Always Have An Out

 "What," said Jerry, "is the least likely athletic event you could still possibly engage in but would never in a millon years even attempt?"

"You mean, like the Boston Marathon or a bike race, something like that?" replied Vince, removing the drink from his mouth in order to do so.

"Yes, exactly, any athletic event along those lines, something that is possible, if not probable."

Jerry stuck his fork in the pasta that covered his plate and pushed and pulled at his dinner while watching Vince mull over the question.

"Hmmm..." Vince mused. "I'm going to have to go with surfing. In order to learn to surf I'd have to learn to swim, and I'd also have to get in an ocean, and oceans are full of creatures that can kill a man with one bite."

With a bemused expression Jerry stared at his friend for a few seconds and then responded with just a hint a sarcasm in his voice. "You've never even seen an ocean, much less put a toe in the water, and yet you're going to rule out surfing? How the hell can you you do that? You might love being in the water, you might take to it like a fish!"

"Yeah, Vince retorted, "That could be true, and I might take to the air like a bird but I'm still not going parachuting either."

Jerry squinted at his friend and said, "Well why didn't you say parachuting then? I can understand the danger of parachuting, much more realistic a fear than being afraid of the ocean."

"Because parachuting is not an athletic event. It's just trying suicide with an out. And I'm not afraid of the ocean, just what's in it."

I Suppose There Are Worse Things To Have Rattling Around Your Head On A Tuesday Morning...

There was a young man named McGillicuddy

Who spent oodles of time playing with silly putty

For this he was held in contempt

By both the clean and unkempt

And labeled a habitual silly putty fuddy duddy

Baby It's Alright

 

Being For The Benefit Of My Health...

This morning I weighed in 52 pounds lighter than I was on November 4th of 2020.

Some people might say that is amazing, some people might say that sounds drastic, and some people might say "How the hell did you do that?'

Me, I say "I'm only at the halfway point, got to stick to the plan and get to where I want to be".

Owed explanation: On November 4th of 2020 I weighed in at 320 pounds (that's slightly more than 145 kilos to just about everybody in the world outside of the U.S.).

I was, from a medical perspective, what is known as morbidly obese. I had known for a while that I needed to do something about my weight (for at least the past three to five years) but it was so much easier to do nothing (other than buy larger clothes).

The above picture is not of me at my heaviest - the above pic was taken when I was 13 pounds lighter than my heaviest weight. It is a pic of me at a BMI in excess of 41. That's morbid obesity - fairly disgusting.

The above pic here is of me when I hit the "50 pounds down" point. It's crazy that after losing fifty pounds I still have a BMI that is in excess of 36 and I am still morbidly obese. 

Crazy as in "Why didn't I do something about this before?"

Still, it's progress that I am reveling in. For starters, I do not have to spend 10 to 15 minutes putting on my socks and shoes anymore (and be exhausted afterward).

So, what did I do to shed 52 pounds between November 4th 2020 and March 28th 2021?

KETO, plain and simple. Last year I ran into a friend I hadn't seen in over six months and he had lost over 50 pounds and, as he put it, "felt better than he had in decades."

Naturally I asked how he did it and his reply was, "KETO".

We discussed the KETO diet extensively, and afterward I did a little research on the internet.

The basics of KETO looked simple enough - give up carbs, specifically those found in pasta, bread, starches & beer, and avoid sugar.

Simple, but as we all know, not really, for pizza and beer are a delicious combo.

But on November 4th of 2020 I committed to KETO, and I have not had pizza nor beer since then (beer is liquid bread, and it goes, as we all know (again), straight to the gut).

My carb intake most days is limited to 20 to 30 grams, I pretty much avoid sugar altogether (that part is fairly easy, never been a candy eater).

I enjoy a wide variety of foods (king of the omelet these days, and eating fish at least 3 days a week), and I'm not starving myself - fact is, I almost always feel full being on KETO.

I found a ton of positives and negatives about being on a KETO diet on the good ol' interweb, but when it came down to it the positives far outweighed the negatives, especially the positive of having a friend who has been on the diet lifestyle for awhile and had absolutely terrific positive results.

This coming Friday I see my Doctor for a physical for the first time since I started this - it's going to be interesting to see his reaction to my weight loss (my Doctor has been wanting me to lose anywhere from 70 to 100 pounds for over a decade now).

I'll post a follow-up to this in June.

Some Things Are Just Beautiful

 

Some Had To Go Beyond The Keen To Earn Their Freedom

He tells people that he simply jumped off a boat to get to the United States.

He almost always fails to mention it was a Soviet fishing trawler off the coast of Alaska in 1981, and that he had to swim 800 yards in bone-chilling cold seas to get to a small rock that he was able to take shelter on.

All while being shot at by the KGB agent who had been assigned to the boat.

Thanking all available gods and goddesses that it was an extremely foggy morning.

Ordinary People Living Extraordinary Lives

 Her story was about as incredible as any I'd ever heard in fact or fiction.

At the age of 12 she ran away from home, fleeing a dangerously abusive mother for what she considered a safer life on the streets.

At 17, still living on the streets, she met a man who did not want to take advantage of her or use her. He simply enjoyed her strength and spirit, and her company.

They fell in love and married before her 18th birthday.

They built a life together in the way the best teams do - every decision they made was based upon whether or not the result of that decision would be mutually beneficial. Their marriage was truly a partnership and they spent their lives accomplishing goals together that they couldn't imagine accomplishing alone.

She went back to school and was able to not only earn a high school diploma, but also a college degree. She became a school teacher.

Forty-eight years after they married her husband passed away. 

