From a Print at Work...

Workout update

Saturday, March 31 marked the technical end of my extensive winter workout regime. I had set two pretty aggressive fitness goals to be achieved by 3/31 but I’m sad to report that I came up short on both. I tried to bench 135 on three different occasions and just couldn’t get it up. But I still feel like I have it in me. It’s a matter of when, not if. I also didn’t get my 8:30 mile on the treadmill. The closest I came was 8:34.

I consider April 1st to be the official beginning of spring and therefore, the end of worrying too much about high intensity gym workouts. Now I slide in to my softball and volleyball seasons and do some longer duration and less intense cardio along with decreased weights and focus on enjoying the weather. I’ve spent all winter in preparation. Now it’s time to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

I’m already lined up to play on 2 softball teams this summer. I think I could add a third and maybe a volleyball team or two. I really want to play with my brother. Oops. That didn’t sound right. But seriously, I can’t wait to get outside and play when the weather is nice. Maybe even when the weather is not so nice.

Two of my recent health initiatives include walking for 15-20 minutes at lunch and keeping a food diary. This was provoked by an embarrassing and painful injury/episode at the gym. I had done some serious lifting and was removing a plate from the bench press bar. (This next action took an extreme amount of skill.) I stood perpendicular to the bar (as if the bar was going to spear me through my belly button) and used my stomach to keep the bar place while I slid the plate towards me. Somehow, some of my belly got pinched between the bar and plate and when I checked it out in the shower, I had a half dollar-sized bruise and I had broken the skin. Doh!

The walk is a nice excuse to get out of the office and stretch my legs for a bit. It's not hard as long as the weather is decent. The food diary has been a very enlightening exercise. For the first 3 days, I focused on measuring out food before eating it and then making sure to record it. I didn’t do any calorie counting/adding until day 4. The numbers were rather sobering. No wonder losing weight has been so hard! I’m going on week 2 of this exercise. I had been dreading doing this but now that I’m doing it, it’s not so bad. Meredith encouraged me to do this when I told her I was thinking about paying someone to help me lose weight. She insisted that I already knew what I had to do.

And finally, the random things that don't really fit anywhere else...

In an effort to find more ways to eat whole grains (I generally tend to believe that whole grains taste bad), I’ve found Quaker chocolate rice cakes. They’re damned good.

How good is iced Dunkin Donuts coffee on a hot day?

Snappage update: 1/2.5


I’m starting to see flashing yellow lights around town. Love the idea! Pure genius. Can’t wait until they’re everywhere.

Customer Requirements

Three automotive engineers sat down for dinner a few weeks ago. (Contrary to what you may think, this is not the beginning of a joke.) We discussed customer requirements. My friend shared that her customer wanted their product (a steering gear system) to perform in the following scenario.

Let’s say, there’s a man who lives in the Swiss Alps. One day during winter, the temperature goes down to -40ºC (colder than the traditional -25 or -35 that most car companies spec to). He goes to his truck, straps on a snow plow to the front (makes the truck even more front-heavy), starts the truck (yeah right, like the battery will work) and without letting it warm up (WTF? Who doesn’t let their car warm up when it's cold?), begins driving it down a mountain (not a driveway or a hill) on a snowy curving mountain road. He’s slaloming down the road when a moose jumps out in front of him. Our customer wants the driver to be able to avoid hitting the moose.

I think there are more important things to worry about.

Outrage about Intolerance

Lots of people are down on religion these days, and understandably so. The Religious Right has a lot of power and is alienating a lot of people. It irritates me to no end that our nation’s leaders are allowed to make discriminatory comments and face no repurcussions. I know that everyone’s allowed to have their own opinions and in this country, everyone is allowed to voice their opinions, but how is it acceptable for our nation’s leaders, who claim to be religious, to say such hateful and hurtful things?

Religion is celebrated by humans. (Except for my man JC,) humans are not perfect and have fundamental flaws. Therefore, no religion is perfect either. But when you get down to most religions’ (not just Christianity’s) basic message, what’s not to like about “treat others the way you want to be treated”? And what is so hard about it? It’s such a simple lesson – one of the only things I actually remember from elementary school religion class. Why are there so many people who struggle with that principle?

I got fired up about this a couple weeks ago while I was on the elliptical at the gym reading Newsweek. There was an article about the Republican’s 2008 potential presidential nominees. (The reporter noted that Mitt Romney, the Morman, is the only candidate with one wife. I thought that was damned funny.) One of the other candidates, I don’t even remember which one, said something about how homosexuality should not be tolerated and it set something off in me. It’s that feeling of outrage similar to the one you felt when you were little and realized that injustice exists and no one is doing anything about it. Somewhere along the line, you grow up, become desensitized and silence your conscience. (Channeling inner Whitney) It’s not right, and it’s NOT ok. The world would be a better place if people with power were committed to treating the largest number of people the right way.

After reading that article, in the course of three days, two radio shows on two different channels were talking about homosexuality in animals. I had never heard anything about that topic. I started thinking about how you would set up that experiment to conduct good research. I googled “homosexuality in animals” and was amazed by how much reputable research (like national Geographic) is already out there. Over many years, scientists have observed homosexuality in some 450 species. If you believe that the scientists’ observations are accurate, and accept that human beings are animals, it’s not much of a stretch to conclude that homosexual humans are probably born that way. I don’t get what is so hard about this.

As I get older, I find myself becoming less and less tolerant of people who are not willing to consider information that is in opposition to their opinion. I can’t handle how people judge each other, without even knowing each other. I despise irresponsibility.

In proportion to the amount my intolerance is growing, I find that my love, admiration, and gratitude for other things, people, and ideas is growing. I’m committing myself to acknowledging and showing sincere appreciation. More on this some other time.