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.)

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.

Dry Spell

It’s been two weeks since our last real snow, and there’s nothing happening anytime soon.

That rain on Christmas might give us a little snow, but not much.

Well, I keep telling Ethel that we picked the wrong town, but we’re actually getting visitors from all over, because we’ve got the most open terrain in the state, or something like that. So things are tough all over.

And it will, eventually, pass.

I didn’t sleep well last night; I was up for a few hours, with stuff running through my head. So when I finally got up today, I was in no hurry to start my workout; I didn’t finish lifting and swimming until 12:30, and it took me another 20 minutes to make it home. I decided that I didn’t care how long it took me; I was going to do the whole workout, and swim the whole routine. I spent a lot of social time because I wasn’t in any hurry to get the next set done. And I did, indeed, do what was on the schedule.

My pulmonologist wants a stress test; he told me this yesterday, and it’s already schedule for the 29th of December. Meanwhile, the cancer doc wants an MRI, and Aetna says “no”; the doc has appealed it, but it will take a month to hear from that. I hope I don’t die from cancer during the pulmonary stress test.

It looks like Ethel has definitely decided on the Everest Base Camp trek, for next October. It won’t be cheap, and it won’t be easy – the trek itself should be less stress than Kilimanjaro, but it’ll take forever to get all the way over there. I’m putting off singing “Kathmandu” over and over again until she’s actually booked the trip.

Speaking of booking – today I registered for the Iron Horse Classic on Memorial Day weekend. I’m in the “citizens ride”, which means that I’m not competing or being timed. It looks like I’ll be spending a while in Silverton waiting on Kim Puckett to come pick me up, as the return transportation ain’t cheap, and I think it’s already filled up. But I’ve never minded hanging out in Silverton.

We’re currently watching “The Long Kiss Goodnight”. We’re way ahead on our Christmas movies this year, because I’m too tired to do much more than just sit and watch them, and it ain’t like there’s any skiing to do. Because, as I mentioned, we’re in a dry spell.

A Good Start

Yesterday was opening day at Wolf Creek. I think it was a pretty good start.

I managed nine runs before Ethel said that it was time to go.

I had gotten up around 4:30 AM to get on the bike and get my long ride done early, but – well, I wasn’t feeling my best, so I only got 90 minutes out of a planned 135. But “not feeling my best” is no reason not to go skiing, so we did.

No lines at all for the first hour or so, then only a short line on one side of the lift. Perfect weather, perfect snow, although there was the occasional rock.

Ethel took a major face plant, and is still feeling bad today. I can’t figure out what happened – she says that she doesn’t think that she crossed her tips, but she just went over fast and hard in the middle of a groomed run – on a fairly flat section, at that. So today she’s on the couch; I can’t seem to get her interested in anything. We didn’t go to church; we’re supposed to meet some folks for breakfast, but I don’t know if she’s going to be up for that, either.

She’s got to get up and busy sometime, though, because we have to pack today. It’s time for our regular Thanksgiving week flight to Alabama. And we leave ridiculously early in the morning – she wants to get up at 3 AM for a 5:15 flight. Yes, it’s almost an hour to the airport. I’m sure that we’ll do it her way. I figure any time that you spend at the airport before the gate closes is wasted time – well, wait, it is wasted time. That’s not an opinion – that’s just fact. But Ethel would rather waste the time in the airport than “waste” it sleeping. So, there’s that.

The hill got five more inches last night; I don’t know if I’m going to go up there or not. I have to admit, after riding and skiing yesterday, I felt terrible last night. I don’t want to believe – yet – that that means that I’m too old to ski.

But – if we’re too old to ski – then I’m going back to Panama. I’m not going to sit in Colorado and not ski. That’s not negotiable. (Okay, maybe it is).

It’s raining down here – there was a little snow when I woke up, but it quickly passed. But all of the forecasts say that, when we get back to Pagosa a week from tomorrow, winter will be here.

Not Just Like a Bicycle

Just the other day, I decided to re-learn Total Eclipse of the Heart on the piano. It turns out, it’s not like riding a bicycle – I’m having to re-teach my fingers and brain what to do. And it’s non-trivial.

