Week 317 Update

At 5:20 a.m. I stepped up on Mr. Scale, and he said "201.5 pounds!"

If my weight had jogged the other way from yesterday's weigh-in, instead of going up, I would have been in the 190's this morning. Maybe next time.

The biggest change in what I did on my journey this week was the walking; I walked 17.7 miles, and I walked on 6 of the 7 days this week, pushing me up to 96.19 miles walked for the year. I averaged an anemic 15.6 miles per month for the first 5 months of the year, and at that rate, this week was better than a month of walking. I am perfectly happy with this week in that area. (If I walked 17.7 miles per week for a year, it would put me up over 900 miles.) For just the walking that I timed for the week, I earned over 38 aerobic points, and 30 is all you need for basic fitness. Our walk on Thursday wasn't timed, and also, Dotti and I did some extra walking not included in my total, because it was not a measured distance. But there was at least a mile or two extra in the week. I hope that I can continue to get out there and walk regularly.

Friday Dotti and I took on a project to move our stuff in a small storage shed over to a larger one, and to complete the garage rearranging that Dotti was in the middle of when she fell and broke her arm. I got a lot of exercise with that (and I am sore today) but Dotti got even more. Her pretty brown eyes, and sweet smile overcame my better judgment, and it almost cost us. But more on that later.

Saturday was what got me going on the walking routine. While I was doing my update, my back and neck were giving me a lot of trouble. I modified the ergonomics of my workstation and that was an improvement but it was not the whole problem. I spent the rest of the day relaxing, and trying to find a way to take the strain off of them and relieving the pain. It didn't do a lot of good, and it reminded me that when I was exercising regularly, my back still hurt, but it hurt a lot less. So, I made up my mind to start getting serious about my walking once more. I determined that I would walk at least 2 miles a day, and do it first thing in the morning before I could find an excuse not to.

One of the things that I have found is that if I wait around for the right time to exercise, somehow that time never comes. But if I get up out of bed, throw on my clothes and just start walking, it is not a problem at all. This week has really been easy on getting my walking in. I hope that my determination will not fade on this, and I will continue to get out there every day, or at least 5 or 6 times a week.

Sunday was my first day to try a test of my new resolve to walk. I was up and out the door by 7:00 a.m. The sun was shining brightly and, rather than going for the more conservative 2-mile walk to the Target area, I did our old 3.1 mile loop; I found out how long it had been since I had last done that!

Early in the walk, I passed by a house where two boys were outside playing some early morning form of baseball, judging from what they were saying. They were behind a fence so I couldn't see them, but it sounded like they were having fun.

As I came around on the main road I passed by a bar that once had a couple of vacant fields in front of it, and behind it a little old house standing on a large lot, followed by another vacant lot. The quiet little location for the bar now has been completely changed! There is a building going up right on the edge of the parking lot at the front, and behind the bar, the little house is gone, and has been replaced by a modern police station with lots of police cars and a beautiful brick building. (It should be the safest bar in town now. ☺) Beyond the police station is a brand new park. We saw the house before it was condemned, and then several stages of its demise, followed by the start of the construction work on the police station and the park on earlier walks. But none of it was finished. Now it's all done: police station and park, including skateboard ramps and basketball hoops. Of course at 7 a.m. on a Sunday it was all vacant, but I am sure later in the day things would pick up on a Sunday.

The new park is named "Gretchen Fraser Neighborhood Park." In checking, I found that Gretchen Fraser was born in 1919 in Tacoma, Washington, but she grew up here in Vancouver. She was the first American skier to win an Olympic ski medal, and she won two of them in 1948: Gold in the slalom, and Silver in combined. She became the spokesman for the ski resort Sun Valley, in Idaho and her blonde braids it is said made her easy to spot. Also in Sun Valley the "Gretchen's Gold" ski run, and "Gretchen's" restaurant are named for this Vancouver lady.

Looking back along the way I just had come, we see the park, the police station, and the road stretching off into the distance.

A little farther along my path there was a new auto repair shop that wasn't there last time; they had really been busy while I was "away."

I took 52:36 to walk the three miles, and I did stop to take a few pictures, but I was not in a hurry. I just wanted to get the walking in. I was able to get a lot more done on the computer on Sunday with a little less pain.

Monday, the kids were out waiting for their school busses when I did my walk. The sky was overcast but it wasn't much cooler than it had been on Sunday. I made the loop in 49:17, after only stopping to take one picture of a squirrel that I passed by.

When I got back Dotti was answering some email and suggested that it might be a good day to go and see the Rose Festival, since the crowds might be a little smaller. So, we did. We drove over to Lloyd's Center to park and then took the MAX train downtown to where the festival was being held. On the train, I took this picture of Dotti and I as we were going along towards the Rose Festival.

