Category: Uncategorized (Page 2 of 4)

50 years is an effing long time. Or, as my kids would say, “Mom and Dad are old AF!” They are not wrong. Pam and I were seniors in high school 50 years ago, and recently I have been thinking about that time in my life.

Today, I felt the need to watch the clip of the pool scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, not because it’s such a great scene, even though it is, but because the setting has shaped my life for the past 50 years.

In 1973, Pam and I were attending Beverly Hills High School, the location of the pool in the iconic scene. It is a unique pool because, for some ungodly reason, the designers felt the need to combine a pool and a basketball court in the same space, resulting in space savings but not yielding either a fully functional basketball court or pool.

But that is not the reason I am writing about the pool. The pool holds a significant place in my life because it connected me with Pam, even though we were not swimming or dancing in the pool at the same time.

It was the final quarter of the school year, and for some reason unbeknownst to me, the school district thought it would be a great idea to offer scuba diving classes as part of the physical education curriculum. At the time, Beverly Hills High School was a truly unique place to go to public school. I mean, how many other schools, public or private, had a planetarium on campus? None, that I have heard of. But that is not the point.

I thought it would be fun to learn to scuba dive. The school hired an outside firm to teach us how to use the diving equipment, and they supervised our class time in the pool. They also said that if we wanted to, we could become certified by doing a series of ocean dives on Saturdays in Corona Del Mar, some 50 miles away from the pool. As the cost of a gallon of gas was a paltry 39 cents at the time, I felt it was a good investment to make all the drives to get certified to dive.

Pam wanted to get certified, too, and while I don’t remember the reason why, she asked me if I could drive her to Corona Del Mar for the beach dives. I dove right into that one and said, “Sure!”

So, Pam and I spent several Saturdays in my car making the drive to and from Corona Del Mar.

During that time one of our classmates, Michelle, had a pre-prom pair-up party. I went. Pam went. Though we did not go together, we ended up spending time together at the party once Pam came to the unfortunate realization that her first choice as a prom date, Roger, was already taking someone else. I, along with most other dateless guys at the party, were her potential Plan B prom dates. Having had spent so much car time with Pam, I felt I had a good shot at being The Plan B Guy. So, after the party, I summoned up the courage to ask her to be my date at the prom, an event which occurred 50 years and one day ago. She said, “Yes!”

Thanks mainly to the pool, partially to Michelle, and partially to Roger’s date saying yes, Pam’s life has been intertwined with mine for 50 years, enabling me to have a wonderful life.

It’s Christmas Day, and I am writing this while listening to various covers of John Denver’s Country Roads, something that has never crossed my mind to do before.

I owe it all to Bryan, Shelby, Portia, and Ford. They went to Louisville to celebrate Christmas. On the surface, it made a lot of sense—to them, at least. I mean, who wants to travel with two kids under four during the week of Christmas. As Bryan is from Louisville and his family still lives there, they had a great reason to go. Pam and I knew it was the right thing, but it put a slight damper on our Christmas activities, not that we do that much on Christmas anyway. But still….

Pam and Kim decided that since we would not be with Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford on Christmas Eve, I should make a Christmas Eve brisket, leaving us leftovers for dinner on Christmas Day, thereby eliminating the need for us to scour the city for a non-Chinese restaurant that would be open. Not that we do not like Chinese food, we do, but we had a lot of it last weekend, making it out of the question this week.

Having finished night one of the brisket, thankfully sans latkes, which I am still digesting after the last time I made them a couple of years ago, Pam and I settled down to watch Glass Onion on Netflix. I cannot say I was thrilled, but I agreed to watch it. It was reasonably amusing and somewhat entertaining. I loved the whole malapropism theme, as it reminded me of Shelby, who was the queen of them when she was younger. The other thing I enjoyed was the soundtrack, which was great.

About halfway into the movie, my subconscious began to register a tune that was, at least for me, out of place with the lyrics. Suddenly, I stopped listening to the dialog and focused on the song, which was Country Roads, yet it wasn’t. The chords and notes were all there. The lyrics were, well, off. I was captivated, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to get a handle on it. Clearly, it was a cover with altered lyrics, but not in the sense that Weird Al turned a cover into a parody. This was a real song, just different, and it was good.

