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the salvaging regime is not enough exercise
Friday, May 16 2014
I'd been hoping that my regime of salvaging firewood on a daily basis would be aggressive enough to constitute real exercise. It certainly feels like exercise when I'm bringing those 100 pound backpack loads home. But there's never more than 20 minutes of hard work in any salvaging mission, so perhaps my hopes exceeded the reality. And so, while the results are impressive (the three-cord woodshed is more than half full after two months of this regime), the results on my physique have been underwhelming. Today I took delivery of a heavy duty postal scale capable of measuring weights as large as 460 pounds, and the first thing I measured was myself. I weighed 180 pounds, which is ten pounds more than the weight I'd had during all of my 30s and (after I'd finished developing my muscle mass) most of my 20s. 180 pounds had caused me to freak out and commence a daily regime of situps and pushups back in January of 2012, something I'd hoped my firewood gathering would serve to emulate. Evidently it's not enough. Or else I have to cut back on my beer consumption (which has been high of late). In a Skype conversation a week or so ago, my childhood friend Nathan had told me that weight concerns had caused him to substitute hard liquor for beer. (But he's also suffering from the fact that his place of work just moved to the top of the street he lives on, completely eliding the bicycle commute that used to be built into his workday schedule.)
Part of the problem is that vegan food these days can be as rich and decadent as the food we remember eating in the bad old days. Today Gretchen took delivery of a package from Vegan Essentials that contained "cheese" ravioli, ravioli being one of the few cravings mostly left unsatisfied (the "ravioli" at John's in the East Village, remember, had tasted "like a bathroom"). She ended up eating the whole package (half with "butter" and half with red sauce), while I ate a completely different meal based on beans, mushrooms, and corn tortillas.
Tonight during dinner, our television entertainment consisted partly of the absolute final round of the Jeopardy "Battle of the Decades." We were rooting for Roger (the understated, unassuming risk taker) against Ken Jennings (who, to us at least, comes across as a smug Mormon) and obvious douchebag Brad Rutter, but yesterday Roger (whose game always consists of huge wagers) had been in the lead but lost it all when he failed to come up with the word "edema." Today that bad luck struck him again, with him failing to come up with "Lake Winnipeg." When he missed that question, I felt like I'd been shot. And of course Brad Rutter, our least favorite contestant, went on to collect the million dollar prize.
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