She was, as you may well imagine, devastated.

She did not stay devastated long though, for she knew her husband would want her to cherish the memory of the life they had created and enjoyed together, but he would not want her to mourn his passing for the rest of her life. He would want her to continue to enjoy life, to go out and embrace life anew, as she would have wanted him to do if she had passed first.

And so she did. 

She took time to travel and track down members of her family she had closed the book on almost 55 years ago, and she met a man on one of her adventures who eventually became her second husband.

Then she decided to track down the father she had never known. 

She discovered that he lived in the same state she did. Not only did they live relatively close to one another, but he had remarried, and she met siblings she had never known.

The only complication was that her father's current wife was someone she had gone to school with over 45 years ago...which stunned me a little - her 91 year-old father was married to a former classmate of hers? 

Wild.

Until You Wake Up On A Respirator That Is

 

The Day After, Again

 

Into The Light By Joseph Campbell, Cast Bronze 2002

 

The Funky Colors Of Fruits & Vegetables

 

It Snowed...A Lot.

 

The Abandoned & The Derelict Part II

 

Get Those Hatches Batten'd Down

The Abandoned & The Derelict, Part I

 

Epitaph For A Locomotive

 The Great Western Railway locomotive lay on it's side, boiler crushed in, lights busted out, exposed wheels creaking with a low squeal in the wind.

  Prairie grass grew tall all around the shell of the once powerful machine. Birds nested in the crushed open sandbox that once sat at the crest of the boiler. The decades of weather that had passed over it since the derailment and decision to abandon rather than salvage the old engine had stripped the exposed side of all paint, and rust had begun to eat away at the resting bulk.

   The line had been abandoned less than a decade after the wreck, which was a hundred years ago now. The closest roads to the now torn up old track bed were more than 50 miles away. Fewer than 10 people knew where the remains of what once was a proud and prized steam engine lay.

   Abandoned and exposed to the all consuming elements.

The Las Vegas Pre-Emptive Divorce

 An acquaintance of mine told me he had flown out to Vegas the other day with the intention of getting married.

'cept when he and his bride-to-be showed up at the little chapel on the strip (I have no idea which specific one), the proprietors of the joint refused to marry them.

Not because they showed up two hours past the scheduled hour of betrothal, and not because they could not produce the required Clark County, NV marriage license, and not even because neither of them were wearing masks.

The people who ran the little chapel of now & forever bliss refused to marry them because they were just about falling-down drunk.

Of course, this was not the first time the proprietors of the little church of endless joy had encountered that specific situation, and they had a plan in place for just such contingencies.

They escorted TG & his future devoted life-long hunny bunny down a hall to a room they called "Recovery."

In this room were a few lounge chairs, recliners, and even what appeared to TG an antique fainting couch (repo, no doubt).

TG also explained that the room had a large kitchen sink, a bathroom, and cases of bottled water stacked everywhere.

And, he further elaborated, their were little trash cans all over the room - virtually encircling each lounge chair and recliner.

I got married in Vegas once, I do not remember the place AB & I got married at having anything like that.

Of course, we did not show up at the place hours late, and drunk out of our gourds, so there well could have been a room exactly like that there, we just never had to make use of it.

As TG was telling me this story I noticed he was not wearing a wedding band, and there was no Mrs TG in sight (we were in a fairly small bar & grill, fairly easy to scope out the room).

I gave TG a quizzical look and pointed at his empty ring finger. At which time he started laughing his tookus off.

For a few seconds I thought I was going to have to perform the Heimlich maneuver, or at least give him a quick hard slap, but he regained control of himself and then told me the rest of the story.

It seems he had almost immediately passed out in one of the recliners, coming to periodically to make use of a couple of the trash cans and once to spend a few minutes with his face under the cold running water of the kitchen sink.

On none of the those occasions, he stated, did it occur to him to check on his blushing bride to be.

After he passed out following the kitchen sink experience, he was awoken first by someone kicking his feet, and second by that same someone emptying a full bottle of water on the crotch of his pants.

Needless to say, he got up with a start and started yelling and flailing about the room. The woman who had agreed to marry him returned his yelling & flailing in kind, and they continued this until a stout young man open the door with what TG said was a dramatic flair, and asked in a loud firm voice,

"Is everything okay?"

The woman who had been all set to enter the magical world of matrimony just hours before looked at the stout young man and calmly asked, "Would you please call me a cab?". The stout young man turned away and had nearly shut the door when the now-reluctant bride spoke up again, "Wait for me please, I do not want to be alone in this room with this idiot."

And with that she gathered up her phone and purse, bunched up her dress as much as she could, and stalked out.

TG told me he just stood in the room for about twenty minutes after she left and then noticed the time - it was only 3:30 in the afternoon, which meant they must have shown up for their 10:30 wedding at 12:30, and they'd only been in that room drying out for a couple of hours.

TG stood there next to me holding his drink for a few quiet seconds, so I took the opportunity to ask him a question.

"When and where did you meet this woman?"

"Fortnight. We meet playing Fortnight a few months back. She has mad skills when it comes to online zombie killing. She wasn't like any of the other women I'd meet playing the game."

I do not know much about Fortnight, but I do know there are over 250 million registered players - and chances are neither TG nor the former fiancé were unique players in anyway, shape or form.

 

The Best Part Of Waking Up, Dragging Yourself Out Of Bed & Going To The Gym

 

At this time of year the sunrises in Colorado lean toward the spectacular. my drive to the gym takes me westbound on Jewell to Sheridan. Sometimes it's the best part of my entire day.