The need for exercise...or not

This may be a revised version of one of my Column 8 pieces, though it seems mostly to be as originally written. 

Practice makes perfect. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. So they say.

Some time ago a member of our family purchased a set of exercise DVDs with the aim of building up her/his muscles. I'm not allowed to be more specific about which family member it was, but the DVDs gave a real boost in the physical department.

She/he disciplined him/herself, getting up at the crack of dawn every morning to chug through those demanding exercises - while the demonstrator chauntered through a flow of esteem-building speeches.

Various other members of the family gave the exercises a go - with varying degrees of success. Still, I don't think any set of DVDs has ever had more use in our house. Certainly the original purchaser got value for money.

While everyone else tackled the exercises, I didn't. I was still walking to work every morning: a sufficient, demanding-enough exercise, and pleasant. A good way to allow the early-morning-family-arousing-stresses to flit off like startled sparrows. I use to run most of the way, but my legs had begun to find pounding down the hills jarred the hips and knees.

Still, the walk was enough to keep me fit, I said.

If so, why did I find my knees creaked more when I knelt - and it was more difficult hoisting myself up again? (If I could rouse the body to such a level of enthusiasm as to want to get up again.)

Why did the floor seem further away when I bent to pick up bits of paper or safety pins? And why did it take three attempts to grasp them?

Why did I have to sit a little further back from the steering wheel than before, and find the pedals further away? Why did the plate on the meal table seem not quite where it used to be? (‘There's many a slip twixt cup and lip’ was finally starting to make sense.)

Why did I feel like a formerly deft and agile adolescent struggling with clumsy-making growth spurts?

Lack of exercise.

My family has been nagging - sorry, encouraging - me, for some time, to do some exercise. (There's particular concern that they can't see the telly if I'm standing just to one side of it.) So the other night I began the exercises, in company with a couple of other family members who'd done them before, and wanted to get back into them again.

I enjoyed the exercises which required me to lie on the floor, because at least I didn't have to keep my body vertical at the same time, but I wasn't too fussed about the exercises that seemed akin to some of the spine-dislocating, hip-unhinging and bone-crackling one of my children does in modern dancing.

I know these exercises will do me good.  (I used to have a best friend who was always telling me things he suggested would do me good.)  I know that if I play difficult music on the piano, and work at it, even if I can't play it up to speed, I'll have fingers that move when I want them to, instead of fingers that ice-skate across the keys because they can't be bothered to dig their nails in.

I know if I'd kept at that memory course that now sits gathering dust on the shelf, I'd be remembering all the names of the people I want to remember - including the name of my grandson which had gone completely from my mind when I woke last Saturday.

And I know if I write a blog post a day, (inspired or not), I'll produce new ones with half the sweat and strain they usually require.

I think.

But I don't like doing these exercises. They make me feel a hundred and fifty, they make me feel as though I'm no longer capable of any physical effort - and I am! I really am!! - they make me feel that if I have to hear that trainer's voice one more time burbling visualisation babble I'll smash his fancy face in.

Apparently Henry Ford didn't say history is bunk, he claimed exercise was. "If you're healthy," he said, "you don't need it. If you're sick, you shouldn't take it."

How (ouch! oooof!) true.

Google pays up!

My first ever cheque from Google in payment of Adsense credits arrived today. $125.65 in NZ dollars.

It's only taken me four and a half years to get that much - I first started collecting from Adsense way back in late 2006 after I finished up at OC Books. And because the income came in so slowly - and Google doesn't pay out to overseas customers until they've got $100US in the kitty - it's been a long time coming.

However, in recent months there have been considerable amounts coming through Triond; for instance, up to today for June, I've earned US$5.94, which is about ten times what I use to earn in a month, or three months even. So the next Google cheque may not be quite so far away...2012 rather than 2016!

On another tack, I've been using Evernote for a few months to keep track of odds and ends I come across on the Net, or other bits of info. It's great because it syncs onto a cloud, and I can pick it up on other computers. Occasionally it's a bit clunky...like when it copies something from a site, and insists on putting a box around it so that you can't insert other stuff easily...but in general it's a great storage space.

And it has a great search function. For instance, I wanted to see if I had anything that related to the phrase laminate flooring. I couldn't find that phrase exactly, but in the process of looking I found all sorts of other interesting things (that I'd forgotten about!)

A note about where the first floor plans for the house are stored, for example. The following "MIDDLE AGE TEXTING CODES:... ATD: At The Doctors. BTW: Bring the Wheelchair. BYOT: Bring Your Own Teeth. FWIW: Forgot Where I Was. GGPBL: Gotta Go, Pacemaker Battery Low. GHA: Got Heartburn Again. IMHO: Is My Hearing-Aid On? LMDO: Laughing My Dentures Out. OMSG: Oh My! Sorry, Gas! ROFLACGU: Rolling On Floor Laughing And Can't Get Up. TTYL: Talk To You Louder".

This odd ending to an interview with N D Wilson (who is currently writing the screenplay for C S Lewis' The Great Divorce : Let's just say, I used to hate coffee, and now I don't. I've also gotten pretty good at deep breathing exercises and lying on the floor. [Don't ask me what that's got to do with the rest of the piece.]

