Sibylle and I have joined a local gym. The mother of one of her students remarked about how much she enjoyed her fitness club, which got Sibylle to looking at our options. We went and visited the Prairie Life Center nearest us one Friday evening about a month ago, and had a tour.
The facility was nicely spacious and very low key. The manager who walked us around was also very low key, no hard sell at all. We were given three guest passes and used them over the next week to come in and try things out on our own.
We were able to sample a yoga class, use the weight machines, the treadmills, elliptical walkers, rowing machines, and the walking/running track. We also tried out the whirlpool and sauna in the locker rooms. At the end of the third visit we were both sold, and so at the start of our fourth visit we signed up for the monthly membership.
Since then we have gone at least once or twice every week. Our routine is starting to be established and it feels good. We start with some laps on the track - to warm up. A run through the weight machines is typically next, followed by some treadmill work for Sibylle and a little rowing machine action for me. I try to complete the stretching exercises required for my lower back in the stretching area, on those days we are there, and then we might walk another few laps to warm down. Last, but certainly not least, is a sauna or whirlpool and a shower.
Our workouts are unstructured in terms of when we go, or how long we stay. If there is a group class in pilates or yoga when we are there we may or may not join in. We’ve both talked about trying one of the water based exercise classes but so far haven’t committed to that yet. By letting ourselves approach our workouts in an unstructured manner we both have a positive feeling about them. Going and working out is time shared, and something we look forward to, rather than a chore that must be accomplished in order to feel good.
The last time I belonged to a club I obsessively tracked the repetitions and sets I completed, and the total weight lifted for each workout. In order to not take time from the rest of my day I was getting up at 5:30 and working out before going to work. While that gym experience ended when I hurt my leg in kendo (which eventually contributed to my lower back issues), I think the regimen wouldn’t have lasted; simply because I was making it about work and not about play.
The uncomplicated manner in which Sibylle and I are approaching the gym now, feels much freer and more rewarding than a rigid schedule with objectives and goals. Perhaps we might see more benefits sooner from a more structured approach to our gym time, but I think we will gain in the long run with our unstructured, but fun, approach. As long as it is fun we are more apt to stick to it.
I’ve made some updates to my resume, it now looks like the paper one (more or less). Go have a look, and feel free to pass on any comments or suggestions.
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Even so, it’s pretty cool to get a growl notification of a new tweet and have it be one from a Presidential candidate.
Today, Sibylle and I traveled to Manhattan KS to participate in and watch the 2008 Manhattan Area Music Teachers Association Concerto Competition. Students competed in four age categories by performing concertos accompanied on a second piano by their teacher, who played the piano reduction of the orchestral accompaniment for the various pieces.
The adjudicator has four award choices for each category: no award, Honorable Mention, Second Place, or First Place. She or he may also award a tie or, and this is the interesting part, they may choose not to reward any performance.
In America most contests or competitions are geared towards finding the winner. In today’s competition the students weren’t competing against each other, they were offering up their performance for evaluation against criteria such as: ensemble, note accuracy, rhythm, tempo, technique, style interpretation, poise, and choice of literature. Each performance is evaluated individually against these criteria, and not against the other performances. Therefore it is quite possible for a category to produce only Honorable Mentions and no placing at all.
Today there was a category that produced only Honorable Mentions, no First or Second place awarded. With so much focus in America culture on winning, or being the best, I think we some times lose sight critiquing against a standard and not just determining who was better. Was one of the performances in the category in question “better” than the other? Perhaps, but neither was up to the standard of a First or even a Second place performance.
In my experience I think the only place where I have been regularly critiqued against a standard and not against my peers is in job evaluations. With just a single source, then, of individual performance based evaluations, I am not as comfortable with this form of learning as I could be. And I suspect that my managers who, although they perform this activity for their direct reports on a regular basis, aren’t as comfortable with it either.
When I was competing in martial arts we had a saying, the gist of which was, “just because you won today doesn’t mean you would have won yesterday, or will win tomorrow.” In other words, winning, being first, is a temporal event. The winner was the winner on that day, under those conditions. It may or may not be a repeatable event. (The recent Superbowl loss of the New England Patriots comes to mind.) However, an objective evaluation of your performance against a standard gives you excellent chance to grow, particularly if the adjudicator is capable of writing lucid comments and suggestions for areas of improvement.