The first time I learned this, I was using HDPiano’s teaching method, which involved visually seeing the note being pressed on the keyboard – with this cool technique of showing which notes were coming (hard to describe, but anybody can see it on YouTube). But now HDPiano has dropped this song from its repertoire, and I can’t find the same arrangement anywhere else other than in the sheet music, so – here we go, the hard way.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve heard from my new (possibly) piano teacher – last I heard, she was going to check her schedule and get back to me. It may be that she doesn’t want to add a student, or maybe she doesn’t want to add another adult student.

Or, maybe, she just doesn’t want to teach me. The simple fact is, quite a few people dislike me – some grow into it, but some folks don’t like me right away. And that’s none of my business.

So, until I hear from her, or happen to run into another possible teacher, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing – which isn’t much. Since the ablation, I haven’t done much at all. Not being able to work out, or do yoga, leaves me feeling bored and tired. You’d think that not working out would give me more energy – but, contrary to popular opinion, it turns out that folks who work out tend to have more energy. Another case of, as Mr. Heinlein said, “…if ‘everybody knows’ such-and-such, then it ain’t so, by at least a thousand to one.”

Kim Puckett is feeling bad today. She woke up with a headache, and went back to bed – got back up a half hour or so later, and the headache had subsided, but she still felt awful. So she’s in the bathtub,. That’s her place of retreat.

We’ve got church in another ninety minutes; I don’t know if I will go without her. Probably, just because I need more discipline in my life, not less. (Note what I said above re: “the hard way”). While the idea behind the ablation was that I’d hopefully be able to do more afterwards, I’m starting to fear that maybe I won’t be able to do anything at all. Heck, it’s been four days since the procedure, and I could just sit in my recliner and read Bosch novels.

Now, what happens if I am now a couch potato? How does one live in Colorado, as a couch potato? …sure, I see folks doing it. But it just seems wrong, somehow. Moving to Colorado and not skiing/hiking/climbing is like moving to Las Vegas and joining the Baptist church – you can do it, but you’re kinda missing the point of the whole thing.

But, since Ethel says that we have to live here, then that’s what I’d do. The only place that I would go back to is Panama, and she has….reservations. She doesn’t want to go back there. I can’t make sense out of it, when she talks about it, because she just loved it when we were there, and then – suddenly – she had to leave. And, when something like that happens, one tends to generate reasons for the actions that one’s instincts are taking. And she did. So we can’t go back there.

So I may just sit here in my recliner, and get older and fatter and stupider, and – every so often – go back into the music room and try, one more time, to play Total Eclipse of the Heart. As Cool Hand Luke said, “It’ll be something to do.”

Yoging

We’re back to doing Yoga with Adrienne.

I have been wanting to do this for a while, but Ethel kept balking. But for some reason she has relented. We’re doing a 30 day return – a session every day – and then we’ll probably go back to three times a week, which was what we were doing in Panama.

In my opinion, the injuries that we had this year would not have happened, had we been doing yoga. That’s pretty subjective, but I know that when we were doing yoga before, we didn’t get injured. Of course, we’re older now.

These days, we’re talking about what we might do next year, and we’re working at cross purposes. Ethel wants to trek in Europe. I’m asking – you live in Colorado. Why would you go to Europe to hike mountains? That would be like going to Colorado to look at castles. But the problem is that I want to climb something more adventurous, and Ethel has had enough of being on bare mountainsides in cold weather.

Today is college football – it’s the Third Saturday in October, which means that Alabama is playing Tennessee. The game starts at 5:30. Well, so does the local meeting. So she’s going to be here by herself for the first hour of the game. That feels a bit strange….but it’s not going to hurt anybody.

This morning, I did my long Saturday ride, and, 90 minutes into it, I had a district meeting – I’m the GSR for our AA group. So, with Kim’s help, I got Zoom set up so that I could attend the meeting while on the bike; I used a headset, so that Ethel could keep watching the game while she was on the bike next to me. That’s something that worked well. These days, it’s nice when something works well.

