Category: United States

Bike rides to the Inlet. Weight workouts. Daily tasks. Body for Life. Getting projects done. The last week and a half we’ve kept chugging along steadily.

The Body for Life project is taking over our lives, in a good way. Each day starts at six a.m. or shortly thereafter. Four days a week we head out immediately for the Inlet for a twenty-three-plus mile bike ride. We take about two hours for the whole ride, including a short break at the Inlet.

Riding and the Inlet

The Inlet never fails to entertain us. Last week we saw a local fisherman catch a barracuda. As Chelsea took photos, the fisherman worked to get the hook out; he’d already promised the barracuda to three other fishermen who wanted to use it for bait. I was front and center watching the whole process, and when the fisherman got the hook out, he handed the barracuda to me, on the line, telling me to hold it.
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Mother’s Day 2008 found us at Café du Monde in New Orleans eating beignets and sipping café au lait. We’d left the Lakeview District the previous afternoon with our Couchsurfing host Darryl Goodwin (and his dog Maria), bicycling eighteen miles through New Orleans, taking a ferry across the Mississippi, and spending the night in the Algiers district.

Mother’s Day morning we bicycled back through the same route, but wandered through the French Quarter on our return, stopping for the world famous coffee and beignets at Café du Monde before heading back to Darryl’s house.

Mother’s Day 2009 found us in Oak Grove, right on the Gulf in southwest Louisiana, staying with Jo Ann Nunez. By the time Mother’s Day rolled around, we’d been staying with Jo Ann for over a month and had begun to feel a part of the local community. Mother’s Day started at the Baptist Church, celebrating the first use of the main area of the church after its post-Hurricane Ike repairs.
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How it happened is not a big surprise, but Chelsea and I have both gained significant body fat over the last two years; I much more so than Chelsea. Stress contributed greatly – it’s not been an easy several years with the economy having wiped out our income sources – but maybe the fried fish, crawfish, shrimp po’boys, cracklins, deep-fried turkey, fried alligator, venison sausage, boudin, beignets, ice cream pistolets, funnel cakes, fried oysters, Blue Bell ice cream, and fried Snickers Bars we consumed on a steady basis during our year in Louisiana had an effect.

Whatever happened, the bottom line is grim. We need to lose inches, lose weight, and replace body fat with muscle weight.

We did well after arriving home in terms of “normalizing” our eating, but letting go of the Blue Bell Moolenium Crunch and Mocha Almond fudge was a struggle. We bought Alex a Ninja smoothie maker and started drinking healthy smoothies; I ordered the herbal formulas LeanCare (helps maintain normal processing of fats) and LiverCare (supports normal liver function); we started taking them regularly.
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The siren call of our trip is never far from our awareness – it underlies everything we do. Though we find ourselves currently in the midst of other projects, each one of them gets us farther and farther along the way to leaving for seven or more years, knowing that everything is shipshape on the home front.

We continue to work on the fundamentals of preparation for leaving. It’s been a combination of gradually acquiring the clothing, gear, and equipment that we need for being on the road; doing research for what we need; and doing essential organizational projects.

Research projects

Finding what’s out there to make our lives easier feels like a full-time job. That’s my job. I spend hours on the computer looking up products, reading reviews, checking prices, till I find some decent possibilities.
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One of the very best things about being home is seeing our family; on the road we missed them so much at times it was a palpable ache.

Paul and Denise and Chandler

My oldest son Paul lives with his wife Denise and son Chandler in Fort Lauderdale. Paul and Denise are extremely busy and that might be understating the case; they are real estate agents – Denise is also a mortgage broker. With the mess the real estate market is in here in South Florida, they work every day, often up to eighteen hours a day. Sunday is their only day off, and they are usually incommunicado, needing to recover to be ready for the week.

Chelsea and I don’t have a car, Paul and family live forty-five minutes away by car, and it’s a miserable long bike ride down there. That means we see them intermittently at best.
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Life hasn’t been all about work, work, work, though it seems like it most of the time. Over the last three months we did get out of the house a few times, sometimes just for errands.

Movies

Late in January an old friend of Chelsea’s (a former boyfriend) called and invited us to a movie and lunch. Needless to say we were delighted to accept. After a lunch at a local Greek restaurant, we watched Sherlock Holmes in theaters. We’ve only seen movies in theaters twice since June of 2007 – hard to believe…! The last time we were in a theater was with Lynn and Hansford Hair (and Lea and James) in Lafayette LA when we saw the new Batman back in 2008.

We didn’t think the movie (Sherlock Holmes) was that great, but we loved getting out to the theaters. Lior, Chelsea’s friend, came back to the house afterwards and talked programming on websites with us.

