Time Trudges On

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One personal problem I have with the time change is that Robin and I are involved in a slow transition which involves going to bed earlier with each year’s passage. For instance, this past winter there were days when we could hardly make it to supper without flagging just a bit. And when we retired to the living room to watch some program or another on television I would begin to doze off as soon as my posterior hit the sofa cushion. There I would be, sitting frozen in time and space with the remote in my hand, as if placed there by a taxidermist.

This usually resulted in quite a large amount of elbowing on Robin’s part, trying to keep me alert enough that she might avoid repetitive questions like “What happened in the story?,” or “Where am I and who are you?” Or worse, have to deal with my embarrassed denials: “I wasn’t sleeping, I was testing the reaction time of my eyelids,” or “No, we don’t have to rerun the program, I only missed a second or two, if that.”

But DST throws a wrench into everything.

One simply cannot go to bed here at BaseCamp, no matter what one’s untrustworthy nervous system tells them, when you can still get a sunburn if you wander outdoors. For one thing, it is rare to find both of us being that tired at the same moment on any given day. This results in the would-be-sleeper having to contend with the Concerto for Clatter and Bang in A Minor, usually being played in the kitchen by the still conscious member of the partnership.

Nope … DST takes some getting used to each year.

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A comment on the guy in the cartoon above. For all of the times I have seen this motto on a T-shirt in my lifetime, whatever the legend states after “You can have my …. ” has so far never been something that I wanted in the first place. But if it came to that, I have seen quite a few cold dead fingers along my way, and I would have no qualms about prying them apart if they were holding something that I needed or wanted.

For instance, the teddy bear.

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At the recreation center Monday, I noticed this interesting turnaround. An instructor was giving a private pickleball lesson to a member. It says something about the sport, I think, that the student was the young and supple one while the teacher was the graybeard.

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A Dick Guindon Cartoon

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I think I posted some stuff on the shuffle dance before, but YouTube served this up to me unbidden this morning. Apparently the trend started in Melbourne AU in the 1980s, and has since spread around the globe. The first video is of some impossibly talented performers, “hot” young men and women doing what would send me to hospital within seconds.

The second video is from Sven Otten, a young German with a sense of style and humor who apparently is making a partial career of it.

The third video … well … what is the opposite of “hot” and impossibly fit? (Actually, this is Paul Shelnutt, a champion buck dancer .)

Whenever I see one of these they make me smile. Happy dances take me to my happy place.

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Tuesday Robin and I took our first bicycle ride since her surgery, and it went well. We were using the e-bikes, which I am convinced were one of the better investments I’ve ever made. Now you would know that this isn’t saying much if you had the ability to scan everything that I’ve called an investment over a lifetime. Most of them were purchases that rose out of thinly veiled fictions that were dreamed up to cover my buying something that I wanted anyway.

But the true value of these bikes is that you can adjust the effort needed to ride them by pushing a button. When you are trying out a knee that’s been rebuilt this is no small matter, and it was a morale booster for the two of us for sure.

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