When we arrived and were just entering the Rose Festival area we spotted this sign. Do you suppose gasoline powered vehicles didn't have to worry about the foot traffic? ☺

We did a walkthrough of the carnival area. In our younger ride-taking-days we would have spent more time there, but none of the rides or attractions called out to us, although a few of the hawkers did.

On the other end of the carnival strip we found the docking area for the Portland Spirit. When we first arrived there was a group of people standing in the loading area having pictures taken. After they left we worked our way down to the river front wall and I took this picture of Dotti with the ship behind her.

Right in front of where Dotti was standing in the last picture two "Tall Ships" were tied up. They were conducting activities for school aged children onboard, and we watched a contest conducted between the two ships as one group of kids tried to raise their sail faster than another group on the other ship.

As those who attended either of the conferences in Vancouver and joined us on the Sunday evening outing (DWLZ-3 or DWLZ-5) will remember, at the loading area for the Portland Spirit is a large fountain. The fountain's name is the Salmon Street Fountain, because Salmon Street ends right across from the fountain. If you walk up about 6 blocks from there, at Salmon and Sixth, there stands the multistoried building where Dotti was working when I first met her in 1974. She was a file clerk in an engineering office for the Pacific Power and Light Company, commonly known as P.P.&L. at the time.

We headed up Salmon Street, with no real goal in mind. But before long we ran into a Subway restaurant, and that sounded really good. We stopped for lunch and during lunch we decided to head back to Lloyd's Center look it over a bit.

When the MAX train dropped us off at the Lloyd's Center Station we cut across the park to get back to our car in the mall parking lot, where we could drop off the backpack, before heading into the mall itself. We spotted this sculpture as we were crossing and Dotti was kind enough to pose in front of it.

AS we got closer to the mall, we came to this constantly changing fountain. The water went higher and the dropped lower, never staying in the same place for long. The weather was nice, and the sun made the background stand out. Our biggest problem was getting enough light on us when we were in the shadows when the sunny background tried to underexpose our faces for the camera.

After stopping at the car, we went inside Lloyd's Center, and as we moved around the mall, it was a real walk down memory lane for us. Here we were taking an escalator in Macy's, a store that was called Meier and Frank when we first met and were married.

When I first saw Lloyd's Center in 1969, it was the very first indoor mall that I had ever seen, and it was a bute! There was a skating rink in the middle of it that was open to the sky. Meier and Frank, a multistoried department store faced the rink and a small bridge that crossed the rink on the second floor level. Instead of doors on the large opening to the bridge, Meier and Frank had an air cushion: blower generated wind that held the cold out and the heat in during winter, and the heat out and the cool in, during summer. My high school friends and I walked all over the mall that first visit and the impression it made on me has never completely disappeared, even after seeing malls from Spain to Hawaii since then.

Here are what the bridge and entrance to the store look like today. The entire thing is closed in now, so no "air cushion" is required to keep out the elements. There is a whole new level above now. And the bridge is wider than it was before. Today, as you can see, Meier and Frank has been taken over by Macy's and the outdoor skating rink is an indoor one.

I drove out to teach a class in 1990 and I stopped into look at Lloyd Center on my way to Corvallis, Oregon, and they were in the middle of these refurbishments at that time. This is the way one wing of the mall looked then, and here is out it looks now...

Here is my lovely wife Dotti looking down over the skating rink. The ice was melted and they were doing some routine maintenance the day we were there, so unfortunately there were no skaters to watch. Dotti used to skate in this rink years ago, before I met her, but we have never skated here together. (We did skate at the Clackamas Mall when it had a rink, but that rink is now gone.) We will have to come over here and skate on this ice one of these days.

To the left, at the end of the rink, but on the same level as we were on for this picture, in 1974 there was a store where Dotti and I bought some knickknacks that we still have today. That store used to be the end of the mall stores, and all that continued past that were administrative offices. Today those offices have been replaced by a whole new wing of the mall. High above the skating rink, and even above the now much wider bridge, there is a food court where the birds used to land and look at the funny creatures gliding around on the ice below. Above the food court is a roof where none existed before. There's a Barnes and Noble today in the mall, and the Newberry's where Dotti and I used to go in 1974 is long gone. In many ways it is not the same mall at all, but there is just enough left of it to make us say, "Remember that?"

Tuesday it was drizzling when I left on my walk. It was cool, which I greatly appreciated. And though I was a bit tired with the new activity, I still completed the walk in 48:18. My neck and my back are feeling quite a bit better and so the walking has helped. When I got home, just as I hit our driveway, the sky opened up, and it started dropping buckets of water on me. It was a rain that even a Florida resident could appreciate. I got inside and was thankful that it waited until I got home. Otherwise, my pants would have gotten soaked. (My raincoat would have kept my top half dry but my pants would not have fared so well.)

