Looking Back

So back in 2017 we took our 30th wedding anniversary trip to Banff.

Strangely enough, I put nothing about that trip in this diary – right then, it seems, I wasn’t blogging much. Of course, I was in my last two months of training for Ironman Arizona, so I was a little distracted.

The whole thing was a surprise to me – Ethel actually arranged it all. A ridiculously fancy hotel on the mountainside, multi-course dinner (to which I wore my tux), sightseeing on a big-wheeled glacier crawler – and a helicopter flight to ogle the Canadian Rockies.

I have the souvenir picture on my desk. Gosh, I was young, fit and trim then.

Of course, this was a lot of fun, and there are a lot of memories attached.

But now I look at this picture and I think – that was nine years ago? What happened to those nine years? Where did they GO?

I can look at my training log – or at this diary – and see the things that happened during those nine years. But somehow, it doesn’t seem like enough stuff to fill up all of those days. And, truth be told, it probably isn’t, since two years later I retired, so a lot less has happened than might have happened had I kept working.

But, still – wow. Nine years. Where does the time go? Nine years now seems like a ridiculously short time.

My next thought, then, is – hey, in nine years, I’ll be seventy six years old. That doesn’t bear thinking about.

So, I won’t.

Okay, this last week was pretty much a full training week, with seven hours on the bike, and three runs. Yesterday, after church, I went skiing, but I didn’t seem to be skiing the way that I normally ski. And then, last night, when I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I was almost staggering. My legs were tired and stiff.

This was a Monday, which means that I was supposed to swim. But when I woke up, the legs felt no better. So, I put “Swim?” on my morning list, and – since I was undecided about it – I asked God for “inspiration, an intuitive thought or a decision”, just like it says to do in the book. And then, over and over again, I kept asking Him for the inspiration to swim, if He wanted me to swim.

Apparently, He didn’t. Or I was too lazy to hear Him.

Instead, I finished Tom Clancy’s “The Bear and the Dragon”. I love the way that he writes battle scenes – especially when there are M-1 Abrams in the battles – since, being a tanker, I love how those things never lose. They told us in basic training that we were going to be the first unit ever trained on the ultimate killing machines, but we didn’t know – heck, I don’t know if anybody knew – just what a game changer those tanks were.

Ethel is gone out for another two+ hours of church stuff, all to do with her being the new treasurer. I sorta warned her off of this thing, since it seemed to me that she was already spending enough time at church – but she paid me no never-mind, and now she’s hip deep in the hoopla. It’s amazing how often she’s doing that stuff that was only going to take “two to three hours per month”. Well, maybe it’s just her normal tendency to overdo stuff. I feel sorry for people like that.

So now I’m practicing the piano, incredibly simple stuff that I seem completely incapable of doing to the beat of the metronome. I hear it behind me now, clicking and clicking and calling me back there to face my inadequacy. It’s just one more way that time seems to be defeating me.

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 🙂

They Say It’s Gonna Snow Soon

Yes, that’s right. They are saying that La Nina is dying, and a new weather pattern is happening starting the middle of February.

I hope so. But they’re also saying that it may be too late to save our winter.

Ethel’s making the best of what we have –

My legs are tired. And that’s weird, because I haven’t lifted with my legs since last Friday, when I tore the hamstring. I had physical therapy today, and I wasn’t impressed. I don’t know if what they’re doing is really going to help. It doesn’t seem to be impacting my hamstring at all. But, then, I’m not a physical therapist. I’m just a patient, but I’m not very patient.

I saw an ad for Line skis today, and the guy was coming off a cliff, straight down onto what looked like a cliff landing. And I realized that I will never ski like that. And now that I’m 67, the word “never” is getting a lot more immediate. It’s like I feel the door of my life closing – and the room on this side is a lot smaller.

It doesn’t help that much to live in a retirement town. The people that I talk to generally talk about the stuff that they used to do – and how they don’t do it any more. There’s a lady who does the water aerobics at the pool. I just happened to run across her yesterday in the base village at Wolf Creek – she was there with her husband. She says that she’s 82, and that she doesn’t ski any more – which is a shame, because after age 80 you can ski free there. She says that her knees won’t let her ski.

Now, she does the water aerobics with the other older ladies, and then she puts on sneakers and basically jogs slowly in the pool for a half hour or so. She’s out there, doing what she can – but aware of what she can’t. And I see that happening to me. I see what I am doing – but I also see what I’m not doing, or what I can’t do any more. And it does feel like doors closing.

