Step Lively
Hello World,
Well, it's certainly hard to believe that we find ourselves on the very brink of the official start of summer, the way the weather in the local area has been carrying on for the last three weeks already. It's been so cold and rainy for so long around here, that a person could be forgiven for thinking that they must have slept right through summer, and woke up to find themselves in late fall by the looks of it. According to all scientific calculations, the summer solstice is right in front of us, but all it would take would be for anyone to actually look out a window and see for themselves that the whole idea is implausible in the extreme, if not downright preposterous. There may be some starry-eyed innocents out there who are prepared to buy into this bill of goods they're trying to pawn off on us, but as for me, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, and they've got to start showing me some temperatures before I get behind this whole summer solstice malarkey, by golly.
Of course, last Sunday was Flag Day, and having another red-letter day was the Flag Brigade around here, who remembered to put out the flags upstairs and downstairs in the morning, and also take them back in later in the day. Even more amazing, Sunday was a nice enough day to fly the colors, instead of the pelting rain and high winds of most other days lately. In fact, one day last week, there was a severe thunderstorm in the middle of the day, and one huge bolt of lightning hit so close by that the thunder made all of us at work jump out of our seats, as well as setting off car alarms all over the campus. The dinosaurs and I can remember when it had to be hot to have thunderstorms like that, not 50 degrees like it was last week, and Bill said next there would probably be hail, while it's at it, which is something else that you only used to have when it's hot, since there are no standards anymore, heaven knows.
I don't know if this is new, but as they say on NBC, it's new to me, so I'm passing it along for anyone else who has yet to try it. The nice folks at Friendly's have their own ice cream they call Royal Banana Split, and you can buy it right in the supermarket, and I don't mind saying, I think you should. When you open the container, it looks just like any three-flavor ice cream, but in this case, looks are deceiving. It actually consists of chocolate ice cream with nuts, strawberry ice cream with fruit chunks, and in the middle, banana ice cream with swirls of fudge sauce. So all in this one handy package, you get three different kinds of ice cream, fruit, nuts and chocolate sauce, just like a real banana split, without having to assemble all of the ingredients by yourself. Around here, we call that the kind of progress we can live with.
I'm happy to report that things continue apace with Walk Group. I said to Bill that it struck me as odd that no matter how many of us went out at a time, or who they were, I always seemed to come back fourth of the group. Last week, there were two days when I actually came in second, and in my own mind, I awarded myself the prestigious "Most Improved" trophy among the participants. One day, the ostensible leader of the pack, Marathon Margie, handed out pedometers to all of us, so we could chart our progress. The first day we used them, it said I had taken 3,263 steps along our route through the neighborhood. I tried it again the next day, and found to my dismay that it had recorded no steps for me at all over the same route, since I apparently misunderstood the "lock" function on the device, which prevents it from counting any steps. Today I didn't fall into that same trap, but I noticed that it counted 3,687 steps over precisely the same distance, so I'm not exactly sure how accurate these things are. Of course, they are obviously promotional items that the hospital received for nothing, so we don't like to complain. I figure over the course of doing this repeatedly, the amount of steps will probably begin to average out to where there's a consistent enough result to be considered plausible. After all, I don't want it to be said that I received the hypothetical "Most Improved" trophy under false pretences.
One thing I found funny about Walk Group, although in an inadvertent way, happened the first time I joined them, and observed the marathoner in charge, who appeared to be an imposing and no-nonsense black woman wearing a serious suit with wide shoulder pads and voluminous hair extensions that went in every direction. That first day, when I turned purple from exertion, and came back sopping wet, she never broke a sweat, and bounced along keeping track of everyone from the front to the back of the group the whole way, like this was just a walk in the park for her. The next day, she wasn't there and we walked without her, and the following day, I wasn't able to find anyone from Walk Group, so I walked by myself. That same day, the Engineering secretary came to my office to ask about some orders, and brought someone with her that I didn't know, who was small and quiet with her hair pulled into a bun. To be honest, I paid no attention to her, since I figured that she had just tagged along with the secretary to keep her company or have a change of scenery. When we were finished, I was about to go back to my work, and was surprised to still see this stranger standing in my doorway. I was not prepared for what happened next, when she said in a small voice, "We missed you today." I must have stared at her, because she added, like she was talking to a very small and retarded child, "Today at Walk Group. We missed you." At that point, I was not only staring at her, but my eyes were bugged out of my head, and I found myself blurting out, "I couldn't find anybody!" I said to Bill that there was nothing about this person that would have reminded me of the marathon leader of Walk Group, for that indeed was who it was, and even though I ran three miles with her on Tuesday, on Thursday in my office, I would not have recognized her to trip over her. Bill said that he thought Walk Group was challenging enough without having this "shape shifter" as the group leader, and I had to admit that I agreed with him. She called me Friday morning to make sure that I didn't miss Walk Group again, and when I joined them on the patio where we start out with warm-up and stretching, I wasn't concerned that she might have changed her looks once again so I wouldn't know it was her. I said to Bill that all I needed to do was find the one person that I didn't recognize, and it was bound to be her, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. It certainly added an element of mystery to Walk Group that I hadn't anticipated, that's for sure.
