My internet has melted, and has been at best intermittent throughout the day, so lemme just throw up a quick proof-of-life before it goes down again: it was brutally hot outdoors today; I think the heat index reached somewhere in the 105-110 range, with tomorrow expected to be just as bad. Amazingly, though, it wasn’t nearly as humid as I was expecting, meaning that outside was unpleasant but not the immediate death I was planning for. We spent the evening in the pool. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.
Tag: swimming
On returning to normalcy
I feel like I should already know why you get so many pictures of Warren G. Harding if you Google Image Search the word “normalcy,” or at least that I should be able to figure it out if I apply some thought to it, but I’m not going to do that. This post could use some weird, frankly, and that picture is funnier if I don’t know why it came up.
One of my oldest friends passed through town on Friday, and we hung out for a while and chatted on the back porch; the topic of masking did not come up. Yesterday we put the pool up; it’ll likely be a week before we can take a proper swim in it, judging from the weather report, but it’s full already somehow and ready to go, and my wife got to say the words “I’m going to go buy sand and acid” to me earlier today and that was fun for both of us. I mowed the front lawn today (no cicadas yet, but I’m watching) and did some weed whacking and other various Adult Chores, and I was done with my grading within two hours of getting up.
It has, by any account, been a Productive Weekend. I still have some school stuff to do after dinner, but there should be plenty of time for guilt-free video gaming tonight.
I also filled the car up with gas, which is only significant insofar as I needed to break a $20, so I went into the gas station to buy a lemonade, and realized when I was almost inside that I didn’t have a mask on. I shrugged and went in anyway; the county mask ordinance has been cancelled and a two-minute in-and-out at the gas station is about as safe as an indoor interaction can possibly be. If someone had said something to me, I’d have gone and gotten a mask, but no one did. This is the first time I’ve purchased something in a store without some sort of face covering on in well over a year.
(I even did it without any particular self-recrimination about looking exactly like the kind of guy who refuses to wear a mask rather than a vaccinated person who briefly forgot, but I’m blogging about it fifteen minutes later, so maybe I don’t get to pat myself on the back about that one.)
In keeping with the theme of this year, which had about six “first days of school,” this Wednesday represents the first Last Day of School; this year will feature at least three, if not four. My students have their 8th Grade recognition ceremony on Wednesday and are not expected to return to the building afterwards. Friday is the original Last Day of School for everyone else, and since there was a day of school cancelled in January because the entire city lost power, June 1, which is the Tuesday after Memorial Day, is the technical Last Day of School, a day after a three-day weekend where I expect no students at all to attend. Then there’s my Last Day of School, which is June 2, and then I’m off until August, barring a day or so a week where I’ll have various responsibilities that can be done from home and studying for this math test from Hell I have to take sometime.
Bring it on.
In which it’s almost ready
I did promise that I’d post a picture of the pool once it was actually full. The boy has been in it, briefly, but right now we’re making sure all the chemicals are balanced and shit before making it official. We will probably be swimming in it by Monday or so.
(Oh, also: don’t look straight down into a gallon container of muriatic acid to see if you’ve poured out half of it or not. Bad idea! Bad! Don’t do that!)
Anyway. Pool:
I am buying a new ladder today, one more suited for a man of my … robustness, and I plan on spending most of the rest of the day staring at this thing while it sucks all the little tree thingies out of the water. It’s fucking hypnotic, I tell you:
In which I get summer break sorted out
So here’s what I did today. It was supposed to take 45 minutes.
So, yeah, we’re gonna have a pool in the back yard this summer. Total cost was about $450, and a membership in the local neighborhood pool that we’d have to get in the car to go to is around $325, so I figure even if we only get a couple of seasons out of it it’ll be worth the money. I did the math; it’s a 48″ pool and it’s filling at about 4″ an hour so it’s literally going to take half a damn day to fill it up.
Also, across the 15 feet of the pool we’re only about 1.25″ off from level. I’m pretty certain that’s about as good as it gets in a back yard.
I’ll post another picture or two once it’s actually filled tomorrow, and then there’s chemicals and shit before we can start swimming in it on a regular basis, plus I’m sure it’ll rain for the next two weeks.
Whee!
How to be an Asshole Without Even Really Trying
…okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be around much today, but I want to write this down before I forget about it and it won’t take long.
