Category: walking

Fitbit Thoughts

I enjoy the Fitbit. It’s amusing how it’s conditioned my thinking. Just like cats train us, the Fitbit has me trained.

I’m more congnizant of moving and the need to move. Whereas I used to attempt to be expedite doing things, I now make the most out of activities to get max movement. For example, I used to think, “Okay, I’m going to the master bedroom. What do I need to take back there?” Then I would load up so as to do only one trip. Now, I take one thing at a time and make multiple trips because I want those steps. This is also less stressful to me.

My average miles per day is up to five point seven three miles. Steps have increased to thirteen thousand, one hundred twenty-seven. Active minutes have increased to a seventy-one per day average.

It’s easy to forget to put the Fitbit back on. It needs to be removed for showers or baths, and recharging. My wife and I have both caught ourselves walking briskly around as we clean, accumulating steps, only to discover we don’t have our Fitbit on. So all that stepping you did, and no points! Damn!

My solution to the recharging side of it is to recharge at the end of the day. If I do forget to put it back on, my sleep won’t be tracked. That’s not a terrible loss.

The Fitbit’s sleep function seems iffy. One day it didn’t record my sleep at all. I reported it to Fitbit. We know we have some issues with it, they replied. We’re working on it.

Another night, my wife got up to check on something with the cats. I was also up at the time. It was about one thirty in the morning. According to the Fitbit, she slept uninterrupted for over seven hours.

The Fitbit can be cheated. That keeps me leery of all its numbers. For example, a rocking chair or playing with the cat with a string will increase your numbers. I’m dubious how much benefit either of those activities are to my overall goal of walking more and being more active.

Overall, after almost four months, I’m satisfied. We are more active. We go on walks together. Needing something for a salad or a green vegetable for dinner, we’ll just walk the mile to the store and back, together, to acquire the steps, miles and activities. We’ll walk to our favorite used book store, The Book Wagon. Its less than a mile away. Typically, we’ll combine them. The grocery is one direction and the book store is in the other, so we’ll end up with a three mile circuit.

Or, like yesterday, we’ll take a brisk walk around town and through the park. And sometimes, like yesterday, we’ll stop in a cafe, pub or coffee shop.

Yesterday, we stopped at Zoey’s for ice cream. I had the bourbon fudge gelato.

It was excellent.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

The end of the last century went well for me. Retiring from the military, I was living in the Bay area and was able to catch fire a start-up. I worked with diligent, capable people. We had fun and the future was exciting. U.S. Surgical and then Tyco bought us, and everything changed. We made money but it was a lot less fun.

Into this came a group with an unusual sound called ‘Smash Mouth’. They eventually had a few more hits and became well known for providing the theme music to ‘The Big Bang Theory’ on CBS, and for songs in the ‘Shrek’ franchise. Back in 1997, though, we knew them for ‘Walking on the Sun,’ with its cynical reflections on the hippie revolution, pop culture, advertising, and our future state of affairs.

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Today’s Theme Music

Testing, testing.

Can you hear me?

Excellent. Let’s get started.

Today’s theme music is by Fine Young Cannibals. This is ‘Good Thing’, from 1989. I think you’ll be pleased with the selection. It’s a fine song for streaming in your head as you conduct your business today.

Have a nice day.

That is all.

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Fitbit Writing

I’ve had my Fitbit for three and a half months. My daily average for steps is eleven thousand, seven hundred. My daily miles are five point five two. My personal best for daily steps was seventeen thousand, five hundred.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, I achieved almost twenty-two thousand steps and ten miles. I confess, if I’d known I was so close to doubling my average, I would have done it. That’s how I’m wired.

Now it’s the morning after.

I feel great but I question myself about what my Fitbit goal and expectations should be. I will work to reach and exceed my daily goals. I want to attempt another big walking and exercising day.

It’s the same way with writing. I typically write about eleven hundred words a day. I also edit, revise and polish. That’s part of my pantser organic writing process. My writing mind is like a loom weaving the story. I move back and forth through it.

Some days, I catch fire. The most I’ve ever written in one day was five thousand words, five thousand very intense words. Just like walking twenty-two thousand steps yesterday, it felt awesome. The next day, I wanted to do again. Why, if I could do five thousand words a day, every day, I’d become impressively prolific.

But the next day’s writing session was a struggle to achieve my standard output. I fought to achieve one thousand words and felt exhausted and disenchanted afterwards. It’s been like that with other writing days when I’ve doubled or tripled my average. Why, I tested myself to understand.

After thinking about this over the years, I’ve concluded that I do have a finite daily energy level. Exceeding that can happen but it takes it toll on the next day. I don’t know if science and medicine back me up on this, or if others have had the same experience. I know through my military experience of working twelve plus hours a day through illness and terrible conditions that I can draw deeper from the well. But doing so requires me to shut out absolutely everything else.