Though I never told my friends and would have lost several fingernails before I admitted it, I have always been a John Denver fan, even before he was popular, even before he released Country Roads, even when I was in high school. For a kid from West LA, this is quite an admission. In an era when it was cool to spend hours eroding the grooves on vinyl albums like Surrealistic Pillow, Woodstock, Live at Fillmore East, I was content to idle my post high school day afternoons away by myself listening to Aerie, the album John Denver released prior to Poems, Prayers & Promises, the album that featured Country Roads. I did not know it then, besides the phrase was not coined yet, but John Denver was one of my guilty pleasures, albeit a sub rosa one.

Which is a long, winding way for me to get back to Country Roads. Thanks to Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford, I found myself with not much to do today. So out of the blue I googled the Glass Onion soundtrack. I noted that the song that fascinated me was sung by Toots & the Maytals, a long-lived Reggae group of which I had never heard. I listened to their cover more than once. It turns out that they recorded their version of it in 1972, soon after John Dever’s release. Who knew. I didn’t, but I do now.

Not being content to leave it at that, I started listening to too many, if you ask Pam, one would have been too many, covers of Country Roads, a song that has been covered way more times than I would have suspected. It turns out that it is an amazing song to cover. Its simplicity and heartfelt lyrics lend itself to a wide range of artists. I played several of the covers, beginning with the versions by Loretta Lynn and Olivia Newton-John and a gaggle of versions by no-name artists before listening to Brandi Carlile’s 2021 version, a stripped-down, soulful rendition which highlights the purity of her voice. It was the best one I heard.

So here I sit writing this, enjoying some great music and feeling quite sure that I will be doing something similar on Christmas Days to come. I just need Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford to go back to Louisville.

Merry Christmas.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way, but it did. I wasn’t ready for it, but I got used to it. Now I embrace it. So much so that my name on the Tonal and Peloton leaderboards is set to it or a form of it. That’s right, I have become the Glump.

My grandfather moniker was supposed to be Grump or Grumpy, mainly because I can be, but as Portia, our exalted granddaughter, could not pronounce her “Rs” in 2021, she started calling me Glump or Glumpy. So I became the Glump, and I wear that moniker proudly.

Thankfully, 2021 was a good year for the Glump. Given all the good that was going on, it was actually pretty tough, even for me, to generate enough glumpiness to really be glumpy. It turns out glumpy is actually a word in the English language, albeit the archaic English language, but a word nonetheless. It can mean sullen, gloomy, somber, sluggish. And while I do not generally earn those labels, I do embrace my moniker.

So why was I not generally glumpy last year? Mainly because the family was healthy and happy. Work was fun, even if I was too busy, which drove me to form a new business at the end of 2021 to actively pursue in 2022. Pam and I embraced our Covid driven, homebased lifestyle, which included going to Shelby’s every weekend to see her, Portia and Bryan. My sister and I have continued to have a great relationship, and Pam and I were able to visit her in Northern California in the fall. Shelby is expecting another child at the end of March. Kimberly is happy and in a relationship. I have not seen an airport in over two years. I was able to work from home all year. Life, in short, was good.

Importantly, I have continued to embrace exercise and movement, something that is crucial to sustained health as I age. As I sit here writing this on New Year’s Day, I have already finished my first strength workout of the year. I completed the 16th and final workout of a four week program I began in early December. At first I was bummed that I would not finish the program on New Year’s Eve, but it actually feels really good to finish it on New Year’s Day, as it has given me a great sense of accomplishment to start the year.

So how much exercise did I do in 2021? In short, a whole lot. Thanks to modern technology, I actually know what I have done. I mean, my Tonal tracks pretty much every strength movement I do. My Peloton tracks every stationary mile I ride. My Fitbit tracks every step I take, while tracking the miles I have moved and the total beats of my heart. Of course, Fitbit is not super accurate with respect to heartrate so I also wear my Scosche arm band heart rate monitor while I exercise. Frankly, the only thing I do not track is what I eat, mainly because I am happy with what I eat. At least most of the time.

My Fitbit told me I took about 2.5 million steps, either walking or running during 2021. This translates into moving about 1,000 miles. It would have been more, but I stopped running when I suffered a stress fracture in my right foot at the end of January.

My Peloton, which I bought in early March after my stress fracture healed, told me I “rode” 1,000 miles in the 10 months I had it.

