My ambition has long been to be a young man of independent means. I achieved the “independent means” part some years ago, but I don’t seem to be making much progress toward being a young man.

Still working on it!

Is this not an especially lovely loaf?

No photo, so not so interesting for you, but at the end of our walk, just before crossing our little creek toward home, Ashley and I saw a red fox! It ran off as soon as it saw us, which is too bad—I’m sure Ashley would have enjoyed a good tussle with another canid. 🦊🐕

Jackie toppled up my third coffee, so I get three-and-a-third coffees this morning! (Also shown: Ashley #dogsofmastodon.) #coffee

Not many people out-and-about before dawn on a foggy Christmas Eve.

Solstice feast: Roast beast with Yorkshire pudding, served au jus, with horseradish sauce, green beans (me) and Brussels sprouts (Jackie). Her desert was more Yorkshire pudding with honey, while I ate some of my ginger sparkle cookies left from Zamenhof Day.

Things outside the window that need barking at, in priority order, according to Ashley 🐕 #dogsofmastodon:

1. Dogs
2. Squirrels
3. Small children, especially if running, especially if closer than the sidewalk
4. Strangers, especially if pausing
5. Anyone wearing a hood or hat
6. Anyone carrying a box or bag, especially if carrying it awkwardly.

I have ordered a signed copy of Steven D. Brewer’s Better Angels: Tour de Force, just out today!

I have ordered a signed copy of Steven D. Brewer’s Better Angels: Tour de Force, just out today!

Based on the ideas that I talked about in Training for everything, here’s my latest cut at a personal exercise program. (My first cut was derailed by circumstances, and then I adopted a dog which derailed everything except dog walking. Then I got West Nile fever.) See my no-longer-particularly-recent Starting to rough up a new training plan for more information about the specific exercises and how I organize them into sets, reps, and progressions.

I have a set of exercises that I want to do, ideally twice a week each:

• Kettlebell swings
• Kettlebell clean & press
• 1-handed heavy club swinging
• Bodyweight gymnastic rings circuit
• Run

That’s five things, so if I did each twice, and gave everything its own day, I’d have to have a 10-day week. That isn’t impossible. In fact, I’ve seriously considered planning my workouts in a longer cycle than weekly in the past, it but is unhandy in various ways. Fortunately, I think I can double-up several of these exercises in a way that will let me fit them into 7-day week.

The 1-handed club swinging isn’t particularly intense cardiovascularly, so I’m thinking I can combine it with the clean & press. The KB swings is intense cardiovascularly, but because it’s very different, I’m thinking I can combine it with the gymnastic rings bodyweight circuit, doing the KB swings as a “finisher” after the rings workout.

My HEMA (sword fighting) practice is three times a week, and I can’t adjust that schedule, except by skipping workouts, so I have to work that in when it actually happens.

Of course I also want to get one day a week of complete rest. I’d normally make that Sunday, but there’s a HEMA practice session on Sunday so it’ll have to be on Saturday instead.

So here’s a quick stab at a possible weekly plan:

I’ve omitted a “warm-up” block, because I already do my morning exercises, my ridiculously long warm-up routine, nearly every day. I’ve also omitted my dog walking, which averages something over 6 miles a day.

I’m pretty happy with this. It has my HEMA practice sessions in at the correct times; it leaves open the time slots where I have Esperanto, and meeting friends for lunch; it has a full rest day.

I don’t show it here, but I’ll definitely do a de-load week every 5 or 6 weeks.

I should be very clear that, at this point, this is entirely aspirational. I’ve been doing each of these workouts individually, but the only combined workouts I’ve tried so far are the heavy club swinging and the clean&press workouts. I’ve also been taking more than one rest day per week. But the progress I want seems to depend on doing something like this workout schedule, so I’m going to give it a try.

I’ll report back regarding my success or failure.

For a few weeks near the solstice, you can see the sun rise between the buildings east and south from my house.

You can see the sun, but don’t look at the sun.

Poor Ashley. Nobody’s ever told her the story of The Dog Who Cried “Woof!”

(She’s been barking at me.) #dogsofmastodon

Okay, I know it’s lichen and not moss, but I know how to spell #mosstodon, whereas I have no idea how to spell #lichentodon. #lichen? #lichens? #lichensofmastodon?

That’s more like it! My first few runs after having been sick were pretty mediocre, but today I ran 5.19 miles in 1:18:28, and felt good right on through. 🏃🏻‍♂️

I’ve felt entirely recovered from West Nile fever for going on three weeks now, and I’ve been going back to my HEMA training sessions. But until today I’ve been finding that, once I finished the actual class part of the class, I was all worn out, and didn’t feel up to sparing. But today, I felt like I could spar. So I did.

I didn’t get any video unfortunately, but I did spar with two different people, and managed to get some hits. It was good. I’m not going to beat anyone who’s any good at fencing, but that’s okay at this point. The main thing is that I’m finally, once again, able to train for an hour and a half and then spend half an hour sparing.

Oh, and two related details. One from my Oura ring which give me a score of 100 for my activity today:

And from fitbit on my Pixel watch, yesterday I got the Sahara badge, meaning that since I bought my Pixel watch (October 2022) I’ve walked the length of the Sahara desert (2983 miles):

For several weeks before and after the winter solstice, I’m quite prone to seasonal depression. In recent years, I’ve come up with a list of things I can do to ward off depression, two of which we practiced today.

First, we went to the University of Illinois Conservatory. It’s a rather handsome greenhouse where the plant biologists keep interesting plants, and make the space available to the public to come and see the plants, and hang out in the warm and humid and sunny.

Sadly, today it wasn’t sunny.

But that’s okay. It was still warm and somewhat humid, with lots of exotic plants.

After the Conservatory, we went to the iHotel, where we had drinks by the fireplace, then went into Houlihan’s for lunch, then sat in front of the fireplace some more.

It was very nice. I’m sure it staved off winter depression for a day or two.

When the family dog would adopt this posture in a chair, we’d say she was “Sitting up like a regular person.” I don’t remember Ashley doing so before. #dogsofmastodon

An above-average dawn sky.

I’ve cooked enough fjord trout (which is a lot like salmon) to feel safe just winging it as far as seasonings go. This one has cashmere chili powder and ground cumin, with the addition of allspice. Served with sautéd red onions and red peppers, Cahokia rice, and a Stone Delicious IPA.

A few years ago I noticed a sharp increase in the number of cars left running empty to warm up. Of course: all new cars come with a remote starter, so now everybody is doing this, rather than just the people willing to go out in the cold, crank up their car, and leave it running empty.

Mi veturas al la kunveno de la Esperanta grupo per buso, kaj hodiaŭ mi povas vidi plenan lunon. Ĝi supreniras malantaŭ la buso haltejo.

Moonset over the solar farm.

I’ve had a draft post that was originally called my “fall workout plan,” and then called my “late fall workout plan,” but that I never posted because while I was sick I couldn’t work out at all, beyond walking the dog. I will post it. Perhaps not until it makes more sense to post a “winter workout plan.”

In the meantime though, I am, finally, back to doing workouts, and thought I might talk about what I’m doing, because my workout plan is to do workouts very similar to what I’ve been doing over the past week or so.

• Two weeks ago, Sunday November 11th was a HEMA practice session.
• Monday I did some kettlebell swings with my adjustable kettlebell adjusted to 40 lb. The previous week I’d done 10 x 10 swings emom (every minute on the minute), so I went ahead and did 10 x 11 swings emom. I’ll continue bumping that up until I hit 10 x 20, and then I’ll go up in weight and drop the reps back down to 10. (There’s a 45 lb kettlebell in the fitness room, and I own a 53 lb kettlebell, so I have a couple of options.)
• Tuesday I did a 1-handed club workout with my Adex adjustable club at 10 lbs, doing 9 x 5 L / 5 R outside circles, shield cast, and inside circle. That was pretty easy, so I did one more set with the club adjusted to 12.5 lbs. That worked okay, so I decided I could use that as my working weight for a while.
• Wednesday and Thursday were rest days.
• Friday I went back to 1-handed club swinging, doing 5 x 5 L / 5 R with the new, higher, weight of 12.5 lbs.
• Saturday was a rest day.
• Sunday was another HEMA practice session,
• Monday and Tuesday were rest days.
• Wednesday I did kettlebell clean and press, with the kettlebell adjusted to 20 lbs, doing 6 x 4L / 4R in a reverse ladder. (That is, I did 4 clean & press with the left hand, then 4 with the right hand, the 3 left and 3 right, then 2 left and 2 right, then 1 left and 1 right. Then I put the weight down and rested a couple of minutes. That was 1 set. I did 6 sets.) After that I bumped the weight up to 25 lbs and did one more set, which went okay. I think I can carry on with 25 lbs going forward.
• Thursday I did 10 x 12 kettlebell swings emom with the 40 lb kettlebell. Then I did some 1-handed club swinging, doing 5 x 5 L / 5 R. I’d have expected that I’d have done 6 sets, but 5 is what I wrote down in my notebook.
• Friday was a rest day
• Today, Saturday November 25th, I went to the fitness room and did a (mostly) bodyweight circuit. I did 3 rounds of 5 exercises, each for 30 seconds, then with 15 seconds to rest and move to the next exercise. I did jump rope, negative pull ups, goblet squats ( with 20 lb and 25 lb dumbbells), push ups, and hollowbody holds. That’s pretty close to what I was doing during the pandemic, except the fitness room was closed, so instead of dumbells for the goblet squats, I had to just do more reps without weights.

Ashley and Moose Tracks tussling in the dog park.

Moose Tracks is still a puppy, and kinda bitey, but Ashley did very well at simultaneously tolerating his behavior and teaching him how to do better. #dogsofmastodon

My whole adult life I’ve suffered from SAD (seasonal affective disorder). Years ago I got a light-therapy light, and found that I used it quite reflexively: It would pretty much stay off all summer and early fall, then one day in mid-October or so I’d turn it on without even thinking about it. Only later would I realize, “Oh, yeah. I needed that.”

