“I am no longer running the show. Thy Will be done.”
That’s what I’m supposed to remind myself, many time per day, according to page 87-88 of the Big Book. And I’m reminding myself…I’m reminding myself.
I just ordered expensive supplements.
My doctor here told me to take them. She told me this just after telling me that they won’t give me any testosterone pellets, as it seems my total PSA number is too high for them to give me the pellets. So I’m supposed to take these instead.
No pellets. I’ve been waiting for over a month to get my next set. And it ain’t a-gonna happen for at least six months.
“I am no longer running the show. Thy Will be done.”
I could jump on a plane to Miami and probably find a doctor there to give me the pellets. But that just seems sort of self-willed – it feels like the kind of thing that I would look back on and wish that I hadn’t done. So, I’m not going to do that.
This means that I will not be operating at full steam, physically. I was already feeling the lack, but had the notion in the back of my head that when I got my pellets, I’d be knocking out the workouts again. But that’s not the case. I may be going gently into that good night.
I can tell myself that I’m still probably doing more than most 63 year old men. But that’s never really worked for me – I can only really compare myself with, well, myself, and that comparison isn’t coming out to my advantage these days.
“I am no longer running the show. Thy Will be done.”
Not running the show means an awareness, and an admission, of just Who is running the show. And that awareness and admission carries with it the conviction that He knows better than I do what is good for everyone, including and especially me. And that is in every way, in all things, all the time.
“I am no longer running the show. Thy Will be done.”
It doesn’t look like a bad day. The day actually looks quite nice. Okay, sure, the pools and beach are crowded. But that’s to be expected on a Tuesday 🙂
I did my ride – the same 45 minute VO2Max ride that I’ve been doing for a long, long time. These last two months, I’ve slightly increased my FTP by 5 points each month. So I’ve been doing it at this difficultly for a month now. But, today, my heart rate was about 10 beats higher during the repeats. But I got it done.
But when I went out to run with Juneau, I just couldn’t keep my legs turning over. I stopped inside of five minutes – and then, again, inside of another minute – and then, again, after less than another minute.
Then I walked home.
No, I don’t know what is wrong. I’ve sort of decided on giving up on the whole day – I’m just taking it easy. I’m not doing my piano, and I’m only doing enough Duolingo to keep my streak going. I’m simply calling it a bad day. I hear that folks “sometimes have bad days”. I don’t suppose that I’m exempt.
I don’t remember the last time that I started a workout and didn’t finish it. I don’t think that it was this year. I’ve been amazingly consistent – at least, I’ve been amazed by it – all this time. But inside of a minute or two today during the run, I knew something was wrong.
I’m deciding not to freak out just yet. I’ll wait and see what happens on Thursday.
So, we have our account with Glacier Bank, the little local bank in the Flathead area of Montana, way up in the northwest corner of the state. It’s a cute little bank.
Well, now we’re all intercontinental Pucketts and everything, and so Ethel wanted us to have a bank with a little more reach and power. Since we’re happy users of our Capital One cards, I got us a nice Capital One 360 account.
So now, it’s time to “whirl fat checks”*. We need to start transferring large balances down here to our new account at Banistmo, which is a contraction of the Spanish phrase that means “Bank of the Isthmus”, in order to proceed with the purchase of our condo. So I go to Capital One to set up the wire transfer.
Oh, wow. Guess what. Capital One doesn’t do international wire transfers.
Didn’t see that coming.
So, I’ve transferred the money back to Glacier Bank, the little bank up in the northwest corner of Montana that does, indeed, do wire transfers.
This feels sort of silly and counter-intuitive. But, when I think about it, Glacier Bank is centered on Whitefish. And Whitefish now has a “typical home price” of $1 million. So, yes, I suppose that those folks probably need to do wire transfers.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about the Capital One account. I may just close it. It sort of feels like the treadmill that somebody bought, thinking that they would use it, and now it just sits in the middle of the living room, taking up space, and only serving as a place to hang laundry.
…who, me? Still doing daily workouts, still not getting any faster, still doing piano and not really getting any better, still studying Duolingo every day and not getting any more fluent. I suppose at this point it’s just all about the discipline, rather than the results. It’d better be 🙂
Yesterday my heart rate hit 170 during my run, and I still had about 10 minutes left to go. Now, according to the Internet, my theoretical maximum heart rate is 220 – (my age), which gives 157. (Not too long ago, they were saying that for “athletically trained older people, the estimate was 200- (half the age)”. Now they’ve decided that maximum heart rates don’t actually increase with fitness).
