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excercise as stumulant
Wednesday, June 8 2016
In the middle of my workdays of late, I've found myself battling drowsiness, and not because I'm not getting enough sleep at night. It has to do with the nature of the work. This is the risk when the work is too open-ended or too filled with unknowns. This was why it was especially bad yesterday when I was working on an API that only returned empty JSON objects. Today I mostly tabled that taks, but there were so many other tasks that I couldn't work on because I didn't have enough information that the task of handling just that aspect of them was exhausting. I can't rely on Adderall to save the day in such situations; I need to have healthy drug-free ways of handling sleepiness. In the past, I would've taken a nap. But you never know how long a nap will go on for, and it's impossible to stay active on Slack while one is asleep. So I decided to get some excercise instead. Perhaps my problem was entirely one of blood pooling in my body.
So I grabbed my smartphone and my big battery-powered chainsaw and hiked down the trail that leads to near the bus turnaround. Cutting up what remained of the treefalls blocking the trail was easy, but wrestling some of the pieces out of the way was difficult, particularly when they were all jammed together. A tried using a piece of skeletonized oak as a lever, but that didn't help, so I cut a wedge out of one of the pieces, and this allowed me to lift it out vertically. When I was done, I'd cleared the path all the way to Dug Hill Road for the first time in four and a half years.
I didn't have the dogs with me, so I returned home via Dug Hill Road, walking on the shoulder nearest the precipice above Englishman's Creek (the permanent tributary of the Esopus into which the Chamomile ultimately flows). Driving up Dug Hill Road in a car, one doesn't have a view of the slope leading down into the gorge. But on foot, it's hard not to see all the trash people have flung down it over the years. Most of this trash consists of rubber tires, but there are also lots of empty booze bottles (many of them of one particularly uncommon brand, suggesting one individual litterbug is responsible for disproportionate about of littering). There's also a couch and something that might be a toilet. I seem to remember there also being appliances, but today I didn't see any. But if I ever have a project that requires lots of rubber tires, I know where to get them. Those tires probably contribute to the local mosquito problem, though I doubt they many of them can fly far enough (800 feet) to be a nuisance in our yard.
That little burst of exercise definitely helped me overcome my torpor, and by the end of the day I was delighting myself with my prompt productivity. Of course, it helped that I'd been given a last-minute task with well-defined limits, a clear plan of attack, and it was also just enough of a challenge to make it fun.
It's become unseasonably cool again, and tonight that chill was joined by brutal winds that made me nervous to be in the laboratory (there's still that damaged tree just north of the house with cables that hopefully keep it from falling southward).
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