Yesterday, it didn't stop raining all day, and even I didn't feel like going outside, and I consider myself made of sterner stuff than the rest of Walk Group. On another occasion of inclement weather, I found Walk Group had re-convened on the 8th floor in an empty conference room, and exercised to a workout video instead. It seemed a nice enough video from Prevention magazine, which I originally thought would be a low-intensity routine for older adults. It turned out to be anything but that, and was not only grueling, but much longer than I expected. About half of the group bailed out and sat around acting as our cheering section, which they can't do when we're walking, or they'd be left behind, blocks away from the hospital. After about 40 minutes, I finally had to pack it in, and worn to a frazzle, while the Prevention team was still jumping around and kick-boxing like a bunch of alien mutant exercise cyborgs and not real people.
So I admit when it was raining yesterday, I was not looking forward to a repeat performance with the Prevention Boot Camp, and I climbed the stairs to the 8th floor with a lack of enthusiasm that spoke volumes. I can only surmise that others felt the same way, because that day Walk Group consisted of me and Margie, all by our little old lonesome's in the conference room, and no one else showed up the entire time. In an unexpected twist, it turned out that she had neglected to bring any exercise videos with her, so the two of us spent 30 minutes pretty much just jumping around aimlessly, trying to remember moves from other exercise tapes that we had seen, and getting a workout that could be described as whimsically unstructured. I would be less than candid if I didn't say that I still considered it an improvement over the Prevention video, but after all, it wasn't me that nixed the idea, because I would have gone right along with it if she had brought it with her again. I'm not sure if we can claim the credit for inventing a new fitness regimen, which I'm calling "Imaginary Aerobics," but I think I can safely say that it's a step in the right direction.
Elle
Well, it's certainly hard to believe that we find ourselves on the very brink of the official start of summer, the way the weather in the local area has been carrying on for the last three weeks already. It's been so cold and rainy for so long around here, that a person could be forgiven for thinking that they must have slept right through summer, and woke up to find themselves in late fall by the looks of it. According to all scientific calculations, the summer solstice is right in front of us, but all it would take would be for anyone to actually look out a window and see for themselves that the whole idea is implausible in the extreme, if not downright preposterous. There may be some starry-eyed innocents out there who are prepared to buy into this bill of goods they're trying to pawn off on us, but as for me, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, and they've got to start showing me some temperatures before I get behind this whole summer solstice malarkey, by golly.
Of course, last Sunday was Flag Day, and having another red-letter day was the Flag Brigade around here, who remembered to put out the flags upstairs and downstairs in the morning, and also take them back in later in the day. Even more amazing, Sunday was a nice enough day to fly the colors, instead of the pelting rain and high winds of most other days lately. In fact, one day last week, there was a severe thunderstorm in the middle of the day, and one huge bolt of lightning hit so close by that the thunder made all of us at work jump out of our seats, as well as setting off car alarms all over the campus. The dinosaurs and I can remember when it had to be hot to have thunderstorms like that, not 50 degrees like it was last week, and Bill said next there would probably be hail, while it's at it, which is something else that you only used to have when it's hot, since there are no standards anymore, heaven knows.
I don't know if this is new, but as they say on NBC, it's new to me, so I'm passing it along for anyone else who has yet to try it. The nice folks at Friendly's have their own ice cream they call Royal Banana Split, and you can buy it right in the supermarket, and I don't mind saying, I think you should. When you open the container, it looks just like any three-flavor ice cream, but in this case, looks are deceiving. It actually consists of chocolate ice cream with nuts, strawberry ice cream with fruit chunks, and in the middle, banana ice cream with swirls of fudge sauce. So all in this one handy package, you get three different kinds of ice cream, fruit, nuts and chocolate sauce, just like a real banana split, without having to assemble all of the ingredients by yourself. Around here, we call that the kind of progress we can live with.
