Not a day

I found this on Facebook.

If you follow the river, you can see the route I call Miller's Loop.  It has the flagged footbridge to the right, and Colorado Bridge with Whitewater Park to your left.  The sidewalk is visible through the snow due to foot traffic.



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Not a day

It is getting to be Christmas.

One of my friends informed me of  Christmas carols being played 24 hours a day on-line .  As I do my yoga in the same room as the computer, it was nice to have the music while I stretched and relaxed.  The music also helped me hold my poses longer, and I look forward to my next session as being more enjoyable than I usually do.  (Usually yoga is a cross between brushing my teeth and getting them cleaned--a have-to that I do more out of a sense of personal responsibility than anything else.  Always glad to have it done when it's over.)

(The url for this image is at play.google.com)

Day 69: More water exercisng

Missed the class, but that was okay, as the women's locker room was closed for ceiling repairs.   The ceiling tiles were finally being replaced after months of repair work on the roof. The contractor didn't get the replacement roof done by the deadline, and the rains came and, yeah.  Lots of drywall got wet, ceiling, etc.  Karen told me the details that I didn't hear back at the shop, including that she'd found a pair of shoes and put them in the lost and found.  They weren't lost, they belonged to a certain facility supervisor who had been working on the clean-up, and who was rather, um, annoyed that they were missing.

I went to the new locker room, walking past lockers that were in the hall way, a few that had personal locks on them.  The other women's locker room was large, and there were no locks on the lockers.  I overheard a facility employee answer another woman's question, that purses can be left at the reception desks for safe-keeping.  There were no personal changing booths.  The showers did have some that had curtains and benches for use, and there were about eight toilet stalls, and they had hooks inside the doors. 

Karen told me that I could use a family changing room if they weren't being used, in the hallway.  I could see that three were empty, so I made quick use of one to change my clothes and then stuffed everything into a locker in the changing room, and went to use the lap pool, making forty minutes of my glorified dog-paddling before going to the hot tub.

At the hot tub, a couple of people were describing their travels, and both agreed that the present place was the pleasantest and the cleanest of the various pools they'd been to in their cross-country journeys.  Grants Pass was the worse by one account, while Kansas City was by another.

Found this drawing in a Google search.  It's from https://www.quotev.com/SincerelyJazz

Day 68: Water-walking in the lap pool

Thanks to my obsession with writing essay answers and reluctance to go outside in freezing temperatures, I was late getting to the swimming pool, but I still went and did the work for the rest of the class time, which was half an hour in the four foot deep area of the pool, following directions 

Right afterwards, I got out of the pool, grabbed my towel and a floation belt and hauled my wet body to the lane pool, which is also the outdoor pool.  The pool has a large ceiling and walls skeleton, which is covered with a huge white cloth skin in the winter to keep the heat in.

I was expecting the pool to have a shallow end, with three feet depth going to five feet, as the indoor pool had, but somewhere along the timeline that I wasn't paying attention to, that half all became an even seven feet deep, and the coy little drainage ditch that used to be between the water and the edge was gone, and the water went right up to the edge of the pool.  (I am sooo easy to impress.)  I got my belt on, and got into the slow lane and started "water-walking" back and forth half the length of the pool.  (Suspended water-walking is pretty much glorified dog paddling.) I was amused at one point to discover that my brain was quiet, that the whole focus was to keep my arms and legs moving.  There was an amber and black reader board with ads that flashed up, one after another, and at least six large timers that marked the minutes and seconds of the clock to help hold my interest for the half hour.

When I got out, I removed my floation belt, grabbed my towel and headed to the door.  Between the doors of the outdoor pool and the indoor pool is about five feet of outside (freezing!) air.  I pulled my door open just as Cynthia opened her door.  I didn't wait for manners.

"Thank you, Cynthia! Thank you! Thank you!" I gushed as I hurried past her.

She laughed. "Hey Barb!  Good job! Good job!"

Outdoor lap pool in the winter

Day 67: Diet and Exercise vs. Blubber and Botox

Okay, okay.  I walked laps at Kiwanis Park today.  One of my friends and her twins had moved over into the neighborhood, and I was waiting for her to text her address to me.  The park is off Wilson, on Centennial.  It's a porta-potty park with a small pavilion, a small baseball field, some picnic tables and a small tamed wild area--basically a patch of pine trees that gets raked once a year, containing  native grasses. There's a fence between the park and the rail road tracks, and on the other side of the fence is debris such as a flowery fabric covered full-size mattress, some empty beer boxes, a bike frame, tattered take-out boxes, and so forth.

For the  most part, I was the only one in the park.  A police officer was there, then he left and then someone sat at a table, and later a couple of young women walked by.  The afternoon sky was low and cloudy pewter, and an occasional snow flake wandered in my way.

A couple of summers earlier, I'd been at the park in the summer.  The head of park facilities was playing in a band there, park rangers were handing out ice cream pops, and there were some games hosted by recreation, an attempt to try to get people to use the smaller parks for their venues.

I thought about how much more I still need to do to recover my health, to get to my weight and strength goal, and I thought about the election.  Some of my associates on the 'net pointed out that Americans tend to go for opposites, and such was the case this time.  A fit black man whose wife championed healthy eating and exercise is now being replace by a blobby white guy whose wife--I didn't know she was his wife when I first saw her on the news, I thought she was a mannequin, and I wondered a few moments later in the newscast why it had been put on the down escalator. at the shopping mall Trump was apparently visiting--anyway, whose wife is a trophy one who, according to one news article I read, has a contract or something to keep the weight off and an keep up her appearances, for which she gets to live surrounded by gold and have her haute couture.  No diet and no exercise advice from Trumps! chortle the internet trolls who despise the First Lady and her health and fitness advocacy .

After my visit with my friend, I came home and read how Trump's pick is going to gut Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. I felt awful, as I thought of how people with dwarfism and/or other genetic and non-genetic "pre-existing conditions" will be probably worse off than they were before, and Medicare will be gutted, among other challenges.  I hope the AARP and its lobbyists scream loud and long, and those who voted for this will regret it as much as we who didn't.

I need to double down on my fitness programs.  I don't want to have to deal with medical challenges in a Trumped-up world.

President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama