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.

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.

In Training

Well, now that I know where and when I’m going heli skiing, I had to get busy making sure that I would be in shape for it. So I’ve skied six out of the last eight days. I think that’s why I haven’t posted a diary entry for four days.

Here’s the view from the top of the Bonanza chair, looking out over the back side of the mountain, across the San Juans.

I’m tired, yeah, but not as tired as I would have expected. My resting heart rate is going down (I came off of a GLP-1 about ten days ago) and I’m not doing yoga. On my lift and swim days, that’s all I do, but on bike days, I go ahead and ski. The legs need to know that they’re going to have to do the work.

I’m not sure how long this will last. But I’m willing.

I feel like I’m starting to “ski” – no, I don’t have the form I had when I was doing 100 days in a row in Whitefish, but at least I don’t look like a tourist from Toledo. And I may never again be able to ski like that, even for five minutes. But time on boards is the most important thing that I can do right now.

I’m also thinking about adding some stuff. We’ve been doing Spanish in Duolingo since we moved to Panama, almost four years ago. But we still can’t speak Spanish. Well, there’s a “conversational Spanish” group that meets at our church on Monday afternoons. I’m going to try to talk Ethel into going. She can be intransigent.

I’m also wondering if we don’t want to go back to choir practice. That’s just “wondering”.

I turn 67 this week. That’s the age that Dad was when he died. Since Mom didn’t want an autopsy, we don’t know exactly what killed him, so I don’t know how much danger I’m in. I don’t feel like I’m about to die, but I’m definitely feeling my age – at least, I think I am. It’s kind of hard to know, since I’ve never been this old before.

I do have medical stuff coming up. I have the MRI biopsy for my prostate, the followup with the doctor who did my AFib ablation, a meeting with a doctor about getting the Inspire implant so I can get rid of my CPAP, a followup with my pulmonologist, and my annual checkup. Sheesh. I remember when I started getting annual physicals – at that time, that was all that I had as far as seeing doctors was concerned, except for various and sundry injuries resulting from my rather active lifestyle.

Okay, now I’m going back into the living room. Ethel is in there, lying down, because her back is out. Now, my back isn’t out, but the lying down part sounds pretty good. Maybe I’m more tired than I think I am.

Dismantled

Ethel decided, after moving in, that she didn’t like the fireplace. So now, we’re going to get rid of the tile, and replace it with natural stone.

But first, they had to take out the mantle.

So now we have no mantle. I have no idea when the new stuff is coming in; until then, we have a blank, empty wall.

We’re still watching movies. I find it interesting how some movies that we used to like, we just don’t like anymore. I wonder if my brain is just too slow now, or not flexible enough. For instance – Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. We tried to watch that a month or so back. I remember that it used to be funny.

But, now, it’s not funny – it’s just British.

And today, we pulled Buckaroo Banzai out of the player and put it back into the box. I just couldn’t seem to follow the story, and while I found this or that amusing, I never actually laughed. I must be getting old – physically and mentally.

But some things are still wonderful. When she pulled out BB, she put in Magnificent Seven – and I don’t mean the remake. That movie is a great – and I use the term sparingly – Western. It is so very well done. I sort of felt privileged to be allowed to watch it.

Fitness new – no good fitness news. Every week, I’m in worse shape than I was the week before. Today I saw the cardiac PA for the first followup after my ablation. Turns out that the ablation doesn’t work right away – it takes up to 90 days for the scar tissue that prevents the fibrillation to form. So things aren’t going to get better any time soon. Fitness is bad. I keep finding new lows.

Skiing ain’t here yet. There’s talk of some snow starting Sunday, but not sure that I believe it. I’m sure, however, that eventually skiing will happen.I’m holding on until then.

Can’t lose any weight. I’m taking one of the GLP-1 meds that worked so well for others that I know, but it’s having no effect whatsoever.

So I can’t get fit, can’t lose weight, can’t ski, and can’t even laugh right* 🙂

*not entirely true. I still can’t help but laugh when Steve McQueen says “Look at that chucklehead, out there in all that dust and heat” and Yul Brynner says “Yeah. Not smart, like us” 🙂

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.”

No Good?

I have spent a lot of time in my life wondering what I might be good at.

We just spent a few weeks in Tanzania. I see the Tanzanian folks working, doing business; I see their children, every morning, in their school uniforms, heading out to get an education. I see all of the effort – but, then, I see this: a Tanzanian strip mall.

How is it that they are so poor? What’s holding them back? In conversation, they seem intelligent and they seem to have good attitudes. We spent a lot of time walking with our lead guide; he not only has that job, but he also has a farm, and he has an MBA, and he runs his farm like a business. So, why aren’t they doing better?

I wonder if it’s simply a lack of ambition – not “laziness”, but maybe they think that things are good enough the way that they are.

Not long ago, I was chairing an AA meeting, and for the topic, I brought up the line “At some of these we balked”. I submitted, for discussion – where are you balking? What could you be doing better? This is the sort of thing that I think about all the time.