This year I didn’t have the urge to turn the light on until yesterday, which is several weeks later than typical in recent years.

This morning, while out walking the dog, I realized why it was so much later: I’m out walking the dog close to sunrise nearly ever day.

And, as everyone knows (if they think about it), the best light-therapy light is the sun.

Highly recommended: Get outdoors while the sun is still low in the sky. Get yourself some light, along with some vitamin N (nature), and some outdorphins.,\

Ashley lay down on the floor in the bedroom, so I sat down on the floor next to her. She started woofing at me, so I woofed back at her.

She seemed non-plussed. #dogsofmastodon

Google offered several filters to make this sky more dramatic or colorful, but I decided that I liked it best with no filter. Dawn sky over the prairie next to Winfield Village.

Back at the end of September I came down with West Nile Fever, which made me pretty sick for a long time. The only time in my life before I was that sick for that long was when I had Mononucleosis when I was a freshman in college. That time I was sick for most of the term, and it took several weeks of the Christmas vacation to fully recover.

With West Nile it took about three weeks to recover from the acute phase of the illness. That is, I had a fever constantly for three weeks. Then it took another three weeks to get my energy levels back. For that period I could walk the dog, fix breakfast, and then do one thing, after which I needed to go back to bed and take a nap.

As of a couple of days ago, I think I’m back to full health. I’ve been doing workouts—not as frequently as I’d like, but often enough that I’ve been able to start pushing the weights up again, although not up to what I doing before I was sick. I’ve been for a couple of runs, both of which were harder and slower than I’d like, but were okay—I didn’t feel like I was sick, just like I hadn’t been running enough the past few weeks.

On Sunday I got a Covid booster, so I felt slightly less energetic Monday, but that has already passed.

After too many weeks, I finally feel back to normal!

Dum mi atendas la aliajn membrojn de la grupo, mi trinkas bieron “U of IPA.”

Just because I felt like it, I made a thermosy french press of coffee, so Jackie and I could have 4th coffee this morning.

If I live to eleventy-one (like Bilbo), Jackie and I will have been married 78 years. #jimmycarter #rosalynncarter

Whiskey club: Cody Road Rye

Cody Road makes a very fine rye. It’s got a nice rye spiciness, without being harsh at all, and a bit of bourbon sweetness as well (even though the grain bill is 95% rye, 5% barley, according to the label.

Today I served in neat in one of my whiskey peaks glasses. There are several versions of these glasses, with different mountains in the base of the glass. Mine have Mt. Fuji. The shape works great for aerating the whiskey when you swirl it in the glass.

Just a couple of days after seeing the crescent moon at dawn, last night there was a crescent moon at sunset! (Obviously not a surprise to anyone familiar with the phases of the moon, but it made me happy.)

Whiskey club: Cody Road Bourbon. Pre-pandemic, our local liquor store used to have tastings. (It probably does again, but we haven’t started going again yet.) At one tasting there was a rep from Cody Road, which turns out to be almost a local distillery: It’s in Le Claire, Iowa, just across the Mississippi. I don’t remember the precise details, but the rep mentioned that they try to use local corn and rye, grown close to the distillery.

The rye was actually even better than the bourbon (and I’m not usually a huge rye fan). We’ve got some of the rye in our liquor cabinet—I’ll have to have some again soon.

Today though I poured the bourbon on the rocks, although it’s also good neat.

Ashley likes to go for her first walk of the morning right at sunrise (hence the numerous sunrise photos here over the past year). But this time of year the sun rises so late, Ashley has started getting me out well before sunrise.

Whiskey club: The whiskey I drink most often is Evan Williams black label.

I particularly like it for whiskey and branch water. (Equal quantities of whiskey and tap water are how I prepare it.) Several of the fancier whiskeys that I have really suffer when overly diluted with water, but the Even Williams holds up very well.

Two years ago I bought this hat for running. It’s merino wool, but machine washable, and of course high-viz, so great for running.

I had been reserving this hat just for running, but for pre-dawn dog walks, it occurred to me that maybe high-viz was the way to go.

I did a poor job of training Ashley to look at me. Instead of looking to me for guidance, she’s usually looking around, mostly looking for things she shouldn’t be doing.

This morning, though, she was looking at me, so I seized the opportunity to get a picture of her that’s not just of the back of her head. #dogsofmastodon

Ashley was pleased to walk about one-third of the way through Dohme Park. But once I got this image, she was ready to head home again.

The crescent moon from the previous picture is visible way over at the right.

Crescent moon over Park View.

Autumn tree backlit by setting sun.

One of the great things in Illinois is the libraries are structured as taxing districts. With voter permission they can levy a property tax, and then receive the funds from that tax. So there’s no danger that the city, township, or county will decide that it needs the money more. Or, as in this case, that the library is doing something wrong, and therefore shouldn’t get any money until they toe the line.

https://literaryactivism.substack.com/p/a-pennsylvania-public-library-had

(I normally don’t link to substack posts, but this one seemed important.)

Ashley was ready to head on back, but I insisted that we walk as far as First Street, so I could take a picture of the dawn sky, such as it was.

Do, ekde la komenco de la grupa kunveno, estas plene malhela. Sed mi havas bieron. Do ĉio estas en ordo.

Already well past sunset, as I head to Esperanto, but not yet full dark.

Because I use wearables to capture as much information about myself as possible, I can go back and see how my illness affected my activity.

Between returning home from vacation in August, and getting sick in late September, I averaged between 6 and 8 miles a day, mostly walking the dog. (Separately I got in a run each week, pushing that day’s mileage up over 10.) In October (as you can see above) my distance fell to between 3 and 4 miles each day until just about the middle of the month, then gradually started increasing. I exceeded 6 miles on October 15th. I didn’t reach 8 miles until October 30th.

Now I’m right back to 6 to 8 miles a day, same as before I was sick. And today I went for my first run since September 26th. It was a pretty crappy run, but better than not running.

Today I managed to get in a workout—my first since coming down with West Nile fever five and a half weeks ago. (I dropped the weight by 33%, and dropped the set count by almost 50%, but I did do the whole workout I’d planned.)

I was only really sick for about 3 weeks, but oof—it has sure taken a long time to go from “mostly better” to “well enough to exercise.” The past two and a half weeks just fixing breakfast and walking the dog left me so tired I had to take a nap.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to regular exercise now, and go back to sword fighting!

I noticed how sluggish Ashley got when the temperature rose above about 72℉, but I hadn’t really noticed that it was kind of a continuous function. Now that’s gotten quite cool (down near freezing overnight, 43℉ just at the moment), she is full to the brim with energy.

Back in the late 1970s, Merrill Lynch, and then several competitors, created what became known as a Cash Management Account. I really wanted one.

Basically, a Cash Management Account was a brokerage account wrapped around a money market fund and an associated credit card.

It was really aimed at high-value customers. The sort who might make discretionary purchases in the $10,000 range. The sort who wouldn’t want to have multiple tens of thousands of dollars sitting around in cash just in case a few of those purchases might end up being made in the same month. For those customers, a key feature was that the brokerage account was a margin account.

You had an American Express card tied to your account. You could charge whatever you wanted, just like on any other AmEx card. At the end of the month the account would automatically pay the balance on the card. You also had a checkbook that you could use to pay your bills. If either kind of transaction drained the cash out of your account, you’d automatically get a margin loan against your investments. Margin loans were at a preferred rate (because they were secured).

At your own convenience, informed by knowing when more cash would be flowing into your account (dividends on your stocks, interest on your bonds, transfers from the trust your daddy set up for you), you could either let the margin loan be paid off by incoming cash, or else decide to sell some asset or another.

For someone with liquid assets in, let’s say, the million dollar range, it was really very convenient. For someone with much less than that it was less useful, but to keep out the riffraff (people like me), they required a minimum initial investment of $20,000.

By the time I had the money to buy into an account like that, it’s advantages had pretty much been rendered moot by modernization in the financial industry. Now you can roll your own cash management account easily enough.

Here’s what I do:

• Have a local bank account for checking and a debit/ATM card. (Nowadays it wouldn’t have to be local, but I like having access to a local branch for teller services, a safety deposit box, etc.)
• Have an internet bank for a high-yield savings account.
• Have a brokerage account for investments.
• Have a credit card.

I have these accounts connected so that I can transfer money between them via the Automated Clearing House (ACH).

I make my local bank the center of everything: All deposits and all payments flow into and out of that checking account. Any time that adds up to surplus money, I transfer the funds to my internet bank to pick up the extra yield, or else to my brokerage account to be invested.

It’s basically exactly like a cash management account, except that I don’t have paying the credit card automated. (Actually, since I originally drafted this post, I’ve gone ahead and automated paying my credit cards. We went on vacation back in July and August, and were going to be out of town right when the bills could be expected, and not back home until after they needed to be paid. So, now almost all of my bills, finally, are paid automatically. I now live in, I don’t know, 2005 or thereabouts.) Oh, also: my brokerage account isn’t a margin account. (It could be, but the whole preferential rate structure for margin loans faded away some years ago, so there’s no point.)

If there’s something about a formal Cash Management account appeals to you, pretty much any bank, brokerage firm, or mutual fund company offers them now, often with no minimum investment. But there’s really no point.

Currently the ACH takes 2–3 days to move money, but the infrastructure for same-day payments (called FedNow) is now in place. Soon enough a few banks and brokerage firms will make it available to customers to distinguish themselves, and either the others will quickly fall in line, or I’ll move my money to the more enlightened institutions.

Zoomies! #dogsofmastodon

I slept so late this morning, the sun was already up when I got out to walk the dog!

It has been 11 years since I wrote this bit of advice, and I think it may be the best advice I’ve ever provided to a new writer. In just 2 hours get a keen insight into how an editor looks at story submissions!