Meanwhile we signed up for Netflix. For under $10 a month (we’re sharing it with Tyler so it’s only $5 a month each) we can watch unlimited movies online and we get one by mail. Chelsea and I have taken full advantage of that; we’ve caught up on a lot of great movies, watched many classics (all the Bogie movies), and seen some really, really terrific films. It’s our favorite way to end a long hard day, or to “veg out” on our few rest days.
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Weather

Like the rest of the country, we’ve had our fair share of unusual winter weather. We had an all-time record breaking cold spell in January, and one of the coldest Marches in memory – in fact, it’s been the coldest winter we remember in the ten years we’ve lived here. As if that’s not enough, it’s been the wettest winter in years.

Spring came really late, along with a record pollen year – I’ve never seen anything like it. To make matters worse, we had looong stretches of twenty to thirty mph winds, often gusting up to thirty-five mph or better. Not only did it wreak havoc with the pool, blowing an unending supply of pollen, leaves, and grit into the pool (which then had to be cleaned out), but it made riding really unpleasant.

Riding

Despite the cold and very dark mornings, we have kept up our riding, although intermittently. When the alarm goes off at 6:15 and it’s cold and pitch black in the room, it takes a supreme act of will to roll our feet out onto the floor and get ready to go. Once we get out the door we’re fine, because we really love the riding.

We’ve been so tired with our projects that awakening to a fiercely windy day, or rainy day, or 35 degree day didn’t inspire us to want to ride, especially since we had a huge backlog of tasks to do. We figured that when spring really arrived and the weather got better, or we got rested, we’d start our rides in earnest.
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What we thought was “pretty good” in our pool status paled in comparison to the real thing.

Yes, we finally got the money organized to get a new dirt catcher and filter. (Check out the before and after photos in the blog. It’s really astonishing.) Combined with two rounds of chlorine; running the pool pump with its new filter for forty-eight hours; and a last vacuuming to suck up the remaining bits of grit and leaves on the bottom – voila – a gorgeous pool.

The pool, with its sparkling blue water, looked like an ad for Florida, tempting us to leap in and relax on pool floats with a drink in our hands (picture tiny umbrellas and little chunks of fruit in the drink).

The bad news? We were thoroughly entrenched in a lengthy unseasonable cold spell, and being in the pool was the last place we wanted to be. We had hopes, however, that the weather would change soon. Meantime, Alex scheduled his second annual Eggs n’ Kegs party for St. Patrick’s Day, a month away.
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Remember I wrote earlier about learning the guitar? I’ve had major progress in that arena.

I finally got my guitar properly strung at Marathon Music (they were awesome); they even tuned it for me for free. Once home I dug out my books from the packed boxes and have been teaching myself chords. We’ve been so slammed with projects that I haven’t taken time to play, but I got an amazing device called a Grip Master to keep my calluses going and to strengthen my fingers.

The Grip Master is a squeeze device that strengthens the forearm, the wrist, the fingers together, and each individual finger, depending on how you squeeze. I bought the “Ruff Caps” to add to the Grip Master. Ruff Caps have lines which replicate the idea of the guitar strings, keeping calluses callused when it isn’t possible to play your instrument.

It works amazingly well – it’s light and easy to carry around, so it’s convenient to use it watching movies, sitting and talking, in the car, and so on. I can already feel a big difference in my hand strength. I got one for Amanda too; she developed carpal tunnel syndrome from her job. The Grip Master has been used for anyone playing musical instruments; for recovering hand strength after strokes; for arthritis; for those who work extensively at computers; and for carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s a totally clever and useful little device. I love it.
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My bedroom was originally a renovated garage, with no real closet and bath, so about four years ago I decided to have our rehab guy (he’d rehabbed a house for us in Ft Pierce) put in a cork floor, a real closet, and small bathroom with shower, sink, and toilet. Our guy promised a week-long job.

Six weeks later I was still sleeping on the recliner in the living room. Four years later the tile in the bathroom wasn’t finished; the door wouldn’t close; the drywall wasn’t finished; wall plates were missing; the shower didn’t have a drain and had a dismal shower head; the door molding inside the bathroom had been tacked on lightly and fell on us at the slightest provocation; the closet and outside bathroom molding hadn’t been put up at all; the sink was dangling from the wall; he’d left holes gouged in the ceiling from his various maneuvers; and he was long gone.

We’ve been living in a construction zone for four years. How often did we think, “If only we had a real towel rack!” The various annoyances grew from a rumble to a roar, especially when we cleared out the shed and re-discovered the tiles, closet doors, molding, drywall paste, and paint.

Chelsea began agitating to finish the job. I wanted to write. Then Tyler arrived. On his first tour of our room (he’ll be taking it as soon we leave), he suggested that we could finish it up, assuring us, “Wouldn’t it look nice; it’d be so easy!” Telling us that he’d brought all his tools, and that he’d worked in construction a bit, he offered to help with whatever we needed.
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