What surprised me was that, of the 20-30 folks in the room, they pretty much all said that they thought that they were doing fine. They did the most common misquote from the Big Book – they said “we strive for progress, not perfection”. (The actual quote is that “we claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection”; elsewhere in the literature, it is made plain that we are, indeed, supposed to strive for perfection, while understanding that we will fall short). Indeed, most of them thought that trying to do better would be “perfectionism”, which they thought of as a character defect.

Elsewhere, we call this attitude “complacency”, and it’s also referred to as “resting on our laurels”. No wonder the Fellowship isn’t growing.

This….is not my problem 🙂 Somewhere I got the idea that I am at least supposed to try to do better. Wait a minute – it’s not “somewhere”. It’s something that I got from my parents. They told me, when I was little, that, even if I grew up to be a garbage man, to be “…the best garbage man that you can be”.

But striving can also be tiring.

Just before awakening this morning, I was dreaming that I was on a high school football team, and I was, of course, not a good football player. But, in this case, the people around me were a little embarrassed – even ashamed – of my poor showing in this activity. And when I woke up, I brought some of the emotion of that with me into consciousness.

I had the sudden thought – what if I just give up? What if I stopped doing the things that I was no good at? How would that look, in my life?

I did a quick inventory. I’m actually a really good skier – at least, I’m the absolute best 66 year old skier, from Alabama, that I know of 🙂 So, I could keep skiing. And, that’s good, since I already live in a great ski town, and have plenty of excellent ski gear.

But…but, well, that’s about it. I was able to make a case that I’m OK as a cyclist – basing that on the fact that, in a triathlon, when I’m on the bike, I don’t get passed very often, and I tend to pass a lot of people. But, then, full disclosure – I’m such a poor swimmer than, when I come out of the water and get on the bike, I’m with all the un-athletic fat old farts, so no wonder I pass them on the bike 🙂

And…..okay, that’s about it.

I realized that, by giving up all of the things that I’m not good at, I could save a lot of time, and money. There goes the gym membership, and the race entry fees. There goes all of those medical bills that only happen because I’m out there trying to do stuff.

I could also save space – we’d throw out the bicycles (which would free up an entire training room) and the piano and the guitars and the banjo and the ukulele and the bagpipe chanter (actually, those last two don’t use up much room. But, in a spirit of completeness, out they go). Heck, there’s a lot in the garage that would be gone, as well.

I was imagining how less tired I would be, if I wasn’t always doing all of this dumb stuff that I do. No swimming or running or lifting – just those things, by themselves, would give me all kinds of time and energy that I don’t currently have . And there’s also losing the frustration that goes along with trying, and failing, to do stuff.

These thoughts sort of froze me in bed; it was hard to get up, if I’m not going to do anything. However, one thing that I have to keep doing is the program, which includes Step 11, which means getting up and following all of the “upon awakening” instructions on pages 86 and 87.

And, when I did that, I wrote down the stuff that I was led to write down, which included – my Wednesday swim. So, I went to the gym and got into the pool.

While I was there, the 9 AM water aerobics ladies came in, and got into the pool to start their “exercises”, which don’t seem to be exercises to me, but it seems that way to them. Then I saw a lady coming in late for the class, and she had her husband with her.

He was tall (I envy tall folks, since they make more money and live longer and get management jobs and chicks dig ’em) but he moved pretty slowly. I figured him for maybe mid 70s. But he moved much, much older than that.

They got in the pool for the water aerobics, and she was doing the routines, but he was just standing there, barely moving.

And I wondered – maybe, ten years ago, he had a morning like mine, and maybe he decided to stop doing things he wasn’t good at. And maybe he decided to stop doing pretty much anything. And, now, he can’t move.

So I finished the workout.

And I haven’t yet sold the bikes or workout gear.

Into Africa

Well, we’re in Moshi, Tanzania. We flew in around 4:30, got through immigration and customs and found our driver, and headed east toward Moshi.

Just looking to the north, we saw…

Just like a lot of things, it’s a lot bigger in person. And intimidating. Really makes a fellow wonder what in the heck he thought he was doing when he decided to climb it.

Other than that – well, TIA (“This Is Africa”). Things are pretty primitive. The hotel is barely functional (although dinner was nice) and you can’t just go places and buy things like you can at home.

Or, in point of fact, like you can in Doha. We spent about 11 hours at Hamad International Airport, and I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere. “Opulence – I has it.” I have not only never seen anything like it, I’ve never imagined anything like it.* We spent the night in a “quiet room”, which is a large, dark, quiet room with rather firm recliners in it – not completely comfortable, but the best night’s sleep I’ve ever gotten in an airport terminal.

But here in Africa, there’s poverty, and inconvenience, and the service that you’re used to back in the States just isn’t going to happen. I suppose some might say that they aren’t driven by the “almighty dollar”, but they seem to be interested in money, but they don’t have our mindset about how to go about getting it.

But our tour company is American, and they do, indeed, have a very good reputation for service and quality.

If I could just contract them into carrying me up that mountain.

*actually, back in 1991, I went to LA on business, and I recall going past Rodeo Drive just to say I’d been there, and it might have been something like the airport in Doha. But it wasn’t anything like the immense SIZE of the place. And opulence, opulence everywhere. I explained to Ethel that we had paid for it, every time we filled up the truck or the Mazda.