As someone who just spent five weeks recovering from West Nile Fever, this article spoke to me:

climate change will result in the infectious disease dengue becoming endemic in parts of Europe and the United States,

Source: WHO chief scientist warns of endemic dengue in Europe, US – POLITICO

(Dengue and West Nile virus are both in the same family, along with Zika and Yellow Fever.)

Via Bruce Sterling.

In 2007, when I left Motorola, I was kind of reserving LinkedIn as a potential job-hunting site. In my brain I was already retired, but I hadn’t completely abandoned the possibility I might want another job, so I kept most of my random silliness off LinkedIn, just in case.

That hasn’t made any sense for at least a decade, but it has taken until now for me to get organized to fix it.

If you don’t want to read about my writing, sword fighting, dog walking, random sunrise photos, etc., feel free to use whatever tools LinkedIn provides to filter such stuff, or just stop following me. I’ll take no offense.

Breakfast was a potato omelet with onions and peppers, and hot buttered toast with fresh sourdough baked by Jackie yesterday. Jackie also has toast, but her breakfast is granola with blueberries and homemade yogurt.

The sun rises behind the buildings east of where I live this time of year, so I need to walk all the way to First Street if I want to see the sun on the horizon.

Even while I was sick, I still had to walk the dog. I cut back just a bit—when I was at my sickest, I took her for just three walks a day. Now that I’m mostly better I’m back to five or six walks per day, although the mileage is still a bit shy of what it was before I got sick.

I appreciate the less spectacular dawn skies just like the more dramatic ones.

About three weeks ago I developed a fever and moderate flu-like symptoms. It felt like a virus, so I mostly just treated it liked one—sleeping extra, drinking extra fluids—and waited to get better.

It was kind of frustrating, because it just went on and on. For a brief period there in the middle of week two, it got a bit more exciting: I starting having trouble finding words. (I sounded exactly like my dad when his dementia made it impossible for him to say stuff. Pretty scary.) At about the same time I started suffering from double vision.

At the prompting of my mom and brother, I went to the emergency room for the word difficulty. They did a whole workup for a possible stroke: CT scan, chest x-ray, and and MRI.

I was not having a stroke.

Once I was released from the emergency room I made a follow-up with my regular doctor, who was kind of groping for possibilities, and put in an order for a few tests. The blood was draw on Monday, and today I got the results: positive for West Nile virus.

The related illness, West Nile Fever, does sound exactly like what I had. (That’s actually kind of a scary link. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have any of the longer-term consequences. I was just sick for three weeks.)

Anyway, I think I’m on the mend. I’m resuming normal activity as each thing seems okay. It’s taking a while feel up to swordfighting, but I think I can finally do everything else on my usual list.

Jackie has an Illuminated Brew Works Weird Science. Isn’t that a lovely Cthulhu illustration? I’m drinking a Triptych Dank Meme.

At Black Dog bbq.

Jackie has two band-aids, having gotten both a flu shot and an RSV shot. (Covid shot delayed another couple of months, since she had Covid in August.) In the foreground, Ashley is showing proper care. #dogsofmastodon #vaccinesofmastodon

According to my Oura ring, my readiness has been declining for days now. Doubtful about the ring’s guess—that I wasn’t getting enough recovery in—I largely ignored its advice to take it easy. But after a crappy run yesterday, and another crappy readiness score, I’m taking today as a rest day.

I grabbed this image and sent it to my brother @stevendbrewer, saying “I guess I don’t need to get to Yellowstone now.”

Then Winfield Village sent me this text:

UREGENT MESSAGE FROM ILLINOIS AMERICAN WATER A main water line into the property has broken and a boil order is in effect until 5:30 pm.

Yesterday’s equinox sunrise.

Ashley found a ball. #dogsofmastodon

Walking Ashley gets me out around dawn every morning, giving me a chance to get a dawn photo most days. I kind of enjoy the mix of spectacular ones along the more pedestrian ones. Here’s a few from the days leading up to the equinox:

To celebrate the equinox (actually because our dog is spending the day at Canine Academy) we’ve come to Seven Saints for lunch. I’ve got a Voodoo Ranger, while Jackie is drinking a Starcut Squishy cider.

During the pandemic I followed something of a training plan—a mostly bodyweight exercise plan with minimal equipment beyond a pair of gymnastic rings, based largely on Anthony Arvanitakis’s Bodyweight Muscle books and YouTube channel.

Post-pandemic (once my local fitness room reopened, and exercise equipment became available again), more activities became possible. As they did, I added some in. With extra stuff to fit in, I let the program go. Instead I began exercising more intuitively—simply trying to fit in my strength training and my running as best I could. Each day I’d decide what to do influenced by how I felt, and what I’d done (or hadn’t done) the previous day or two, trying to cover all the bases, while allowing adequate time for recovery.

It has worked pretty well, but not as well as I was doing with an actual program. However, I don’t want to go back to the bodyweight rings program, because I feel like I’m getting real benefits out of the kettlebell and heavy club activities. So, I’m working on roughing up a training program that includes all the stuff I want to do.

Goals

It probably doesn’t make any sense to talk about the activities I do without thinking about the goals I’m trying to achieve.

Of course, I want to feel fit and healthy.

In the spirit of Peter Attia’s Centenarian Decathlon, I want to not only be capable of all the activities of daily living, but have enough reserve capacity now that I’ll still be able to do those things when I’m eighty, ninety, or (as I like to joke, except I’m totally serious) eleventy-one.

Among those things are the obvious—be able to hike a few miles on a rugged trail, climb a steep hill or several flights of stairs, carry a heavy bag groceries home, put a suitcase in the overhead compartment, get down on the floor and back up again, etc. Besides those, I also want to be able to do well at longsword, which requires the ability to stand and walk in a low lunge, hold the sword with my arms at full extension (both forward and over my head), etc.

Fitness Activities

I figure the first step is just to document the activities that I think will support these goals, so that I know what I want to fit into the week. Here’s my first pass at a list. (Note that I already do an extensive warm-up every day, because it makes me move and feel better all day, whether I do a workout or not. I also walk my dog, and she rather insists on at least 6 miles a day.)

HEMA practice

My group has 2-hour meetings three times a week. They’re mostly skills training, so not too intense, although now that I’m approved for sparring the intensity has gone up.

Running

I want to go for two runs per week. One is a “long” run, in the 6–10 mile range (although I may want to work up to half-marathon length). The other is a “fast” run, which might include sprints, hill sprints, or just a hard run in the 3–4 mile range.

Kettlebell swings

This is primarily to work the muscles of my posterior chain, which needs a regular workout to keep me functioning well. In particular, I learned the hard way what happens if I don’t work my glutes. Currently I’m doing a heavy/light cycle, where I alternate between swinging an 18 kg (40 lb) kettlebell and a 24 kg (53 lb) kettlebell.

For the light kettlebell I’ve worked up to 10×19 swings emom. For the heavy kettlebell I’ve worked up to 10×12 swings emom. I try to add one swing per set every week.

Somewhere around sets of 25, I’d no longer get any break at the end of a minute. I don’t yet know if that’ll mean I’ll be able to do 250 straight swings.

Heavy club swinging

This is one of my newer additions, and I have already seen it do great things for rotational strength, plus grip, arm, shoulder, and core strength. As the weight has gone up, it has started hitting the legs as well.

I do three exercises (outside circle, shield cast, inside circle) in sets of 5 left and 5 right, and I work up from 5 sets on each side, adding one set every workout or two, until I get to 10 or 12 sets on each side, and then go up in weight. I’m up 8 sets with a 13.75 pound club. Soon I’ll go up to 15 lbs.

Kettlebell clean and press

This one seems especially useful for longsword, where you often need to hold the sword over your head, with your arms near full extension.

I do these as a reverse ladder, starting with 4 reps on the left and 4 reps on the right, then 3, then 2, then 1 rep on each side. Then I take a short break and repeat for some number of sets. Each workout (or every other workout) I add one set.

I just did 7 sets. I’ll work up to 10 or 12, then either increase the weight or else start the reverse ladder at 5 reps left and right, and go back to workouts of 4 or 5 sets.

Gymnastic rings circuit

Versions of this were my main workout all through the pandemic, when fitness rooms were closed and kettlebells impossible to come by. These were push/pull/legs workouts preceded by a starter and then ended with a core exercise. I had at least a couple variations of each exercise, so the starter was often jumping rope, but sometimes some sort of quadruped movement, push generally alternated between dips and some version of a push up, pull alternated between pull ups and inverted rows, legs was often air squats, but sometimes hindu squats or lunges or wall sits, and core was often hollowbody hold, but sometimes planks or reverse planks or V-ups. I’d set the number of reps of each exercise at what I thought I could carry through for 3 rounds, and the 3rd round I’d aim to push to technical failure.

Toward a schedule

Putting all these things into a weekly schedule has proven to be difficult.

One issue is that my HEMA practice sessions occur at specific times, so there’s a certain lack of flexibility in the schedule there.

Besides that, there’s simply more stuff I want to do than fits easily into a week.

One solution to that would be to abandon the idea that “weekly” is the right structure. I could fit things into, let’s say, a 9-day cycle—but there are enough inconveniences with that, that every time I’ve considered it before, I’ve ended up sticking with weekly.

I’m pretty close to having a first cut at a weekly schedule ready to post. Look for it here in a day or two.

Sunbeams.

Mi trinkas bieron “Cloud Inversion” dum mi atendas la aliajn membrojn de mia Esperanta grupo.

“To take the dog for a walk safely, you have to pay attention to the dog, and to the surroundings—people, squirrels, other dogs… It’s a lot like multitasking.”