I’ve been doing bench press now for a couple of weeks, and I see that it’s not improving. I’m not getting stronger. Usually, that happens right off the bat.My body just doesn’t respond the way that it used to respond. And now I feel tired. But, there’s nothing else for it but to keep trying.

Speaking of trying – had my second piano lesson with Miz Kathy yesterday. She’s got me doing simple stuff, because she wants me to sight read – not just notes, but tempos and rhythm, too. So, I’m doing that. It’s really simple stuff, too. But I’m going to follow instructions – because, once again, what choice do I have?

The pipers are getting ready for St. Patrick’s Day, but I have pretty much given up on my chanter. It’s just one more thing that I’m not good at.

I sure hope that that new weather system kicks in. Living in the San Juan Mountains, in January, with brown grass, can really color one’s perception of the whole word.

Again with the Heliskiing? :)

Okay – under the tree (along with a lot of other nice stuff) was an Atomic ski bag – as in, a piece of luggage designed to take one’s skis and other ski equipment onto an airplane – and four printed sheets of paper, each giving the particulars of different heli skiing operations, ranging from northern British Columbia all the way to Anchorage.

Ethel says that she really, really wants me to go heli skiing – now, before it’s too late 🙂

Okay, twist my arm 🙂

I was supposed to go in March of 2020. Y’all remember what happened then, right? Yes, COVID – a few days before my flight was to leave for Juneau, Alaska banned all incoming tourist traffic. Surprise, surprise.

So now it’s six years later, and I still haven’t gone. So she was adamant about the whole thing. She wants me to book the trip, and book it soon.

Well, of course I would love to go heliskiing. But – am I really in shape for this? According to my Garmin, my VO2Max has dropped from 49 to 38 – now I’m supposedly in the “top 25% of my age and gender”. Well, before that, I was in the top 5%. I’ve developed exercise-induced asthma. I’ve given up running because it just got to hurting too much. I’m waiting on an MRI for my prostate cancer and a nuclear stress test to find out why it hurts when I do my VO2Max workouts.

So – would I be able to enjoy it?…or would I be sitting in the lodge, huffing on my inhaler and watching the helicopter take off without me?

So, I”m not in a hurry to do anything. But, of course, booking the trip has to happen before things are booked up. So, we’ll see. I started researching the various options today. They are all ruinously expensive. But maybe Ethel’s hoping that I’ll die in an avalanche while I’m still well insured 🙂

…in other news, Christmas was very nice. Ethel got some things that she wasn’t expecting. I’m hoping that, with this new stuff, she’ll now wear her new cowboy boots more often 🙂 We finished up all of the choir stuff on Christmas Eve, and didn’t get home until almost 9:30 at night. We don’t stay up that late on New Year’s.

We had some folks over for Christmas Dinner who are locals without any family. Ethel outdid herself on the dinner, and it was a very pleasant experience – apparently, for all involved.

But after all of the stuff we did heading into Christmas, Ethel has declared today a Pajama Day – not leaving the house, not doing any workouts, not really doing anything. So now I’m wearing my pajamas, and heading into the living room to sit down with her. We’ll see what happens.

We’re Number Six!

This morning, on the bikes, we were watching the Tennesse/Alabama game from the Third Saturday in October, when we happened to see these two paragons of honesty and humility:

Yes, that’s right. After so many years of watching fans – of any team – hold up one finger and say “We’re Number 1!” – even if they aren’t ranked – these two young ladies were very glad and happy to proclaim, for the camera, “We’re Number Six!” and hold up one hand and one finger 🙂

…and, if you look down at the graphic, you will see that Alabama was, indeed, number 6 😉

Alabama beat Oklahoma this last Friday, and now they’re playing Indiana on New Year’s Day. Indiana is currently ranked #1. Now, Ethel is, indeed, a Hoosier, but you don’t want to hear what she has to say about the University of Indiana’s football team. Suffice it to say that they didn’t play a very tough schedule – they only played a few teams with winning records.

But the fact that they haven’t been really tested doesn’t mean much. They may still whup up on ‘Bama. In college football, anything can happen.

