I skip the Seated Cable Rows and move to a flat bench in the free weight area. I hate oblivious people and I spy one right away, a middle age dude talking on his phone, touching all the solid BBs in the rack, wandering between squat stations and benches. I grab the 30 lb BB and decide to cut my reps for the tricep exercise. I also reduced the weight of the DBs for Lateral Raises since that would aggravate the shoulder more than anything else I was doing. But I kept the 15s for Alternate DB Curls. I still used the 10s for a warm-up set beforehand.
There's not a lot of kids in the gym at this point, just a few adults. One dude is using an inclined bench several feet from me. I'm in the middle of my workout, resting between sets and logging my reps. Oblivious dude comes over to chat with other dude but of course has to stand right next to my bench. Which makes it really hard for me to do any sort of pullover movement. I wait for a minute or two but oblivious dude is deep into his rant. I'm not one for tiptoeing around issues, especially in the free weight section of a gym. I also tend to curse a lot which I'm annoyed. And I was very annoyed. Because, headphones or earbuds or not, we all keep an awareness of people and things around us.
I have my earbuds in with Lady Gaga singing Born This Way. And while I'm not yelling, I am cursing about why this MFer is in my way. Cuz I am just annoyed enough to suspect that this old fart wants a chance to chat and waste my time. So I am not about to pop out an earbud and ask nicely for him to move cuz he's in my space, wasting my time. Honestly, the gym is one of the places where I really feel no compunction to be ultra nice or polite.
There's gym etiquette, bro! If you're such a moron that you can't keep yourself out of someone else's workout space in a mostly empty gym, then serves you right to get your head bit off. Not that I bit his head off. But he did look sheepish and moved back several yards to where he'd been in the bench racks. Before he decided he needed to rant. He could've stood on the other side of that dude. No one at all on that side. But nope. Which is why I think he was creeping, and I'm not at all sorry for cursing him out.
I felt okay with the lower reps and lesser weights, then moved on to the Aerobics Room. There's a guy in there doing some hip flexibility moves on a yoga mat. I do my pared-down routine but add 50 reps of alternate limb bird dogs. That just makes my toes a bit numb but nothing else. I can deal with that. After Air Squats, I decide to just do a few push-ups. I get as far as 15 before my shoulder starts to complain, so that's where I stop. The sciatica is quiet and I'm pleased. Maybe less is more.
The problem with being less painful is that I'm always tempted to do more, push a bit further. And then I get myself into trouble. My sciatica had been chronic and intermittent for some years but it was manageable. Pushing an arching stretch popped that errant vertebra and has caused me so much trouble this year. Ugh. So I pull back from my workouts, try to heal up best as I can, then gingerly push forward a bit at a time again... One step forward and two steps back. It's advancing in reverse, but at least it's movement. And movement is better than stationary, cuz that's essentially lifeless.
Speaking of lifeless, the bees and hornets are all frantically trying to gather as much food as they can before winter comes. I still have some red and white clover flowers but not much else. While the bees have stuck with the shriveled, wrinkled jewel weed flowers, the yellow jackets are everywhere, including the outdoor flytraps. These 4 plants are preparing for dormancy but still have baby traps sprouting, and active traps among all the dead and dying (blackened). I'll trim off the blackened leaves and traps to prevent mold from forming.
Yellow jackets are all over the plants, and a few have actually been snagged. I was concerned because the traps aren't big enough to fully encompass the insects, but apparently that's not a problem. I found at least two partially enclosed wasps, one struggling to back out of a trap, rather unsuccessfully. So, no stingers in the traps. I hope the heads and thorax are as nutritious as the abdomen...
 |
| Nymph on a paper towel |
No comments:
Post a Comment