Yes, I was a little more ill slept that usual, but I could scarce believe my fortune in rising at almost the precise time I had originally wanted to.
I had been in turmoil over the preceding evening, feeling my role in the house to be the family dog where having to eat up leftovers and the various dishes that my well-meaning wife brings home but which no one else will touch.
I had felt compelled to eat a volume of soup at my day's first meal that left me with scant room for fare of my choosing; and then for my second and final meal of the day, a different mystery soup filled that position.
I was already pressed for time because this was both a bath and laundry day, and I could not do my laundry because my eldest stepson sleeps virtually next to the facilities and is presently working a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. graveyard shift, and does not rise until around mid-afternoon; but this mystery soup proved to contain numerous small pieces of 'junk' cuts of chicken ─ things like wing tips and sections of vertebrae.
I do not live to eat, but Thai people love to eat communally for long periods of time, and care not if a meal takes a couple of hours to get through. So here I was, laboriously trying to pick clean all manner of shards of chicken pieces that had been unceremoniously chopped up with a cleaver or something with no care as to the logic of the pieces and bits.
I grew more and more frustrated as that meal dragged on and on, when all the while I wanted to be finished and have my bath. Normally, I like to have eaten in 15 - 20 minutes with only five - 10 minutes spent putting my meal together, but this meal seemed to be taking an hour or longer.
And I do not particularly enjoy voluminously liquid soups. I like substantial components to my meals ─ condensed fare.
Anyway, thus my late evening.
I rose at 1:29 a.m. to see that my wife had not come home from her full day of work at the Thai restaurant where she is employed part-time. And I saw a weather warning online that rain was due to start and endure the next two hours.
So I packed my umbrella. Then when fully dressed to leave on my walk, a weigh-in left me almost aghast: approximately 192½ pounds. At most I had been 189 pounds fully dressed for my early a.m. walk Saturday. This extra weight was the fault of those two voluminous well-spiced soups that had saturated my tissues.
It was 2:13 a.m. once I was outside and set to go. Everything was wet, but it was only sprinkling rain a little, so I left my umbrella in my tote bag.
I did stop at the elementary school playground three or so blocks distant to assess whether exercising was feasible, but the equipment was dripping wet. I would need to use my gloves, and I did not wish to be wearing drenched gloves from the start of the new walk route I tried out early Saturday a.m. that I had calculated to be 5.677 miles.
That route was designed to reduce the stress to my left lower leg and foot, for of late I have been beset with debilitating lameness that I attribute to walking darkened uneven terrain for about ¾ of a mile on my normal shorter route.
Well, I had not gone a mile on this new route when the lameness set in ─ I can not convey the utter discouragement this engendered in me on top of all else that seemed to be plaguing and demoralizing me of late.
Here I was in rain (I was refusing to resort to my umbrella) and confronted with better than five miles of a slowed, limping pace ─ it was either that, or return home in abject defeat.
I continued.
The rain was not always wetting, but enough of it was such that my denim jacket was definitely damp, and my footwear somewhat beginning to wet through.
Towards the end of my walk, I again stopped at the school playground, determined to at least try to have a semblance of my usual exercises there.
It was pathetic. My gloves were immediately soaked by the wet jungle gym monkey bar I used for two sets each of pull-ups and chin-ups, yet my repetitions totalled a mere 3-2-3-2. Then on the gymnastics-style rings, I could not even do two complete repetitions in each of those two sets, and my final pull-up may not have even seen my upper arms achieve a fully horizontal posture ─ yet I struggled to hold it for a 20-count, slowly losing to gravity.
Then when I essayed what are normally a dozen slow, full-range decline push-ups on a cement ramp, I barely managed eight of them. My arthritic knees were so sore I could barely regain my feet, and my outcry was audible had anyone been near.
I felt all 74 of my years, and was again brought to tears in my outcrying to God for having ever allowed me to descend to this fix (I had similar outcrying over the course of my wretched walk).
And before exercising, I had done my best to shake out my usual stiffness from the long walk. So this abominably poor showing made little sense ─ I could only conclude that my overall bodyweight had increased by several wet pounds from the rain.
It was 4:33 a.m. by the time I was back home ─ my walk had taken 20 minutes over two hours. This was abominable.
My wife had come home at some point and long gone to her bed.
I had made a point of remembering to again weigh myself, so I went directly to the scales ... and discovered myself to be a bloody half pound lighter than when I left home dry ─ how the Hell can this be?!