We need more standards based evaluations and less winner/loser evaluations, I think, in order to mature as a society. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with keeping score and deciding a winner, however I think we would all benefit from more emphasis on standards based critiques. As today’s performances demonstrated, just because one performance is “better” than the other doesn’t mean it was good enough to be first.
After a week of wearing trifocals I have come to some conclusions.
They are better than progressive lenses for me. The blurred, fun-house-mirror effect the progressive lenses had is not present at all with trifocals. This isn’t to say that there isn’t some adjustment required. When I got my first set of bifocals in May 2003, I experienced some adjustment. At that time I remarked,
The worst part, so far, is finding a new head position for things. It seems like the line between short and far is always getting in the way…. I would agree with that earlier incarnation of me, and add that having two lines in one’s field of view is even more distracting. That my posting from five years ago echos some of my thoughts today, comforts me. Especially in light of my memory of bifocals. I remembered them fondly (if one can think of glasses fondly). With some time and patience I think the lines on these lenses will disappear too.
Having three focal ranges is nice, extra lines notwithstanding. I can read the syringe markings for Nekko insulin clearly and easily for the first time. Reading in bed is enjoyable once more. I can print documents at work two-to-a-page, and read the result. The intermediate range works fairly well for my desktop workstation at work. I can see the text clearly again. The height of the intermediate range isn’t quite tall enough to see the entire screen without tilting my head a bit. This makes me aware of the lines above and below that portion of the lens. Hopefully my conscious awareness of those lines will fade over time. There is even some added sharpness at distance, although it is slight enough that I can get by without my glasses for activities like driving.
Several years ago I tried a pair of lenses that had anti-glare coating on both sides. At the time I cleaned my glasses rather haphazardly, usually with the pad of my finger to brush away the large bits of debris on the lens. This fingertip cleaning method caused huge smears and smudges on the glare coating. I took the glasses back and had the coating removed. I was offered glare coating again with these glasses and turned them down, remember my earlier experience.
Now that I’ve had the glasses for a week I wonder if the glare coating will help to minimize my awareness of the lines between the different focal areas. I have only touched the lenses once or twice so far, in an attempt to learn to use the little micro-fiber cloth instead. If I can learn this habit I will opt for the anti-glare coating on my next lenses.
To sum up my experience so far, if you can’t abide the blurry effects of progressive lenses, go for the trifocals. I think you like them.
If you are like me, you have at least once in your email usage history, accidentally sent a mail that you either didn’t mean to send, or immediately wanted to recall to edit or attach or otherwise massage before sending. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to hold your outbound emails for a short period of time?
As luck would have it, there is a way. At least if you are using Outlook.
Create a new rule using the “Start from a blank rule” option. In the Rules Wizard, under the “Step 1: Select when messages should be checked” option, pick “Check messages after sending.”
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Click next.
Unless you want to apply the delay rule to a specific subset of messages you send, click next on the “Which condition(s) do you want to check?” dialog. Outlook will confirm that you really want to apply this rule to every message you send. Click yes.
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On the “What do you want to do with the message?” dialog select the last option, “defer delivery by a number of minutes.” Once you’ve selected that, click on the underlined portion of the statement in the edit portion of the dialog and enter the delay you want. Originally I had 5 minutes but I find this is too long so I’ve cut that back to 3 recently.
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Click next again.
The “Are there any exceptions?” dialog gives you another chance to limit the scope of your new rule. Unless you want to add some exceptions, click next.
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The final step is to name your new rule. I called mine “Defer sending.”
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Click Finish to complete the rule. Outlook will popup a message warning you that this is a client-only rule, that will only run when Outlook is running. Click on OK.
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That’s it! You now have a built-in sending delay or 3 or 5 or whatever minutes. The next time you hit send without having attached the file, or just before realizing that you didn’t spell check the message, you now have a chance to visit the outbox and correct the mail before it is sent.
Last week, on Thursday, Sibylle and I pulled the trigger on a bookcase purchase from IKEA. As a full-time music teacher, Sibylle has a lot of music, and a lot of reference books that she’d like quick and easy access to. We also have lots and lots of books that we’d like to display.
Sibylle had researched many options and found one at IKEA that we both liked. The size, the color options, even optional glass doors, which we though we might add later. I filled out the online order forms and was informed that we’d get an email within 24-hours with the shipping information and a phone number to call to provide the billing information.
