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 🙂

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.

Some Really Good Stuff

We’ve kept going on those 700-800 movies that we have on disk upstairs, with Ethel bringing them down two disks at a time. I keep saying “Hey, this is good! Why haven’t we watched it?”

Some of the stuff isn’t just good. It’s really, really good.

For instance, the other night, she surprised me with “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”.

This is only about 45 minutes long. It was produced very quickly by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy and Firefly, and I think that they put it together in a couple of weeks in a garage or something, and put it on the Internet, for free, back in 2008.

And it’s amazingly, ridiculously, stupidly good. I mean, really. Now, like everything in the world, it’s not for everybody, but if you’re the type who likes this stuff, then you’ll really, really, REALLY love it. It’s about a villain who is trying to become a real supervillain, so that he gets invited to join the Evil League of Evil – and his crush on a girl at the laundromat, and his struggles against his nemesis, Captain Hammer, a superhero.

If that sounds campy and farcical, it is. You bet. And it’s delightful. And it’s a sing-along blog, so there is plenty of music – really good music.

We’ve been watching a bunch of good stuff. But last night, Ethel put “Vanilla Sky” in the DVD player. This is a Tom Cruise science fiction film. It is not for folks with a short attention span – it requires thought and concentration. It is, in some ways, the opposite of Dr. Horrible. But it gets me, every time. While Dr Horrible is a huge hit that everybody loves, Vanilla Sky is very polarizing – folks either love it, or they just don’t get what all the fuss is about. But it always leaves me sitting in my chair saying “Wow”.

I don’t know what today’s movie is going to be. But I’ll get up in a bit and go in there and find out.

I haven’t skied since Friday, because the snow was firm, and getting firmer. And there’s really nothing at all in the forecast. This drought has now reached record stages – a record low snowpack. And last year wasn’t great, so this is two years in a row.

However, Texas, apparently, doesn’t have the Weather Channel, because they’ve come up for MLK weekend, even though conditions are poor. Arizonans seem to be suffering from the same lack of information. Or maybe they just don’t care.

I’m just over nine weeks out from my heli-ski trip. But I’m starting to think that my legs will be able to handle it. I’ll keep training and hope for the best.

Sixty Seven

Today is my belly button birthday (as we say in AA) – the day that my legal age changes. I am now the same age that my father was when he died in his sleep. Sixty seven years old.

I still managed to do my Sweet Spot ride this morning, and then hit the bumps on Thumper up at the ski hill.

But the Sweet Spot ride wasn’t the length or intensity that I used to do, and when I hit the bumps these days, it seems like they hit back, as well.

Ethel is gone today – she’s got service commitments out the wazoo. I’m leaving a little early to meet a pigeon at the evening meeting – time to go over pages 84-88 with him. I think Step 10 won’t go easy with this fellow, as he’s not the most phone-philic type. But my job is to make myself available to help him work the Steps “out of this volume”, as it says on page 96, so I’m going to do that. Then we have the 5:30 meeting, and perhaps we’ll go out to eat “for my birthday” 🙂

Sometime this summer, I hit a crack in the running path here in Pagosa Lakes, and something about the way that I got jerked around really hurt my right hamstring right at the insertion point. I decided last week that, since it hasn’t healed, I would ask my doc for a referral to physical therapy. Well, it’s a week later, and today it felt like maybe I’ve zinged my right rotator cuff – again? – and then, during my last ski run, my right knee started complaining. So, yes, I reckon I’ll go to physical therapy.

I’m moving my Wednesday workout to Friday. I realized that I’m lifting hard on Monday and Wednesday, and then have five days off until the next time. So I’m moving Wednesday to Friday, so that I can have three days, and then two days, in between. I hope that that helps with this fatigue.

I haven’t started piano lessons yet – I’m not sure that my teacher is really all in. She is always going to contact me, but never actually doing it. It’s possible that she might not be really excited about teaching me. I’m not the nicest person in the world – or perhaps I should say “likeable”. I like folks, but they don’t seem to like me as much as I like them. It may be that my self-centeredness just bores people. I know that it bores me.