Jackie

#dogsofmastodon

Ashley in the early morning sun. #dogsofmastodon

The Winfield Village finance committee (everyone here interested enough in the budget to show up) met last night. The subject of interest rates came up, and I was surprised to find it a near-unanimous opinion that rates were going to stay high at least through 2024.

Thinking of myself as a contrarian, I always worry just a bit when I agree with everyone, but I think they’re right.

This makes me really want to read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger:

there is a tradition on the radical left when it comes to mistrusting the system, and a tradition on the radical right for seizing on that mistrust when they can.

Source: NYT

Wanted an extra loaf as a gift, so I made double the dough and divided it. Took maybe 15 minutes longer than just one loaf would have, so pretty quick and easy.

My copy of the new translation of Meyer’s 1570 sword-fighting treatise has arrived!

The ice fairy cometh.

(In my brother’s household, the person who actually takes the trouble to make ice, when everyone else just takes ice, is referred to as the ice fairy.)

The sun shining through the patio fence cast almost zebra-like, or tiger-like stripes on Ashley. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon

I dragged the dog to the prairie (right next to Winfield Village), so I could get this picture of the dawn sky. (She had her own opinion of where we should go for our dawn walk, but did indulge me when I insisted.)

I cleaned and waxed my feder before heading to St. Croix. But I forgot where I stashed my cleaning supplies, and it took me until today to find that stuff again. But I have found it, and have now removed the effects of Sunday’s practice session from the edges.

The sky went from “Ooh, look at that red ball!” to “Ooh, don’t look at that red ball!” in the time it took me to get my phone out to take a picture.

Apparently I was a lazy girl my whole life, and didn’t even know it.

The Wall Street Journal provided a fairly succinct summary of a lazy girl job in July: “one that can be done from home, comes with a chill boss, ends at 5 p.m. sharp and earns between $60,000 and $80,000 a year — enough to afford the basic comforts of young-adult life, yet not enough to feel compelled to work overtime.”

Source: The New York Times

One of the best things about cats was that they seemed to understand when you were sick. They’d sit on your lap all day and be completely undemanding.

This is so not true of dogs. #dogsofmastodon

Speaking as someone who has advocated for a return to local solar time (now that everyone has a supercomputer with GPS in their pocket to handle the necessary conversions), I was intrigued to read this article about just how bad things were before we started using timezones:

It’s peripheral to the main article, but I was kind of intrigued by this bit:

When he arrived in Ann Arbor in 1852, Tappan gave a speech outlining his vision for a new type of university. Drawing on the German model of education, he sought to transform the University of Michigan into an institution where knowledge was not just taught, but created.

It’s a pretty narrow strip early in the morning, but Ashley has found her place in the sun. #dogsofmastodon

I haven’t done a #FootpathFriday post, but I’m constantly taking pictures of the paths I hike (much to the annoyance of @stevendbrewer). #stx

If you’re like me, and enjoy fantasizing about how nice it would be to have high-speed rail in the U.S., you might enjoy this video:

Forty-eight hours ago we picked Ashley up from SportsVet boarding and brought her home. Today she very insistently led me the six or eight blocks back to SportsVet.

I guess she liked it okay. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon

Turns out “priority” boarding on American Airlines in St Croix means “wait for all the coach folks.” #aa #stx

My brother, @stevendbrewer, is contemplating various things, including holding office hours on the island, and the fact that this particular hour is very nearly over.

This hermit crab has been hanging around our three cottages for a couple of days now.

Seen a lot of anoles. Finally got a decent picture of one.

Guy in a white T-shirt walking into the water, and I was thinking maybe a christening or something. But then the guy starts handing out beers, so I figured probably not.

A shot of papa juana and a Leatherback Reef Life at Spratnet on the north side of St. Croix, with @stevendbrewer #beersofmastodon

There’s a cruise ship in, making it a good day to just hang out and Cottages by the Sea and not try to go into town.

Looking south from Cottages by the Sea. Waiting for the green flash. #STX

Sunrise is in 10 hours 56 minutes.

My brother @stevendbrewer and I are having great fun pretending that we’re here to watch for the green flash every evening.

I’d forgotten how much better it makes my skin feel, just to spend 20 minutes in the ocean twice a day.

This handsome fellow climbed down the tamarind tree into the cabana and then walked on by. #iguana @stevendbrewer

At the Islander Bar and Grill in the Miami airport. Jackie has a Prison hazy IPA. I have a Hollywood Brewery Roadhead, which I think was described as a session IPA. #beersofmastodon

I have a Triptych described as a hazy Midwest IPA. Jackie has a Brewdog Elvis Juice.

Is there a #beersofmastodon hashtag?

I was explaining to Ashley why she doesn’t get coffee, even though it’s wonderful and she’d probably like it. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon

The crescent moon and the red clouds made a dramatic statement when I took the dog out for her walk last night.

Some serious tongue-wagging going on. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon

I ironed a bunch of shirts to pack for my upcoming trip to St. Croix. #STX

Looking forward to sipping morning coffee and evening rum punch on the porch and under the tamarind tree, wearing a series of linen, seersucker, and madras plaid shirts.

Thanks to my long run, 🏃 on top of walking the dog, 🐶 I got another fitbit badge.

I blew right on past the distance of my longest run ever by close to a mile and a half. 🏃🏻‍♂️ I felt great right on through—no pain at all. I did start feeling tired at about mile 9.5, but I ran pretty strong right to the end.

🎶 And then I saw her snout, now I’m a believer. Not a doubt of trace in my mind. Then I saw her snout. Oooooooo! I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave her if I tried… 🎶 #dogsofmastodon

My sword arrived!

I got the Regenyei Armory Paratschwert Feder.

I see so many pretty sunrises these days (out walking the dog), it’s possible to get a bit blase about the ones that aren’t spectacular.

Mildly amusing. Low peak for the first dog walk, notch for drinking coffee and Jumbletime, then my most active time is 7:00 AM, for the second dog walk.

Before I got a dog, my most active time was 11:00 AM, because that’s when I finally get to my workout.

It’s just a rumor (I don’t have have first-hand information), but I hear that if you create a Threads account and then delete it, Facebook deletes your Instagram account as well.

Which, you know, is probably a good thing, but probably not what most people had in mind.

A can of beer in the sun gets warm really fast. You can’t see it, but the magazine under the #MensHealth is #TheEconomist #beer #magazines #patio #arnold #schwarzenegger

The brats are “Sheboygan” brats, which according to the woman at Olde Time Meats are the same as regular brats except they have more black pepper. The skewers vary slightly: Mine has an extra purple onion; Jackie’s has an extra yellow pepper.

Dinosaur detention area. See also: Red Bridge detention area.

As long as I’ve been using a Pixel phone (I’m on my third), Google has been alerting me to make “canvas” prints. But the alert always led to a blank screen.

A couple of days ago I thought, “You know, I don’t need them to pick which photo to print; I can just print one I like!”

Although this post is extremely topical, and will make no sense in a few weeks, I thought I’d mention that for a couple of weeks now I’ve been limited myself to reading zero tweets per day.

I was not particularly sporty as a child. My dad played catch with me an ordinary amount of time for a father who had no particular aspirations that his son would be a sports star. I played whiffle ball with the neighborhood boy across the street, and threw that ball a good bit. I took tennis lessons, and played quite a bit of tennis, and eventually got sorta okay at tennis, and there’s a certain amount of throwing in tennis, to get the ball to the person whose serve it is. (Plus, a serve and a forehand are both throwing-pattern type movements.)

My point is simply that although I did throw balls around some as a boy, it was never important, and I pretty much quit as soon as I was out of high school.

(And even in high school phys ed there was way less ball-throwing than there probably should have been—the fake, altered versions of sports that they made us play in class provided neither training nor practice for the kids who were not “good at sports.” We were sent out to stand in the field and do nothing except be available to be blamed once every 10 or 15 hours when a ball unexpectedly came our way.)

This was brought home to me a couple of times in the past decade or so. Once, perhaps 10 years ago, while out walking near some ball fields in our old neighborhood, I had a softball roll up at my feet. A player across the street asked me to throw it to him. I attempted to do so, and ended up throwing it perhaps halfway to him.

That was embarrassing.

When I thought about why I did so poorly, my analysis was that there were several issues. One was perhaps just a lack of strength. Just as much was simply having forgotten how hard to throw a ball to get it to go a particular distance—an important skill in many sports, and one that requires quite a bit of training. Mainly, though, I think the issue had to do with having lost the fine motor-control patterning. Throwing a ball involves a bunch of muscles that all have to fire in sequence, each one at just the right moment.

I was reminded of this more recently, because Ashley likes to chance a ball, so I’ve been throwing one for her from time to time.

When I started doing this, around the end of November last year, once I had Ashley signed up for the dog park, I was crap at throwing a ball.

I’m still crap at throwing a ball by any objective standard, but maybe 1000 throws, spread out over the course of six or seven months, have gotten me up to being able to throw the ball perhaps three times as far as I could in November, and with quite a bit more accuracy.

I suspect that the main thing is simply the muscle pattern stuff: my nervous system has relearned which muscles to fire at which moment in order to execute a competent throw. Secondarily, I think my heavy club swinging has helped some. Inside Circles are essentially a throwing pattern, and using a 15 lb club lets me build considerable strength in those muscles.

It’s not the exact same motion as throwing any particular ball, so I still need to practice whatever throw I want to be good at, but the muscles are being strengthened in the right patterns, which I’m sure has already helped.

National Weather Service: “Destructive 80 mph winds.”

Jackie, wanting to be clear: “Not the constructive kind.”

At our last dog training class, the teacher mentioned that a dog massage course would be offered in the next session. Sadly, the course will be on giving your dog a massage, and not on training your dog to give you a massage. 🐕💆‍♂️ Very disappointing. #dogsofmastodon

Other times when the #airquality has been “bad” according to some metric or another, I’ve generally found it no big deal. This time that’s not true: the air quality here is legit terrible. And there aren’t even any forests burning up here in Illinois.