So now running outside, to get acclimated to the heat, is actually pushing my heart rate so high that I’m supposedly in danger, and it’s certainly affecting my ability to increase my aerobic fitness. But if I don’t acclimate to the heat, then I won’t be able to race outside.
Maybe I’ll have to start doing my long runs inside, to get the aerobic fitness. Or maybe do my short, intense runs inside, and run outside on Sunday, but keep taking breaks to keep my heart rate down.
Oh, well. International wire transfers and aerobic fitness in the tropics were not my parents’ problems 🙂
*this is a phrase from “Bill’s Story” in the Big Book 🙂
Here’s the new view, from the balcony of 7E. I took this picture the other day, while we were having the inspection done.
It’s been over a week since I’ve been on the beach. Now, I spend a lot time every day actually looking at the beach, but lately we’ve been so busy – or, if not busy, then so tired – that we haven’t actually made it down there to the beach.
But I’ve gotten all my workouts in, and I’ve done a bunch of medical stuff, and we’ve done all the things this week that we were supposed to do about buying 7E, and made meetings, and worked with pigeons, and gone to some friends’ home to watch the Alabama game and eat the mojo, and only missed one day of piano, and done my Duolingo every day, so I think that this is the living part of “living in Panama”.
And plenty of naps. Which is probably a pretty important part of “living in Panama”.
The new condo* has two parking spaces with it. This leaves me thinking that I ought to buy a car. Just a day or so ago, Ethel and I were in a situation where two cars would have been a good idea. Of course, we could have taken a taxi….but looking at these taxis, I’m just not feeling sanguine about my chances of actually getting there in one of those. And I’m not sure about Uber out here in the playas.
But I don’t want to start looking at cars, because then I might get car fever. And that’s a difficult thing to get rid of, once one gets it. It’s kind of like jumping off a building – kinda hard to change your mind, once you actually get started.
I’m getting heat acclimated – which means that I’m actually getting used to running about two minutes and thirty seconds per mile slower than I thought I was running. But at least I don’t have to stop and breathe and sweat and put my hands on my knees, like I was doing a couple of weeks ago. This is all part of “living in Panama”.
I wonder if some of the things that we’re doing are just part of the adventure – just so that later on, we can say that we did them. Just so that we are, indeed, actually living in a foreign country, and being expats, rather than just on an extended vacation. This week, we got our Panamanian drivers’ licenses. Now, we could have simply jumped on a plane every six months or so and avoided all that. But now we both have foreign licenses. (here’s a funny thing – it’s possible that by the next time that we get back to the United States, our Montana license may be expired, and so we would have to go to the rental car counter and get a US rental car using our Panamanian licenses 🙂 )
Now I’m going to go have lunch. I’ll be eating Panamanian food, on Panamanian plates in a Panamanian kitchen. All part of “living in Panama” 🙂
*I keep calling it a “condo” because that’s what we would call it. But the locals call it an “apartamento”. The difference, in the US, is that one is owned and one is rented. But down here they don’t make that distinction. So eventually I’ll get used to saying “apartamento”. But not yet.
We went to the City on Sunday and stayed at the Marriott at the Multiplex mall. Looking out the window at the skyscrapers, I felt like a hillbilly from Nueva Gorgona 🙂
I saw the urologist, and now he wants me to take another test, and I’m trying to get the test set up for out here, to avoid another trip into the city. I think that folks in the city just normally assume that folks want to go to the city, whereas many of us would just rather not 🙂
Monday was pretty much a lost day, as far as piano and training went, although I did make two meetings – we used to have no meetings on Monday, and now we have two, although one of them is temporary; we’re doing an in-depth study of the Traditions. We’re doing this because so many folks here said that they really don’t know the Traditions. But those original folks who express regreat over not knowing the Traditions aren’t coming to the Traditions study 🙂
I’ve been thinking today about some of that sort of thing – some examples of that sort of contradiction. Some of the things that we say in the rooms are, if examined honestly, dishonest, and self-contradictory.
One of my favorites is “you can’t be humble, and know it”. This is often restated as “If you think that you are humble, then you aren’t.” Sounds wise and witty, and it also makes fun of folks – but the folks that it makes fun of are folks who think that they have achieved some measure of humility, and, so, according to the wisdom expressed in this little pearl, they deserve to be made fun of.