Wednesday morning was Dotti's Newsletter day. I got up at 5 a.m. and before my walk I took the "draft copy" from Dotti, and ran through my standard proofreading routine on it. It used to take about 5 hours to check that all of the links and the images are good, do a format proofread, and a grammar check, and a spell check on the document, and then do a word for word read of the entire document to catch anything else I might have missed. Dotti's draft copies are getting quite good these days, and I am getting a better system down so it is taking me less time to complete the task. Just after 8 a.m. I hit the send button on the newsletter and it was on its way.

I was then able to get out and start my walk. The morning was cold and I had gone about half a mile into the walk when I decide to don my gloves and change my DWLZ ball cap for my knit winter cap. I felt more comfortable after the switch but I had put my ball cap at the back, with the bill tucked into my pants, something we used to do when I went to Navy boot camp. I didn't realize it at the time but I had only gone a short distance before the hat fell off its perch and onto the road. I kept walking for about 550 steps (I checked that later in the week) before I realized my mistake. I turned around immediately and went in search of where it might have fallen. I was really surprised when I found the hat lying on the road only a short way beyond where I had tucked it under my belt. I then returned along the path for a second time, and completed the rest of the normally 3.1 mile loop, feeling just a bit steamed over my stupid mistake. I completed the entire walk in 1 hour and 33 seconds, almost exactly 60 minutes.

When I am walking at my fastest pace, I have a 36-inch stride. But I was only doing a moderately fast pace, and that shortens my stride a bit. I know I was at least covering 33 inches when I marked off the distance I had to double back and so that comes out to at least 3025 feet (round trip distance) or 57% of a mile. I took credit for half a mile extra and counted the walk as 3.6 miles, because I am sure I walked at least that far. (As a sanity check on that number, using that distance for the time I walked, I averaged 3.57 miles-per-hour. That was nearly as slow a pace as I achieved on Sunday when I was taking it easy and stopping to take pictures. I know I really pushed it, especially the last mile of my walk on Wednesday because I was trying to come in under 1 hour total. On both Tuesday and Friday I held a pace over 3.8 mph and I am sure I at least matched that on Wednesday, because of the extra effort and the cold temperature which always makes me walk faster. If I walked at 3.8 mph for an hour I would have covered 3.8 miles. I am almost certain that I did, but there is no doubt that I covered at least 3.6 miles.)

Thursday I didn't do my 3.1 miles in the morning because Dotti and I were going to do a hike instead. But as it turned out, Dotti couldn't get to sleep and was not feeling too well at the time we would have had to leave, so we scrapped those plans for this week. In the evening we made up for it by taking a walk to Borders Books, which covers 2.2 miles round trip.

While sitting in their coffee shop I nearly finished "The Chilling Stars – An New Theory of Climate Change" by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder. For anyone interested in the "Global Warming" phenomenon this is a must read book. (I received the lasted Discover magazine this week in the mail and they had an interview in it of Henrik Svensmark where he gives a thumbnail overview of his theory and the large amount of supporting evidence for it that has already been amassed.)

While the political climate of today on this topic is warming up even more than the earth is, I think this may cool off the activists a bit, or at least make them less respected. There is no doubt that the planet is warming today but that is perfectly normal for planet earth. We are still in an ice age technically, because we have ice sheets on Greenland, and covering Antarctica, and glaciers are found in many other places as well. In the past the earth has gone from being completely covered with ice to not having any ice. (Dinosaurs used to run wild on our southernmost continent, the ground now thought of as strictly penguin territory.) If you think that CO2 is the most important culprit in warming things up, then you really should read this book, you may change your mind. (I think in time the scientific community will come to embrace the model in this book. But don't take my word for it—or any Al's word for it☺—see for yourself.)

While I am on the subject of books, I finished two of them this week: Fantastic Voyage and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. The former was an interesting romp through the inner workings of the human body from a perspective of something as small as a bacterium. It was fiction but it was educational as well, as a miniaturized submarine cruised through the blood and lymph circulatory systems, and even stopped off inside the lungs for a bit. I read the book back in the early 1970s, but my knowledge of anatomy was not as great then and I didn't enjoy it as well as I did this time.

