After One Week

Well, I’ve been working out and eating better for a week now. The hardest part is to get through the cardio. Spinning, or jogging on a treadmill, or even aerobics are just plain boring. And my knees can’t take the abuse, so I’m pretty much limited to the elliptical machine. (Talk about boring! See the picture for the type of machine I'm using.)

Really though, the elliptical machines are the reason that I joined the gym that I currently belong to. I was at a “health club” in a hotel around the block from me and it has several things going for it: a swimming pool, a sauna, a nice staff, membership rates for greens fees at the golf course, and lots of members that I know. (Our neighbors down the street are members, but I only used to see them Saturday mornings because they’re retired and go during the day when I’m at work.) To be honest, I thought that I would use the pool more than I did and I never have played the golf course.

It’s also more expensive than the new place, but the biggest reason that I switched was because I spent a lot of time standing around waiting for people to get through with a machine that I wanted to use. For a gym that had seventy-five or eighty members (out of two hundred) that routinely used the facilities, they only had three elliptical machines. No one intent on a cardio workout would use the elliptical for less that 20 minutes, and an hour or ninety minutes is not out of line. While the machines were in use, I tried to make up the difference with a treadmill or a stair-climber or a stationary bike. This is how I found out how much they caused my knees to hurt. I tried to find out when the gym was used least, but because it was in a hotel and the guests had full use also, it depended on what was happening in town and who was using the hotels convention facilities. When cheerleading competitions were held there, you couldn’t even get into the gym or pool.

So, I now work out at a larger gym with a cardio area that is just about the size of the entire facility at the hotel. I have never had to wait for a elliptical machine. (Although I once saw all of them in use at the same time- this was for about five minutes when I was also using them.)

Getting back to the subject at hand – working out is boring. Knowing the benefits of exercise and weight loss are enough to get me motivated to go to the gym, but maintaining that motivation is sometimes a problem. One of the ways that I compensate is to make sure I get a machine that has a working closed caption feature on the TV. I can keep my music on the MP3 player for rhythm and keep my mind occupied with mindless drivel on CNN or Fox News or ESPN or the Golf channel. I also sometimes put a towel on the bottom of the screen over the section that has the accumulative time and relative distance. That leaves me the clock on the wall (that I try not to look at) or the TV shows or counting the songs on the MP3 player.

In the first week, I’ve lost five pounds – excellent toward the goal, but this rate will be impossible to sustain. My weight is 224 lbs.

Something to Blog About, Making It Better

I like the feeling that I get after finishing a post. It's a small accomplishment, but it is a discernible accomplishment - something to feel proud about. The writing may not be the best, but putting the thoughts into a communication helps to keep the thoughts left in there straight.

So what to blog about? I've been thinking about this every week or so since HSC was first written. It should be something that adds to the discourse without being as trite as Facebook statuses can be. Self improvement might be just the thing, but I'm inviting any followers to join me. (There may be three right now.)

Baby steps first - exercising will help lose weight, lower blood pressure and counteract diabetic symptoms. Visiting the gym helps one exercise, as does walking, running, cycling, or swimming. A goal of exercising five to six times a week for thirty to 90 minutes is what I need to get started.

So, there's the goal. Blogging about it should give an impetus to stay on track. If this works, I'll switch the focus to diet, sleep, and other subjects to try and remain healthy. I'm starting out at 229 lbs.

Sea Gulls

Living on Cape Cod, you get used to sea gulls. They are everywhere, chasing fast food bags down the street; dive bombing your wind shield; and stealing french fries from your plate at the seafood hut on the waterfront. I worked at a place where they dropped mollusks and crustaceans onto the pavement to break them open so that they can eat them. Walking into work at dawn, it seemed as though it was raining clams, crab claws, and even conches. Thank god we were given hardhats before we started work. And you wanted to make sure that you parked on the gravel, off the blacktop, or else your car was substituted for the hard surface to drop the critters on. What a mess!

Just like anything else though, not all sea gulls are bad. National Geographic channel had an episode where they talked about a symbiotic relationship that has been built up between a certain kind of gull and a particular pod of dolphins. This happened in the Bahamas. There is a certain pod of dolphins that live much longer than the fifteen or sixteen years that is the lifespan of a normal dolphin. The University of Miami (Florida) researchers followed one bottle-nosed dolphin for 61 years and it is still going strong. It not understood how it works, but the presence of this certain variety of gull, called a Napoleon gull, in large numbers seem to help the pod find food and the gulls will “sanitize” the area after the pod completes eating by feeding on the scraps of fish and shrimp.

Now a Napoleon gull is smaller than normal varieties of sea gull, but has a pure white body with jet black wings. They strut around as if to say, “Hey, I may be small but I am so much better looking than you, Mr. Common Sea Gull.”