…who, me? I’ve been busy. Ethel signed us up for the choir for the Christmas season, and we’ve been at practice almost every day. I’m sure that she wasn’t expecting this. I know that I wasn’t. But we’ve only got two more days – St Patrick’s has a Christmas Eve service, but not one on Christmas Day. But it’s been difficult to keep our regular schedule while doing a practice almost every day. Difficult, but not impossible – but, while not impossible, definitely tiring. I’m really tired of choir practice. Especially since it’s one more thing that I’m not good at. I get lost, and then have to listen to the other tenors to figure out what the notes are. It’s a little discouraging.

I did have some good news, sort of – yesterday, I was able to do both sets of 40 pushups with my feet up on the bench, and the swim went well. And today, on the bike, I was able to do the VO2Max workout without any pain. Now, I used the nebulizer before the workout, and I suspect that that was the difference. I’m hoping that this gets me off the hook for the nuclear medicine stress test next week, which – of course – I have to go to Durango to do. I’m also tired of going to Durango.

Haven’t skied in almost two weeks; we haven’t had any snow in almost three. Now, we’ve got better snow than anyplace else – here’s a Facebook posting that somebody did from Park City:

That’s really depressing. At least Wolf Creek has snow everywhere – at least a couple of feet. Now, it will probably rain on us here in Pagosa on Christmas, at 7500 feet, but thank goodness our ski area is three thousand feet higher.

Meanwhile, Jay Peak, Vermont, has plenty of snow. Once again, we picked the wrong town. (I was holding out for Jay Peak, but Ethel said, no, she wanted Pagosa. But I’m not bitter!) And I’m certain that things will straighten out – we may have another low snow year, but the snow will happen. It will happen.

Okay, time for me to go to bed. We were up a little later than normal, watching the first third of “Miracle on 34th Street”. I love that movie – I wind up believing that he really is Santa Claus. I’ve never seen the remake. I have no desire to do so. Why would anybody remake perfection?

Tomorrow morning, it’s lift and swim again, assuming that I have enough gumption. I’m really, really tired of doing stuff, and then having to go do choir practice. And, tomorrow night, it’s choir practice at 6:30, and then the actual Christmas Eve service at 8:00.

Ethel is trying to kill me.

But I’m not bitter!

Movie Time

A few days ago we opened the Christmas movie season with – of course – Die Hard.

We followed that with Die Hard 2 (of course) and then came Elf*. Then Lethal Weapon, and we just watched White Christmas. Now, here’s a funny thing – there’s not that much Christmas in White Christmas – although the movie opens on Christmas Eve in 1944, in the European Theater of war, and ends on Christmas Eve in 1954, in Vermont. But mostly it’s just amazing music and dancing.

She says that next we’re watching Family Man. That’s an interesting movie – it’s a cross between Scrooge and “It’s A Wonderful Life”.

We did have a white Pearl Harbor day, but the chances of a white Christmas are diminishing as we speak. We’re stuck in a high pressure pattern, and the weather is beautiful, sunny, and blue – and almost all of the snow has melted down here in town.

We’ve got presents under the tree, and we’re singing in the Christmas choir, and we lit the home Advent wreath tonight. So, it’s definitely and really our first Colorado Christmas. Of course, it’s just Kim Puckett and I; we may have some friends over for Christmas dinner, but it won’t be like it has been elsewhere, where we had a busier social life. In Whitefish, for instance, we had a lot of holiday traffic through the house. But we also had fog and clouds, so Ethel prefers this.

I’m aware of what we’re celebrating, of course – the way that I think of it, two thousand years ago, a Child was born. And that Child grew up, and He said some things and He did some things, and some folks wrote those things down, and 1900 years later, some folks read those things and decided to try them almost literally – and, out of that movement, Alcoholics Anonymous was born, and now I’m alive and not even arrested. “So that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

But Christmas is also about tradition – things that are not religious in themselves, but that are part of us identifying who we are by repeating actions and words that have come to mean much to us as a culture, a nation – and a family.

Which is why we’re watching our Christmas movies. I can’t wait for “Muppet Christmas Carol” 🙂

*Ethel really likes that one. I always feel like my IQ is dropping while I’m watching it, but there are some cute moments.

My Animism

Well, that animism is bothering me again*.

The liner in my ski boot has torn; it’s a hard piece of plastic, and so it’s tearing into my ankle when I put the boot on – painfully.

So I went to the ski shop, and they sold me a pair of rental demo boots until I can figure out what I’m going to do. Ethel says that I should get new boots, but that’s something that doesn’t happen quickly, so I have the rentals until that happens. So now I have my old boots and these old new boots (or new old boots). And it leaves me feeling guilty about getting rid of those boots.

