Sold out to the Rooskies!

I journeyed to Cheyenne for my annual medical check-up Monday. My appointment was at 0700 so I was on the road at 0530 to make my 0645 show time. The drive is an hour, and as we all learned in the service, actual show time is 15 minutes prior to published show time. It's the kind of thing that weirds civilians out.

The drive over was nice. It was still dark and there was a lot of ground fog but you could clearly see the moon. Horizontal viz varied from 200 yards to two miles, but vertical viz was nearly unlimited through the rather shallow fog layer.



The check-up was great although I had to add some blood pressure meds as the ol' pressure has started creeping up. I hate the idea of having to take antihypertension medication because that path is highly correlated with being old, and I don't want to be old. I'm well known for wanting a lot of stuff though, a great deal of which is unrealistic. Been that way since I was a kid.

As it turns out, I've basically got two choices in how I deal with this new reality. I can sign up with America's 2019 zeitgeist and join the growing ranks of the professionally and perpetually victimized class, or I can accept reality on a rational basis. The natural arc of my corporeal existence is aligned with reality. My physical self is exactly what it is, and not anything else. It's certainly not a projection of my wishes and desires. I can throw all the temper tantrums I want, I can demand the government provide me with a hypertension-free safe space, I can go on television and screech about Trump's part in a vast Russian conspiracy to attack me personally by raising my blood pressure, blah, blah, blah. Or I can take an incredibly effective and laughably inexpensive pill every morning and get on with enjoying the fruits of liberty. I'm very fortunate indeed to live in a place and time where hypertension can be treated.

I also got a flu shot and pneumonia vaccination. By the time I got back to Kimball I was feeling like dogshit; very sore arms, aches and pains, a bit of a fever, and the general feeling of getting sick. That stuck with me all day and well into the night. I still felt a bit wobbly when I crawled out of the rack Tuesday morning, but generally I felt better.

I was pretty sure that the best cure for my lingering vaccination malaise would be to work out, so I hit it pretty hard. Three mile sprint/walk followed by 160+ flights of steps. It was a good one! By the time I'd finished the workout I felt supremely human once again. And my but it was a lovely day to be an individual human being at liberty.



A nice workout bonus yesterday was finding the snow drifts at the underpass diminished enough that I could run all three flights of steps. In the wake of the blizzard the two flights on the north were completely buried in deep snow. Due to the vagaries of wind and snow deposition during the storm, the south flight of steps remained open, so I never lacked for steps to run while waiting for the big melt. Nevertheless, I do like to run all three sets of steps. There's more variety that way, and switching flights allows for a few moments of recuperation between sets. Yesterday the northwest flight still had crusted snow and ice on the bottom 4 steps, so that was a bit of a challenge. Challenge is good. I only took one header, and I was quite pleased with the way I fell and the way I recovered from the fall. It was essentially a trivial thing. I don't have to fear gravity or the ground. Not everyone is so fortunate.

Today I got over to smokebong hill, which had been drifted shut until yesterday. This morning there were only remnants of rapidly melting snow drifts and so the only hard part of running the hill was, well, running the hill.

I also ran some steep embankments.



Nona enjoyed the outing, though she wonders why I waste so much time with all the running and puffing when I could be throwing the ball for her. Life don't always make sense.

A few of last season's sunflowers are still upright, but they'll be down and decomposing soon.

Later on I ventured into the world of electricity. I replaced the motor on a bathroom exhaust fan and I swapped out a pair of 15 amp wall outlets for 20 amp outlets. I didn't get zapped, and the breakers didn't pop when I was done. Hopefully the big billboard LCD television will stop clicking on and off now, though I suspect the problem is more with the TV than wall outlets. Time will tell I suppose.