Training Log Archive: Charlie

About 6” of wet snow, quite slippery, and can’t say I greeted it with any enthusiasm. Didn’t have the studded snows on yet, and I was sliding around a fair amount in the truck. Shoveling not so entertaining either. Got it done, and glad enough because enough snow melted that the driveway and steps were mostly clear.

With Rhonda from PV.

Yoga exercises.

Yoga exercises with R.

Weights, in the gym with Rhonda. Deadlifts, squats, some band work

An interesting excursion. Sassy did her usual swimming workout and emerged to ice up pretty much right away. She looked cold. She went off to roll in some leaves, which seemed to deal with her problem, but they stuck to her fur and she looked pretty funny. Anyway, she didn't much seem to mind. The car thermometer said it was 24 F. But kind of raw and seemed colder.

C • Wish you had taken a pictur... 3

I went out to Rhonda's morning yoga class, but only made it through about ten minutes. It is a normal and congenial event that the ladies chatter about their families and other things of marginal interest, and it is generally pleasant, sometimes humorous and good social lubrication. However, today one in particular was dominating the affair and waxing eloquent about her interior decorating experiences, and the combination of the extreme boredom induced by the painstaking recounting of color choices, etc and the volume control which seemed to be amping up as the dissertation continued was making my head explode, so I made my excuses and skedaddled. Not to mention that this particular devotee has a voice timbre that I find particularly piercing. So good to get away from it.

With R&S. Sassy had an encounter with a wild beast up ahead, and very reluctantly abandoned it to come back and get leashed up. I thought from the distance that it might be a porcupine, but when we got close to the area, it was revealed as a raccoon, and its behavior was erratic enough that I feared it might be rabid, so we kept the dog well leashed until we were pretty far on. Sassy has little to no interest in dogs, but finds wildlife endlessly fascinating. Pretty lucky to get her out of there without a closer entanglement.

Yoga exercise group. This is doing me an amazing amount of good.

Got in an hour of laurel wrangling, in for a call, then back out for an hour of brush mowing, taking down some of the laurel encroaching on the dog loop trail. Nice. Not much mowing left this season.

Part of Rhonda's morning class. She is only doing about 35 minutes of it herself, these days, and I was a bit late in arriving.

Matthew sends me a variety of fitness suggestions, some more interesting and/or relevant than others. This one I have been following for the last 10 days and finding that it is doing me a lot of good, and now have Rhonda engaged in it, too. There are 11 poses, but 3 are bilateral, so a total of 14, and I do them for one minute each, with a few seconds to swap, so maybe 16 or 17 minutes. The garland pose is pretty excruciating, but getting a little better. Camel is also pretty hard, but I am getting way better at that pretty quickly. All good stuff, though, and my quads are much happier than they have been in a long time, and when they are happy, my back is much happier, too.

Yard work. Put out the mushroom logs, and re-organized the area, getting them up out of the dirt, which seems to be a current recommendation and putting them in an orderly array so I can keep an eye on them. Found a few mushrooms that must have grown yesterday - quite a surprise. They were frozen this morning, but thawed out nicely and found their way into my lunch.

Then a bit of laurel wrangling with an eye toward manicuring night-o routes a bit.

Difficult sleeping night - dog had eaten a bag of pistachios when she was not being supervised, and suffered the inevitable gastric distress about 10:30 pm. Sleep was fairly unsettled thereafter.

Anyway, there was a lot of clean-up to do from the mushroom event yesterday. Made the executive decision to throw out the unused plugs and turn the unused logs into firewood. Put everything away. We ended up with 32 inoculated logs, brought 16 down to Fra and Jeff and helped them set them up in the woods down by the brook, and pretty soon it was time for Peter and Gail to show up.

The four of us, Rhonda and I, Peter and Gail, were off to see Lina and Angelo and recount to them my visit to their tiny town in Molise, and I had a fine time doing just that. Their son Angelo and his girlfriend Marielle came as well, and it was a very fine party. Angelo the younger and Marielle are English teachers at the Torrington middle school, and there was a lot of lively conversation about that as well. The dinner was very extensive, and the full extent of it was beyond the amount any 8, 16 or 24 people could have consumed. Amazing. Maybe 10 different antipasto items, all in quantities that one would have been enough, as well as fresh bread, also made by Lina. At that point we were feeling pretty full, but then the first plates came out, two kinds of pasta, again homemade, one with pesto and the other a sort of bolognese. We are defeated by now, but then there are the second plates. Large platters of roast beef, grilled salmon and eggplant, again, any one of which would have been enough for any group of 8 who had missed the antipasto and the first plate. A large dish of roasted cauliflower and broccoli, quite good. And then a salad came around. Lots more lively conversation, exhortations to eat more. Of course there was a lot of wine the whole time. Then the fruit started to come out, first cantaloupe and strawberries, then persimmons. They were a revelation. A friend of Lina's had ordered them from someplace special in NY. These are a different variety from ones we had eaten in Sicily, which were very soft. These are firmer, although ripe, and delicious as well. OK, maybe we will survive, but no, then come large platters of freshly made cookies of about 5 kinds, also delicious, but much too much, and some espresso, and then a big cheesecake, covered with berries. We are reeling. Lina then brings out the apple cake. Really? We are utterly defeated. When finally we leave, we do so laden with various leftovers. Quite a spectacle!

Once home, P&G head on their way and R&I are catatonic.

C • Loathe as I am to question ... 4