Scales of injustice
There’s this bloke who forgets his wedding anniversary. His spoilt wife is furious, and growls at him: "Tomorrow there’d better be something in the driveway for me that goes from zero to 200 in a matter of seconds."
The next morning, she finds a small package in the driveway. She opens it and finds some brand new bathroom scales…
Compared with her, I’m regarding my own bathroom scales quite favourably. As a glass half-full man, I prefer to focus on them showing me to be around 9 pounds less laden than I was at the start of last week, rather than on the fact that I’m still somewhat… over-substantial. According to HM Ministry of Fat People, a healthy weight for someone of my height is between around 148 and 185 pounds, which puts me somewhere between 43 and 77 pounds overdrawn. Last week, this would have been between 52 and 86 pounds, so this is marvellous news. No matter how fat and unhealthy you are, there’s always someone even fatter and unhealthier, even if it’s yourself.
No loping over the weekend, though I did have two extended bursts of activity in the garden instead: one to pick a thousand dandelions and mow the grass (and there’s a lot of it), and one the following day, to dig a couple of beds and re-plant the apple trees that have been in a temporary home for more than six months. Moving them while they’re in blossom isn’t a great idea, but leaving them to grow more roots in the wrong place is marginally worse. It felt good to have these tasks checked off, but the cost was a bad back ache that I feared might hamper my revival.
By Monday I felt able to venture out for a 40 minute plod, though I shouldn’t have bothered. I was still tired from the sudden explosion of exercise in the past week, and would have been better off resting another day. But no harm was done. It was a warm evening — warm enough to bring out the flies, and with them, the reminder of how annoying it is to get a mouthful of the blighters (protein or no protein).
Today was better. The start of the afternoon deluge seemed like a good opportunity to take an hour out from my work, and head for the bird lake. It’s a pleasant environment: wild enough to break the computer’s curse, but with just enough stretches of well-maintained paths to keep my ankles out of the mud. The rain was heavy but warm, and sort of respectful. A circuit of the lake is around a mile, after which I headed off down one of the lanes along by the canal. Not much more than 3½ miles logged, but I felt better for it. I’m still not running from start to finish, though the ratio is getting bigger all the time, Today it was around 7:2 jogging:walking.
I’m happy with that.