It only points to how truly demanding that walk had been on me ─ I actually lost weight.
I was back to bed by around 6 a.m., and had not yet found any sleep when I heard my eldest stepson arrive home from work.
I want to have a walk this evening in far newer footwear ─ the hikers I wore this morning are possibly an acquisition of the 1990s. My bad left foot is feeling some sensitivity of the longitudinal tendons of the sole.
What irks me is why my right lower leg and foot never seem affected? And I mean never ─ it is always my left lower leg and foot ever since the surgery to reattach that leg's quadriceps tendon on November 5, 2010.
The only problem I seem to have with my right leg is that excessively arthritic knee. The left one prior to the surgery was probably as bad, but the surgery seems to have rekindled a regeneration of the cartilage of that knee.
If this is all I am to know in this life, then I do not wish to continue with it much longer.
I never rose for the morning until something like 8:50 a.m. Due to how late I was in joining my brother for some morning T.V., I had to wait until 9:30 a.m. before he relinquished the T.V. to me so that I could play videos via our Android TV Box.
I led us off with several relating to the grilling of Tony Fauci this past weekend by Republicans ─ for instance:
- Dr. William Makis' Substack: VIDEO - Fauci Questioning - EXPLOSIVE exchange today (June 4, 2024) between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Congressman Rich McCormick
- Dr. Peter McCullough's Substack: Deceptive, Deflective, and Imperious Dr. Fauci on Capitol Hill
- PBS NewsHour (YouTube): WATCH: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tells Dr. Fauci, 'You're not doctor' during COVID hearing
- Breaking911 (X ─ formerly Twitter): https://librti.com/item/8874513088401101015
That last one featured Brandon Fellows, who had only gotten out of prison on May 20 after serving three years for participating in January 2021's Capitol "insurrection", so he clearly despises Democrats and their darlings such as corrupt Fauci.
I now adore Marjorie Taylor Greene, by the way! Look at her unleash in this short video clip of her interview following her skewering of Fauci: https://librti.com/item/every-day-is-1776-https-x-com-i-status-1
I also tuned in this 55-minute (55:53) video published today at Rumble's Unscrew the News channel: MEASLES, The Next Great Scare Tactic?
Val Zimmer, a dad on a mission. Science is doing science. You do not have to be a scientist. He, like many of us, knew something was wrong in the world and instead of just taking the bs from the media and the tyrants, he began to question the motives and the insane stories that we were all supposed to believe and make us fearful.
Think for yourself and do the research that you are told to just trust them.
Substack: https://valzimmer.substack.com/
X: https://x.com/ValZimmer2
Unfortunately, Val Zimmer expresses himself very poorly verbally. I also have that curse. I can only communicate well with the printed word.
We finished with an episode of The Last O.G. ─ season three's episode eight ("Come Clean").
Then it was off to his bedroom for some bed rest for my brother. I had still not sought my needed nap by the time he had emerged from his bedroom and left for the day.
My wife had another full workday today, but she never rose until something like 9:45 a.m. Even so, she still managed somehow to get away within a half hour on her rather long drive despite showering.
Before I got to having my nap, I heard my cellphone ringing downstairs at 2:10 p.m.
It proved to be my brother. He was at Guildford, some 3½ miles distant. It seems that he locked himself out of his van, and wanted one of my stepsons to bring him a spare key that he had in his bedroom.
Well, I wasn't going to ask them for the idiot, so I turned the phone over to the youngest who was at his computer ─ he usually works from home. It turned out that the lad already had taken his lunch break, but he said that he would waken his brother and ask him ─ his brother is the only one of them with a car anyway.
It developed that his brother was too sleepy ─ he had another graveyard shift at 6 p.m. coming up, and wanted more sleep. (He has quite a drive in the opposite direction to get to work.)
So my brother was out of luck. He had to take two buses to get home, but he made surprisingly good time ─ I still had not napped.
However, I expect that my brother will be harbouring some ill will towards the elder lad (29 years old). It would be another two buses for my brother to get back to his van, although he could be doing it on the original bus transfer, so it wouldn't cost him ─ only time.
The day has been a mix of Sun and cloud.
It is already approaching 8:15 p.m., so I am going to quit blogging for the day and try to rest my eyes before deciding just what sort of walk I am going to attempt. Maybe I'll have a drink first, as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment