Racing the Calendar

On Wednesday I reported the beginning symptoms of what has developed into a pretty bad cold. On Thursday I was more or less functional, but Friday was the dripping, sneezing, stay-close-to-a-box-of-Kleenex day. Yesterday was the weak, achy, stay-in-bed-most-of-the-day day, and today is the sore, tight throat day.

Since my husband and I are scheduled to fly to the Pacific Northwest on Tuesday, for visits with family in Oregon followed by my attendance at the Microsoft MVP Global Summit in Seattle March 1–4, I sincerely hope that tomorrow will see a dramatic reduction in symptoms.

I’ve been steadily grinding through the mountain of details that have to be taken care of to prepare for a ten-day absence, and I think I’m pretty much on track to get everything done, but this virus has definitely thrown a monkey wrench into the works, constraining all my excursions—to the grocery, to the library for used paperbacks for the trip, to the post office, to the drugstore for more cough syrup—into what will undoubtedly be a very crowded Monday.

Since I haven’t emerged from the house any farther than the front walk to bring in the newspaper, needless to say I haven’t been out walking, but I’ll have plenty of opportunity for that in Portland, Astoria, and Seattle—details to follow.

Hitting the Ground (Not) Running

After the exhilarating experience of actually managing to run short distances on Sunday, it was frustrating not to be able to get out at all on Monday.

I had every intention of doing so, but to begin with I overslept and so got a late start, and then I spent all morning in email, it seemed, fighting the various fires ignited by the messages I’d received, and at 11:55 a.m., I was still in my nightgown.

I’d suggested to my husband that we have lunch out (at a “square table” restaurant that serves generous portions of plain “home-cooked” meat and vegetables) so we could just have a sandwich for supper (I could see how the day was going and knew there wouldn’t be time to spend on cooking supper, much less getting out to the grocery for more food). But he had a client meeting in Mobile at 3, so we would have to leave for lunch no later than 1 p.m. He was headed out for a run and figured he would just barely have time, but it was obvious I wouldn’t (since I wasn’t ready to leave the computer yet, anyway).

So I not only didn’t try running again, I didn’t even get out for a walk. Yesterday I had ballet, so I wouldn’t have gone out anyway, but I got up with the kind of chest congestion that augurs weeks of asthmatic bronchitis and felt punk all day, not to mention that it was another nonstop day—there wouldn’t have been time.

This morning my chest seemed clear, but my head was stuffy instead, with a sinus headache that promised another unpleasant day. To my surprise, though, even after I’d dawdled every way I could think of, I still ended up with plenty of time for a walk before getting ready for Rotary. Given my iffy state of health, I thought better of trying to run again, but, again to my surprise, I found myself strangely energized and walking much faster than usual. I ended up finishing my route only a minute slower than on Sunday, when I ran (and four minutes faster than usual)!

It didn’t hurt that it was a gorgeous morning—temperature close to 70° F. and sunny at least to start, though it was completely overcast by the time I got home and did actually rain later in the day, as forecast (and now is turning much colder).

It has been another nonstop day, but at least this time I felt more in control—not as if my To Do list were overwhelming me—and I think that is at least partly attributable to the sense of satisfaction I felt in getting in a really brisk walk this morning. I hope I can remember that the next time I have “too much to do” and am tempted to slack off and skip the walk.

Trying to Run

I was tempted to title this post “Wanting to Die.” At least that’s the way I felt at times during this morning’s walk, during parts of which I attempted to run, succeeding in a sort of mild lope.

I didn’t set out with the idea of running. Whenever I’ve attempted it before, my arthritic knees have quickly let me know that running was out of the question. But lately in my ballet class we’ve been warming up by skipping, and this always feels so good to me that I feel like I could keep it up all day, though actually I’m out of breath and more than ready to stop after a couple of laps around the studio. At any rate, I thought that, even if I couldn’t run, perhaps I could skip for at least part of my walking route and thus get a more aerobic workout and more cardiovascular benefit.

I was raring to go. I was well and thoroughly rained out yesterday—nearly five inches of rain over the course of the evening, night, and early morning—but this morning, while still wet, didn’t look too threatening, and in fact the sun was beginning to come out by the time I got home. The temperature was very pleasant—in the low 60s, with a fresh breeze—so conditions were ideal.