I'm happy to report that things continue apace with Walk Group. I said to Bill that it struck me as odd that no matter how many of us went out at a time, or who they were, I always seemed to come back fourth of the group. Last week, there were two days when I actually came in second, and in my own mind, I awarded myself the prestigious "Most Improved" trophy among the participants. One day, the ostensible leader of the pack, Marathon Margie, handed out pedometers to all of us, so we could chart our progress. The first day we used them, it said I had taken 3,263 steps along our route through the neighborhood. I tried it again the next day, and found to my dismay that it had recorded no steps for me at all over the same route, since I apparently misunderstood the "lock" function on the device, which prevents it from counting any steps. Today I didn't fall into that same trap, but I noticed that it counted 3,687 steps over precisely the same distance, so I'm not exactly sure how accurate these things are. Of course, they are obviously promotional items that the hospital received for nothing, so we don't like to complain. I figure over the course of doing this repeatedly, the amount of steps will probably begin to average out to where there's a consistent enough result to be considered plausible. After all, I don't want it to be said that I received the hypothetical "Most Improved" trophy under false pretences.
One thing I found funny about Walk Group, although in an inadvertent way, happened the first time I joined them, and observed the marathoner in charge, who appeared to be an imposing and no-nonsense black woman wearing a serious suit with wide shoulder pads and voluminous hair extensions that went in every direction. That first day, when I turned purple from exertion, and came back sopping wet, she never broke a sweat, and bounced along keeping track of everyone from the front to the back of the group the whole way, like this was just a walk in the park for her. The next day, she wasn't there and we walked without her, and the following day, I wasn't able to find anyone from Walk Group, so I walked by myself. That same day, the Engineering secretary came to my office to ask about some orders, and brought someone with her that I didn't know, who was small and quiet with her hair pulled into a bun. To be honest, I paid no attention to her, since I figured that she had just tagged along with the secretary to keep her company or have a change of scenery. When we were finished, I was about to go back to my work, and was surprised to still see this stranger standing in my doorway. I was not prepared for what happened next, when she said in a small voice, "We missed you today." I must have stared at her, because she added, like she was talking to a very small and retarded child, "Today at Walk Group. We missed you." At that point, I was not only staring at her, but my eyes were bugged out of my head, and I found myself blurting out, "I couldn't find anybody!" I said to Bill that there was nothing about this person that would have reminded me of the marathon leader of Walk Group, for that indeed was who it was, and even though I ran three miles with her on Tuesday, on Thursday in my office, I would not have recognized her to trip over her. Bill said that he thought Walk Group was challenging enough without having this "shape shifter" as the group leader, and I had to admit that I agreed with him. She called me Friday morning to make sure that I didn't miss Walk Group again, and when I joined them on the patio where we start out with warm-up and stretching, I wasn't concerned that she might have changed her looks once again so I wouldn't know it was her. I said to Bill that all I needed to do was find the one person that I didn't recognize, and it was bound to be her, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. It certainly added an element of mystery to Walk Group that I hadn't anticipated, that's for sure.
Yesterday, it didn't stop raining all day, and even I didn't feel like going outside, and I consider myself made of sterner stuff than the rest of Walk Group. On another occasion of inclement weather, I found Walk Group had re-convened on the 8th floor in an empty conference room, and exercised to a workout video instead. It seemed a nice enough video from Prevention magazine, which I originally thought would be a low-intensity routine for older adults. It turned out to be anything but that, and was not only grueling, but much longer than I expected. About half of the group bailed out and sat around acting as our cheering section, which they can't do when we're walking, or they'd be left behind, blocks away from the hospital. After about 40 minutes, I finally had to pack it in, and worn to a frazzle, while the Prevention team was still jumping around and kick-boxing like a bunch of alien mutant exercise cyborgs and not real people.
So I admit when it was raining yesterday, I was not looking forward to a repeat performance with the Prevention Boot Camp, and I climbed the stairs to the 8th floor with a lack of enthusiasm that spoke volumes. I can only surmise that others felt the same way, because that day Walk Group consisted of me and Margie, all by our little old lonesome's in the conference room, and no one else showed up the entire time. In an unexpected twist, it turned out that she had neglected to bring any exercise videos with her, so the two of us spent 30 minutes pretty much just jumping around aimlessly, trying to remember moves from other exercise tapes that we had seen, and getting a workout that could be described as whimsically unstructured. I would be less than candid if I didn't say that I still considered it an improvement over the Prevention video, but after all, it wasn't me that nixed the idea, because I would have gone right along with it if she had brought it with her again. I'm not sure if we can claim the credit for inventing a new fitness regimen, which I'm calling "Imaginary Aerobics," but I think I can safely say that it's a step in the right direction.
Elle
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 9:32 PM
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