Yesterday was Jackie’s birthday, and she and Ashley came to my Esperanto meeting. Jackie and I had beers (the Hazy U of IPA), but poor Ashley had to make due with water. (And some of Tony’s potato chips.) #dogsofmastodon

The pose in this picture reminded me of the famous Andrew Wyeth painting of the girl reclining in the grass facing a farmhouse. Here Ashley is reclining in the grass facing Winfield Village’s office and community room. #dogsofmastodon

Sunny Ashley is a pretty Ashley. #dogsofmastodon

One of the many nice things about having a dog is getting up in time to see the sunrise almost every day.

Inflation and a declining standard of living are two different things. Inflation is when the money becomes less valuable, resulting in rising prices. But when a whole society becomes poorer, it can look like inflation, because prices may rise, but it’s not the same thing.

“Despite the Bank of England’s efforts so far, there is accumulating evidence that inflation will be harder to stamp out than previously expected. In the past week, data has shown that pay in Britain has increased faster than expected, inflation in the services sector has accelerated and food inflation is still near the highest level in more than 45 years.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/22/business/economy/bank-of-england-interest-rates-inflation.html?smid=url-share

To my eye, viewed from over here, that looks less like inflation and more like a falling standard of living—largely caused by Brexit. If you block immigration, of course wages are going to go up. If transporting stuff across the border takes longer and is more expensive and difficult, of course food is going to be more expensive. That’s not inflation. That’s reducing everyone’s standard of living by raising actual costs.

It looks similar, because the symptom tends to be rising prices, but they’re two different things. If the problem is inflation, then raising interest rates (by reducing the rate of growth in the money supply) will probably help. But if the problem is a declining standard of living, then it’s probably not going to help. Higher interest rates will just be yet another expense (like border controls) that flow through to making everything cost more.

There is a squirrel up that tree. #dogsofmastodon

If I’d realized that this run would be 0.01 miles less than my longest run ever, I’d have run another 0.02 miles. I did run it three minutes faster, though, despite the heat. #run 🏃🏻‍♂️

It may not be obvious from the picture below, but those sprinklers are not only blocking the sidewalk; they cover the entire right-of-way from the detention pond to the drainage creek. To get around it I had to walk through a parking lot, down the street, and back through two more parking lots.

This post will go to twitter, but it’s the last post to go there. The site is no longer a place where I want to be seen.

If you want to follow my stuff, I’m https://wandering.shop/@philipbrewer at Mastodon and I’m https://micro.blog/philipbrewer at micro.blog. And, of course, you can follow my RSS feed right here at https://www.philipbrewer.net/feed/.

Any time spent asleep is time well spent. #dogsofmastodon

Dawn is pretty early this time of year—too early for me to see the sunrise, but not too early for me to get this picture.

About one minute after I took this picture, the solar arrays started to turn to point east.

More Ashley and Dodo. #dogsofmastodon

I’m a little surprised to get a score of 100, considering that I didn’t go for a run. In fact, I got a 2 hour nap in the early afternoon.

It’s true I spent most of the rest of the day walking the dog.

You can barely see it there in the distance, but Ashley was Very Interested in that opossum. #dogsofmastodon #possumsofmastodon

Cropped to make the possum visible:

Yesterday’s #run was long for me, at 7.7 miles. The route included the south arboretum woods, which Jackie was a little jealous of. I’ll have to get out there with her again soon. #running

Ashley and Dodo at the dog park.

Ashley has been kinda recalcitrant the past couple of days. Hopefully a bit of tussling will help. #dogsofmastodon

We have a great photo of our first boxer when she was a puppy, that I came upon while going through my dad’s files:

Having just scanned that photo in, when Ashley jumped up on a picnic table on the way home, I spotted the similarity, and thought I’d try to recreate the vibe with her:

Not a complete success, I’m afraid, although it’s still a nice picture. #dogsofmastodon

Just a month or two after we got Ashley we happened to have the bad luck of walking right under the siren used for tornado warnings when they did their monthly test. (Something they do on the first Tuesday of every month at 10 AM.)

Ashley started howling along, which made me laugh. But then Ashley looked a little embarrassed, and I couldn’t have that.

So I started howling along with the siren myself, to assure her that it was entirely appropriate behavior, and she joined back in.

We’ve done that every month since then, but I had failed to capture it on video until a couple of days ago with this month’s test.

That second rule seems odd. “No pets without leash or horses.” Does that mean that if your dog has two or more horses it can be off-leash?

Ashley hanging out with her bestie Charlie. Don’t they look happy? #dogsofmastodon

Me, responding to Jackie (asking if I want her to close the house up): “Don’t do anything on my account. Do whatever makes sense to you. Or, if nothing makes sense to you… be confused.”

Combining three of her favorite activities, Ashley broke lose a woody stem, carried it home at break-neck speed, and then chewed it into smithereens. #dogsofmastodon

There’s a lot of talk these days about the risks of AI, with many suggestions that it should be “regulated,” but with little specificity of what regulations would be appropriate. As usual, anybody who has an AI loves the idea of some sort of regulation, which would serve as a barrier to entry for competitors.

I have a suggestion that avoids that trap, minimizes the harm of regulation, and yet sharply constrains the opportunities for AIs to do bad stuff. It’s also easy to implement, because it requires little or no new legislation.

It’s very easy: enforce copyright laws.

Any firm that uses or makes available a large language model AI should be required to identify every copyrighted text used in training the model, and then share with all the copyright holders any revenues that the use or availability of the AI brings in.

This burdens existing AIs whose creators thought they were getting all their content for free by scraping the web for it, while giving a big leg up to any AIs that are simply trained on a corpus of text that the AI owner has the rights to. (I read about a physician who had been answering patient questions by email for twenty years training an AI on his numerous messages. He’d be fine.) That seems all to the good.

As to how much to pay the copyright holders, I think the publishing model of the past couple hundred years provides a good guide. Roughly speaking, book publishing contracts proved half the profits to the writer—but because it’s too easy to game the expenses side of the business to make the profits disappear, the contracts are written to provide something more like 10% to 15% of the gross revenues. That would probably be a reasonable place to start.

The huge cost of actually identifying each copyrighted text used, and finding the copyright owner is very much part of the desired outcome here: We don’t want people pointing at that difficulty and then saying, “Well obviously we should be able to just steal their work because it’s too much trouble to figure out who they are and divvy up the relatively small amount of money they’re due.” Making firms go through the process would provide a salutary lesson for others tempted to steal copyrighted material.

Ashley and Dodo in the dog park. #dogsofmastodon

I got a 100 on my Ours ring activity score twice in the past week, and it’s standing at 100 for today so far. Go me!

My progress toward being ready for sparing is very slow, but Purpleheart Armoury got some stock of HF Armory Black Knight gloves in my size, so I figured I should just go ahead and buy them.

They arrived today.

In my workout yesterday, in the “lower body” slot where I’d usually do either some type of squat or some type of lunge, I decided to practice stepping for longsword fencing. As soon as I started, I realized there was all sorts of nuance to how to do it, with a lot of details I wasn’t sure of.

I posted a question to the group discord, asking when to pivot the foot. (That is, the front foot is pointed straight ahead and the back foot is turned out 45 to 90 degrees. After you step forward with your back foot it’s easy enough to just put it down pointed straight ahead. But your new back foot needs to turn out at some point.) I also wanted to know whether people did a toe-pivot or a heel-pivot.

A couple of people responded to say that they did toe-pivots, and that they did them at the end, after establishing the new front foot. Good to know.

When I got to today’s class, Christopher Lee French (one of the intermediate HEMA students, but also an instructor in sport fencing at The Point Fencing Club & School of Champaign) gave me a whole master-class in stepping. He made a series of excellent points.

(Let me pause just for a moment here to make it clear that all the following is my understanding informed by what he was telling me. It’s certainly not his fault if I’ve gotten some things wrong here.)

Here’s a short list:

1. While you’re stepping, the foot you’re not stepping with has to support all your weight for the whole time your stepping foot is off the ground. (This is true with ordinary walking as well, but in ordinary walking gate you typically straighten and then momentarily lock the knee of your standing leg. Judging from the woodcuts that illustrate Meyer’s treatise, you stand with your front knee bent at nearly 90 degrees, making it a real strength challenge to hold yourself up.)
2. You don’t want to push off with your back foot (because that would tend to make you bob up and down). Rather, you want to traction yourself forward with the planted foot.
3. Your stepping foot needs to move twice as fast as your body. That is, your body is moving forward one step. But your foot has to go a lot farther in the same amount of time, because it’s also going from being the back foot to the front foot.
4. As you step forward, you don’t want to swing your stepping foot out and around. Rather, you want to keep it straight in line with the spot where it’s going to end up. This is it better for a lot of reasons, but one is that it means you’re not telegraphing whether it’s a passing step or a gathering step.

He demonstrated many of these, and his example steps also helped me make sense of the (to me) odd use of a toe-pivot described by others in the discord. He tended to finish a quick step with his back foot not yet pointed out. Instead it was pointed forward, with the heel off the ground. When I asked about why he wasn’t turning it out, he said, “Fix that when you have time.” And the way you’d fix it would be to do a toe pivot, and then put your heel down.

None of this really has much to do with Meyer’s text. That is, I’m not trying to figure out how to step. Rather, I’m thinking about what to train to be able to execute what Meyer’s text documents.

Specificity would suggest that the way to train for fast, smooth, even steps would be a lot of stepping. But I know from experience that it’s always worth breaking these things down and checking to see if any of the pieces is posing a limitation.

To pick a not-so-random example, I’m limited by my leg strength for single-leg standing in a very low stance. Things to train for leg strength with bent knees: wall sits, single-leg wall sits, single-leg standing. Those first two I’ve done before, but I can emphasize them a bit for a while. I can add some bent-knee single-leg standing. And, because specificity is still a thing, I’ll also practice executing passing steps and gathering steps as smoothly and rapidly as possible.