But according to MW, the first definition of the word is “not proud or haughty: not arrogant or assertive”. There is nothing there about being self-deluded. In fact, many people think that “a reasonable estimate of one’s own worth, abilities or importance” is a needed ingredient of humility – but the “you can’t be humble and know it” folks would say that if you know your own worth, then you don’t know your own worth, because you can’t, because they have this really cool saying, see…… 🙂
Then there’s the one about “the more I learn, the less I know”. I hear this one all the time, stated as bland fact. It’s just another case of “I want to say something that sounds wise, so don’t contradict me”. But, of course, it’s just a matter of wanting to sound humble – which is a problem, because if you think you’re humble, then….oops 🙂
Now, it’s true that the more that I really learn, the more aware I am of just how much there is out there to learn, so I’m made aware of the fact that there are larger areas of knowledge that I haven’t even tapped yet. So, the more I learn, the more aware I am of my own ignorance. But that’s not the same thing, at all.
But the one that got me thinking this morning was the always-stated-as-fact “nobody is better than anybody else”. That one is usually expressed with the eyebrows lowered, and often with the arms crossed, stated as a challenge to anyone to counter it, so that the speaker can blast them with the holy flame of humility*.
I don’t disparage this notion in terms of the law – we are all equal before the law, and people shouldn’t be treated differently by the law; and that includes the laws of interpersonal relationships as much as the laws of the land.
But pretty much anyone in the rooms would state, freely, and happily, that they are “trying to become a better person”. Of course, they’re trying to become better people – part of being humble is realizing that we need to be better people.
And if you asked any of them if they believe that they are better people now than they were when they were drinking, they will – humbly – acknowledge that fact.
Well, if I’m a better person now than I was then – then, am I a better person now than somebody else who is, right now, drinking and behaving the way that I used to?
Stop right there! Un-ask that question! 🙂 You can’t say that, because….because it’s not humble!
Yeah, I think that Jesus was a better person than I was. And, if we’re allowed that, then so were Mother Theresa and Saint Francis.
So we’ve now moved into the sort of verbal land mine in which we’re allowed to say that other people are better than we are, but that we, by definition, can’t be better people than anybody else, because that wouldn’t be humble…but that means that we’re consciously aware of being humble, which means….uh oh 🙂
*which is a problem, because the speaker, in order to use the humility blast, would have to know that he is, indeed, humble, which causes a bit of a problem, as you can imagine….
That’s the condo that we’re making an offer on – 7E, which, since we are in 15 E right now, means “the same condo, eight floors lower”.
It’s decorated quite lovely.
Our landlord still doesn’t want to sell, and two E units came on the market, so we looked at both of them. One of them is two floors higher than we are, and then there’s the one on the seventh floor. I decided I liked the lower one better; I like being able to see the palm trees closer up, and 7 is still high enough to get the breeze and avoid the bugs, but gets me down to the ground quicker those three or four times a day that Juneau has to go outside.
We’re buying it for less than we sold our equivalent sized condo in Whitefish three years ago. I’m happy with the price and the unit; we’ve got some things we’ll want to do to it, but we have another four months where we are, so we can have those changes made while living here.
It also has two garage spaces, side by side, and a storage area. Our current unit has storage, but we can’t use most of it, because it’s where the landlord keeps stuff. And we only have one garage spot, which is one reason that we only have one car.
Now, there’s one other condo I want Kim to see before she buys this. We’re not under contract yet, because we’re waiting for our lawyer to look over the offer, so even though we’ve agreed in principle, nothing’s been signed. And I want her to see the condo at the Biltmore because it has another bedroom, and a much larger kitchen. No, it doesn’t have a lap pool, but I can work around that. So we’re going to see that unit today.
We’re dropping by the Biltmore anyway to take Juneau to the dogsitter, because we’re going to the city tonight. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow morning, early, and it’s easier to spend the night in town than it is to beat the traffic in the morning.
Buying a condo – actually, they are called “apartamientos” – in Central America was not on the list of things I was expecting when I was living in that pup tent on Fort Hood. But “the things which happened to us when we put ourselves in God’s hands were better than anything we could have imagined” 🙂
Here’s the weather forecast for Nueva Gorgona through the 20th of this month.
Sorta leaves a fellow wondering if there is actually anyone, anywhere, doing any actual weather forecasting at all 🙂
One thing that’s not in the forecast is the humidity, which does vary. Also, the winds vary as to time; every day there will be lulls where there’s no breeze, and sometimes it gets much stronger. This only matters because of air conditioning; sometimes, we turn on the AC if the humidity gets uncomfortable, or if there’s no breeze at night. But, right now, I can’t remember the last time that we turned it on.