My Tonal told me I lifted over 1.1 million pounds in 2021. What it didn’t tell me was how many calisthenic type body weight movements like lunges and regular squats and split squats and burps and burpees and pushups and crunches and planks I did in 2021. Suffice it to say I did many. My Tonal did tell me, though, that I spent over 50 hours under tension during the year, meaning 50 hours doing weighted reps of many different movements, and it told me I lifted the equivalent of an Airbus A380.

I would have been proud of my accomplishments if I had done them in my 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or pre-Medicare 60s. Having done them while on Medicare just makes them more meaningful.

I did a lot last year. I expect to do at least as much this year. And I hope I continue to wear my moniker because I like it. Not because I earn it.

It’s mid-December. How the hell did that happen? I couldn’t believe Thanksgiving, as late in the month as it was, got here so quickly. Now Christmas is just around the corner. Many people have issues during the Holiday Season. I don’t. I have issues when they end.

Ever since I have been a young adult, I have always dreaded the first week of January. Not because I had made a boatload of resolutions, because I usually hadn’t. Not because I had gained a bunch of weight, because I usually hadn’t. Not because I had to return to work after many days of vacation, because I usually didn’t. Not because I had missed a slug of workouts, because I usually hadn’t. Not because I would miss holiday music or Hallmark holiday movies, because I knew I wouldn’t. So what gives? Why the dread?

I think it has always related mainly to, sorry Billy Joel, my New Year’s State of Mind. I live my life in a very orderly rut, a rut that I flow through without lots of thought. That is not to say that I do not make changes in my life. I change, but I change the way glaciers used to change before global warming, very slowly and very subtly. And those changes are not marked by the calendar. They are marked by need. Generally, this has worked out very well for me, and I have made significant changes over a long period of time. But there is something about the first week of January, all fresh and new, that just makes wonder if I need to pop out of my rut and press reset. It is this wondering, or maybe more accurately any FOMO, occurring as, sorry Andy Williams, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year draws to a close, that causes me to dread the first week of January.

Ironically, this year is different. There is no dread in my head. There is no wondering. I have pressed reset.

Over the past several months I have been dwelling on the most asked of questions: “What do I want to do with my life?” At 66, well almost 67, I should have made those decisions already. And to a large extent I have. But, as I wrote about earlier this year, the specter of a rapidly diminishing quantity of quality time remaining has been causing me to assess just how I want to spend my next chunk of quality time.

After much thought, I have decided to continue to spend major portions of my life doing exactly what I am currently doing. I am really fortunate, as I am, sorry Tim McGraw, generally Living Like I am Dying. But I have decided, despite how much I enjoy my work, to change how I work, to change with whom I work, and to change how much time I spend working.

For good or bad I am not ready to retire. So instead, I have decided that at almost 67 it is time for me to become an entrepreneur again, something I have not been since 2004. For the past four months I have been laying the groundwork to start my own consulting entity. I would have preferred to transition to it earlier in the year, but I had to finish several projects in which I played a key role, forcing me to live in my current rut for longer than I should have.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that, sorry Carly Simon, my Anticipation about starting anew in January has put a damper on my dread. In fact, there is no dread. Just the opposite. I feel more alive and excited about the future than I have in years. I cannot think of any better way to defer retirement. Or any better way to spend my time.

As far as I am concerned, the first week of January cannot arrive soon enough. I can only hope that by the time next year ends I will be firmly ensconced in my new rut and dreading the first week of January yet again.

47 is an odd number, literally. It is close to 50, a nice round, even number that is worth commemorating, but 47 is not 50. So why am I writing about 47? It has nothing to do with the number of the next POTUS. It is not the number of years I have been married to Pam, my saint of a wife, which is only a paltry 41. It is not the number of years since my high school graduation, which is 48. So WTF am I writing this for? Frankly, I could have just written about the number 1, which is the real significance of 47 for me.

In the summer of 1974, 47 years ago, I began my first physical, not spiritual, rebirth. In the summer of 2020, 1 year ago, I unknowingly began the rebirth of my physical rebirth. Simply put, I changed my exercise regimen dramatically in my 47th year of exercising. That is why 47 is so significant to me. And that is why I could just as easily have written about the number 1.

I did not expect this change. I did not seek this change. I did not even understand that I needed to make this change. Nor did I understand just how important this was going to be for me. The reality was that I had been in an exercise rut for years, smugly thinking that I was fit. And to some extent in one dimension I was.

