I'm not hiking

You read the title correctly: I'm not hiking right now, and I'm not happy about it. Let me explain.

I've been planning on hiking in the Adirondacks for awhile. I've had time, but I haven't had anyone to go with.

I'm an extrovert. If I go alone, I'm just walking around outside. This is a social event for me. But I also want to do the thing. Whatever.

I had an opportunity. Some of my people were planning a hike that was going to start today and run through the weekend, hiking over three of the peaks. You might notice that I'm posting this today. I shouldn't have internet access from there. I don't.

Because I'm not there.

Last couple of weeks there have been some nasty rain storms, and it turns out that a lot of trailheads and bridges were washed out, and my people decided to cancel the trip. Not postpone, no. Cancel.

Bah.

So here I am again. I get it, especially when half of them work in schools and there just isn't time later on. Though at this point I'm thinking of spearheading it myself with another group.

Swim lessons

This is the last week of swim lessons for the summer. My wife always signs the kids up because she not only believes that they should be able to not die in water, but it gets them out of the house and away from their screens for awhile.

Of course, free swim starts when their lessons are finished (she always schedules the last classes for the day), so they stick around and tire themselves out. They always drop off much easier on those days.

The difficult part about the end of lessons is that free swim starts much earlier, so they want to go much earlier, which while it still tires them out, they have a lot more recovery time, so it doesn't drop them by the end of the day.

At least they're active.

Gardon't

My mom asked me what I was getting out of my garden so far. My answer: frustration with the local wildlife.

I planted eight cherry tomato plants, six have been destroyed. I planted six roma tomato plants, two have been destroyed. Whatever is getting past my fence also destroyed all of my sweet peppers, eaten over half of my zucchini, and all my radishes.

I had zero problems with critters last year, so this is a surprise. All the traps and repellents in the world aren't working. More to the point, I don't actually know what is doing this. My wife caught a groundhog sulking around in my back yard, but on another occasion I saw something jump out of the garden bed, but I was too far away to see what it was.\

I couldn't blame it all on rabbits, as much as I want to.

I need a backyard fox.

Sizing

Losing weight has its perks, but your clothing never fitting was unexpected. I had to buy new pants because my olds ones were too big (yay) and a month later I had to do it again.

yay?

Then I get stuck in between sizes. I have to go out of my way to find odd sizes, but I ask myself if it's worth it if I'm just going to have to replace them again in a month.

When my wife went through this, she wore stretchy clothes and skirts. Not an option here.

The app cheat

I use an app to track my workouts. The goal is to track what works and what doesn't, and how much weight I'm lifting. I use the same app to track my food intake, so it also has a calorie count for everything.

Wasn't my goal, but there it is.

Just keeping track of what I eat has had a strong impact on it. Being accountable - I want to eat half a cake, but I don't want to log it in the app. 

I use the stair climber at the gym. (I'm planning a mountain hike in the Adirondacks, so I adjusted my workout to that end). I log how long I was on it, and it also tells me how many calories I burned. Again, logging the calorie burn wasn't the goal, but there it was, and I found myself enjoying watching that number climb up as I went through my workout.

Then the numbers changed. 15 minutes on the stair climber used to burn X calories when I first started, but since then it's slowly gone down, one by one. Right now it's down by eleven, and while it was never my goal, I still feel cheated.

Familiar faces, unfamiliar places.

My gym opens at 5 on weekdays. Since work starts at 7, I usually get there pretty much right at 5. 

Yes, I'm a morning person. Always have been.

But the gym opens at 7 on Saturdays, and that always feels weird. 7am, I'm normally long done. So many Saturdays, weather permitting, I'll go to the park near my house. It has a pretty long trail on the lake. I've been coming to this park since my parents were strapping me into a car seat, I love this park. But on these early Saturdays I've started to notice things. Or rather, I've started to recognize them.

The people from the gym. Also there in the wee hours of the morning. Not many of them, no. You can really only do cardio on the trail, but the ones that are always doing a lot of cardio are the ones I've started to recognize. 

My idea was not as unique as I expected.

Boom boom boom boom

We always do a fireworks show in our driveway.

We live in the suburbs, so shooting anything off into the sky is generally considered impolite. Also we live close enough to the airport where it also would warrant a visit from someone with either a badge or a three letter job title.

So, ahem. We always do a fireworks show in our driveway. The wife is always the one in charge of procurement, and she told me we never bought enough. So I reminded her who always got them, and told her to just buy more.

So she did.

Fast forward to the big night, and we had some family and friends over. I was then surprised to find that my brother in law had brought some of his own as well.

The show lasted much longer than my dear wife had the energy for.