“That felt like going downhill,” said Jackie.

“We’ve been living in Central Illinois too long,” said I.

(To be fair, it was downhill—just barely.)

I got kinda ho-hum about rainbows when I lived in California, because they were so common. Back here in Illinois they’re more of a big deal—I probably see less than one a year, on average.

I was unaware of the word blep until the last time I posted an image like this. But this one is new today.

I’ve long known I’m no good at paying attention to more than one thing at a time. Because of that, I try pretty hard to avoid even trying to multitask. Still, even having accepted that I’m crappy at this sort of thing, I’m a little frustrated at how it’s showing up in my longsword practice.

Generally I think I’m okay if I try to just do one thing. For example, I’d assume I could execute a single cut or a single parry. But, no. In fact, I can only do a piece of a cut or parry—because one of the things Meyer says is “Every cut gets its step.” So I’m not doing it right unless I do the sword action and the stepping action.

It’s not actually quite as bad as I’m making it sound. I can move into any of the guards. I can swing my sword in any of the principle cuts. I can step with proper form. I can even swing my sword and step forward. But as soon as I try to, let’s say, step to the side and swing my sword, my form tends to break down.

Longsword is called “longsword,” not because the sword is long, but rather because nearly all the cuts and parries are executed with the arms extended. (And this is actually crucial to being successful. If you have your arms extended and your body in the right position, you can parry any cut. Try that with your elbows bent, and you’re very likely to get hit with a sword.)

I can hold the sword in good structure, with my arms straight. I can execute a cut with it, with my arms straight. I can even execute a cut and step forward, with my arms straight. But when I try to do any specific cut with any specific footwork, my form starts to break down: I tend to pull my arms in. And if I focus on keeping my arms extended, I forget to take the step.

It’s very frustrating.

Fortunately, having learned taiji, I know the solution to this: Practice.

That is, proper “deliberate practice” à la K. Anders Ericsson, where you: perform an action, monitor your performance, evaluate your success, try to figure out how to do it better, and then repeat.

If I can only pay attention to one thing at a time, I need to break these sword moves down further. I need to practice keeping my arms straight during a cut, and then repeat that move (paying attention) over and over again, until I can do it without paying attention. Then I can add in the stepping, and practice cutting with a step over and over again until I can do both of those things without paying attention. Then I can start working on a longer phrase: cut while stepping, next cut while stepping. And so on.

I haven’t started practicing outside of class much yet. There are only certain things that can be done without a partner, but those things—stance, guards, footwork—are exactly what I need to practice.

And we will still be meeting over the summer, so I’ll have plenty of opportunity to practice the other things as well.

It’s time to make a plan.

Looking through my dad’s stuff while in Kalamazoo for his funeral, I happened upon this photo of my brother and me that he’d taken.

Katy asked me to say a few words about my father at his funeral. I wrote the following and read it at the service.

My father was a scientist—an ornithologist and an ecologist.

He was many other things too, of course. Father. Teacher. Student. Writer. Conservationist. Artist. But even those things he often did in ways that drew on the fact that he was a scientist.

He told me a story once of when he was an undergraduate student.

He had taken a course in optics, and the optics textbook that the teacher had chosen was unusual, in that it did not solve some classic—very difficult—problem in optics that was worked as an example in every other optics textbook. Instead, it offered that as a problem for the students to solve, and his professor had assigned it as homework.

Finding the problem difficult to solve, my father went to the library and looked at another optics textbook which worked through the solution as part of the text. Grasping the essence of the solution, my father solved the homework problem.

The next day the professor asked if anyone had managed to solve the problem, and the only student to raise his hand was my father. The professor asked how he had solved it, and my father said, “It seemed obvious to me.”

As, of course, it was, after working through the solution in the textbook from the library.

I tell this story for several reasons. First of all, it was very much how my father was. Asked to solve a difficult problem of course he would use the resources available at the library. And, although he wasn’t quite so much this way after becoming a father, I gather he was something of a smart ass as a college student.

I think he always hoped that his students would approach the problems he provided in this manner, and was always a little disappointed how few did so.

My father had a pretty good sense of humor about most things. But he also had his quirks.

One time he mentioned aloud that needed his license plate number for some form, and my brother immediately replied, “It’s 332 QRQ.”

“How is it that you can remember my license plate number?” my father asked.

“It’s easy,” my brother replied. “You have three hundred thirty-two quirks.”

My father didn’t think that was especially funny, which of course made it all the funnier to the rest of us.

Along with being a writer, my father was also an editor. He edited the Jack Pine Warbler for many years. When I was first writing science fiction stories he would read them. He didn’t offer much in the way of a critique, just unqualified support. And a careful line edit, which was very useful.

We spoke many times about our philosophies of writing. One time in particular I remember him saying that his goal in writing was, “To say exactly what I mean in limpid prose.”

It struck me as exactly the right goal for a writer. I have stuck with it, even though it is clear that having a more distinctive voice might make my stories my salable, because it suits me so well.

My father taught me to think like a scientist.

Several times when I was in high school I remember sitting with him in his study, trying to come up with a testable hypothesis for this or that phenomenon. I remember two in particular. Once we generated a few hypotheses for why we see reverse dimorphism in many raptors, but rarely in other birds. Another time we generated some hypotheses for why we sleep.

We never conducted any experiments to falsify any of these hypotheses, but the experience of generating falsifiable hypotheses—of thinking about things in terms of falsifiable hypotheses—was invaluable to me for the rest of my life.

Even our family vacations were expressions of his scientific understanding and interest. More than one vacation took place at a biological research station. One in particular was memorable for its black flies.

My father was many things but, above all, he was a scientist. This influenced and governed his thinking about everything. His work. His writing. His art. His land conservation. It was what he devoted his life to, and what he would want to be remembered for.

My father passed away a few weeks ago. His funeral was Saturday.

My dad and me in 2018

Jackie and I found a place to board the dog, and then made a lightning-fast trip to Kalamazoo, driving up on Friday, hanging out with Katy that evening and the next morning, attending the funeral, and then heading right back home.

My brother and my dad in 2015

All of Katy’s kids came, along with their spouses. It was good to be able to visit with them as well.

The funeral was at People’s Church, the Unitarian church that my family attended from some time when I was in late elementary school. It was a great church, offering a spiritual community that avoided being laden down with a bunch of “god” stuff. I had not previously met Rachel, the current minister, but she did a great job, talking about the value of mourning, the value of sharing stories.

Along with Katy and her kids and their spouses, Jackie and I stood outside the sanctuary and shared a few words with each of the more than 100 people who came to celebrate my father’s life. There were many neighbors who had met them just in the few years that they’d lived at Friendship Village, neighbors from their old neighborhood on 5th street, many of my father’s former students, and more of my father’s old colleagues than I had expected, given that he had outlived so many of them.

After the funeral Jackie and I hit the road straight from the church, and headed on home, getting in just about dusk.

I’m glad to have gone.

I wrote a few words about my dad to read at the funeral. I’ll post the text in a bit.

I keep taking Ashley on longer and longer walks, trying to tire her out so I can get stuff done, but (duh) it just makes her ready for yet longer walks.

In other news, Ashley continues to look like a dog fitness model. #dogsofmastodon

Jackie and I had seen these sculptures from the road on our way to our dog training class. Today we parked at the other end of the Robe trail, then walked to this spot and back to the car, about a 3-mile round trip. #dogsofmastodon

My copy of The Art of Combat has arrived! #HEMA

Ashley seems unimpressed. #dogsofmastodon

Jackie was in the mood for some prime ribeye, so we got one and I prepared it with a quick and easy mushroom gravy, along with some twice-baked potatoes from the butcher that sold the steak. Served with the nice Triptych beer A Wizard is Never Late.

In class a couple of nights ago the lesson was for us to take our first stab at understanding a piece of the text from Joachim Meyer’s The Art of Combat.

I’ve ordered a copy of the book. It hasn’t arrived yet (being shipped from England), but here’s a different translation of the same text from the Wiktenauer site:

Slicing

Is a fundamental element of proper handwork, when you rush from your opponent with quick and agile blows, you can block and impede him better with no other move than with the slice, which you, though you will treasure it in all instances as special as here, will hold in reserve. You must however complete the slices thus: after you entangle your opponent’s sword with the bind, you shall strive thereon, feel if he would withdraw or flow off from the bind, as soon as he flows off, drive against him with the long edge on his arm, thrust the strong or quillons from you in the effort, let fly, and as he himself seeks to retrieve, strike then to the next opening.

https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Joachim_Meyer, “Of Displacing,” Slicing

The text we used translated what is here as “flow off” as “strike around,” which is actually a specific move (striking first to one side and then to the other). The translation included the word “pursue,” I think where this one says “drive against.”

I generally think of myself as being pretty good at working with text, but I found this remarkably difficult.

The correct move, the instructor indicated, was that you should not wait for the “flow around” or “strike around” to proceed, but rather “as soon as” he begins the move, “drive against” or “pursue” by thrusting your sword forward so that the guard of your sword is pressed up against his.

Since you caught him early in striking around, this leaves him in a very awkward position, giving you many options for striking him effectively.

This all makes sense, but I did not get it from my first ten readings of the text. Clearly I’m going to have to spend a lot of time and effort making sense of it, if I’m going to get good at this.

In our practice session, we did not have the picture:

I think I see this move in the middle bit, where the guards of the swords are pressed together.

All it took to get this badge was making the dog’s long walk of the day a 5 miler, taking her for all her other ordinary walks, the activities of daily living, and then going for a 6-mile run.

Ashley knows where to go when the lawnmowers are going past. #dogsofmastodon

The most obvious goal for someone learning to fight with swords is to get good enough to enter sword-fighting competitions and do well against other sword-fighters. And, I suppose that is my long-term plan. My medium-term plan is less ambitious, but rather specific.