Some feral cats found their way on to the island where the Napoleon gulls breed and were wreaking havoc on the population. The Bahamian authorities trapped the cats, but the gull colony had been decimated – there were only 10 to 15 percent of the gulls left. The health of the pod of cetaceans started to decline and there were now several that began to show their age.

The researchers started looking for another colony of Napoleon gulls, so that they could replenish the Bahamian colony. The only colony that they could find was in Newport, Michigan, on the grounds of the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Plant. I used to work at that site and there are still to this day, nesting Napoleon gulls.

There is a spit of land that juts out into the confluence of Swan Creek and the Detroit River current in Lake Erie. There 180 to 200 nesting pairs of Napoleon gulls (but no dolphins) that live on that stretch of beach.

After DNA testing proved that the birds were, in fact, Napoleon gulls and not just look-alikes, researchers started raiding the nests for viable eggs. They hatched the eggs at an elementary school in Monroe, about fifteen miles away.

The birds were raised in an aviary until they fledged at about 16 weeks. Then all 50 survivors were crated up and put into a van for the trip to the airport in Toledo, Ohio. As the research team was placing the crates onto an airplane, the FBI arrested them all and took them into custody.

The charge?

Transporting gulls across state lines for immortal porpoises!

As I think about it, I’m not even sure that “transporting girls across state lines for immoral purposes” is proper charge anymore. Maybe it’s transporting minors across state lines for lewd and lascivious acts, or something like that.

Shivers Up My Spine

When I hear the words, “radiation leak” or “radiation in the water supply”, it sends shivers up my spine. Misspeaking like this causes me to question everything I read in that paper or hear on that newscast. Radiation is an effect, not a substance. The substance that emits radiation is a radioactive material and that can be contained in emissions (or leaks) from a nuclear facility.

Why does no one ever correct this misnomer? I expect that newspapers or newscasts rely heavily on words, so I would think that they would try to use them correctly. I guess I would be wrong.

I have spent 38 years working in the nuclear industry and have tried to explain to my family and friends and neighbors what I do and how the plant works and what the many myths surrounding this industry are. Most people’s eyes glaze over when I start telling them why the plant can’t blow up like an atomic bomb, or what the effects of radiation on the human body are. That is one of the biggest myths; we don’t know what radiation does to the human body. If you believe the myth, we can still have giant ants in the desert and fire-breathing dinosaurs under the ocean.

The truth is not as compelling as the myth. Radiation causes damage on the atomic and molecular level. Radiation causes ionization of the material that it interacts with. This ionization can directly break apart molecular bonds and cause direct damage to molecules within the cells (e.g., DNA or RNA or other biological protein strands). It can also ionize individual atoms or break molecular bonds to create free radicals. These can chemically interact with in the cell structure to damage or kill the cell.

When the individual damage is combined with other damage in very high doses, it can cause biological systems to break down. This only happens in very high doses. This is called radiation syndrome or radiation sickness. It starts if you were to receive twenty times the annual limit for radiation workers in a short time.

What we can measure in lower doses is an increased risk of cancer. This is problematic because there is already such a high risk of cancer; roughly one in four people will get cancer if they received no extra dose of radiation. So, of a group of ten thousand people, twenty five hundred could reasonably be expected to contract cancer (plus or minus the statistical variance). If each person in that ten thousand person group were to receive one fifth of the annual limit for radiation workers, we could expect to see six extra occurrences of cancer (unfortunately within the statistical variance of ten thousand subjects – so it can’t be identified as being caused by the radiation dose).

This is part of what I do. I’ve worked as a Radiation Protection Technician, a Radiation Protection Instructor, a Radiological Engineer and several other jobs that I did to pay the bills. I never forget that what I do is outside the norm, but it is interesting work. I don’t like it when people that don’t understand it try to tell others what’s going on. As I said – it sends shivers up my spine.

Chile and Chili

One of the "masters" of Tex-Mex style chili is a guy named Wick Fowler. He is an enigma. He told his friends that chili shouldn't contain tomatoes, or masa harina (finely ground corn flour used in making tortillas also just called masa). He then put out a chili kit (Wick Fowler's Two Alarm Chili) under his name with instructions to add tomatoes and it includes masa as an ingredient.

The Roy Rogers Show

I think that it would be great to be a kid today. Playstation, Nintendo Wii, and Xbox are head and shoulders above any toy that I had. My brother and I watched “The Man in the Iron Mask” on a daily movie show that was on at 4:00 o’clock and ran until 5:30. It was called the “Big Show”. When it was over, we went out and broke switches off of a tree in the back yard to use as swords to reenact scenes from the movie. Today you can put a fencing game into the Wii and watch your avatars sword fight up and down stairs and all across castle rooms - just like in the movie.

