Thursday, March 1, 2012

Trials and Tribulations...

March 1, 2012, seven months, stuck at 243 pounds while my knee heals...dammit!


Rebuilding the Wreck

   Have you ever seen these shows about people who rebuild old cars? They go find some rusty old car, hiding in a barn somewhere like it is ashamed to be seen. The car guy finds this old rust bucket and says, "Oh my God! This is a 1967 Buggernaut Coupe, built in Luxembourg by Dummass Motorwerks! It's a classic!" He's hopping up and down, all grins and excitement, and then the camera swings to the car, and it's a disaster! The tires rotted out during the Clinton administration, one headlight is hanging loose in it's socket, a chicken is roosting on the roof, and the whole thing is so dirty, you can't tell what the original color used to be. The car guy lifts the hood, and when the dust cloud settles, he gets all excited again, "Yes! It has the original 9 cylinder engine with the turbo charger and the titanium spark plugs! Awesome!"  And you are wondering how he can tell all this, because the engine looks like a pile of rusty, discarded parts in a junkyard somewhere. He buys the heap, and the rest of the show is all about the restoration work he has to do, with whacky little scenes of fun and hijinks by the guys in the shop...

   While the camera rolls, the car guy runs into one unexpected problem after another, because there are so many things rotted out, rusted away, frozen solid, or just missing, and he has to fix one screwed up situation after another. Some parts he has to special order from Bavaria, some he scrounges from a guy in El Paso that owes him a favor, some he actually makes from scratch in the shop, but eventually, he gets it running again. It runs like crap, but it can actually move under it's own power...that's where I am right now with this rusted hulk of a body of mine.

   I was so fat and so badly out of shape that many of my muscles atrophied. The tendons tightened up and the muscles wasted away because I wasn't able to get any decent exercise, so now I'm running into all sorts of little problems. My thigh muscles are weak, and I have tendonitus. All those little muscles in my lower back, hips, sides, rib cage, etcetera, are all weak from lack of use, so when I try to exercise, I am shockingly weak compared to my younger self. I am doing all sorts of therapeutic exercises, but I still have a long way to go...

PLANKING - SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE   

  No, I'm not talking about those morons who post pictures of themselves lying flat and motionless on park benches, coffee tables, railroad tracks, or where-ever. I'm talking about one of the best, most effective exercises I have ever experienced. It is stupid-simple, you can do it pretty much anywhere, and it is amazingly effective. All you do is lie facedown on the floor with your elbows tucked under your chest and your hands under your chin, and lift your body up while keeping your back straight or ever-so-slightly humped.  Don't let your back sag! Think of it like a push up done on your elbows instead of your hands. Concentrate on trying to tighten up all of those abdominal muscles, and hold that position for 15 to 20 seconds. 

shamelessly stolen from someone else's blog...

    This exercise actually works pretty much everything from your neck to your ankles, including all of those little muscles in your lower back, abdominals, and hips, the collection of muscles people have dubbed "The Core". Do that 3 times, with 30 seconds of rest in between planks. If you are in decent shape, 20 seconds won't be too challenging, but you will feel it working. If you are in crappy shape, like me, 15 seconds will have you sweating and shaking like a heroin junkie going through withdrawal. I did three planks of 15 seconds each on Monday, and I'm still feeling it on Thursday morning. For now, one planking session per week is plenty...especially if I do the side plank version while I'm down there on the floor. It is the same principal, just performed on one elbow with your body sideways instead of face down. It is idiot simple and abs-olutely effective! (Get it? Abs-olutely? Never mind, bad pun.)  It hurts, but it's good pain, the kind of pain that happens when weakness is leaving the body...

More sweat and good pain coming soon...


and a word or two about Vodka!

   Do you like vodka? I mean really like vodka? I'm not talking about a splash of the stuff in some orange juice, I'm talking super cold vodka shots, no ice, no mixer, just toss the bottle in the freezer for a couple hours, then drink it straight. If you really like vodka, then you know the difference between the good stuff and the cheap stuff, right? Don't be so sure...

   When you buy a really good whisky, like a fine single malt or a nicely aged sourmash, you are paying for the materials in the mash, the distillation, the fine oak barrels, the long patient aging process under strictly controlled conditions...and it's worth it. When you buy a nice, top-shelf vodka, do you know what you are paying for? If you plunk down $35 for top-shelf vodka, you are mainly paying for the name and the fancy bottle. Vodka is simply the purest distillation of ethanol, mixed with the cleanest water available. There is no careful aging, no oak barrels, no fine aromas and flavors. The best vodka is simply really clean ethanol at about 40% strength, diluted with clean, pure water. So what is the difference between the cheap stuff and the high-dollar stuff? Impurities...those other chemicals in there that make the stuff taste funny. Really cheap, crappy vodka tastes like paint thinner mixed with diesel fuel and a dash of battery acid, and it may actually have some of the same chemicals in it. Cheap vodka tastes bad, leaves a harsh or oily aftertaste, and gives you a skull-splitting, please-kill-me-now hangover. What to do, what to do?

   The answer is simple - purify the stuff! I recently experimented with a cheap bottle of rot gut, the cheapest in the store. I took a small shot of the stuff, gagged a little, and debated just pouring it out, but I decided to go ahead with my experiment anyway. I got an empty bottle, a small plastic funnel, 2 coffee filters, and about 50 cents worth of aquarium filter charcoal, the stuff you can buy at Walmart. I filtered the cheap crappy vodka through the charcoal once, and it was noticeably better. I filtered it through the same filter again, and the stuff was almost good. After 4 trips through the charcoal, I honestly don't think I would be able to tell the filtered cheap stuff from the really pricey stuff with the goose on the label. I tossed the bottle in the freezer for a couple hours, and enjoyed several shots later in the evening while watching something educational and spiritually uplifting - some gun porn on the outdoor channel! I went to bed, woke up fully functional, no hangover at all, no headache, no feeling of being poisoned the previous evening, just one glass of water and I was ready to rock. 




   With whiskey, you pay for all of those subtle flavors and aromas that fine, careful aging can produce, but with vodka, you are paying for what you don't get - all of the chemical impurities that come in the really cheap crappy stuff. Save a pile of cash and simply filter out the stuff you don't want. Trust me on this one, it works!