Month: March 2005

Well, I’ve finally found an Internet cafe, only to discover that the 3 audioblog posts I’ve made — or attempted to make — haven’t gone through. I’m not quite sure why. Ah well.

Anyway, for those keeping score, we arrived safely in the UK last week, after a long, delayed, cramped flight. Virgin Atlantic has lots of bells and whistles on the flight, ie, movies in flight etc., but I’d trade it all for a bit more space on the plane. It was quite uncomfortable. Granted, I am large, even by American standards, but it was pretty ridiculous.

The Marillion Weekend was fabulous, as I expected it to be. The band seems genuinely appreciative of their audience, as well they should be. The music was great, and the vibe was pretty cool as well. We met some cool people as well, new friends, hello to Helen, Ian, Michael, Faith, Franz, John, and anyone else who happens to read this.

One phenomenon I tried to audioblog but didn’t work: in addition to the Marillion festivities, there was also a country and music convention happening at Butlins. Now, there are many reasons to leave the US, and escaping country music is certainly one of them. But at one point, I walked into the pavilion only to discover two gentlemen (or ‘two blokes’ as they say here) on stage, dressed in cowboy hats and bad flourescent vests, looking like Howdy Doody on acid, singing along with their acoustic guitars to canned backing tracks, some really cheesy country music with bad English accents. Now, no one should sing country music, least of all the English. And there were dozens of people dressed the same way line dancing. This is yet more evidence proving the theory that rednecks are everywhere.

Now we’re in Bath, and we’ll be here for another 2 days. Tomorrow it looks like we’ll travel to Glastonbury, which will be another highlight for my trip. Then we’re off to London to visit a friend, after which we’ll train up to Scotland. After Scotland, it looks like we’ll come back to Cornwall for a few days to stay with some new friends we met at the Marillion convention. They are a great couple, and they have 2 kids right around my daughter’s age. One cannot pass up an opportunity to make good friends, and my daughter (what a trooper — bless her) is holding up great and could really use the opportunity to bond with some other kid friends.

Anyway, the clock here is ticking, so I’ll sign off. Not sure why the audio posts didn’t work. I’ll have to investigate, but not when I’m paying by the minute.

As one says when in the UK, cheers mate!

Thanks to a friend’s LJ, I came across a brilliant site for weight training. Stumptuous.com Women’s weight training contains a ton of useful information. And it’s not just for the chixx and grrls; the information contained there is useful for anyone who wants to embark on a sane weighttraining regimen.

But even more intriguing to me is the shovelglove and the No S Diet. Both of these were created by the same guy, designed to be simple and effective lifestyle-changing methodologies.

The shovelglove is simple form of weightlifting:

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your “shovelglove.” Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays.

The idea is to work your muscles using useful human-oriented work tasks. The sledgehammer becomes your weight. Very intriguing. I like the simplistic philosophy, for example, his rationale for choosing 14 minutes:

You guessed it, 14 is a significant number. Why? Because it’s one minute less than the smallest unit of schedulistically significant time. No calendar has a finer granularity than 15 minutes. No one ever has a meeting that starts at 5 or 10 or 14 minutes before or after the hour. You have no excuse not to do this. Time-wise, it doesn’t even register.

Yet it is just long enough to give some aerobic benefit. Yes, half an hour would be better. An hour would be even better. But guess what? You won’t do it. You might do it for 3 weeks, or maybe even 3 months, but you’ll start to resent it and you’ll quit. Do it for 14 minutes and you’ll do it for a lifetime.

Very interesting. I like the way this guy thinks.

The No S diet is and equally compelling model of elegant simplicity:

There are just three rules and one exception:

• No Snacks
• No Sweets
• No Seconds

Except (sometimes) on days that start with ‘s’

That’s it.

Too simple for you? Simple is why it works.

OK. A few days before I leave for a vacation is hardly a good time to begin a new diet/exercise regimen. But this system resonated with my consciousness in a way that few things ever have.

I’ve really been enjoying going back to the gym lately, but knew that the time to supplement that activity was anon. I think I will try to incorporate both of these into my life, in addition to the workouts I’m doing (on average of 2x per week), since they are both so simple.

My modified diet over the past several weeks has been ‘no food after 9pm,’ and it’s been working nicely. The main objective there is/was to get my late-night eating under control. But for a week or two now, I’ve been compelled to modify my diet strategy, and the no-s diet seems right on the money for me.

Incidentally, there is a 3rd component to his system, which is walking an hour a day. This is another important component, one that I would very much like to include, especially now that clearer weather is on the horizon.

Anyway, who knows. Lots of food for thought. I don’t want to make a commitment just yet, but I really feel compelled to give this system a try.

Now, to do some sledgehammer pricing….

I’ve been stupid busy lately, but then I seem to be saying this a lot.

I’m trying to finish up a volunteer typesetting gig before we head out to the UK. I’m also trying to get the Freakwitch recording project into a certain state of being before we leave, so that Matt can record vocal tracks while I’m gone.

Not much to say lately; my political work has mostly been in typesetting these few weeks. I should have more to say from the UK, though blogging may continue to be light until I return.

My family and I are going on a trip to the UK, leaving next week. This new audioblogging feature will be useful to me while I’m there. I had thought about taking my laptop with me. But we’ll be backpacking so I don’t want to be encumbered with it. So instead, I’ll be armed with my digital camera, a small hardbound journal and a pen, and a phone number for the audioblogger. So during the trip, I’ll be able to make the audio posts from a phone. Then, when I get online (either back at home or from an Internet Cafe or something) I can add my written thoughts from my journal after-the-fact. And of course I’ll have a photo gallery online when we return.

I’m definitely looking forward to this trip.

The following is the first-ever audioblog post to this site. I can post from any phone. Pretty cool.