That being said, there is a lot to be said for growing up as part of the “baby-boom”. I don’t think kids today ever had a straight forward World War 2 series like “Combat”, or a goofy puppet show like “Kookla, Fran and Ollie”. And we had Roy Rogers.

The Roy Rogers Show was one of my favorites. Roy, and his wife, Dale Evans, were joined by Pat Brady, a hired ranch hand.

Pat Brady was different than any other ranch hand on TV. He hardly ever rode a horse. Instead he drove a jeep that was likely to break down at any minute. He called his jeep “Nellie Belle”.

Pat provided comic relief for Roy and Dale. Together, they were a family that included their horses, “Trigger” and “Buttermilk”; and their dog, “Bullet”. They all lived in the wide open spaces on the Double-D-Bar Ranch.

I later read that one episode was based on a true incident. It seems that Roy went to Texas and had a pair of Tony Lama cowboy boots made specifically for the show. They were extra fancy, and fit him like a glove. He was very fond of those boots (as only a cowboy can be).

On the first episode of 1956, Roy was out with Pat, rounding up some bad guys that had rustled a prize bull from the ranch next door. It got late, so they made camp and bedded down under the stars.

In the middle of the night, there was a noise. Roy jumped up to investigate and he could see the bull on the ridge silhouetted against the sky. He was so excited, jumped on Trigger in his stocking feet and left his boots next to his bedroll.

By the time he got the bull roped and wrestled into submission, it was near dawn. Pat and Roy went back to break camp and found a mess they couldn't believe.

It seems thay after they left, an animal (probably smelling food and seeing no one around) tore up everthing in the camp looking for food. It had torn apart Roy's Tony Lamas and chewed every bit of the leather!

The King of the Cowboys was so mad that he was barely able to discern the mountain lion tracks all over the camp. He vowed that the cougar's hide would get hung on the wall of the bunkhouse.

They got the bull back to it's rightful owner and stopped by the ranch to provision for the hunt. After explaining what happened to Dale, Pat put food and extra camping gear in Nellie Belle, along with plenty of extra gasoline. Roy put on an old pair of boots, grabbed extra ammo from the ranch house, kissed Dale, hopped on Trigger, and they were off in a cloud of dust and jeep exhaust.

They started tracking and in a short while, they heard the animal's high pitched scowling roar. It ran up a ridge and was gone over the top before either could get a shot off. The animal must have known that he was their quarry, for he remained hidden in front of them the rest of the day.

Over the next three days, the cougar remained elusive and started running for its life. The only time they saw or heard it, it was out of range of their guns. They were losing it.

On the fourth night they heard it roar off in the distance. Roy could have sworn that it was laughing at him.

Days turned into weeks and after two of them , with no longer any tracks to go by, they had to admit that this laughing mountain lion had eluded them. They headed back to the ranch. The four day ride was silent except for Nellie Belle's backfires (which happened just rythmically enough that it sounded like laughter; which didn't lighten Roy's mood).

When Roy and Pat returned to the ranch, Dale cooked them a wonderful meal and consoled them as best she could. Roy was still beside himself, but he had a grudging admiration for the mountain lion that had out smarted him over the couple of weeks.

They were sitting on the porch watching the sunset over the mountain, There was a movement on the hill to the south of the house. It looked like a mountain lion!

Dale, her eye on the hill, tapped Roy on the shoulder and sang, ♪ ♫"Pardon me Roy, ♪ is that the cat that chewed your new shoes?"♫ ♪

A Rant That's Been Building

To start this off, let me say that I have health insurance through the company that I work for. I don’t have to worry about being fined or imprisoned for violating the Massachusetts Mandatory Healthcare law. I pay much more for it than I did a few years ago, and the level of coverage has been reduced, but it is still workable for my circumstances. On to the rant:

After years of “mandated” health care insurance, I still don’t understand how the state can tell me that I have to spend my money on health insurance.

The legal basis for auto insurance is the state can revoke my privilege to register and drive my car if I don’t buy auto insurance. This is because driving a car is a privilege, not a right.

To make that work for health insurance there would have to be a corresponding privilege to revoke if I refuse to buy health insurance. What is that privilege?

Under this system, if there is not a privilege to be exercised, healthcare becomes a de facto right. If healthcare is a right, then it is the government’s responsibility to provide it. They may assess taxes to fund this responsibility, but that is not the same as requiring people to spend their own money in the market place.

The government of the Commonwealth needs to decide if healthcare is a privilege or a right. If they decide that it is a privilege, they must stop mandating that people buy insurance. If it is a right, they need to get ready for the opposition; create the bureaucracy to administer healthcare; and assess taxes to pay for it. It may get them voted out of office if their constituency disagrees with it, but that is in the calculus of being an elected representative of the people.

I will be a member of the opposition to this, but if they feel it is the right thing to do, they should stand up for their beliefs.

How I spend my money, or not, is a right that must not be curtailed by the government.