It was blurry, but nice

It was a no-good, dreary, rainy day.  It was like that yesterday too, but sans rain.  At least yesterday I could go outside, even if I couldn't go out and soak up some sun.  Yesterday I went out and walked for a couple of miles, and there were even some pretty leaves.

See?  Pretty.

Today it rained.  Pretty much the whole day.  I went to see my dentist, which might have been awful if he were somebody else, but my dentist is not awful.  We always have good conversations.  And his daughter, whom I like, works for him, and I love to listen to their back-and-forth.  So that part was nice.  Not so nice when he was doing hurty things to my gums with small metal instruments, but nice other than that.

Around two today, on the second day of the sun not having come up and what the hell?  The sun is supposed to come up EVERY DAY.  It's in the rules.  The physical, astronomical rules.  But no.  No sun.  Stupid sun.

Anyway, around two today, I got an email asking me to go to another building.  Something that should have been working was not working, and somebody needed to go push a button.  You would think that at NASA we would have button-pushing robots, or telepathically stimulated on switches, or something.  Instead, we have a middle aged system administrator who walks over and pushes the button.  Cheaper.  More reliable.  No firmware updates.

I was happy to get the email.  I had been trying to convince myself to go for a walk out in the rain, and the parts of me that dislike being wet had been winning.  I took off my glasses first.  I am not really very near sighted, and I don't need the glasses for either walking or button-pushing.  And I hate the raindrops on them.  So glasses off.  Then I put on my rain skirt (see yesterday's blog) and my raincoat, and I stuck my phone in my pocket, and off I went.

I don't really mind walking in the rain.  What I mind is my face getting wet.  This is only a problem in light rain, when those tiny raindrops are more like mist blowing.  Very wet mist.  Today was a very wet misty rainy day.

I walked over and hit the button, and stayed to verify that the thing had really turned on.  Then I walked back to my building and emailed the fellow to let him know that his machine was working again.  Then after all that, he emailed me to say that he hoped the weather wasn't bad.  He had heard it wasn't nice out.

Huh.  I was mostly thinking about what a lazy git I was for not going out on my regular walk.  I just needed a nudge.  I had forgotten that in fact most people would not have walked the mile over to the other building.  Most people would have driven.  Or made an excuse.  "Can't do it right now, in the middle of something important.  Will get to it first thing in the morning.  (When the sun is out.)"  It would not have made a nice, if damp, change for them. 

I think this is one of those things that sets hikers aside from other people.  It's not that we necessarily enjoy going out in the rain.  Although some do.  Or being uncomfortable.  (Although some do.) It's that we've forgotten that going out in the rain isn't a regular thing.  It's just one more way to have a walk.  A sunny day, a windy day, a day with mosquitoes, a day with deer, a day with rain.  They're all different types of walking days.  

Love walking days.

I gave blood today. And people were nice to me.

Guess what I did today, Internet?  I gave blood!  Rich, juicy blood.  Mmmmm.

Sorry, got off track.  Started thinking about rare stake.  I mean steak.

I listened to a song about cannibalism and now I'm all confused.

Anyway so I gave blood and it was a fun time.  And there were cookies!  JD and I calculated the caloric value of a pint of blood (not even counting the extra they take for testing!) at about six hundred calories.  So those cookies and the tiny can of juice are free, by my count.  Although the buffet we went to tonight wasn't.  But at least I started my day on the straight and narrow, sort of.

They said I wasn't allowed "vigorous" exercise but I figured walking isn't all that vigorous, so I went for a walk.  Then I forgot about the precautionary notes and started jogging.  Of course, my version of jogging still isn't that vigorous.  And besides, I still had on a bandaid.  So I had it covered!  So to speak.

Between walking over to get my blood drawn, and walking and jogging, and my many many trips to the buffet, I went over 10000 steps today!  Yay! 

The snazzy NASA auditorium with futuristic looking tables and stuff, set up for a blood drive.

It's no lie:  They have cookies!  It must be the dark side.

All Mondays should be like this

Today was kind of nice, yall.  Nothing bad happened.  Yes, I took Xanax but that was my own leftover issues, not anything horrible at work. 

I woke up at  6:30, all on  my own.  Nobody yowling, no phones ringing, no dog barfing.  Just a gradual rise to consciousness and the realization that I needed to pee.  But also that I wasn't tired, which is unusual.  Especially on a Monday!  So I went ahead and got up and let kittens out and generally didn't hate the morning like one sometimes does in the winter.

Dory IMMEDIATELY headed down the stairs to see what sort of trouble she could get into.  The boys stayed upstairs and played soccer.[1]  Dory did find trouble fairly quickly.  I didn't see her for a minute or two so I went and found her.  She was backed into a corner behind our Guitar Hero guitars.  Andy was in front of her, all Puff Daddy with the big fur, and he was growling ferociously.  Now, Andy has not offered to lay a paw or a claw on the kitten, but he is making some pretty mean noises.  Dory was momentarily cowed and went back upstairs for the rest of the morning.

Which didn't last all that long, because I came up to shut the door.  All three kittens stood in the middle of the room, glared at me, and shouted "MEW!"  They were not ready to be done playing soccer yet, and they let me know.

I checked Dory's incision.  She had opened it up overnight.  A phone call and a quick drive to the vet's later, our favorite vet tech[2] said it was too late to restitch it.  So Dory gets at least three more days of the cone of shame, and neosporin.  Sigh.

