Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Legwork and Life, week of 2/14/17

I'm not sure if it's the fact that we're leaving soon, or just my imagination, but it feels like the apartment complex has been extra loud and obnoxious this last week or so.  Had someone leaning on their car horn at 6:30am a few days ago, which woke me out of an already restless sleep.  This is extra frustrating because generally once I'm awake in the morning, I'm awake.  There's no going back to sleep.  So one inconsiderate jerk can start my morning off poorly... and has, repeatedly.  Though thankfully only the once at 6:30am.  7:30am seems the more normal time for this jerk to show up, which is 20 minutes before Chris' alarm goes off in the morning... 

I'm also not going to miss hearing children shrieking outside every morning and afternoon.  I know some people love hearing children make noise, but I just can't equate high pitched squeaks and shrieks with pleasant feelings when each one of them hurts my ears and disrupts my concentration.  I presume the social obsession with babies and small children will continue to elude me for the rest of my life. 

In happier news, though.  Yesterday we closed on the condominium I've been talking about for the last few weeks.  (For the confused: "closed" means we've signed all the paperwork, and we now officially "own" the home.  We'll be paying a mortgage for a loooong time, but it's still way cheaper than renting.)  The drive to the place was long, but we caught lunch afterwards with our realtor, who we like quite a bit. 

Chris was a sweetheart and took the entire day off, so instead of having to rush back to get him to work, he stayed home, and made me beef stew, which is, at this point, probably my favorite non-dessert food.  He also made his rosemary bread recipe, which is both delicious and relatively simple.  So that was a nice way to spend the rest of that day. 

I'm looking forward to being moved over into the new home.  I expect the place will be much quieter, not only because there's only one shared wall, but because the dwelling places are spread out much wider.  Even if children live in the area, their noises will be much further away.  And really, I don't hate kids.  I just wish they'd be quiet. 

I suspect my biggest annoyance at the new place will be geese, rather than ill-mannered jerks with car horns.  There's a large-ish pond out in the back yard area of the condo, and while it doesn't look that deep, geese don't really care as long as there's grass and water.  Chris jokes that we can just get biodegradable airsoft pellets and shoot the geese if they get too close to the home.  I hate to admit it, but I am awfully tempted to allow it.  You can't hunt geese for food, but I'm not sure there's a specific law that prohibits shooing them away forcefully. 

In other news, I seem to have opted for a 5 day a week exercise program.  Twice a week, I go to my parents' place to use their gym, which comes with exercise classes.  My mother frequents those, and once or twice a week, I'll join her.  Those classes involve a lot of arm exercises, which are useful because I have little patience for doing arm exercises by myself.  They also involve core exercises, which are important for health and fitness.  Then, too, the gym has a range of exercise machines, which I make use of. 

At this point, I'm eschewing the recumbent bike and using a cross trainer, treadmill, or elliptical machine instead, and then indulging in whatever other machines I can fit into the time.  The reason for this is because of my recumbent bicycle at home, which I use the other three days of the week.  At this point, I've set a minimum of 15 minutes for each session, but I may increase that as I find better ways to incorporate it into my life.  To date, most of my sessions have been well in excess of that, but some days my brain just seems to panic and flail more than others, so being able to say, "It's just 15 minutes.  Look, I'm already 5 minutes in.  This is doable," is very helpful.

I know I'd be better off doing a minimum of 30 minutes, 6 days a week, but I feel like if I try to overdo it, the exercise bike will end up gathering dust, as all too many of them do.  $150 is too much money to spend on something that's just going to gather dust, in my opinion. 

Coming up: moving stresses!  Yayyy...

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