I went ahead and threw them away; and while I was doing that, I was talking to God about how these boots don’t have any feelings, so it made no sense to feel like that – but when I trashed them, I still went ahead and told them that I was grateful to them. I had these boots for a long time – Ethel got ’em for me for Christmas either 2013 or 2014.

So I am now on used boots – we’ll see how they do.

I did wind up riding for an hour and a half, and it left me tired. I seem to be going downhill faster than I was. But I’m no longer running the show.

In other news – today, for the first time ever, I went to choir practice. I have never sung in a choir, and it went better than I would have thought. I’ve been told to sing tenor – as in, ten or eleven miles away. 🙂 Ethel identifies as a tenor, although she’s always sung alto. The folks were nice and tolerant and haven’t asked me to go away yet. Of course, they’re good Christians, so they might not get rid of me – but, then, the good Christians in Massachusetts burned folks at the stake, so maybe I’d better not place too much stock in that.

Alabama was in a game with Georgia today. You’ll note that I didn’t say “played a game” because they really didn’t. It was the worst that I can remember seeing Alabama play since before Nick Saban got going. So, they lost the SEC championship in a big way. Oh, well.

I didn’t get in any piano or chanter practice today; again, that bad night of sleep has left me feeling poorly all day. Tomorrow we go to church and I’m supposed to actually sing for real – not just lip sync. I hope to go ski after that, but we only have until 2 PM before our Zoom Traditions inductive study starts. Nobody asks me about the scheduling of these things.

It wasn’t a great day.

*if you don’t know what that means, then hit a dictionary – or you could go to my search window and search for it, and you’ll see it associated with my old car, and my old refrigerator, and my old chair….

“Diseases Desperate Grown…”

The fireplace is getting done, slowly. When we got the estimate, it sounded like a reasonable deal – but now I see what it’s taking, and it seems that I’m paying the mason and his helper something like $200 per hour. Of course, he lives in Pagosa, so that’s probably minimum wage.

So – I had a talk with the electrocardiologist the other day, and she told me to back off on my workouts so that I only go up to the low end of Zone 3 in my heart rate, and she told me to “listen to my body”. So this morning, I backed off to 80% intensity in my Sweet Spot ride, and then had to admit that – if I’m being honest, which I have to do according to page 58 – I don’t feel up to going skiing after that workout.

So – I’m really in bad shape, cardiovascularly. I was saying “Well, I can’t run, but at least my bike and swim are still strong”. Well, my bike and swim aren’t strong anymore.

And my prostrate is acting up. My PSA has gone up in the last few months, so that now they want an MRI. When this prostrate cancer thing started off, it was “No worries, mate. It’s cancer lite. We’ll just monitor it”. Well, they’re monitoring it, and it’s not good.

So – I’m in awful physical shape – the worst ever – and my medical problems are getting worse.

I’ve always said that, if I can’t ski, I might as well move back to Panama. But, if I have all these medical problems, then I can’t live in Panama because I’ll need medical care.

SO HERE’S THE PLAN – I “move” to Texas. I reckon I’ll rent a room from my childhood friend in Dallas (no, I haven’t asked him about this) just to establish residency. Then I’ll move back to Panama. Then I can fly “home” easily to top-notch medical care in Dallas, and I won’t have state income tax.

To quote Jacopo in Count of Monte Cristo, “tell me why this is not a good plan”,

However, Ethel isn’t going for it just yet. So I’ll leave her to sit with it for a while, until she suddenly realizes that it’s actually her plan. To quote Jubal Harshaw, “once [she] pees in it, she’ll like the flavor better, and she’ll buy it”.

In the meantime, I’m resting, and hoping that tomorrow morning I feel up to going skiing. Before I “move” to Texas.

Nothing Ever Settles

We got back from Alabama last night, and unpacked, and even watched a movie. Time to settle back into a routine, right?

Wrong again. Nothing ever seems to be settled down.

Here’s the living room right now:

For some reason, Ethel didn’t like the fireplace surround – apparently, it didn’t surround the fireplace correctly – so now we’ve bought stone and timber and hired a mason and a carpenter to put up stone and a new mantle. During all of the prep and discussion, the stonemason has been responsive and on time. Now that it’s time to start the job, he’s late.

