Two Percent

Sometimes, I wonder about things.

For instance – the label on this jug says that it’s two percent milk.

Well, then – what’s the other ninety-eight percent? There’s a whole lot of liquid there. If only two percent of it is milk, that leaves a lot of undisclosed ingredients.

It’s Saturday, which means that I did a two hour and fifteen minute ride this morning. The pedaling was easy – even more so because I finally got tired of TrainerRoad telling me that I’m weaker than it used to tell me, and accepted their suggested FTP, which was 31 watts lower than what they told me last month.

The problem with this ride is the saddle. This is nothing new – it’s always hurt me to sit on that saddle for hours. But now there are ads all over Facebook saying that it shouldn’t be that way, and that, with the Bi Saddle, it won’t be. All I have to do is give them a couple of hundred dollars and my hiney won’t hurt any more.

I can’t tell if their guarantee is money-back or not – but I’m thinking about ordering one. I understand that the setup is not trivial; it takes time, and it takes 6-7 rides to get it right. But it would be worth it, if it works.

…okay, that’s done. I’ve ordered it. Watch this space to find out if it worked, or if it was one more thing that didn’t work 🙂

Just finished reading Clancy’s “Executive Orders”. I always like it when John Clark shows up in these books – I know that, if he’s around, then something is about to get straightened out. I’m going to reread “The Bear and the Dragon” now. Do y’all remember, back in the 90s and early 2000s, when Russia was going to be our friend, from here on out?….after decades of worrying about when the bomb was going to drop, we thought that now, those days are over. I don’t keep up with current events, but from what I’ve been able to gather, that’s no longer the case. I wanted to go see the Kremlin, but Ethel says that it’s not a good idea right now. But, at least in Clancy’s books, Ivan Emmetovich gets along with all of those folks.

We’ve been watching the “Mission: Impossible” movies when we’ve been on the bikes together. Currently, we’re in the sixth movie – “Fallout”. Ethel asked a question today that, in fifty years or so of watching MI stuff, I’d never heard before – how, exactly, would Mr. Phelps (and now, Ethan Hunt) tell management that, no, he does not choose to accept this mission?

That was a real head-scratcher.

Okay, I’m gonna go watch our movie until Ethel heads off to work with her pigeon. Saturdays, lately, haven’t been really active after we get off the bikes, because that uses up time and energy. These days, I have time. It’s the other thing that I’m lacking.

Rolling Back

We’ve firmed up our plan for climbing Devil’s Tower – we’re going with Wyoming Mountain Guides on July 11th. We’re doing a trad refresher on the 10th, and then climbing the tower on the 11th. (“trad” in this context means “setting your own protection as you’re climbing, rather than using pre-set bolts in the rock). Here’s a picture from their web site:

I’m giving up on what I’ve been doing for the last two months or so. I moved to a strength training scheme, and rearranged my week to support that. But – it hasn’t worked. I tore a hamstring, and my bench press hasn’t improved at all. So, I give up. One of the things about being sober and aware is that I can say “well, this isn’t working”. So, it isn’t working.

So I’m going back to swim M/W, ride, jog and lift T/TH, Friday off, long ride Saturday, and attempt a short jog on Sunday. Now we’ll try this for a while and see what happens.

Now, a person smarter than I am might say “Gee, Jim, maybe it’s time to give up on working out altogether. I don’t see your contemporaries at the gym.” Well, actually, you do – maybe not a lot of them, it’s true. But I see what happens to Pucketts that don’t work out, and it’s not pretty. (No, it’s not pretty what’s happening to me, either, and I’ve never stopped working out. But, trust me, it can be worse).

We’ve sent off our taxes for 2025. We’ve been using the same tax accountant since 1998 – one of the managers at Fidelity Investments recommended her, and we just kept using her. She’s done our taxes from Utah, Arizona, Utah, Montana, Panama, Alabama, and now from Colorado. (yes, we’ve lived in Colorado before, but that was just half-time, and we kept our legal residence in Arizona at the time). Our taxes are probably getting a lot simpler now, but – well, I just prefer using our old, trusted retainer. Maybe next year, when we have only Social Security, our disbursements from our retirement accounts, and only have lived one place for the whole year, we’ll try doing it ourselves.

So now I’m definite for heli-skiing in Canada, Iron Horse in May, and Devil’s Tower in July. Ethel is still waffling on Everest Base Camp. She keeps saying that she wants to go to Germany, and see where I was stationed. Whenever she says this, I say “Buy a ticket”. But she won’t do that. She just keeps talking about it. I’d go tomorrow, if she’d buy a ticket today. It’s really that simple. Well, okay – I have a lot of medical appointments set up already. But…but….forget the buts. I’d go anyway. Seeing all of these doctors doesn’t seem to have helped me all that much.

So now, I’ll walk into the other room and say “Buy tickets for Europe.” Let’s see what happens.

(Update – she didn’t.)

Devastation

The big news in Colorado these days is the snow drought. Now, I think of it in terms of not being able to ski – but the local see it in terms of how much water we’ll have next year. I suppose that’s a more….important consideration – especially since that includes how dry the forests will be, which means how big the wildfires will be.

I can tell you this – I’ve never seen bare ground on Engineer Mountain in January.

They say that the weather is going to turn, sometime around the middle of February. They say.

Speaking of February, it’s….Groundhog Day!. Punxatawny Phil has forecast six more weeks of winter. Well, in the NorthEast, they have certainly had winter. Six more weeks of what we’ve had so far isn’t exactly thrilling us.

Here in a bit I’ll go into the other room and we’ll start watching “Groundhog Day”. We’ll have to split it up, as we’re supposed to go to the Conversational Spanish group at 4, and then we have the Monday night meeting. I’m not feeling up to either one of them, but I’m going to go to both anyway.

Today’s workout wasn’t great. Yesterday I did something that I had said that I wasn’t going to do. I tried to jog on the treadmill at the gym. I was only able to go two minutes at a time, for a total of ten minutes, but something in my innards was telling me that I haven’t done anything aerobic in a while. My Tuesday and Thursday rides are anaerobic, and my Saturday long ride is really an endurance thing – heart rate never gets high enough to be “aerobic”. So I did that.

And, today, I did it again.

It was awfully uncomfortable, but I might keep trying. My resting heart rate is creeping up, which means that I’m losing aerobic fitness. Maybe that shouldn’t matter to me, but it does.

And then, I gave up on the swim just one-third into it – that exercise-induced asthma seemed to be bothering me. I used the inhaler, but not the nebulizer. I reckon I’ll go back to using the nebulizer for a while.

I’m supposed to go get labs done this week – I have yet another MRI with contrast next week, and they want labs to insure that my body can filter out the contrast. Now, I just did this a few months ago. But, here we go again. The MRI will be of my prostate, just checking in on it because my PSA numbers keep creeping up. I don’t know why. I’ve been off of testosterone now for well over two years. Of course, I have been listening to ZZ Top, and I’m sure that that raises one’s free testosterone levels.

I’m looking out of my office window right now, and it’s brown. I can see a little snow over on the golf course if I peer around the monitor, but mostly – brown. I sure hope that those long-range forecast folks are right.

Okay, I’ll go watch Groundhog Day now 🙂