From the...ah, Basement

I feel like I ought to title this something profound.  I write this from the future.  Something like that. 

 Actually, I write this from the treadmill.

I would like to have more physical activity in my life.  Riding, especially eventing, is quite good exercise.  I have been giving my horse some time off, which I think she needs, and I’m glad that’s about to end, because I can really feel the difference in my body, riding less.  Recently my husband and I bought a treadmill, which I thought would be very handy, and indeed I like a lot of things about it.  But, while he can Tivo sports shows and watch them while he exercises, there’s very little on TV I actually care about.  My daughter and I are slowly working our way through Downton Abbey Season 4, via a quasi-legal internet connection, but 1) that requires a laptop, not a television; and 2) it doesn’t seem fair to watch without her.  Even if she has been dragging her feet because she’s still so upset about the death of Matthew Crawley.

 Anyway, I can still read books via the treadmill’s magazine rack, or even magazines.  I’ve noticed though that I tend to read at night, after dinner, when I’m happy and cozy and want to have a glass of wine in my flannel pajamas, not sweat.  Also no matter what, I spend a lot of time at my desk, sitting down, and according to the latest health reports (those same people who told us butter was very very bad for you, no, butter’s okay, it’s margarine that’s bad, very, very, very bad—whatever) sitting down all day is a terrible terrible thing.  I also heard that standup treadmill desks are all the rage.

So I invested $35 in a little Plexiglas-sorry, polycarbonate, supposedly bulletproof though nobody’s firing bullets in my basement—a little shelf thingy that I can hang off the treadmill console and Velcro my laptop to, and voila!  I write this at a 3% incline going 1.3 mph, my hands bouncing a bit and the fingerpad nearly worthless, but still, writing and walking, which, exercise wise, has got to beat talking and chewing gum at the same time.  The only problem I’m having is that I haven’t used the laptop in a little while, and therefore it’s intent on getting updated, immediately, so it keeps popping up little windows, and I have to use the fingerpad to close them.  But hey, first world problems.

 

wrote a lot about Advent for love blooms bright, a Wordspress blog, and then on Christmas Eve I posted one fairly snarky post about Duck Dynasty and Christ, and then I had a lovely Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.  And then things got a little harder, though not because of anything anyone could have prevented.  Just—harder.  So pray for us, if you do that kind of thing.  Hope your Christmases were lovely, too.