Second Week Update

Workouts currently consist of forty five minutes (up from forty) of cardio (read elliptical) one day and twenty minutes of cardio followed by an upper body workout; then a day with forty five minutes of cardio followed by a day with twenty minutes of cardio followed by a mid-section workout; then a day with forty five minutes of cardio followed by a day with twenty minutes of cardio followed by a lower body workout; and repeat. That is not to say that I go to the gym every day – on any given day it’s alright to skip a day, as long as there aren’t two skipped days in a row. And a skipped day means that you just delay the next workout in order by a day, so you’re not actually skipping a workout.
An upper body workout consists of three or four sets of eight to twelve reps on a pull-down machine; the same (three or four sets of eight to twelve reps) on a shoulder press, the chest press, the triceps press, the curling machine, and the butterfly machine.
A mid-section workout consists of three or four sets of eight to twelve reps from the left side (and then the right side) on a torso twist machine; the same on the abdominal press and back press.
A lower body workout consists of three or four sets of eight to twelve reps on hip adduction and abduction machines; the same on the leg extension and leg press machines and the thrust machine.
I plan on increasing the time from forty-five to fifty minutes; and then fifty five, until every other workout is an hour of cardio. Along with this, I’ll increase the shorter days incrementally to thirty minutes and increase the weight for strength training.
My target weight is 190 lbs. along with low enough blood pressure and cholesterol to at least cut back on the dosage of (if not forgo) the blood pressure and cholesterol medicines. Then I’ll work on the maintenance plan to keep from getting this bad again.
As the weather warms up, the cardio may be switched from elliptical to cycling outdoors or swimming – just to change it up. I better watch out for the seagulls!

Weigh in today was 223 lbs. More like what I expected when it is put in perspective - six pounds on two weeks.

What To Make of Piping Plovers

On Cape Cod, we have several at risk (or threatened) species. The sand-plain gerardia, the roseate tern, and the northern red bellied cooter are on the endangered species list. Nobody gives these a second thought. Probably because there are so few that they are very seldom seen.

When was the last time you went out on the sand-plain looking for gerardia? And when was the last time you saw a cooter? Northern, southern, red or yellow bellied? What the hell is a cooter? Would I know one if I saw it?

The only one you hear about is the piping plover. It is threatened, not endangered, and anyone finding their way around the beaches in late April through June have come across the roped off areas that are posted “No Entry – Piping Plover breeding habitat”. Wouldn’t want to invade their little love nests. Heaven forbid!

A favorite walk is from the house to Kalmus Beach, down along the inland side beach, across the seawall and around the peninsula, traversing the Nantucket Sound beach and going back home again.

Around the whole sand spit that is Kalmus Beach, there will be a rope to ensure the piping plovers have enough privacy to breed (no peeking!). The rope will stay there until the chicks have hatched, grown up and fledged. There used to be some coyotes that lived in the woods around Snowy Creek, not far from Kalmus. There hasn’t been any sign of them lately – I think that someone saw them going after the plovers’ eggs and chicks and trapped them. Anything to save a plover! Not that anyone is necessarily sorry to see the coyotes go – that’s a whole other set of problems.

Plovers are not very big – they're slightly smaller than the common sparrow. The worst thing about plovers from my perspective is their disposition after the eggs hatch. At thirty yards away from the closest nest (which you can’t see because it is on top of a ten to twelve foot high sand dune), the adults will still dive bomb your head to try and back you off more. They never really hit, but they try their best to make you think that they will.

When they’re attacking it makes you think: “No wonder no one likes you guys.” They are nasty little birds that get people around here mad because, in the push to protect the plovers, they stop “over the sand” vehicles until late June (or even early July). You can pick out these guys – four wheel drive vehicles with huge sand tires and bumpers stickers that read “Piping Plovers – tastes like chicken”.

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.