Now I’ll go back in and try to help Ethel cheer for Georgia. So far, neither team has stopped the other – every single possession has resulted in a score. This is SEC football?

At Least We Don’t Have Natural Disasters

One of the nice things about living at 7500 feet in the Rocky Mountains is that we don’t have natural disasters. We don’t have tornados or mud slides, we don’t live near a fault line, we don’t have hurrica….

Oh, wait. Apparently we do.

Downtown Pagosa Springs is flooded. You can’t even go through town on 160 to go east; the whole downtown is closed. Apparently this is caused by remnants of Hurricane Priscilla.

It’s not really affecting us ; we live “uptown”, which means that we’re uphill from downtown – Putt Hill is about a five hundred foot climb from where all of the mess is going on. So unless we have some urgent need to shop or go to the Hot Springs, we’ll never see this mess. (I chair the meeting downtown on Monday evening; perhaps this will be over by then).

meanwhile, things up here go on as planned. This morning I’m serving as chalice bearer at church, then I go to the gym to run or hit the elliptical. After that, it’s easy pleezy for the rest of the day. I hope to play some piano or hit the practice chanter, but who knows? It’s Sunday. Yes, I know – Sunday isn’t the Sabbath. But it’s still the weekend…yes, I know. I’m retired, so I really don’t have weekends 🙂

I understand that some homes downtown are flooded, but I can’t be sure. It’s not like I watch the news, and it’s not like Pagosa Springs really has a news outlet, anyway. If anyone needs anything from me, they’ll ask.

The rain, though, looks like it’s going to continue throughout the week, which is something that we’ve never seen. I mean, this is Colorado. Last year, the ski hill opened on 22 October. That doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this year.

Oh, well. At least we don’t have plagues of locusts or wildfires. Oh, wait…. 🙂

Feed Jake

This wasn’t what I was going to talk about today.

I’m not sure what it was, but this wasn’t it. But this is what I’m talking about.

I was in a text group chat, and my eldest son said something about nobody dying while we’re on Kilimanjaro, but – that if anybody did – then feed Cash (his dog).

So then, I had to go watch the video for the Pirates of the Mississippi song, “Feed Jake”.

Now I’m pretty much useless.

This song is a tear jerker – I mean, a real tear jerker. Fortunately, nobody was here when I was watching it. I didn’t get “choked up” or “teary eyed”. I was absolutely sobbing – big, racking, ugly sobs, the kind that my wife would say were not very attractive in a man. That’s not the sort of thing that I do, anyway. I get choked up. Heck, watching “Blind Side”, I probably get choked up twenty or thirty times.

But this was plain old, out-and-out, loud sobbing.

Okay, it’s not just that the guy’s best friend has died, and that now he has to feed Jake. If you’re a dog person, that’s enough, right there – watching the teens play with the puppy, and then seeing the old, heavy, slow-moving dog at the graveside. Holy mackerel – I’m having trouble keeping it together right now, just typing this. And Kim and I often wonder about dogs really going to heaven – and, if so, it’ll be nice to see the ones that we’ve lost along the way. One dog in particular comes to mind – one I had to put to sleep, by myself, while Kim was on the East Coast on business. That one punched me in the gut.

But, it’s not just that – it’s also the middle verse, which seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the song:

Now, Broadway’s like a sewer, bums and hookers everywhere
Wino passed out on the sidewalk – doesn’t anybody care?
Some say “He’s worthless, just let him be”
I for one would have to disagree
And so would their mamas

Well, I was definitely the drunk passed out on the sidewalk. And I had a mama, who sort of knew that things weren’t well with me. And I’ve now been sober in AA for quite a few decades – but I know what it’s like to have an alcoholic son living on the streets. One of my sons is now almost ten years sober – and one died of an overdose.

I don’t even know where the third son is.

So, when I hear this song, it hits me from several different directions at once. I suppose that other folks aren’t like that, or there would be “Feed Jake” support groups all over the place.

I don’t watch this video often. And now I remember why.