Holy crap!

Nicolas Flamel was a real person!

I subscribe to the near-daily interesting tidbit site of KnowledgeNews. Once you have a subscription (or a lifetime one as I do), they send you an email detailing various interesting bits of knowledge, typically based on current events.

Today's current event was a discussion of the history of alchemy, inspired by the opening of the fifth Harry Potter film.

In particular,

In 1382, alchemist Nicolas Flamel insisted he had created
gold with the help of a mystical Hebrew text. Flamel was
full of it, but his contemporaries had actually begun to
discover something useful: nitric, hydrochloric, and
sulfuric acids--all highly corrosive substances with
serious scientific promise. And monks were tapping alchemy
for medicine, applying what they had learned while
translating alchemical texts to create herbal and mineral
cures.

Way cool, and quite entertaining.

I read a lot of magazines on my train ride back from my morning workouts with Kris. Today's magazine was this month's Health. On page 44, there's a statement,

"On average, female smokers die 14.5 years earlier than nonsmokers."

The source of the statistic is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fourteen and a half years earlier. Sure, that's on average, and some people smoke until their 90th birthday. If smoking is, however, the difference between living to 65 and living to 80, wouldn't that possibly be motivation to stop stinking by stopping smoking?

Not sure if most smokers know that they stink. As in really stink. As is, do you really think that by going outside, smoking, and waving your hands around, that I couldn't smell the stench on your clothes?

I suspect the quality of life for those extra 14.5 years is better for non-smokers, too.

I am now in the workout-every-day phase of my season. My hamstring is still bothering me, but it seems to be okay when I consciously stretch it several times a day like I'm supposed to.

I may, however, be overdoing the workouts. I'm not sure yet, because Sunday's practice was so hard for me, with the heat and my hamstring bothering me. Sunday's practice was four hours long, followed by a fairly light Monday workout at Velocity Sports. It had to be light, I was able to finish it.

This morning, Heather and I returned to the Center of Balance, this time in the morning to try another instructor. I suspected that, well, since VS has the hard instructor in the morning, so maybe CoB also has the hard instructor in the morning: only the hard core people would get up early in the morning to work out, right? Right.

Heather and I both broke a sweat in the same place in the workout, about 3/4 of the way into the hour long Pilates/Yoga/Core progression, and near the beginning of the abs set. Once again, there were maybe two exercises I couldn't do, but, because of the much smaller class size in the morning (8 people vs about 30 in the lunch class last week), I received individualized alignment help.

After adjusting both Heather and I on a particularly difficult ab position, the instructor asked if we were both soccer players. Apparently our builds, strengths and weaknesses, all implied the movement of soccer players. When Heather said, no, ultimate frisbee, the instructors face lit up. Clearly, yes, he was close in his first guess, but yes, ultimate made sense.

He encouraged us to stick with the program for a month and see how much better our sense of balance is. I think that's a fine idea, since he teaches Tuesdays and Thursdays, offset from the VS MWF morning schedule.

Of course, this will make me a morning person.

In the evening, I went to track practice. The workout didn't seem too hard on paper: 1 mile warmup run, 2 sets of 200-300-400-300-200. Two steps into the warmup run, however, and I knew this was going to be a very hard workout for me. Not only were my legs total moosh, but my left achilles was shooting up flares of hot-white-poker pains.

I managed to make it through one set of 200-300-400-300-200 with careful running to minimize my achilles aggravation, before I gave up during the break and left early.

Since my legs were moosh, I decided an ice bath was in order, so filled the tub with cold water, skipping the ice. A few screeches later and a magazine later, and I was sitting in the bathtub, the really really cold bathtub. I kept moving slightly to prevent the thin layer of water next to my skin from warming up, which I'm sure made the whole process even colder. Lyndsay swears by these things, so cold water it is.

Three articles later, I was done with my 20 minutes in the water. As I stood up from the bath water, I realized I was about to dump all of this water down the drain, when all I did was sit in it. It may not have been clean enough to drink (or it might have been), but it was certainly clean enough to put on my plants.

After drying off, I wandered to the backyard for a hose. Guy had bought a potable water hose for me last week, as "potable" is the only type of hose I'll buy or use at this point, so I had one that would work for the syphoning I had planned.

After filling the hose with water, I kept trying to figure out how to get the other end out the window and onto the ground without letting air into the line. I gave up after about five minutes, threw the hose out the window, verified the one end was still submerged in the bathtub, and wandered outside.

My plan was to get the water out of the tub, onto my garden. The problem, however, was getting the water flow to start.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to use a 25' hose as a drinking straw for tub water?

It's hard. I bruised my lips in a circle trying to suck the water onto the garden. I mean, hello? How many people do you know have circle bruises on their lips? (Me? I know of only one.) Worse, done to save less than 2 cents of water?

Eventually I realized the suction was going to fail, and I ended up using a bucket and hauling the water from the tub to the garden the old fashioned way: by hand.

This austerity program is killing me! Piece by little piece I don't fill up my life with pieces of crap, or items that will make me happy for a moment, but ultimately clutter up my life and weigh me down emotionally at all the stuff I have.

I know the eventual outcome. Doesn't change the face that I want it (where "it" is the object du moment). I want it now.

Each time I think, oooooooo, I want, I want, I stop and think for a moment. Do I really want it? Can I live without it?

Pretty much the only thing I'm spending money on now is food.

I'm still receiving little surprises every now and then, as an order I placed months ago is sent to me (hello, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). For the most part, however, my credit card bills are smaller (and you say, "zero balance?"), my bank account is staying the same, and I'm slowly weaning myself from the obssesive consumerism that has been a constant in my life for the last decade.

If only I had bought an iPhone before I started this program.

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Yeah, so, writing and posting, two actions, not one. If you are one of the small number of people who come here on a regular basis, you'll probably want to skip to the end (or, the other end) to catch up. I'm posting in reverse cronological order, so yesterday's post comes first.

Nothing like playing blog catch up to figure out what's been goin' on.