Or this intriguing introduction to The Annual Turing Test: Since 1991, the Turing Test has been administered at the so-called Loebner Prize competition, an event sponsored by a colorful figure: the former baron of plastic roll-up portable disco dance floors, Hugh Loebner. When asked his motives for orchestrating this annual Turing Test, Loebner cites laziness, of all things: his utopian future, apparently, is one in which unemployment rates are nearly 100 percent and virtually all of human endeavor and industry is outsourced to intelligent machines.

Or from a piece on urbanisation: Once, while jogging on a treadmill on the top floor of a Sao Paulo hotel, I tried to count the many helicopters buzzing by. The city has the highest rate of private helicopter use in the world -- a literal sign of what heights people will go to in order to avoid the realities of the world below.

Okay I haven't found anything helpful in relation to 'laminate floors' but I'm having a ball going through these old files...

Smart dog smart phone

We spent some of yesterday trying yet another way to stop the dog digging up the seed potatoes - he likes the flavour of the blood and bone we put with them to help them get started.

Our first attempt a couple of weeks ago had been to try and surround the potato patch with a kind of fence but the wind was too strong for the material we were using. Then my older son suggested using a spray of cayenne pepper (ten parts water to one part cayenne pepper) - that kept him (the dog, not my son) away from the patch briefly. My son also suggested putting down newspaper over the patch with some sort of weights to hold the paper down. This kind of worked, except where the dog removed the paper.

Yesterday, while my grandchildren played with my wife's iphone, we tried the approach I'd suggested initially: some netting over the top of the patch that would allow the plants to grow but keep the dog from digging. It looked very successful - we even managed to reuse some very elderly wire netting that was cleared out from under the house where my wife and youngest son had pulled out the laundry floor on Friday in preparation for a new one going down.

After making some pins out of number 8 wire to hold the netting down, we felt that success had finally been achieved. Went inside to rescue the smartphone from the kids. Found later in the afternoon that the dog had chewed some of the netting (it's a material type) and got into the end of the one of the patches and....dug up a potato. Put the remaining bit of elderly wire over the broken material.

Went to my other's son's first son's birthday party (on yet another very hot day) where my son didn't have time to show my wife his newly acquired iphone mark 4 because he was busy running around after a bunch of pre-schoolers, and came home to find yet another potato had resurfaced. Dog duly told off in such terms as to make him look abashed for at least five minutes.

Pinned down the material again. Discovered that the dog has decided to use the area around the clothesline for depositing other things -the kind you walk in by accident and only discover after the smell keeps walking along with you.

Washed the dog who was also carrying around some of the same smell, and finally settled down to watch an excellent Indian movie on Maori television that I'd already seen in which true love doesn't win out, while my wife, who knew the story already, played a game that has so far defeated her, on the app on the phone that is obviously smarter than her...at least for the moment.

Shotgun or NO Shotgun

Something called 'NO Shotgun' passed my way yesterday. At least I thought it was NO Shotgun, but it proved to be N.O. Shotgun. I came across it on a site relating to NO Shotgun reviews, and discovered that N.O. Shotgun is a kind of supplement you take it you're aiming to build your muscles up - big time. (Don't ask me what the N.O. stands for - I've missed out on that bit of info.)

NO Shotgun gives you increased energy - something I could do with about 2 pm most days, when my mind decides that a little nap wouldn't go amiss. It's one of a huge range of products available nowdays for those who think that building up strength and energy the old way - by working out - isn't sufficient.

There was a guy on TV recently who's dying because of the way he's treated his body in order to be able to look like the most muscular guy on the planet (you know, the kind of guys who seem to be all arms and legs and very little else). And yet he's still punishing his body; it's an addiction.

And on my way to work I notice that a shop has been opened just recently which sells these kinds of products and little else. The window display at present consists of large boxes containing stuff that's supposed to make you big and strong. Don't think I'm going to be trying any of them any time soon, not even to foist off a nap.

Apropos of the above not at all, we got a quote today for removing the laundry floor. Why would we want to do that, you ask? Well, when it starts off flat and then heads rapidly downhill as you go towards the back of the room, something has to change. The piles had always had an amateurish look about them, but they've survived longer than the thirty plus years we've been in the house. Until now. Some of the piles consist of a bundle of bricks stacked on top of each other with a bit of plaster to hold them in place, and a piece of wood shoved in at the top if the bricks didn't fit directly to the base of the floor.

Some of that wood has just given up the ghost. On the other side of the room, however, is something even more amazing - and this was put in by whoever built this part of the house. Instead of having a flat wall of bricks on that side, every so often there's a brick sticking out sideways, and these bits of brick are supposed to support the floor over there. Extraordinary. The builder who came to look at the floor the other day had never seen anything like it. One of the bricks isn't even touching the floor at all.

Anyway we're going to get some proper piles, and a new floor, and hopefully from then on when we enter the room, our first experience won't be of slightly queasy feeling as we see the floor lowering away before us.