Well, almost ideal. While it is not at all unusual to see people running and walking, you basically don’t ever see anyone (at least not anyone my age) skipping, so I felt a little self-conscious about starting. The hardest part of moving from walking to doing anything else is changing gait to begin with, but I’d made up my mind I’d get down to the corner and then start skipping on the part of my route that runs along the bluff overlooking the bay, where there are houses on only one side, on broad lots and several of them unoccupied, so there would be few potential observers. So naturally, as soon as I got to the corner, there was an explosion of vehicular traffic. Where were all these cars coming from? (Some of them from Mississippi, to judge by their tags.)

Finally, the last car in sight turned a corner, and I started trying to skip. Bad idea. I don’t know whether it was the road surface, the shoes, or just the general ambiance, but it simply wasn’t working. So instead I tried the knees-bent jazz run we also do in class. To my surprise, this actually worked out pretty well (no knee pain).

Not surprisingly, I couldn’t keep it up for long, but I did manage to get in several stints (of a block or two or three) of “running,” interspersed with longer stretches of catching my breath. Perhaps it was the effect of the increased heart rate, but I found that even when I dropped down to a walk, I was walking faster. The bottom line was that I shaved better than five minutes off my total time and presumably got a better workout, so I guess I’ll try to keep it up, even if at times it does seem entirely likely that I’ll drop dead in my tracks.

Pedestrians: An Endangered Species?

A fellow Microsoft MVP posted a link to a walking-related YouTube video that had been picked up by another blog that is actually about driving. If the instructions given by WordPress for embedding YouTube videos work, you’ll see it below.

I do like the deadpan tone of the film, which was created by B. C. Brown.

Ordinary People

I have noticed that blogs written by Ordinary People (by which I mean people who don’t blog regularly as part of their job assignment) tend to have long silent periods followed by abashed apologies. I will not apologize. It’s been too cold to walk, and I’ve been almost too busy to think, besides.

But this morning I did walk, and one of the things I was thinking about was Ordinary People and the Internet.

I’ve been transcribing some letters written by my great-grandfather. The ones I was typing this morning were written in 1887 and describe the death of his five-week-old daughter, his first child, “My darling little baby that I had learned to love and to hope so much for.” It is inevitable that in a letter that old, there will be references that tantalize. One was to “Metten’s food,” which I took to be some sort of infant formula. In fact, I found that it was actually Mellin’s Infant Food, a powder to be added to cow’s milk for nursing infants, and I learned a great deal about it—its composition, history, and advertisement and sale in the United States.

All this would not have been possible without the Internet and efficient search engines (thank you, Google). Even more amazing, though, was what I was able to find out about poor Mary’s final resting place. My great-grandfather, in his letter to his parents, wrote that the baby had been buried, in a white casket covered with white flowers, in Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemetery. At that cemetery’s Web site, I found that I could “Locate a Loved One.” A search for “Mary Benton” turned up four results, one of which was the baby who, had she lived, would have been my great-aunt. When I clicked on the ID number, I was presented with a PDF of the actual grave record card, which provided information I could not have obtained any other way.

I am constantly amazed at the wealth of information that is available online, some of it information I never dreamed existed. In a casual search for my great-grandfather the other day, I ran across a letter being offered for sale, a letter written to my great-grandfather when he was at West Point. That letter must have been in the possession of our family at one time, and one can only speculate how it came into the hands of the History Broker, but the price being asked makes me even more determined to guard carefully my great-grandfather’s letters and other writings describing the San Francisco earthquake and his experiences in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War.

We all think our families are special, even if they’re not special to anyone but us, but the fact that we can find so much information online about family members—even information we never dreamed existed—still seems like a miracle to me. As more and more institutions (museums, libraries, cemeteries, public agencies) digitize their holdings, it becomes possible to get more and more information about everything, but in particular about Ordinary People (e.g., my family) and Everyday Life (e.g., nineteenth-century infant formula). To me this value outweighs many times over the waste of server space devoted to porn, spam, and popup ads (not to mention worthless blogs like this one), and I welcome further development along these lines.