I’ve come up with this intermediate goal because I know that I am not a natural martial artist. My reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination are merely average. Besides that, I am well below average in my ability to watch someone execute a move and then do “the same thing.” I’ve written about this before in my post Learning movement through words.

I hadn’t realized it in advance, but the very nature of Historical European Martial Arts makes it especially well-suited to me: Essentially every HEMA practice is based on a text—in our case Joachim Meyer’s The Art of Combat. The text provides the verbal description that I need to be able to learn a movement practice.

Still, even with the text and the instructors showing us stuff (and correcting our errors) and classmates to practice with, I’m still the guy with merely average reflexes and hand-to-eye coordination (plus a lifetime of no experience with stuff like this, because I was in my 40s before I figured out that I could learn this stuff at all, as long as I have a verbal description to work from), so my expectations for developing the skills of an excellent sword-fighter are rather low.

That would be rather discouraging, so I’ve come up with my own personal medium-term goal. I’m going to focus on executing Meyer’s system very, very well. Success for me will not depend on doing well sparring with opponents, but rather on looking like—moving like—someone who has trained with the best teachers of Meyer’s system.

Expressed in aspirational terms: A year or two from now a modern expert in Meyer longsword will look at me and think, “Wow—this guy looks like he might have trained with Meyer himself!”

Knowing my own strengths and weakness, this seems like it might be achievable, with the bonus that it will probably be much more effective at making be a better sword-fighter than if I jumped right into trying to figure out how to spar well.

I had been waiting to get the new translation of Meyer that’s coming later this month from HEMA Bookshelf, but decided to go ahead and order a copy of the existing translation. It’s what everyone in the group has been working with for several years now, so the instructors and senior students all know it. I’m sure it’ll remain a useful reference even if everyone switches to the new translation as soon as it’s available. (And I’ll get the new translation immediately myself.)

My short-term plan to support my medium-term plan will be to create my own practice sessions on the foundational stuff: stance, footwork, guards, and cuts. The classes covered stance and footwork on the first day (and then added a third stepping pattern on the second day), but hasn’t returned to those things since then. This makes sense: We’re practicing stance and stepping as we’re learning cuts and parries. But for my purposes, I think and extra 15 or 20 minutes each day specifically working on these items (which are readily amenable to solo practice) will do me a world of good. I’ll also spend a few minutes each day working on the German vocabulary, so I know the names of everything (and know what the thing is!).

One bright spot: I seem to be fit enough. The first week and a half I was just a bit worried about whether I could do a 2-hour training sessions and the recover enough to do the next one and then the one after that, but it seems that my fitness regimen of the past few years is standing me in good stead. I may not be as strong or as fast (or recover as well) as the fitter of the college-age kids, but I’m fit enough to see a practice session through to the end.

While walking Ashley, noticed that a ladybug had landed on my hand. Stayed there long enough to get a picture.

Prairie grass is growing like a weed where they did the burn a couple of weeks ago.

It’s not visible in the picture, but I saw a Yellow-shafted Flicker fly up ahead of me. They’re showy birds, always fun to see.

“Be a good dog. Don’t boop my laptop with your snout,” I said.

“What should she boop it with?” asks Jackie.

#dogsofmastodon

Ashley (just visible behind Jackie) likes shifting from the sunny places to the shady places every few minutes. Jackie, on the other hand, enjoys sitting in the sun (as I do). #dogsofmastodon

The highest and best use for day lilly leaves is chewing on them, according to Ashley. #dogsofmastodon

If you don’t want to get hit with a sword, you might want to consider a different hobby.

My instructor at yesterday’s HEMA class.

Badge from my Oura ring today. Photo of me from my HEMA class last night (a guard position called Tag).

This week I attended my first and second HEMA classes, and had great fun. I am even (almost) in good enough shape to work out for two hours, although I’m certainly feeling it this morning.

The first class was half devoted to longsword fencing at a conceptual level, looking at key concepts from Joachim Meyer’s The Art of Combat (which serves as the basic text for the local HEMA group), with the second half devoted to stance and footwork.

The concepts section had to do with the “five words” of Meyer: Vor (= before), Nach (= after), Sterk (= strong), Schwach (= weak), and Indes (= during, or maybe between). Quite a bit of time was spent talking about these concepts, which nevertheless remained subtle and (at least to me) rather unclear.

The stance was kind of interesting, purely because of the modest difference between a longsword stance and santi stance.

In Tai Chi, santi stance is described as a spiral: Your back foot is turned out about 45 degrees, your front foot is turned in (that is, the same direction as your back foot) just slightly. Your hips are turned less, kind of between your feet. Your torso turned less. Your shoulders are turned still less, your head is turned only slightly. Perhaps only your forward eye is pointed directly at your “partner” (i.e opponent).

Meyer’s longsword stance is different: Your back foot is still turned out 45 degrees (or up to 90 degrees). But your front foot is pointed straight forward, as are your hips and shoulders.

Once we’d we practiced the stance (getting our front knee directly over our front ankle, making sure our back knee was modestly bent), we went on to footwork, learning the passing step and the gathering step. Passing step is just stepping forward, except of course, that changes which is the front foot (pointed forward) and which is the back foot (turned out). The gathering step is like an advance in fencing: you back foot steps up to about even with your front foot, and then your front foot moves forward to reestablish a proper stance. And, of course, you don’t need to be committed: You can move your back foot up, and then if circumstances warrant, simply put it back where it had been.

The second class began with a pretty extensive warmup. We did some mobility, and then some stretching, and then some practice stepping, which both got us practice and got our heart rates up a bit. Then—one part I had trouble with—a bunch of lunges: regular lunges, backward lunges, jumping lunges. (Click my “lunge” tag to read a bit more about my difficulties with lunges.) We also sprinted just a little, I assume primarily to get our heart rates up.

Then we learned one new step: Triangle step. In triangle step you bring your back foot behind the front foot, taking you off-line from an attack from the front.

We practiced something they called “dancing,” which is a variation on the introductory practice of push hands: you and a partner touch your hands together (finger tips, or fist) and then one leads, stepping forward or back, while the other attempts to remain stuck, by stepping back or forward, so as to remain at the same distance—while, of course, using proper Meyer longsword footwork.

After that we picked up swords for the first time!

We learned the four principal guards, and then four cuts. They all had names, but unfortunately the acoustics weren’t good enough for me to hear most of them. But there are extensive web resources (including translations of Meyer’s book), so I have the technology to track them down and learn them before Tuesday.

We practiced the guards and cuts quite a bit, which (after all the stepping practice) left me pretty tired, and rather achy this morning. Happily, I’m not suffering from any over-use injuries, just feeling like I got in a good workout. (The one exception is my toes, which were slightly strained from the lunges. Hopefully they’ll be all better very shortly. Henceforth I’ll remember to do some toe stretches before each the HEMA class.)

The steel club swinging I’ve been practicing for months now stood me in good stead: my hands, wrists, arms, and shoulders are strong enough and stable enough, which I don’t think they would have been otherwise.

Classes take place in the Stock Pavilion, an old University of Illinois building (constructed over 100 years ago) originally built to support the Ag school’s mission as a place for students to learn about things like cattle judging. It’s a large space with a dirt (wood chip) floor and concrete bleachers, which suits pretty well for sword-fighting practice.

Next thing to do: buy protective gear (mask and gloves). I’ll also want to get a copy of The Art of Combat, which I understand has a new translation coming out next month, so maybe I’ll wait for that.

I came home to find my contributor’s copies of my new story A Classic Beginner’s Mistake, along with a few extra for signing! You can order a signed copy (or the ebook, or an unsigned trade paperback) at that link.

Sunrise on the equinox. It should be due east and the road should head due east, so I’m not sure why the sun appears to be rising just slightly north of the yellow line.

I’ve been meaning to get this photo for years. Thanks to Ashley getting me out for an early morning walk every single day, I finally got it.

After several days when the weather was too crappy for either me or Ashley to want to take a long walk, it was slightly better today, and I managed to get the pupster out for a pretty long walk.

There’s a solar farm just north of Winfield Village, with ranks of solar arrays that turn from pointing east to pointing straight up to pointing west. (Oddly, they’re not arranged to point south. I assume the people who built it knew what they were doing, but I’ve been puzzling over it for a couple of years.)

The directions they point (and the timing of the changes) seem odd, and I’ve been trying to characterize the whole thing.

I initially assumed that they’d be programmed to point a particular direction based on ephemeris data about where the sun will be, but that seems not to be the case.

Here’s one piece of data: At dawn they do not turn to point east. Rather, they turn to point straight up:

It is only after the sun is well up that the panels turn to face east.

Last night, perhaps an hour before sunset, they were pointed about halfway between west and straight up. Which kind of makes sense, as there were clouds to the west, so they clear sky straight up was probably as bright as the sun behind the cloudy sky.

My current working theory is that the panels turn to face whatever direction produces the most power, regardless of where the sun is in the sky.

I’ll continue to watch, and try to characterize their behavior further.

Maybe I’ll even get in touch with the University and see if they can provide a link to a description!

Ashley doesn’t indicate needing to go out by scratching at the door. Instead, she boops my laptop with her nose.

A trifle annoying, but today it got me out right on time to see the sunrise.

I’m pretty happy with my (no longer so) new Pixel watch. In particular, it’s not too big for my wrist. As I have kind of a small frame, I was glad to see that it fit well. (Post started a while ago, but I guess I never posted it.)

I think this is hilarious: a very expensive Pixel Watch (like I recently bought myself) with a case and watch face to make it look like a cheap G-Shock knock-off.

I immediately got the aesthetic they were going for, but half of the commenters are like “Why would I want to do that?”

Since the county roads here are strictly aligned on compass directions, every year I think I should get a sunrise photo on the equinox, showing the sun rising right at the end of the road.

