Free Time Breeds Laziness

Well, it's official: I'm absolutely backwards. I can manage to find the time to keep the blog nicely updated with snappy rhetoric and nice pictures, it seems, only when my schedule is swamped with the stagnant water of never-ending commitments. Give me free time in any appreciable quantity and I go off it almost instantaneously. Not, I may add, that I have anything "better" to do with the time, I just tend to let everything other than the gym, movies, and the occasional cleaning spree slip quietly off the radar. In "Hunt for Red October" I would have been the ship captain who remained convinced that Mancusoe was chasing a seismic anomaly and not Sean Connery and Sam Neill in a Russian submarine. It would mean that I had more time to stand on the flight deck of the set and get my hair whipped in the artifical wind whilst I found the most attractive way to shout all my lines at the extras.

(A phantom Russian submarine? Only if I get some good close-ups of my devistatingly attractive, yet appropriately tense profile.)

At least, though, I can console myself with some rather committed gym attendance. Mum ran - well, walked really, since her joints are so bad - a 3k for heart disease awareness the other week, and as part of the congratulations pack, received a pass to take a free week at the local gym. Since I'm home all day with naught to do but bake unnecessarily copious quantities of muffins, watch old Top Gear episodes, and start on paperwork for graduate school, she took pity on my lethargy and gave the pass to me. Victoire! I now had something to occupy me for at least another hour-and-a-half out of the day. Perhaps this will yeild nothing more than reading fewer chapters of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" this week, but I do hope for more.

Having gotten back into the routine last week, I have determined that it is now time to push the envelope a bit, so to speak. If done with the right effort, it'll be a sad, sweaty little envelope by week's end. I'm reminded of a shirt that my friend got once which read, "pain is weakness leaving the body". We had fun with that one for a while. Having climbed what the machine told me was the equivalent of 4-miles' worth of stairs yesterday before walk/jogging 2 miles on the treadmill, I figure I'll let that set the tone for the rest of the week before I must resign myself to waving a pitiful goodbye to the free gym time. (Don't worry...we'll always have Provo. Just doesn't have the same ring to it!)

(I realise now that in order to explain how I got back into the routine last week of going to the gym every day, I must state that the guy who processed my lovely free week pass quite kindly added on an extra free week. Score.)

I've toyed with the idea all the past week of actually taking advantage of the fact that the gym has a proper lap pool. I think today, I shall put that idea into practise. Perhaps it won't seem like arduous gut-busting exercise if I treat it like a reward for climbing another 4 miles of stairs and doing a bit of jogging on the side. Hopefully, my normal routine when home of running about 3 miles through the neighbourhood won't suffer any (well, any more) by comparison once I get back to that. For now, there's a muffin and Ian Flemming prose calling my name...