On Monday, we looked at two condos here in Bahia. We’ve been in Panama, with a short break, since the first of April, but this is the first time that we’ve ever looked at real estate. This is absurd, since nowhere else that we have been has so much fit our wants and needs and been so reasonably priced. But Kim kept waiting for an E-unit – east end – in the very tower that we’re in now. And two of them came on the market at the same time.
I’d buy either one of them. But she’s concerned. The AA group is still in upheaval (largely because of our arrival, and some others from up north, and us being sticklers on things like Traditions) and there still aren’t a lot of newcomers. And she’s also afraid that if she buys here, then she’ll never go back to the States.
So I don’t push. Whatever she wants is fine with me. I can keep renting; the amount that a condo would cost is more than the amount that generates enough income to pay my rent, allowing me to have my cake and eat it, too. But it would be nice to have our own place, where we could make changes and make it our own.
Again, this is the “rainy season”, which is supposed to be the bad, uncomfortable time of year. That makes us laugh out loud, often. If the dry season is more comfortable, I don’t know that I’d want to leave, ever.
That’s already caused us a bit of change. This month is our 35th wedding anniversary, which would normally – it being a multiple of 5 – mean a big trip somewhere. But we just can’t bring ourselves to leave, even for the three or four days that such a trip would take. Ethel was going through the motions of scheduling that trip, and found that she just couldn’t generate any excitement over it – and it makes no excitement to do leisure travel if you don’t want to. So we’re staying here.
And keeping an eye on the weather. Never know when it might hit 83 or 86 F.
I now have the whole song. I own it. It’s mine. On the piano.
Okay, it’s Eric Clapton’s. Or it belongs to Eric, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle, and Jim Gordon – or, at least, those are the names that my brain supplies me with when I think “Derek and the Dominoes”*. And also Duane Allman, who sat in on that song (along with possibly some others) when it was recorded.
Rolling Stone lists it as the 27th Greatest Song of All Time. I don’t know – I do know that, as a 12-14 year old boy, falling in love and lust and stupid, it tore my heart out all the time. The incredible violence of the riff, the depth of the rock, and the beautiful ballad of the piano outro just tied me up, and left me exhausted at the end of every hearing.
And now I can play it on the piano.
I still can’t play the guitar riff correctly. Okay, I’m not Eric Clapton or Duane Allman. And the piano, when I play it, doesn’t have that band behind it – but it doesn’t matter. To me, and for me, it stands alone.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play the Piano Outro one more time 🙂
*and, as it turns out, after fifty years, my memory is exactly correct. Isn’t that strange.
I just signed up for the Half Ironman here in Panama, next March.
I was amazed the first time I ever signed up for a 70.3, at how much it cost. That was back in 2014. Let’s just say that it is, indeed, inflated, as much as everything else has. The price was ridiculous.
But the idea itself is insane. And the price is nothing – almost literally – when compared to the amount of training that it takes. At my old hourly rate, when I finally retired at Workday, the hours I spend training on any given weekend would more than pay the entry fee for this race.
A local friend mentioned that she had signed up today, and that as of tomorrow it was going to go up even more, so – I blame peer pressure.
I have to admit – I still haven’t decided about IMAZ. I don’t have to decide – I’ve already paid for it. I can’t cancel it or defer it. Now, having paid for it sounds like a big deal – and, yes, it is – but compared to the cost of going there to do it, now that I live in Central America, the sunk cost isn’t that big, after all. So it’s really going to simply be a question of fitness. If I think I can do it successfully, then I’ll go through with it. If not – well, then I won’t.
The second weekend of March. Six and a half months. If I was couch bound, I could train up for Panama by then, but I’m actually in the best shape I’ve been in in a couple of years. So, if I can just stay in this shape, I’ll finish comfortably.
That’s true, come to think of it. Right now, I could do a half. I wouldn’t PR, but I’d beat the cutoffs without hurting myself. And that’s something to say, when a fellow is 63 years old.
UPDATE: I typed this yesterday. This morning, I ran outside, instead of inside, for the first time in months (other than during the very short Acuatlon a few weeks back). I’m now convinced that the treadmills – both of them – downstairs in our gym are somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 seconds/mile off, which means that I’m 90/seconds mile slower than I thought I was.
That’s a pretty big deal.
I remember, back when I was young and “fast”, but I would have a bad run and it would affect my mood. This isn’t having a “bad run” – it is, instead, finding out that all of my good runs have been bad, and that’s a somewhat bigger deal 🙂
Fat Charlie's Diary 