That was easy to do in a military environment. We had an established mission with a high priority. Other missions and units were depending on us. If we failed, a domino effect began. The stakes were high. So was the visibility.

Our expectations also set us up for success. Everyone outside of ours – family, friends and other unit members – understood our focus. They knew we didn’t have time or energy for anything else, and they gave us space.

But the writing experience is different from the military experience and the Fitbit experience. With Fitbit goals, it’s a personal goal. If I don’t make it, well, that sucks, but c’est la vie. The military commitment was well-established and understood.

Writing, however, is a terribly personal beast that has a hold on me. While the Fitbit goals require physical commitment with some smaller levels of intellectual and emotional commitments, I have all that in me, no problem. The military commitments were drawn at higher levels from those same veins.

The veins of energy and activity required for writing are much, much different. Physically, sitting in a chair, thinking, reading and typing, it doesn’t seem like it should be taxing. Yet, it becomes physically exhausting. Writing takes more out of me than walking all those steps.

Likewise, from intellectual and creative points of view, writing is more of a debilitating challenge. I worked for a decade for IBM as a planner and analyst. I was often presented with unique business cases to analyze and consider for my recommendations, observations and inputs. Those were interesting and challenging logic problems, and required intensely creative problem solving approaches, but still, they fell way short of what’s called for when fiction writing. Yes, my stories, characters, situations and worlds tend toward being complicated and involved. I remain constantly astounded by the levels of commitment I give my writing.

Returning to my Fitbit goals, I understand that twenty-two grand was a terrific result for me. I’ll enjoy it and move on because my goal is not to beat myself every day, but to maintain and achieve an average that will help me toward greater goals of being healtheir. In other words, the daily steps are not an end of themselves but part of a larger process.

So it is, too, with the writing. The word counts, editing, revising and polishing are not the end results. They’re part of a larger process of conceiving, writing, finishing and publishing a novel.

Time to write like crazy now, at least one more time.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Despite the sobering news out of Europe regarding terrorism and the most recent attack, we go full on pop mode streaming today, with a pause to think of those who were died or injured, those who lost someone, and those now distraught by the latest.

It’s part of the world wide web that we can know such news with the immediacy of video and audio recordings and feel others’ grief, but experience a much different reality on a personal level. A legacy of our immediate wired world is that we reach across the connections to offer ourselves and our resources, no matter how meager they are or their nature, because we feel helpless to do much more.

A cold front bulled in here, shooing the rain away and sweeping out the clouds. Except for some high, feathery cloud remnants, the weather is blue sky sunny. ‘Walking On Sunshine’ has already begun streaming in my brain, establishing itself as the song for the day.

I know, like, five things about this song.

  1. It’s by Katrina and the Waves.
  2. It was a hit in 1985, while I was driving around the southeastern quadrant of the continental United States.
  3. It’s the only song by KaTW that I know.
  4. It’s a bouncy melody with easily learned and remembered lyrics.
  5. The song’s properties lends itself to popular culture, so it’s been part of movie soundtracks, television shows, and advertisements.

Stay strong, everyone. Let’s do this.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Reflective mood today from dredges of disturbing dreams. Today’s selection is a double offering from Jackson Browne’s 1977 album, ‘Running on Empty’.   Here’s ‘Load Out/Stay’.

The first song begins as a quiet and pensive reflection on touring before shifting into something more triumphant and uplifting in ‘Stay’.  They’re pleasant accompaniment to walking through the day while thinking about what is and isn’t.

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s song is one of many that suffered from mondegreens. ‘Alive and Kicking’ by Simple Minds came out in 1985. Stationed at Shaw AFB in SC after returning from Okinawa, I was assigned to the 1701 MOBSS.

I lived in Columbia, about twenty-nine miles away, and a straight shot down the highway. The MOB in our unit designation was short for mobility. We went on temporary duty to other locations regularly. Sometimes I drove to those locations, such as Eglin AFB in Florida. Between that and my daily commute between Columbia and Shaw, I listened to a bit of radio.

When the song came out, I swore they were sometimes singing, “I like the chicken.” Naturally, that’s what I walked around singing. Still do when I stream the song in my head.

Here they are. From 1985, Simple Minds with ‘Alive and Kicking’. 

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Today’s Theme Music

Today’s blast from the past comes via The Americans’. The show is taking place in 1983 and features music, news and events from ’83. It included this song, ‘Major Tom (Coming Home)’, in the episode I watched the other night on Amazon.

‘Major Tom (Coming Home)’ is a continuation of a theme begun with David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ of 1969 about an astronaut, Major Tom, victimized by a malfunction while in space. ‘Space Oddity’ was an early hit for Bowie and drew me into his fold of fans. One of the best concerts of my life was seeing him in Charleston, WV during his glam rock period.