Sixty seven years old. I didn’t expect to be who I am, where I am, doing what I’m doing the way that I’m doing it at this age. I expected to be wise, fit, and probably living under the lift at Big Sky. Instead I have a lot of medical appointments in my calendar, and I’m tired – always tired.

Of course, it’s possible that being sixty seven years old just feels tired, no matter what.

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.

A Small Town – But Not My Small Town

There are, of course, some very nice things about living in Pagosa Springs. For instance, last week, when I left the gym, I forgot to lock my locker.

Of course, everything was fine. Nothing was taken, and nobody even bothered to lock it for me 🙂 We don’t worry about such stuff very much here in Archuleta County.

Yes, it’s a small town. And it’s a small town in Southwest Colorado, which – except for the current drought, I really like. (Today it snowed all morning, but it’s been so warm that it just kept melting as it hit). While we’re close to Durango, it doesn’t “lean left”, as folks say. Nobody here has asked me for my pronouns.

But this morning, I had a bit of song lyric stuck in my head as I was getting ready to go to the gym. And it occurred to me that it is entirely possible that nobody in Pagosa Springs had ever heard the song. It’s the old Ray Stevens chestnut, “Jeremiah Peabody‘s Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissolving Fast-Acting Pleasant Tasting Green and Purple Pills.” (Woah yeah).

I was careful not to sing this song while doing my lifting and core routine – however, the gym speakers did play Alanis Morrisette’s “All I Really Want”. I actually have a copy of “Jagged Little Pill”. I hope that she got some therapy, eventually.

But that’s a heck of a juxtaposition, ain’t it? Ray Stevens and the Queen of Angst.

The workout went okay – I was weaker on my pushups and pull-ups than I was last week, but I was a little bit faster on the swim. I wonder if skiing yesterday had any effect. I’m going to have to find a way to ski and also work out. When I look back at my last 100 day year – that’s the winter of 2019-2020 – I see that my working out was hit or miss until the last week of February, when I managed to stick to the plan, while skiing every day, although that all went to heck on the middle of March, when they closed the ski hill and the gym on successive days.

Of course, I was six years younger then.

I haven’t yet booked my heli ski trip. I’m concerned about several things – but, mainly, I doubt my own ability to ski the way that I would need to ski, and keep skiing, to take advantage of that opportunity, Yesterday’s 11,000 feet wore me out. For the aforementioned 100 consecutive days of skiing, back in 19-20, I averaged over 12,000 feet per day – and those 12,000 feet were steeps, bumps and trees, in powder.

That was the year that I was SUPPOSED to go heliskiing in Alaska. I was supposed to go at the end of March. But the day before I left, Alaska closed the doors – something about a global pandemic or something.

Now I’m wondering if I missed my chance.

Winterless

Here’s the tram at Jay Peak, in Vermont.

We’re not there. I’ve tried to get Ethel to go there, but she won’t. She’s so mean and selfish.

Here’s a post from this time last year. I’m not showing you what my back yard looks like now, because it looks exactly like this. Winter just ain’t happening. It’s happening in Vermont, but not in Colorado. Now, I admit, I’m as surprised about this as anyone is. Southwest Colorado has always been a pretty good bet for great skiing and great weather. But not last year, and not this year.

We came to Pagosa for five or six weeks in the winter of 23/24, and the skiing was great – or, at least, that’s the way that I remember it, and that seems to be what this diary says. Right now, here in Pagosa Springs, we’re not wild about the skiing – I went today, and it was better than (say) North Carolina, but there was a lot of, shall we say, firmly packed powder.

But one thing that Southwest Colorado has that Jay Peak will never have – Texans. Lots and lots of Texans. I thought that they would have gone home by now. I was wrong. Now, there are nothing like the throngs of Texans that we had the last two weeks, but there are still plenty, and they fill up the parking lot and the lift lines….and the restaurants, and the stores, and they are all driving all day long everywhere.

Okay, let’s tell the truth and shame the Devil. We won’t be going to Jay Peak, Vermont. We’re going to stay right here. And right here is a whole lot better than (say) Alabama. And who knows? Eventually the Texans will leave, and maybe it’ll start snowing.

But it’s a nice fantasy. Besides, in Newport, VT, I could buy the house I have here for about 200K less. Whups – I forgot. I was going to stop thinking about that.

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!