Tag Archives: lifestyle

Routine woes

It’s the last day of school for teachers, and although I will be in next week I’ve already started to alter my early morning schedule. No workout this morning and the latest I’ve written for this blog on a school day since I started writing daily in the summer of 2019.

This is a bit of a wake up call for me. My pattern for workouts and meditation start to fall apart in the summer when I break my work routine. I don’t want that to happen (again) this summer so I’m going to need to build in a regular routine that works. I used to think routines were boring, now I realize they help me get stuff done.

One routine I broke this year is archery. I haven’t shot arrows in a couple months. I haven’t been upset about it, I let it go because everything felt overwhelming and I decided writing, fitness, and meditation were more important. I hope to build archery back into my summer routine… I just need to figure out what that routine will look like.

I’ve got one more week to figure it out.

Over tired

I crashed and burned when I got home yesterday. Just felt wiped out. Slept for a couple hours on the couch and now it’s after midnight and I can’t sleep.

Two more school days, then another week to clean up and prep for next year. Then my holidays begin. Until then, I need to keep a better pattern of sleep.

I’ve done a lot to take care of myself the last few years and sleep needs to be the next thing I figure out. I used to live easily on 5-6 hours sleep but I need more now, and I’m not getting it. I need to figure out a sleep pattern that is healthy and works for me. And that should start with me not looking at my screen so late… and on that note, it’s time to get some shut-eye!

In debt we trust

If there is one thing you can bank on, it’s that people will spend more than they have. Most people live beyond their means. Maybe they have a savings account, and maybe that savings account is growing… But then a purchase is made: a bigger house, a new car, a renovation, a medical expense, a car repair, a new furnace, a high definition TV, a fabulous new outfit, a vacation… and then the savings account diminishes, and it’s time to go (further) into debt.

I received this add from my bank yesterday:

What’s the message? Today is a great day to meet your shopping goals! Translation: Purchase on borrowed money, and take your time paying it back. Buy, buy, buy, by borrowing, borrowing, borrowing, sending you deeper and deeper into debt. It’s easy, so go ahead and spend money you don’t have.

The thing about this advertisement is that it’s not selling you any one product, it’s selling you a lifestyle where you can live in greater debt. It’s selling you ‘affordable’ interest. It’s selling you a pattern of lifetime debt. Buy now, pay later, and keep paying.

That savings account you once used to build, now grows only immediately after a salary cheque… then each month instalment payments on debt, added to monthly expenditures, eats away any hope of savings. But don’t worry, you’ll find away to almost pay for the next big purchase. Almost. And your bank will lend you just a little more to pay it off. And then you can set your own pace to pay it off. The slower you go, the more you pay, the less you have to accumulate savings… The more you go into debt after that next big purchase.

Welcome to the endless cycle of debt.

An extra day

This past weekend was a 3-day weekend, and it was wonderful to get the extra day off. I feel like I had a holiday. It’s amazing the difference between a two-day and a three-day weekend. If I were ever to start a company, I think I’d institute a 4-day work week.

I’m looking forward to work today. I feel well rested. I have thought about some goals I really want to get to. I finished an audio book that I had about 10 hours to listen to at the start of the weekend.

How different would life be if the work week was just 4 days long? Would people be more productive either at work or at home? Would happiness be greater or would people fall into a similar pattern of happiness that we have now? What would a world with 4 day weeks do to the overall creativity expressed by people?

I’d love to see an entire country try this out. I think the first thing you’d notice is positive immigration… I know I’d like to live there!

50 is the new 30

When I was a kid, I’d watch TV and the grandmother in her 60’s would be hobbling with a cane, and grandad wore a hat that only old people wear.

When I was 25, I moved to Vancouver. At the time my dad was 46 or 47 and I used to call him ‘my old man’.

Today my brother-in-law turned 50. He and my sister have always been the young, hip family, and now he has joined us ‘old folks’ in their 50’s. But they are still young at heart… and so are we! Although my hairline might disagree, and I’m now needing glasses to look at my phone and read the already-too-large font, I have a hard time seeing myself as old.

50 is the new 30. Does this sound cliche? Yes. Do I care? No.

My in-laws are celebrating their 60th anniversary in a few days. My wife and I celebrated our 23rd yesterday. As we look at old photos and reminisce, I don’t look back and think the best years have happened already. Life may be short, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fill the time we have left with new adventures, joy, and activities that keep us feeling young.

