

     The basis of the training plan right now is volume. Do more. Then do more than that. Come next week, see if I can't do a little more. In a couple of weeks, see if I can push a little more volume into the workout.
 
     At what point in the previous paragraph did I use the word "intensity?" You're right! I didn't! Ramping up the intensity of work plays only the tiniest, wee, subordinate role in all this.

     So, what in the name of cowboy biscuits was I doing in a Spin class at 6AM yesterday? How did I ever conclude that this was a good idea? By what tortured logic did I figure that, (in the middle of a programme based on huge volume of work, spread over as much of my body as possible,) doing an hour of intense work, all on the same three muscle groups, was somehow going to make things better? I woke up this morning, feeling like I had been run over by something. Something large, and slow, which kind of lingered as it stepped on me, like a meditative, wool-gathering rhinoceros with no place that it had to be, any time soon.
 
     Which leads me to the second near-milestone. There are several sequential goals in this programme:  

• be under 210 by the end of April; 
• fasting blood sugar below 5 by May; 
• rehab the shoulders to they don't clank when I do bench presses;  
• hit 2-3-4 (200 pound bench press, 300 pound squat, 400 pound deadlift)by the end of next year. 

     All of these goals are in the future, and aspirational, but there is one goal which I have already reached: My consumption of Advil is now at normal powerlifting levels! 

(Advil -- the official vitamin of powerlifting!) 

     Seriously, if I'm not hurting somewhere, at this stage of the programme, I'm not working hard enough. From recent evidence, I'm working hard enough. However, thanks to carefully following Roguszka's Rule (You can put up with a lot more crap in life if you own a really comfortable chair.) even today I'm more or less functional by noon. 

     And, being functional and mobile, it's time to go bust some sets in the gym. More on this come Monday, Lord willing and we don't get washed away in the spring runoff.

In which our hero meets German Volume Training, and is not sure that they'll ever be friends

here is some tentative news to report on the health front: As of today, I appear to have lost something quite close to twenty pounds in the course of a month, without contracting scurvy, beriberi, or the galloping epizootic.


     The method has been extremely simple. In a previous post I alluded to the dietary restrictions. (Did I mention, there has not been a moment in the last month when I could not have instantly devoured the Denny's Grand Slam Breakfast, including immediately after finishing supper?) The other half of it involves going to the gym six days a week, and being there for something between an hour and two and a half hours.

     So, of course, when you go to the gym, the question is, "To do what, exactly?"  My goal over the next month or two is to burn precisely as many calories as humanly possible. I'm familiar with many weightlifting protocols, but they all seem organized to be as efficient as possible, because burning extra calories will interfere with teh gainz. This is not what I want. I'm not here for teh gainz. I'm here for teh Lossez. To that end, I want huge, unreasonable energy expenditures, and not efficiency of any kind.  Baffled and confused, I had only one way to turn for help:

     My friend Google. I asked about high volume weight training, and it gave me something called German Volume Training. (To be honest, the connection with German history or culture is a little vague. Perhaps I'm supposed to time the rest intervals by reciting the greatest hits of Karl Barth, or singing a bit of Schubert. That would still not be the strangest thing I've seen people do in a gym.  But I digress.) The deal is to do sets of ten repetitions. Ten of them. The sets, that it, as well as the reps. And that's not ten sets per workout, or ten sets per body part. That's ten sets per exercise.

     For example: Tomorrow morning, I start with leg presses. It'll be 160 or 170 pounds. I'll do ten, then step off the machine for a minute and a half to contemplate the meaning of life. Then I do exactly the same sequence nine more times. Then I do the same thing with straight-leg deadlifts. (or as many sets as my back will allow.) Then I do about three or four sets of leg extensions, because the leg extensions are an "assistance" lift, not a real lift.

     And wherever there are leg extensions, I meet another old friend.One-and-a-quarter reps.

     One-and-a-quarter reps have done me so much good in my life. They stabilize my knees. They make my legs stronger. They improve the tracking of my kneecaps, and increase the likelihood that I'll be able to live my entire life in my own home. They signal that my warfare is accomplished, and the lower-body part of the workout is over. They give me a benchmark from which to minimize many other unpleasant experiences.

     The other major exercise I do is seated rows. Again, supremely boring, and long, but it burns calories. When my shoulders stop hurting quite so much, I'll be doing bench presses as well, and possibly military (overhead) presses, too. Leg presses will give way to squats in about a week and a half, Lord willing and the creek don't rise.

     There are a couple of things that have to be said about German (sic) Volume Training. On the one hand, it's unpleasant. On the other hand, you get to do a lot of it.

     A standard workout will involve forty working sets (distinct for warmup sets). My gym gives out workout cards that have room for a maximum of twenty one sets. I'm apparently doing about twice as much as I'm supposed to.
         
     There is one more good thing about this training: It seems to work. My clothes are looser already. In another week I try another VO2 max test, and see if there's an improvement. In a month I check the blood sugar again, and see if there is progress on the one thing that matters. The stiffness, soreness, exhaustion and questioning of the meaning of life are just the box that the results come in.