On my list of things to do today was an eye doctor appointment to get fitted with contact lenses so that I can see while I’m swimming. I’ve worn contacts before; I tend to flip back and forth between contacts and glasses every couple of years or so. I left with a pair of sample contacts in my prescription and, after thinking about it for a bit, decided to go for a swim.
Why did I think about it? Because the thought you don’t have a replacement pair, so if you lose a lens in the damn pool you’re going to feel pretty stupid rolled through my head, and I almost decided to give my eyes a couple of days to get re-used to the lenses before swimming.
But I didn’t!
As I was swimming, getting reasonably close to my number of goal laps for the day, I noticed a youngish black kid standing rather nervously at the shallow end of the pool. There was one open lane and one person in each of the other three, and he was being kind of weirdly fidgety about getting in. I stood down at the shallow end and gasped for air for a minute or two, waiting to see if he wanted to share my lane, and then swam down to the far end.
As I got down to the far end and turned around, he climbed into the pool, using the ladder, in my lane.
And right about there, at that exact second, I adjusted my goggles and knocked a lens out of place. It wasn’t out of my eye, but it was seriously not in position any longer, and it wasn’t comfortable at all. I fiddled with it for a second, realized my chlorine-soaked hands weren’t doing me any good, and bailed. From the deep end.
Leaving my towel and flip-flops at the other end.
And, as it was starting to hurt, didn’t quite run– the floor’s too slippery for that– but made for the men’s locker room at as high a rate of speed as being half-blind and in bare feet could allow.
It took two or three minutes in the bathroom, maybe, to get the lens back in place, at which point I thought fuck it, I was pretty close to the number of laps I was going to do anyway, and I think I’ve pushed my luck enough. I went back into the pool area, grabbed my flip-flops and my towel, and went off to the hot tub. Meanwhile, this kid’s swimming– not in my lane, notably, but sharing the one next to where I was.
It wasn’t until I was in the shower a few minutes after that that I realized that, as far as he could tell, the fat white guy had practically jumped out of the pool and fled as soon as the black teenager had gotten in. Fled so quickly, in fact, that I’d forgotten to take my shit with me and had had to go back and get it.
So, yeah, that could have gone better.
(Note that I’m fully aware that I am not the center of this kid’s universe and that he probably barely even noticed I was there. But if he did? Shit. It ain’t like I can track him down and apologize. “Hey, that thing I did, that you might not have even noticed and looked really racist if you did? Contact lens. I swear. Wanna go share the pool so I can prove it?”)
Fat Man III: The DeFatManification
So all last year I worked at a job where I was too fucking lazy to bring my lunch to work 95% of the time and so I spent a shitload of time eating fast food every week. Then I got sick in September or October or whatever and I’ve basically been sitting on my ass at home for the last five months.
I have lost substantial amounts of weight twice in my life. In grad school I got down from 240 to 200 pounds through a combination of diet and exercise. The exercise? Swimming. I love to fucking swim. I don’t even care that it’s exercise. So I will do it. Daily, if necessary.
A couple of years ago I dropped from 260 to 220 through, almost exclusively, diet. Why no exercise? No pool.
I weighed three hundred and four fucking pounds when I got on the scale this morning.
I have been laboring under the mistaken notion that South Bend lacked an adequate lap pool. There are two that I am aware of in town: one is at the YMCA and another is at a local neighborhood rec center called the Kroc Center. Both have, to put it mildly, hours for lap swimming ranging from inconvenient to “why the fuck are you even bothering?”
Last Thursday I discovered the existence of a heretofore unknown third pool at a facility that has been here for the entire time I have lived in South Bend but which was previously somehow hidden from me.
I am deeply angry that this place has been out there being all perfect for my needs and this is the first that I’ve heard about it.
Their lap pool is open the entire time the facility is open and, at least for my hours of activity, the facility may as well be 24 hour. On Friday I took a tour of the gym. This morning, after a meeting with my doctor (believe it or not, this place waives the enrollment fee and drastically drops the monthly rate if you can get your doctor to claim there’s a medical reason you need exercise. I’m very very fat! I need exercise!) I signed up. And I went swimming. I made it 10 laps in a 25-meter pool; at my most fit I could do a mile without stopping. I then spent ten minutes in a hot tub and went home.
I’m done with this bullshit now. I’m so fat, at this point, that buttoning my pants can get me out of breath, because I have stupidly short arms and the way I have to shunt my gut out of the way to deal with my pants actually compresses my lungs. There is a chair in my house that I occasionally avoid sitting in because getting out of it again can be so obnoxious. I have other stories, some more embarrassing; I think you get the idea.