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Update for those of you that watched Three’s Company growing up: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR66HGfT/

Aches and pains

I do a lot to take care of myself and for the most part, I feel good about my progress. But today I feel old.

I usually take in the attitude that age is just a number. I’m as young as I believe that I am. Today my age wins.

Saturday on my 5km walk with my wife, she decided to jog for some of it. I enjoy jogging at my wife’s pace and thought nothing of it. I will run on my treadmill faster than this, and for longer than the two sections we jogged for. Sunday after my archery I did an 8 minute leg workout that I usually do, and added about 4 reps of an assisted pistol squat, because I’m very slowly trying to get myself to the point that I can do these.

But by Sunday night my knee was hurting. I don’t know why, but think it might be running on uneven terrain rather than on the treadmill, or trying the pistol squat after my 8 minute workout, when my legs are fatigued. Then I got a hip cramp that night.

After this my shoulders and back tightened up and for the first time in several months I felt shoulder pain. I only did one exercise with my arms that was slightly different than my usual routine, and I intentionally did it with light weights since it was new. Besides, it was a bicep exercise, not a shoulder one.

This ache caused me to tense up my upper back and the tension between my shoulder blades was so tight, I had to push my back into doorway jams to work the kinks out several times during the day… basically using the corners of the doorway to massage the knots out of my upper back.

Old. That’s the feeling this morning. I feel like the rust has formed on my joints, and the whole machine is seizing up. This morning I’ll ride my stationary bike for 20 leisurely minutes, do some stretching, and that will be my workout. Tomorrow I have a massage booked and it will be a painful one. A lot of deep tissue work on my upper back, and hamstring work because my tight hamstrings tend to be the root of my leg and hip issues.

Maybe after that I can remember why I work so hard to take care of myself, remember to spend more time stretching, and start to feel young again. Maybe I need reminders like this to refocus me. When I don’t exercise, my back pain becomes chronic. But I have to say that it’s not fun to ache in several places at once, and while exercise usually keeps the rust away, right now this machine feels old and rusty.

This morning my age is getting the best of me… but I’m not done feeling young. I’ll work my way back to healthy, and oil these joints back to fully operational again. The alternative to this is being lazy and letting myself fall back into a life of daily pain, and feeling even older than I do today. No, I’d rather keep active and find my way back to feeling young again.

Limbo

I was in our local drug store yesterday and they were taking walk-ins for the covid-19 vaccine. People just needed to be 55 years old or older to get it. I’m a year and a half too young and so I couldn’t get mine. It was wonderful to see, but also so frustrating that I still have to wait. I know it’s not a quick fix, I know I work in schools where students will not be vaccinated for quite some time. I know we will have strict protocols right through the end of June, and potentially when we start up in September again. I know all this, but I feel like I’m in perpetual limbo waiting for my turn to get the vaccine.

I also wonder about all the people choosing not to take the vaccine. Vaccines are not perfect, but neither are countless over the counter drugs that people use every day. For instance, ibuprofen is a drug many people take way too frequently and can be very bad for you.  Here is some information about ibuprofen:

“Regular use of ibuprofen may eventually cause:

  • kidney and liver damage
  • bleeding in the stomach and bowels
  • increased risk of heart attack.”

And, “NSAIDs such ibuprofen can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke in people with or without heart disease or the risk factors for heart disease.”

In a global pandemic, no vaccine is going to be perfect, but the fear mongering and paranoid opportunists have pushed the anti-vax stupidity to what would be comical levels if the consequences of their stupidity weren’t spreading so quickly. I’m frequently surprised by people sharing concerns about the vaccine who seem to have very limited understanding of what research has been done, people who confuse RNA with DNA, and people who cherry pick their information from biased news sources and spout their bias as ‘facts’.

All this leads me to think that when I finally get the vaccine, while I’ll sigh a little sigh of relief, and while I’ll do a little happy dance… I just might find myself in the same limbo a while longer. I’m not sure it’s going to bring me as much comfort as I would like it to.

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Meanwhile, as a PSA… Keep taking your Vitamin D!  (See ‘Vitamin D and Covid-19‘ and ‘Vitamin D could save your life‘.)

