4kDP: Exercise

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I'm not in love with "exercising."  I just hate the idea of toiling in one place, always looking at the same thing, always for the same amount of time, always this, always that.  I think it's boring and unproductive.

This is summer, however, and Mom and I have quite a farm going these days.  Where I don't like "rolling around in the dirt," as I call it, I do like the idea of fresh fruits and veggies, with no added pesticides (I do as much organic gardening as possible).  This kind of "exercise" is more to my taste - at least we're getting something done when we're moving around for hours at a time!

We just harvested some of our baby lettuces last night.  Mom called it "thinning."  (I'm not a gardener, myself - I called it pulling by the root to eat it early.)  We topped it last night with a spicy buffalo meat and some red wine vinegar.

Today, we've got more weeding on the schedule.  There's one weed in particular that seems to be the bane of Mom's existence.  I think it's a nice looking plant, though it does like to take over everything and the roots go straight down into the ground.  I have to admit that I admire it's ability to persevere in the dryer climate we live in.  It's even nice to look at, with frilly leaves and cute little pink flowers.  But this particular plant must really haunt Mom's dreams because she's got us out there pulling those things daily.

The weed I hate is one that has sticky seeds we call "hitch hikers" that attaches to anything that moves by it.  It's a lot like velcro.  Nasty little things to get out of a poodle's fur!  I also have a major vendetta against "foxtails."  Those miserable seeds get into a dogs' ears and just keep working their way down, sometimes puncturing their ear drums.  Compared to these two terrors of the weed world, I think Mom's weed is pretty innocuous.

The lavender is just about ready to harvest now, too.  That's always quite a chore.  It's backbreaking early morning work that can only occasionally be dispersed across two days' time.  To be truthful, it needs to be cut between 6am and 9am, then hung from the rafters to dry between 9am and noonish.  Noon is really pushing it, but our lavender field is almost too big to get this done in one day.  Generally, there's two harvests, so just about the time the first harvest is dried and debudded, it's time to get the next round into the rafters to dry out.  Nature waits for no woman!

Time to get to it!

Numbers:
Me: 0
Mom: -0.4
Personally, I think it's all the weeding and muscle tearing going on as we weed.  lol.

4kDP: "Active Lifestyle Protocol"

It occurred to me that I never did post the plan for those who enjoy living the life of exercise-infestedness.  I don't think that's really a word, but I'm sure you all get the idea.  :)  I don't happen to be one of those who like to run in one place without getting anywhere.  It goes against all the laws of natural, even gravity because if you're lifting weights gravity is the law that you're, by definition, working against.

Numbers:
Me: -1.2
Mom:  ?  She got up early and left today...

P3 & P4 Exercise

I've finally gotten around to looking into exercise programs. Myself, I've just been walking, but the cold temperatures, I gotta say, put a major damper on that plan. I use Yoga as my next favorite thing - it's meditative, calming, centering, strengthening if you do it right, and provides an extraordinarily low impact rate on the body while you're exercising.

I think that Tai Chi would also offer the same benefits as Yoga and I'd like to learn it, but find that my body is too unwieldy still to learn the graceful dance-like poses that flow one into the other.

Recently, I've heard about a different set of exercises, 15 minutes a day, called T-Tapp. It's an interesting set. I've not yet tried it, but wanted to alert you to it's existence. The link goes straight to the "try" section that shares several of the different exercises. If you like it, they encourage you to purchase their DVDs, of course.