Peter Schilling released his song, ‘Major Tom (Coming Home)’ in 1983. Its techno-beat and clear, overly dramatic but positive lyrics work as background music streaming in my head while walking around Earth.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Admittedly, I don’t know much about Phillip Phillips. I know a couple of his songs, including this one. It was released in 2013.

I like the chorus of the song. Deciding to use it today after thinking about the song earlier in the week, I found this YouTube video. I like the children singing with him and the simple setting.

Here’s Phillips with the PS22 Chorus singing, ‘Gone, Gone, Gone’. Have a wonderful day. Beware of cravings.

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A Random Stream

‘Hey Ya’ is playing in my head but otherwise, thoughts are normalized streams of randomness.

  • Eva Lesko Natiello posted a blog about not quitting. I was happy to read it and read it again today because her words summarizes my writing process. Here’s one paragraph.
    • “Yesterday my manuscript was torturing me. I couldn’t move forward. Stuck in my puzzle. I was having trouble with the order of disclosure and who’s POV it should be. Should the dialogue contradict what the character was really thinking? Maybe she wasn’t thinking that at all. What was she thinking? Maybe it wasn’t her place to reveal it. Perhaps we should find out some other way.”
    • I like how she captured this process. Later, she mentions that she becomes frustrated and pushes herself to sit it in her chair and squirm it out. I don’t squirm; I close my eyes and bow my head. But’s it’s the same thing.
  • Earlier in February, Barbara Froman published an interview she conducted with Dr. Harrison Solow in 2013. I read it again this week. I recommend it. I like what Harrison said in this paragraph:
    • “And someone has had the great good sense to leave this book alone. Or if altered, respectfully tuned to perfect pitch by an invisible hand, so that each word has the unmistakable ring of authenticity. The reader perceives nothing enharmonic. A true book and a beautiful one. But although there is no false note, neither is the entire composition a universal symphony. There is vision here — intensely personal, internally arranged.”
    • There is the difficulty, finding the notes so no false notes are played in the novel.
  • Gray, cold air cups the buildings and trees this morning. Walking past a row of apartments, I smell…laundry detergents and fabric softeners being vented out. Nostalgia strikes a chime. This is a day like my Pittsburgh childhood. Smells often transport me.
  • Striding past the cemetery, I acknowledge, again, I like cemeteries but I don’ t like them. The history they represent touches me and prompts questions about the lives beneath the headstones. But I think the land where cemeteries reside could be better used for other things. I’ve never had the interest in visiting them to talk to people who passed on; I just speak to them in my head. But it matters much to others. I guess I’m an unsentimental jerk.
  • Watched  ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ on Friday night. Wasn’t impressed. It seems like, as my wife called it, a movie war, dated and hackneyed. Others obviously think differently, as they nominated it for the Best Picture. Again, it must be me. I do admire Desmond Doss, the conscientious objector (cooperator, he calls himself) at the story’s center. I thought Garfield did a good job, but overall, Mel Gibson as a director seemed heavy handed. I found Hollywood vs History’s details about the differences between the movie and the facts very interesting.
  • Many smart houses, with their smart thermostats, are actually connected to apps that allow you to call it from your phone and change the temperature or turn the lights on or off. That’s not a smart house, but a remote control. A smart house, to me, is one that I don’t have to program and set reminders other than to provide it with some basic operating instructions. For instance, my system is programmed for fifty-eight degrees at night. But if the temperature is dropping into the mid twenties Fahrenheit, like this week, I turn it up to sixty-four at night. Part of this is because the house design; the furnace is mounted on its side in the attic space. It’s not insulated, and the drip line runs through it and down inside a garage wall that also isn’t insulated. That sometimes allows the drip line to freeze. It’s a shortcoming that I’m working on to fix, but meanwhile, a smarter house would be helpful.
  • ‘Nocturnal Animals’ was last night’s household viewing feature. Well done and everything, but not my style of movie.
    • During the movie, my wife turned to me and asked, “Have you ever killed me in a novel?” No, I haven’t.
    • Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Tony Hastings, is a writer. During a conversation, he states, “All writers write about themselves.” I kind of agree; I am the baseline from which I begin, but then it changes according to the character and story’s needs and expectations. Often, though, I model a character on another person and use how I would expect them to behave as my guide.
    • My wife also wondered what I thought of Tony’s revenge. While it’s not something that I would have done, I can see how a writer can end up going there.
    • If you don’t know what I’m writing about, sorry. I don’t mean to be obtuse but didn’t want to reveal too much of the plot.
  • Now time to dip myself back in the imaginary world of an imaginary future, technology and people. In other words, I’m going to write like crazy, at least one more time. I’ll probably do a little squirming, too.
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