I’m done with this bullshit now. I turn 40 in a few months. I can either get control of my shit again or I can be dead by 45. Those are my fucking choices.
Enough.
One of these things is not like the other
I shop at a local fat man store from time to time. They call themselves a “Big and Tall” store, but I never see tall guys in there and tall guys generally don’t need 5XL shirts, which is most of what they carry– I’m at the small end of the distribution in that place.
They send emails. Lots of emails. I got one today, in fact.
I was a little confused as to what this had to do with Large Person shirts and pants until I saw the capacities down in the corner there. I need a portable chair that can support a thousand-pound human. I need it for science.
There was more to the email:
This part, I have to admit, confused me; I don’t go to the beach as a general rule but if I did I can’t see that I’d want to bring a beach tent. I didn’t know beach tents were a thing; if you’re a beach person and you would want such an object, fill me in.
Back to the chairs. There’s no capacity listed for the Picnic Time Portable Fusion Backpack Chair, but holy hell does that thing look heavy-duty. No price listed, either.
And then the email went completely off the rails, as they forgot who they were marketing to:
I don’t know what the overlap is between “people interested in portable chairs with a capacity of half a ton” and “people who need neoprene wetsuits,” but it most certainly does not include me. I’m glad the zippers are heavy-duty, though.
In which I explain
Man, I can’t even imagine what kind of crazy shit it must have brought on ten thousand years ago to look up in the sky and see this happening:
I’ve eliminated one possible reason for The Surge: it hit me this afternoon (in the midst of teaching an algebra lesson and, to wit, being observed in same by my assistant principal) that it was possible that I was in the midst of a wave of spammery. Not the case; Akismet has only caught a handful of spam comments in the last couple of days. At any rate, it’s not quite 4:30 and I’m about to catch yesterday’s traffic. I already have more uniques than I’ve ever had in a single day, for the second day in a row. Still no clue where everyone’s coming from.
Anyway. Let’s tell a DC story; I teased this with a sentence earlier but I figure you maybe deserve the entire story. One of the problems with my career is that I am occasionally forced to act as somewhat less than a decent person because I am a teacher. (At this point I spend twenty minutes digging through my archives to look for a post about a couple of kids finding me at a gas station and demanding a ride home; I can’t find it.) (EDIT: Aha!)
This is one of those stories.
For the first time, the hotel we stayed at on the DC trip had a pool, and a pool with reasonably late hours so that the kids stood a good chance of being able to swim both nights we were staying there. They had a couple of hours during the first night, as a matter of fact. The chaperones just went downstairs and chilled next to the pool while the kids splashed and threw each other around, occasionally reprimanding stupid behavior (true, hilarious fact: after one transgression, one of my chaperones– who is our gym teacher– actually made one of the kids get out of the pool and do push-ups.) but mostly just watching. By the time the pool closed most of them (and the chaperones) had gone back to their rooms and it was just down to me and a couple of kids. Now, the hotel has a rule– which they had been informed of– that denizens of the pool need to be wearing shirts while wandering around in the hotel. One of my girls, while getting out of the pool, discovered that one of her roommates had absconded with both a) her shirt and b) her room key. Neither of these are really big problems, mind you; I had her drape her towel over her shoulders (large towel, slim girl; no biggie) and I had extra copies of all the keys in my room.
We knocked on their door first; nobody home. Well, fine, I’ll go get my key and let you in. I turned and left, not really expecting her to follow me; I didn’t even actually notice she’d tagged along until I had my room unlocked and was halfway in. At which point it hit me that the hotel hallway camera was about to record my ass taking a half-naked soaking wet fourteen-year-old girl into my hotel room.
I’m still not sure whether making her stay in the hallway counts as an etiquette breach– I suspect it was a bit of an asshole move– but… yeah. No, we’re not letting that video get taken, even just for a few seconds, even if leaving you in the hallway to drip while I go inside and figure out where I tossed the envelope full of room keys seems kinda rude. And thus the sentence, which, delightfully, cracked her up once I said it. And then the keys were located and she was let into her room and all was well again.
(Had a similar moment on the way home where several kids tried to get me to add them as friends on Snapchat. Uh, guys? Snapchat is for sending nekkid selfies. Ain’t no damn way I’m adding you on no Snapchat. Sorry.)
Ah, teaching.
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