And now that I’m walking the dog every morning anyway, I may actually manage it!

The equinox is about one week off, but already the sun is rising nearly due east. Ashley appreciates it too. #dogsofmastodon 🐕

For a couple of weeks now the birds have been acting like it’s spring. Now the trees are getting in on the act.

Now that I have a story out in book form, I’ve gone ahead and created an Amazon Author page, which you can see here: https://www.amazon.com/author/philip-brewer

I suppose I should add it to my social media contacts, etc.

Ooh! My new story has picked up a review! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5404239594?book_show_action=false

You can buy the story here: https://waterdragonpublishing.com/product/classic-beginners-mistake/

“A Classic Beginner’s Mistake” is published by Water Dragon Publishing, March 10th, 2023 as part of their Dragon Gems series, edited by Steven Radecki.

EIGHT MINUTES BEFORE MY BOUT, and I was struggling with my goggles — the one really important piece of protective gear. A rapier through the heart is a legitimate medical emergency, but one that the on-site medical staff handle with routine ease. Only a rapier into the brain is at all likely to produce a career-threatening injury and, except for the very rare fluke of a thrust through the soft pallet or the ear, the skull provides enough protection that just about the only way into the brain is through the eye socket.

Hence, goggles.

I shared some preliminary images of the cover of my new book a couple of months ago, but here’s the official cover:

The book comes out tomorrow in ebook form, and you’ll be able to order it here:

A Classic Beginner’s Mistake

A brief synopsis:

On a contract to fix a software bug, Trevo is shamed into entering a fencing tournament where poor folks fight for the entertainment of the wealthy. While diagnosing the bug will earn his pay, the insight from his fencing bouts may prove to be worth even more.

There will also be a print version, and that page will have links for buying it—and for buying a signed version, if that’s what you’re into. (Note that it is a short story and not a novel, even though there’ll be a book version.)

Rainy, windy, and cold today. Even the dog doesn’t want to go out. But yesterday was rather nice and I got this picture of moss growing near the base of a tree. #mosstodon

Ashley is pretty good at fetch—better than any other dog I’ve ever had—but after taking a treat for dropping the ball, she is somewhat inclined to snatch the ball back up again.

I cut a different pattern of slices into yesterday’s loaf before its second rising, and I thought the result was particularly lovely.

My activity score of 100 due purely to walking the dog. Well, and sleeping better since getting a dog.

Evidence for my previous post:

I am very impressed with myself: I walked far enough to get Ashley tired enough that she wanted to nap, without making myself too tired to make bread dough. #dogsofmastodon 🐕

Ashley does not understand that most dog owners are disinclined to bring their dog to the dog park in the rain, and is very disappointed to find no other dog to play with. 🐕 #dogsofmastodon

Just saw a toot wanting a feature to add subtitles to videos, but read it as wanting a feature to add subtlety to videos, which seems like an even better idea.

As every Valentine’s Day since 2016, I recapitulated the very first meal I ever cooked for Jackie. I made minor changes, including baking a flourless chocolate cake and serving it with whipped cream.

Three delightful pieces of flash fiction for Valentine’s Day from writers at Water Dragon Publishing: https://truckstop.waterdragonpublishing.com/. Enjoy!

Among Ashley’s areas of special competence is finding her place in the sun.

That and chewing on sticks.

Somebody should develop a breed of really big cherries, and then name them “tomato cherries.”

Moonrise two nights ago:

Sunrise the next morning:

Ashley emphasizing the importance of weighted carries for optimizing overall fitness.

I forgot to bring my phone on on of my walks, so those steps only got counted twice and not three times!!!I I am bereft.

Chewing on a pant cuff is something

Most days I walk the dog right at the end of cocktail hour, which this time of the year is right at sunset.

Sunny Groundhog’s Day morning. However: Near South Arboretum Woods, Ashley suddenly became so animated I brought the car to a stop. I looked where she was looking, and spotted a juvenile groundhog, bravely standing over his shadow.

I submit we can look forward to an early spring.

Ashley’s place in the sun is very narrow, but she’s found it.

Most of the time—unless I need to go somewhere in particular—I let Ashley pick where we go on a walk. Today, instead of wanting to check all the things, Ashley wanted to head to, and then cross, the busy street.

By then I’d figured it out: She was leading me back to where yesterday she spent the morning at puppy daycare.

Sadly, it only happens twice a month. Happily, Ashley has been signed up for the next one.

Fjord trout with a honey-ginger-mustard glaze, served with mixed peppers and onion and rice.

Some years ago I shared this image in my post depredated bird. I see such configurations of feathers pretty often around here—the remains of a bird killed probably by a cat or hawk, or possibly a fox or coyote.

So I was somewhat daunted when I saw this configuration of sequins on the grass just outside my front door.

Does that not look dauntingly like the remains of a depredated party girl?

It makes me worry just a bit about about what the predator was.

We took Ashley to “puppy daycare,” giving us our first dog-free morning in nearly three months.

I checked my phone a couple of times, half-expecting to get a text saying, “Come get your demon dog and never bring her back,” but apparently she did just fine.

If we spend 45 nights in Hyatt hotels between now and late March, we’ll get enough “bonus points” for another two nights! We could spend 47 nights in Hyatt hotels for the price of 45!

What could be cuter than Ashley’s little pink tongue?

In his post on Water Dragon Publishing‘s Dragon Gems program, Steven very kindly links to an old post I wrote that suggested borrowing for ebooks a publishing model from pulps (which had borrowed from the dime novel).

I get scores in the upper 90s pretty often, but scores of 100 less so. Today I kept my “inactive time” nice and low, which I think is what made the difference.

I keep looking at Ashley all stretched out thinking, “I wish I were that flexible!” But actually, I am that flexible: I spend hours a day in full hip extension.

T-ĉemizo sur griz-barbita fortulo: “Stranga esti sama aĝo kiel maljunuloj.”

I wish libraries would take a page from the old DVD-based Netflix, and make it possible to put hold requests on a queue.

I’d really like to be able to tell the library that I only want one 3 (or 6, or 9) books at a time, and have it pull those books in roughly the order I have them in my queue, skipping over books that aren’t available. (Of course leaving them on the queue until they are.)

I say “roughly,” because if a book is part of a series, I want to read them in order. So, if the next book isn’t available, don’t just go on to the following book. Instead, skip ahead in my queue to the next non-series book that’s available.

When I find a bunch of interesting books, and put holds on them all at the library, they tend to all show up all at once. Then I have a big stack of books at home, most of which I’m not reading. That seems like a waste. Plus, then I have to return them all at once, often before I’ve finished with the last ones.

Obviously I could handle this by making a list of books I’m interested in, and then putting them on hold 3 (or 6, or 9) at a time. But that’s not only more work for me (which could easily be handled by the library’s computer), but there’s also no way to account for some of the books being already checked out.

Libraries should just handle this for me.

I have been surprised (and a little amused) by how difficult the first exercise in the Born to Run training guide is. It’s really just a combination of two exercises that I do all the time already, so I figured it would be pretty easy. But no.

Basically, it’s just single-leg standing with the heel raised. There are three versions with minor differences in what you do with the non-standing leg, to challenge your standing leg in different ways.

I have done single-leg standing for years as part of my tai chi practice. I also do calf-raises nearly every day, including some single-leg calf-raises. And yet. Put them together and things get dramatically harder.

With the single-leg standing exercises I do as part of my tai chi practice, I have my heel down—which makes standing on that foot much, much easier.

With the single-leg calf-raises, I’m only balancing on the standing leg for a few seconds, which turns out to also make a difference.

Standing on one foot with the heel off the ground, and then staying that way for tens of seconds, turns out to be much harder than I’d expected. But it’s harder in ways that I can already tell will mean practicing those exercises will quickly produce improvement not just in those exercises, but also in my running, and in my general foot strength and foot health.

In particular, I keep trying to jab the tip of my left index toe into the ground, when I should be using the pad of the toe. (Probably a left-over from decades of sometimes wearing too-small shoes. My index toes are longer than my big toes, which is not something that shoe salesmen in the 1960s thought about. Also my left foot seems to be a fraction of an inch longer than my right foot, so shoes that fit my right foot perfectly slightly constrained my left index toe.)

My Oura ring prepared an annual summary of the data it has gathered. One interesting bit shows the dramatic change in my activity since getting Ashley

This shows my activity levels across the day, averaging the whole year together:

The white area shows when I was engaging in “hard” activity—basically running, high-intensity interval training, and (if I was really going at it) lifting weights. I did quite a bit of those things for most of the year, and the Oura ring is interested to observe that it was largely between about 10:00 AM and noon.

That graph averages the whole year together. This graph shows the same thing, but just for the month of November (we got Ashley on November 2nd):

I had only a modest amount of hard activity, mostly early in the morning and then again at mid-day. (I assume those are bits where Ashley wanted to run and I tried to keep up with her, something that I quit doing after tripping, falling, and splitting the skin across my knee.) Basically, I replaced nearly all my hard activity with lots and lots more medium activity.

Just as an aside: My 4:00 PM cocktail hour really shows up on these graphs, with modest spikes in activity that I think have gotten larger now that I get the dog out for pre- and post- cocktail hour walks.

One other tidbit that changed with the dog has been my “restorative time,” periods of low activity where the heart rate falls quite a bit. You can see the difference between the first ten months of the year and the last two here:

I used to get at least some most days, but since I got the dog my restorative time has really dropped off. I think that’s partially just because my periods of low activity are shorter (because pretty soon I have to take the dog out again), and maybe also because, since I have less hard activity, I don’t feel the same impulse to really slow down when I get a chance to do so.

Ashley is teaching me how to stalk squirrels. First lesson: When the squirrel’s head is down, creep forward; when the squirrel raises his head, freeze.

Ashley, Jackie with a martini, and my beer.