And we can’t sit in the great room, for at least a week, during the day. We’re great room people – this is where we sit. Where I nap. It’s pretty much the center room of our lives, but we’re now exiled from it, because the fireplace surround didn’t work, and the mason ain’t working, and everything is covered with sheets.

I had to go to the local clinic this morning to get lab work done; I had to get my truck moving outside, at 16 F, with that hard, crusty, thin frost that forms on the windshield and that won’t scrape off very well. Then, when I got home, I got tagged to sit around and wait on the mason before I can do my VO2Max ride, before I can do the rest of the day. Fuss and bother. It was a PSA test, to see if my cancer is acting up. I had to not work out for three days prior, and now it’s time to get on the bike, but I can’t, because the mason isn’t here yet.

We’ve taken the skis in for the first tune of the season. The nice ski techs told me that my Rossignol Soul 7s, that I bought 5.5 years ago, have been worn down too much, and that I’m going to need new skis by the end of the year. Well, gee – Rossignol has quit making Soul Sevens. And there’s nothing out there to say what to replace them with – I mean, if I ask, Google AI is really ready to make suggestions. But Google AI has been so wrong so many times that I really don’t want to trust it.

I hate this. I love those skis.

We’ve got to either put the Thule box back up against the garage ceiling, or put it on Ethel’s car. It looks like it will fit under the garage door, but I know that she doesn’t like the whistling noise that it makes at highway speeds. But we moved to a place that charges $2000 for a double ski locker (the last time we paid rent, at Big Sky, it was $200; we belonged to the Big Mountain Club in Whitefish for about $3500/year) and we didn’t do due diligence – no, wait. That’s not true. We knew that Wolf Creek was going to be building out a locker room, but they couldn’t tell us then how much it was going to cost. Goofed up again. I reckon that I didn’t think “probably seven times the cost of the last locker rental” was a reasonable assumption.

I have a call with my electrocardiologist’s PA today at 11 AM. I’m going to tell her that I can’t run anymore, so I’ve given up on life, and if the doc wants to recommend elder euthanasia, I’m cool with that. But nobody ever wants to do things the easy, simple way.

And now I’m through typing this, and the stonemason hasn’t arrived, or called. So it looks like things are going to be up in the air for a while. – actually, Ethel just called, and he’s going to be a couple of hours, so I’m going to get on the bike.

(UPDATE – Apparently, I didn’t post this yesterday, when I wrote it. Posting it now, a day late).

Insurance

Apparently I have insurance troubles.

See, I had this procedure a few weeks back – a pulse field ablation.

I thought I had nailed down the costs before I did it. Now I’m getting bills that don’t seem to make any sense. Now, I can afford them – but it feels weird to be paying charges that weren’t what I thought I was paying.

Ethel says don’t worry, the insurance folks will straighten it out. But I thought it was strange that the original charge, before insurance, was $125,000.00 on the bill. No, I won’t be paying any real fraction of that – but huh? Maybe six people, working for two hours, and they get $5000/hour apiece?

I picked the wrong profession.

There’s something wrong with a system like that. I told Ethel that I didn’t even want to be part of such a….a scandalous situation. I told her that we should move to Mexico or Columbia, where there’s no insurance, but the medical charges that I had while I was there made sense. I was going to have this procedure in Medellin, where the medical care is first rate, and it was going to cost about $2000 – with no insurance.

Then I had a 20 minute followup with my cardiologist’s PA last week. The charge was $500. That’s a third of an hour. $1500 an hour, for a PA? What the heck is going on?

Well, Ethel won’t move to Medellin. So I reckon I’m stuck here. But it just feels really, really strange. Is any of this real money?

….today was church, and then I was supposed to do an hour on the elliptical at low resistance, but all I could do was a half an hour. My long, hopeless slide into abysmal oblivion keep right on going, no matter what doctor I see. And nobody can explain it. Every week, I’m weaker than the week before.

Oh, well. At least some things are looking up. It’s raining right now – a big storm, but that means that up on the mountain, it should be dumping. In fact, it’s supposed to turn to snow down here tonight, but tomorrow back to rain. But at least winter’s coming. It’s been absolutely clear, sunny and 65 F for what seems like forever. Sure, that’s nice, but it bodes ill for a ski season.

I would say that we’ll be skiing next week – but next week, we’ll be in Alabama. It’ll be nice to see the family. But I wish that I could ski first.