Getting up early meant that despite a sudden vet visit, I wasn't late for work.  Rock!

I methodically worked through the various "HELP IT DOESNT WORK" emails and solved nearly all the problems.[3]  On the way in it had suddenly struck me as weird that NASA is having a problem with spacecraft telemetry and somehow it is my problem to fix it.  Does this seem weird to anybody else?  I mean, don't most people get problems like "we're out of fax paper" or "there is a mistake in  accounting"?  Anyway I got over the weirdness, fixed problems, and now telemetry is getting to places it should get to.  Or will very soon.

I don't usually bother to mention lunch, but today I ate something new (to me) and good.  Amy's Indian Samosa Wrap.  I am not entirely clear on what the contents were, but it was delicious.  Must buy more.

Also, I got to take a walk today for the first time in recent memory.  This might not seem like a big deal, but walking is what keeps me sane.  And if you read back over the last few weeks you might notice a certain lessening of the sanity.  Walkies, people.  Learn it.  Love it.  Do it.  Make time for your sysadmin to go outside and all will be well.

I actually left work before dark, which is extremely unusual in December even when I'm not having a hellday.  I felt vaguely celebratory.  So I came home and had Kitten Time.[4]  Dory explored the sunroom, Andy didn't kill anybody, and the boys sat on the landing at the top of the stairs.  At their current rate of descent, they should be to the living room by Christmas.

I forcibly cuddled everybody,  decided that Olli is definitely an athlete,[5] and called it a night.

Oh, and I know you're sick of hearing about my pets but you know who is the happiest dog ever?  The one who got to lick the lasagna pan clean tonight. 

Oh, and now I'm listening to Neil Gaiman, Amanda F*cking Palmer, and Kevin Smith on the internet and I believe I've reached Nerdvana.


[1] Which is hilarious.  Did we adopt Hispanic kittens?  They are far more skilled than the kittens in the neighborhood where I grew up. 

[2] Aleta

[3] Some problems are too hard even for me.  Especially since I can't have coffee now.

[4] I feel that Kitten Time needs theme music.  Something surfer music-ish.

[5] He purrs at the prospect of getting to bat something around.

How am I the only one who sees this?*

There is a never ending wave of diets in the media.  Everybody is sure that if they eat the right combination of foods, they'll finally get skinny.  Yet the nation gets fatter and fatter.  Even our dogs get fatter.  We've tried the diets.  There are entire genres of food now that didn't exist before we got fat, created solely in the hope of getting us skinnier.  Or rather, capitalizing on our desire to get skinnier.

Yeah, that's not gonna work.

We were not designed to be idle.  Cats, now.  Cats were designed to be idle.  They can sleep twenty three and a half hours a day and still have a perfect feline figure.  Nobody expects them to go to work either.  Maybe I should have been a cat.

Of course I'm not a cat.  I'm a human.  We're actually a compromise in a lot of ways.  We walk upright and our backs never forgive us for it.  We eat meat AND vegetables, and our teeth and digestive system have evolved pretty well to deal with it.  We have virtually no fur but we live cold places.  Fortunately our giant brains have solved the cold problem by inventing clothing.  Or by telling us to steal the skins off of the cats.  (gross!)

But one thing we so far can't seem to compromise on is exercise.  We were designed to move.  We're like horses.  Horses HAVE to move.  They actually can't stay off their feet very long or the weight of their own body will make it too hard to breathe.  (Or so I've heard.)  Without enough exercise, their intestines don't work properly.  Their muscles atrophy and fat develops.  And often they will go a little insane.

Most of us aren't so heavy that lying down is a strain on our lungs, but we have the other problems.  IMHO, it's because we're designed to move.  We aren't designed to sit.  The end product of our current civilization is a populace that sits all the time.  It's given us bad backs by changing the stresses on our back ( to ones our spines and disks aren't prepared to deal with ) and weakening our abdominal support structure.  It's given us hemorrhoids through constant pressure on our bottoms.  We now have weak knees and feet, so when we actually do get a chance to exercise, it hurts.  We have many forms of mental illness that are aggravated by lack of exercise.  And, of course, we're fat.

Grapefruit juice is not going to fix this.  The perfect 1200 calorie diet isn't going to fix it.  We are designed to move, just as we are designed to seek out high calorie foods to offset the famine that never happens.   At the same time, we are lazy.  Evolution set us up just right to be a man on the move.  We want the honey, we want the fatty animal meat.  It gives us the energy to run and seek.  And then we want to collapse and rest so our bodies can recover for a while.  But after that?  We need to be on the go again!

So, Science, please stop looking for the perfect low calorie diet.  How about finding ways to make us more like cats?**  They evolved to the life we have right now.  Somehow they're dealing with it just fine. 

And Everybody Else?  I'm sorry, but you have to exercise.  You were designed to be a long distance hiker, a marathon runner, a manual laborer.  I'm proud of you for using your massive brain to become a doctor, a lawyer, a librarian, a pharmacist, an architect, or something else thinky and sedentary.  But evolution hasn't caught up.  If you want to feel good, you have to move.  A lot.

*I realize I'm not the only one who sees this, but it feels like it sometimes.

**Somehow this post went in an entirely different direction than I was intending.

Trouble says "Go for a walk, Fatty, until evolution catches up with you."