As the summer of ’74 began, I had just completed my first year at UCLA, and, frankly, I was overweight and out of shape, having skipped most forms of exercise for the prior couple of years. I don’t really remember what prompted me to step foot onto the red clay track at Beverly Hills High School, my alma mater, but I did. It was not pretty. It was not pleasant. But at least that first outing was brief, possibly only a single lap, a lap during which I probably walked more than I ran. And while my start was inauspicious, that single act was the catalyst for the commitment I have made to exercise ever since.

Running became my go to form of exercise. My raison d’etre in the exercise world. I could never explain why. I was never more than marginally good at it. But I was that guy. The one that everyone got irritated with. I ran. Not because I had to. But because I liked it. I liked to run without music in my ears, as I just loved the sound of my heart beating in my chest and of my feet slapping the ground. I felt bad if I didn’t do it. Yeah, I was that guy for 46 or so years, while covering about 25,000 miles.

Of course, running was not the only form of exercise I did, but it was my favorite. During the rest of the 70s and through all the 80s and 90s, I did other things along with running. I spent lots of time playing pickup basketball until I realized that it was too easy to get hurt and keep me from running for months. On a whim in the mid 80s, I decided to check out a Masters Swimming workout at the Jonathan Club. It turned out that if I liked running, I was actually naturally good at distance swimming, despite having never done any organized form of it. So for the next 17 or so years, I swam with a Masters team, logging somewhere over 6,000 miles in the pool and ocean. In the late 80s, I dabbled in cycling and did several international distance triathlons and, later in the 90s, bike centuries.

But since I stopped swimming in ’03, I became much more one dimensional. I ran. I sort of lifted a few weights, but there was no organized or thoughtful or consistent approach to my lifting. I didn’t realize it, but my body was changing in ways that were not positive. My running stride was shortening. My mobility and balance were waning, and most of all my core and glutes were pretty much useless. But I still smugly believed I was fit. And in a cardio sense, I was. I just assumed that my physical degradation was due to aging. I began to wonder just how much longer I could run.

Then Covid happened, and I was not lifting at all, not even sporadically. That was when my Tonal entered my life. I had no expectations for it other than replacing my disorganized, unthoughtful and sporadic approach I had towards weightlifting and for keeping me away from Equinox. It enabled me to do both of those things admirably, I was wrong in thinking that was all I would do with it.

I recently celebrated my 1 year Tonalversary. It is shocking to me just how much fitter I am today than I was a year ago. Let me be clear, I will never be the guy who focuses on building big delts, lats, pecs or biceps or getting super strong. I am not interested in those traits. On the other hand, at 66, I am totally interested in maintaining muscle mass and bone density, in training all the muscle groups in my body, in improving my balance and mobility, and in maintaining my cardio fitness levels. When I got my Tonal, I had no idea just how important all of these goals were going to be to me. Nor did I realize how effective it would be to enabling me to achieve them.

I breezed through the first program I tackled. It was a pure beginner program, and I kept my weights low to ease into using the machine. Then I started the second program, and all my illusions of fitness evaporated when I tried my first Bulgarian split squat. After lowering the weight to the bare minimum and falling out of most of the reps, I realized I needed to press reset. My mobility and balance were awful and my glutes apparently had not been used in years. That was about 11 months ago. Suddenly I was not so smug. In fact, I was pretty depressed. All I wanted to do was to avoid doing another Bulgarian split squat. I mean, who needs them, I asked myself.

Then I got mad at myself for being so lame. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I needed them. So I decided to incorporate body weight versions of them into my pre-Tonal warmup stretches. At first, I was happy doing one on each leg. Then two. Then three. Since then, I have done about 1,000 of them. They are now one of my favorite movements. They have become the poster child for the rebirth of my physical rebirth and the genesis for restoring my belief in incremental improvement, despite being on Medicare.

With the help of the Tonal Coaches and community, I have transformed myself. Over the past 11 months, I have mastered many, many movements that I would have thought impossible to do a year ago, movements that have enabled me to focus on my core and my glutes and on a lot of other muscles in my body. I have lifted over 850K pounds in that time, a low number compared to most Tonal users, but a significant number to me. I cannot even count the number of burps, burpees, mountain climbers, squat jacks and other body weight exercises I have done. Sure, I still have limitations and physically cannot do a goblet curtsey lunge consistently right, but mentally I believe that I can and will master them.