Sore from workouts

There are different kinds of soreness that your body can experience, and one of those is the soreness that comes after a hard workout. It’s an ache in your muscles that says to you, ‘these muscles were pushed hard’! And, it is felt even more the second day after you worked the muscles than it is felt just one day after.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of archery recently and so I hadn’t been doing a lot of hard workouts, because it’s hard to pull a 50 pound bow and aim it well when your arms are fatigued even before you get started. But this past week I knew I was going to shoot less and so after a couple months of taking it easy with my workouts, I pushed myself. Right now my triceps, my lats, and my quads are workout sore. Yesterday my chest was too, but that has subsided.

While it’s a feeling that lets me know that I’ve done a good job increasing my strength, it can also be a bit much when I’m feeling it in too many places at once. That’s a reminder that I don’t have to go into ‘all or nothing’ mode. That becomes a challenge as I get older. I cruise for a while, working out but not pushing myself too hard, then I go speed boat and full throttle for a bit, before going back to cruise mode. Overall, I’d have to say that I’ve been good at balancing this off, or evening it out, over the past few years. I think this is a lapse rather than a pattern.

So this morning I’ll focus on stretching, and moving my muscles with lighter weights to help the lactic acid move out of my sore muscles. And I’ll remember that while a little muscle soreness can be good, there really can be too much of a good thing.

Tracking My Heart Rate

I’ve always had a slow pulse. When I was in my last year of high school I was in a pool training for water polo 10 to 12 times a week. When I took my pulse in the morning, it was usually between 32 and 35 beats per second. Now when I take my pulse, usually after my morning meditation, it tends to sit between 49 and 43 beats per minute.

It’s healthy to have a nice slow resting heart rate, but sometimes it can hinder me too. Sometimes, when I’m not active, I can feel tired and lazy. Especially after I eat a big meal. I think it’s because while my body focuses on digestion, my slow pulse doesn’t feed the rest of me enough to keep me going when I’m sedentary. So, I tend to move around a lot after lunch, because I’m not too productive sitting at my desk just after a meal.

I’ve recently been tracking my heart rate with my phone. As I mentioned, the first time is resting, after my meditation, the second time during my workout. The App works by putting my finger over the camera, with the light on. The problem is that I just had to switch phones and this new phone uses a camera that’s farther away from the light than my previous phone, and my measurement during or usually just after activity tends to fail and force a retry. This can happen several times and my heart rate is slowing while I do this.

I shouldn’t let this bug me. I can calculate my pulse without the App, but I like having it track my progress and it bugs me that I can’t get it to work easily. I’m going to have to try a new app, one that works for me, rather than fight me. I like tools to track my progress, that’s why my sticker chart works so well. So I need to find a new tracker, and surrender the fact that I paid for this App… which, while a nominal fee, wasn’t enough to keep my feeling frustrated on a regular basis. Our tools need to work for us, not against us.

Flossing your teeth

Flossing is something that is extremely good for you, you know it, it doesn’t take long… and you don’t do it.

“You can exercise, eat well, and be emotionally healthy, but if you don’t floss, cavities could be just the beginning of your problems. 

Flossing every day is so crucial to health that it’s one of the questions included in the Living to 100 Life Expectancy Calculator.” ~BusinessInsider.com

I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only one who feels guilty going to get my teeth cleaned, because I know that the dental assistant is going to make me feel bad for not flossing. I’m not the only one who remembers to floss for 2-3 days before that cleaning, then promptly forgets to floss until just before the next cleaning. Or I floss when I can feel something stuck between my teeth.

For over half a century that has been my flossing story, until a month ago. I seem to have developed a bit of a gap between two of my lower back left molars and food gets stuck in there very easily. I learned this when I had to floss a few days in a row because I could feel food between these teeth. After that, I was in the bathroom the following night without the feeling of something stuck and decided to floss anyway, after brushing my teeth. Sure enough there was food stuck between those same molars even though I didn’t feel it.

I was a bit grossed out thinking that every night I go to bed with decaying food between my teeth, even though I always brush my teeth. I realized that I’m probably going to get a cavity if I don’t do this daily. And just like that a new habit was finally formed!

So here are is my public service announce: You will increase your life expectancy by flossing every day; it’s a small, easy habit that doesn’t take long in your day; and if you don’t do it, you probably go to sleep every night with decaying food in you mouth.

Want to start this healthy, life-extending habit? Do a 3-night experiment: Brush your teeth like you usually do for three nights in a row… then floss your teeth.

See what you leave behind in your mouth every night, despite your good habit of brushing.