The other book was absolutely revolutionary in the way it pointed things out that are left out of your normal history book. I always viewed Thomas Jefferson as a hero (he was the one behind the Lewis and Clark expedition after all, and they went right by my house ☺), being one of the great thinkers of the founding of this country. But today, he stands even higher in my estimation after having read this book. The author, Dr. Thomas E. Woods, did a wonderful job showing where our political system went wrong and why. Perhaps the most surprising of all was reading our Founding Fathers discussing the potential problems the country might face, and seeing all that has happened being listed as possible traps we could fall into. For anyone who prefers accuracy over conventionality in a history book, this is one not to miss.

It isn't often that I come across two books which are so significant at the same time. So, I am really happy that I came across both of them while browsing the bookshelves of Spokane and Vancouver.

Friday was a busy day. I really wanted to wait until Dotti's cast was off before we tackled the job she was doing when she fell and broke her arm. But Dotti was eager to get on with it, and so we set off to complete the task. Stage one was to move our stored stuff into a larger storage unit, so we could clear out the garage the rest of the way. We took some shelves from our garage over to the new unit first, and then started moving everything over. We finished getting that done before lunch. We ate at Subway and then went home and got a couple of loads of new stuff for the larger storage unit.

As we were making the last trip to the shed, Dotti looked at me with her beautiful brown eyes and her most endearing smile, and begged me to be left alone while she continued working on organizing the garage. I did not want that to happen. I was worried that she might have another fall, or do lifting with her broken wrist that would aggravate that injury. Dotti has a tendency to push herself past her limits. On the other hand, how do you say no to Dotti? I caved in. I was already exhausted by the lifting and moving I had done, and I didn't have the heart to tackle a new big job at the moment. And so the stage was set for a scary event.

I came out to help move the three heavy items in the garage: our gym equipment, but other than that I mostly stayed out of the way. Dotti was scurrying all over the garage, and reminded me of the little furry creatures that cut down trees and build dams across creeks. I told her that I didn't want any more falls, and if there were any doubt at all about safety, call for help, or just don't do it. I came out once and caught her on a step stool reaching for something high on a shelf and my heart went through my throat for a moment. I was thinking that I had told the guy who was putting Dotti's newest cast on that Dotti "was in charge of safety at her company." It suddenly didn't seem so funny.

Finally it was late enough in the day where we had to call it quits. Dotti was exhausted and the project was nearly completed. I came out one last time to lend a hand to finishing up, and then it happened. Dotti went up that step stool again, and on her way down she fell, and right at my feet. I can't begin to express the feelings that ran through my mind as I saw her crumple on the floor. There was the resounding, "NOOOO!" that my mind was screaming as it always does when confronted with that which it refuses to consider as acceptable. I was terrified that she was badly hurt again, and that it might even be worse than last time. (Last time she wasn't standing on anything but the floor when she fell and look what happened!) I was immediately bending down with my eyes open in horror and looking for any sign that Dotti was either okay or...no I wouldn't consider that.

We soon had her on her feet and in taking inventory we found that had hit her knee again, but not as hard as last time. Her cast was hit pretty hard, but it held up and her wrist didn't take any of the strain. Her right thumb did get hit but it was on the side of it and apparently did not drive any force into her broken wrist area. New injuries included a very large bruise on her backside, which hopefully will not cause much pain, but almost certainly is a minor injury. There was also a jammed or "smacked" joint on one of her fingers that did some swelling.

Dotti continues to disbelieve that she is not 17 years old, and pushes herself beyond her limits on projects like this. She should have stopped a couple of hours before but she just "wanted to finish." If her knee and broken arm sustained no significant injuries from this fall and nothing else shows up, we can consider ourselves very fortunate indeed that this fall wasn’t a really big deal. As we get older, everything changes, and things we used to do easily are much tougher to get done. Professional athletes generally start to drop out as they approach 40 and by the time they are 50 nearly all of them are gone. And what of us lesser human beings who don't do physically exceptional things for a living? We at least have to be careful.

I am just so glad that Dotti didn't break anything more. How can I resist that lovely face when it tells me that she will "be careful"? What can I do? I don't know, but I feel like I failed her in not insisting on being there instead of "leaving her alone" as she asked. At least she isn't in the hospital or sporting a new cast on her other arm or one of her legs; she isn't going in for surgery to correct new injuries on the old breaks.

On the upside, we do have a lot more room in our garage now, and the car (or the minivan) easily fits in beside the exercise equipment. The equipment is once again set up so we can use it too. Poor Dotti is really hurting this morning, but there fortunately doesn't appear to be anything new that is seriously wrong; it is mostly muscles and arthritis pain.

6 years, 29 days on my journey; a lifetime to follow.

-Al-
6 '3" 239.5/201.5/197.5±2.5/BMI:25.19/WK- 317

Starting weight: 239.5       Target Weight Range: 195 lbs to 200 lbs