24 hours have become nearly 96 hours, as I only just got the promised email this afternoon - Monday. In that email we are informed that our order will be held for 48-hours and then canceled unless we call to confirm and provide a credit card for the purchase. (I wonder if that is truly 48-hours, or 192-hours, to use IKEA’s interpretation of the length of an hour.)
The email also includes the shipping cost. The bookcase itself is $79.99. The shipping cost is a whopping $265.00.
Two-hundred-and-sixty-five dollars to ship an eighty dollar bookcase?!
I’ve been buying things, large and small, online since the mid-1990s, and I have never had an experience like this. A part of me is tempted to call just to find out how they justify a shipping cost more than three times the original purchase price. I understand that the book case has some weight, and that this weight, and or large size will impact the shipping costs. Had IKEA posted even an estimated shipping cost with the order last week, I think we would have gone shopping locally this past weekend. I strongly suspect that we can get a very nice book case for less than the $345 combined price at IKEA, and probably avoid the 2-3 week wait for delivery.
In the two days since I picked up my trifocals I have been thoroughly pleased with the improvement in my vision. I have sharp focus at all three ranges of sight: near, intermediate, and distance. Having owned a pair of bifocals before my laser surgery mistake, I knew there would be an adjustment period regarding the lines and not needed to tip my head but rather just drop my eyes.
The third band of correction in these lenses, the intermediate zone, is working out fantastically. When I sit and read a book or document I use the near portion of the lens, which is at the bottom. My laptops both fall into this range when I am typing at them. Perfect. My computer workstation at work, however, falls into the middle distance between “up close” and “far away.” The intermediate range portion on my new lenses is nicely tall, allowing me to see roughly half the screen without moving my head up or down. As my eyes track down the screen I naturally incline my head, which keeps everything in focus.
The only place my glasses aren’t any use is going down stairs. Looking through either the intermediate or near correction produces a blurry view of the treads. Fortunately I can quite easily see under my lenses and focus on the stairs that way.
The most unusual thing about these new glasses is that things, particularly my cell phone or laptop screen, seem brighter than before. Certainly there is a noticeable difference in focus, but I was surprised by the apparent increase in brightness. I guess the slight magnification effect of the lenses adds to the amount of light my eyes perceive.
I’m sure that some people can and do adjust to progressive lenses, but I for one an very pleased to have switched to lined trifocals. And I am very pleased with how accommodating and helpful the fine folks at my local vision center have been throughout this process.
Until I generated a graph of my site, I never knew it contained a sunflower.
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(Click on the image to generate one of your own.)
As a student in American classrooms in the 1960s and 1970s I was introduced to the metric system in a failed attempt to join the world standard. (That the United States is one of but three countries on the planet that doesn’t use the metric system speaks volumes.) Personally, I think the reason the metric system failed was making it about converting and not adopting. Countless hours were spent in classrooms adding 32 and dividing by 5 before subtracting 32 and multiplying by 9 to know that 1 centimeter was a 100th of a meter regardless of whether it was freezing in Fahrenheit or Celsius.
So it should come as no surprise that this evening, while working out at our new gym, Sibylle and I discovered something interesting about the weights we’d been using. About 18 months ago I joined another gym and was trained on a set of weight machines. Being a nerd I carefully noted the seat position settings for each machine and the weight I was lifting for each. I made a little card to carry with me so I wouldn’t have to rely on memory. Eventually I was able to remember the numbers without my cheatsheet.
On each of our three visits to the new gym this past week, I have done a few repetitions on the same set of weight machines the other club had. And each time I was somewhat stunned by how heavy the weights were. Could I really have lost that much strength in just a year and a half?
After straining to lift roughly half my prior weight again tonight, I remarked to Sibylle, “These weights are really heavy, I don’t understand it.” Half joking she replied, “You don’t suppose they are kilograms instead of pounds, do you?”
Suddenly a light bulb went off in my head. The little “kilogram to pounds” conversion charts taped to some of the machines took on a whole new meaning. 100 didn’t mean pounds, it meant 100 kilograms or 224 pounds.
Thanks to Sibylle’s remark we now know that our new machines are in fact more than twice as heavy as the ones I’d used before. And that a centimeter is still 100th of a meter, and that -40 F equals -40 C, and both are too cold for me.