Due to a running induced metatarsal stress fracture in January, I stopped running. I began to believe that I would never run again. I could not exist without cardio and had no interest in returning to Equinox, so I bought a Peloton bike, which I have used for cardio for the past six months. But spinning is not running. I will continue to use the bike because of the ease in which I can get a great cardio workout. But returning to running has been lurking in the recesses of my mind for the past month or so. I miss it. So much so that the other day, I put on my running shoes after doing a core workout on Tonal and went for a run. My pace was slow and easy. My distance was short, under a mile. My cardio was a bit labored. But my stride was remarkable. It felt long and fluid. My glutes were firing. My core was stable. I realized I would still be doing some form of running for years. I thanked my Tonal the whole way.

With all due respect to Don Ho and Leon Pober:

Oily Bubbles in the saline

Make me feel happy

Will make me feel fine

For possibly the first time in my life I was full of oily bubbles. To be precise the oily bubbles in my body were really lipid nanoparticles. As these particles were wrapped around a whole bunch of messenger RNA molecules, I was happy and going to feel fine because the messenger RNA molecules are the cornerstone of the Pfizer vaccine, and I received my first injection the other day.

As I sit here writing this, my trusty oily bubbles, aka lipid nanoparticles, have randomly bumped into other cells and released a whole bunch of messenger RNA, eventually leading the other cells to build spike proteins and destroying the messenger RNA.

The spike proteins were the goal. As the cells died or if some of the spike proteins poked out of the cell walls before they died, my body realized that it was under attack and began to mount a defense. I know this because my arm hurt for about 24 hours after I received my shot.

I am no scientist and, frankly, I never took a biology class in school, so I find it more than slightly humorous that I am even typing these words. But, hey, my arm muscle, not the bone, was killing me.

The mere fact that I received a vaccine so early in the vaccination process is a testament to two things: My advanced age and my saint of a wife. As I have written about before, Pam, the saintly one, is rather adept at getting things on the internet.

The reality is that anyone can shop and buy things on the internet, but Pam has a knack for getting things that are hard to come by, like concert tickets, pretty consistently. I have no idea how she does it. Generally, it has been a good thing, but, ironically, her greatest coup with respect to getting concert tickets, snagging unbelievably good Adele seats at Staples just before the ticket website crashed, was for a show we cared about the least. I am not complaining, though, as that show gave me something to complain about for months.

Pam started scouring the internet for vaccination appointments earlier in the month when Ralphs offered appointments to get vaccinated in their stores. Pam’s friends, Daryn and Candace, were successful in getting appointments, so Pam dove in to the Ralphs site and eventually snagged some appointments for us at a market in a scary part of town. Appointments that, thankfully, we were never going to need.

When the county began offering vaccinations at the Forum, Pam and I thought it would be a good place to get the vaccines. It was close, and it was not as large as Dodger Stadium. In addition, we have seen numerous shows at the Forum since they refitted it for concerts, and Pam has always gotten us good seats there, so we felt good about trying. As we never buy Dodger tickets or see shows there, Dodger Stadium was off limits.

At first we were hopeful. Pam logged on to the site and thought she had an appointment, but the site crashed before she could complete the process. I tried to log on, too, but got nowhere. We waited for the new appointments that were to become available the following week, and despite the fact that our other friends were getting appointments, we got nowhere yet again.

Though I was less hopeful, Pam was not to be deterred. After dinner last Sunday, Pam tried again to get a reservation at the Forum. Shockingly, she did. It was for the following Friday. She said, “Harry, get on your computer and log into the county site. There are reservations open at the Forum!” Needless to say, I logged in and noted that nothing was available. Big surprise.

As I mentioned earlier, Pam is a saint. She is also never content with getting beaten by a web site. So she ignored my frustrated cries of dismay and logged back into the county site, this time for me. Next thing I knew I heard her say, “Harry, I can get you an appointment on Thursday! Do you want it? Or should I try to get one on Friday so we can go together?”

Being the Debbie Downer and realist that I am, I told her to snag the Thursday reservation while it was available. She did. Then she tried to go back in and get one for her on Thursday or one for me on Friday, but there were none to be had.

So I got my vaccination Thursday. It was pretty easy, as the county has the vaccination process working much better than the web site. Interestingly, I received an email from Ralphs just after I got back from getting my vaccine letting me know that they were cancelling my vaccination appointment in their store in the scary part of town. I just smiled.