Fitness

I am susceptible to all excuses for not exercising.  The weather is bad.  The gym is too far away.  I am BORED with my routine.

The flip side is that I am easily encouraged and I have few inhibitions about trying new things.

My motivation lit up when Belladonna told me she was hitting the gym.  She also noted that some of the guys there are huge.  Belladonna also shared that she ran two miles.  She claimed it traumatized her, but I could hear the pride in her voice.

I have enough testosterone to want to run with the big boys.  I decided I needed to step up my game.

Foreground: bags of marble chips and scale.  Background: a daypack.  These marble chips run 4 pounds to the quart.

I used to work with a weight lifter who was "thick".  I asked him how he got that way.  He told me that you cannot hurt yourself if you stick with weights you can lift ten times.  His advice was to start low and add weight until you can barely manage ten reps.  Work a circuit and try to get in at least three sets of ten reps each workout.

For the most part, I like the simplicity of "body weight" based exercises and I like the privacy and convenience of exercising in my home.  Forty pounds of marble chips cost $4.35 and the backpack is a leftover.

I used his theory to add resistance to my push-up routine.  I needed 4 bags (32 pounds) plus the weight of the daybag to bring my "reps" down to ten.

I am going to need another plan pretty soon.  The bag is not very happy about holding 32 pounds of rocks.  Any pointers from my readers will be much appreciated.

Clock

Yeah, but can he take it into the White House?

Sometimes I wonder if we were wise to let Kubota take Advanced Metals.

A few pictures from around the place

These are Spigold.  They are a very large apple with a well balanced taste and texture.  Dollar included in picture to provide size reference.

Mrs ERJ and I went out and picked her "breakfast apples".  She likes to start the day with apple slices and peanut butter.

I picked up a few Butternuts.  There is a tree next to Playground of Dreams in Eaton Rapids.  Butternuts are widely distributed but they are rarely common.

They are the size and shape of a kiwi.  They are also fuzzy.

Soaking them softens the husks.  I will stratify these guys for seed.  The reflection of the clouds makes the water appear to be viscous as cold gravy.  It is a neat visual effect.

This is a picture of Keepsake apple.  It is one of the parents of Honeycrisp.  It keeps well and is extremely cold hardy...maybe capable of surviving -35F.  That is about 15 degrees lower than what Delicious, Gala or Jonagold can handle.

GoldRush apple is a very heavy bearer and the apples keep all winter long.  Part of the magic of GoldRush is that it ripens so late that it is easy to find a cool place to store them.

This is a seedling Idaho Sweet Burr Oak.  It is very productive.  I removed some leaves to make the acorns more visible.

Mrs ERJ ran across a box of "trumpet" lily bulbs that showed up this week.  She asked me to plant them.  They were a "promo" mix.  That usually means the vendor throws together whatever overproduced.  I planted some of them around one of our younger yard trees.

Lame Joke alert

A wet, blustery day in mid-Michigan.  Today you get a lame joke in lieu of actual content.

An explorer, lost in a blinding snowstorm in Mongolia stumbled into a nomadic camp.  They welcomed him and he eagerly went into the yurt that was warmed with an open fire in the center.

In the space of a few minutes he found himself gasping for breath and had to leave the shelter.  Concerned, his host followed him outside.

The explorer exclaimed that the gasses in the yurt were toxic.  His host disagreed, "In yurt gasses are not toxic."   He explained, "Oxygen is not in yurt."

Budgeting Challenges

6ShotsOr5 commented:

Instead of long distance minutes, its now Gigs of data throughput. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Navigating in a universe of limited resources is a lesson we learn in our youth and it is a lesson we keep bumping into throughout our lives.

I am not blogging about budgeting because I think we are doing a stellar job.  I am blogging about budgeting because it is a challenge that we all deal with.  We are all in this together.

Kubota is cutting his teeth on "data" but it is a universal challenge.  What he learns now will serve him his entire life.

One way to manage the challenge is to make it visual.  Humans are poor at processing digital data but can intuitively process analog data.

When managing day-by-day, a column chart where each day is a discrete bucket is a great way to communicate performance.

Our first discussion was held on Day 10.  Kubota vowed to "try harder".  We stayed below the bogey on that day but then "blew up" every other day.  Kubota thought one good day would redeem a day when he slipped.

On Day 16 we went into "submarine mode".  The modem was unplugged and moved into our bedroom before Kubota came home.  Otherwise, we ran periscope-up.  On Day 20 we did not get it unplugged until after Kubota had been home for 45 minutes.  Day 23 had the steam engine video upload.

For "accumulation" metrics like performance-to-date a line chart with a trend line to provide a reference is the most intuitive way to communicate the information. 

We really need both types of charts to manage our household.

The plan for next month is to let Kubota have access to data and to create both charts each day.  If he burns through two gigs of data then he is cut-off until we are back to the trend line.  The advantage is that Kubota is likely to have seven cycles in the month to figure out what he needs to do to calibrate his usage.  It will take us three days to recover from a two gig blow-up day.  That will give him time to think about what he will do next time.

Technology

One piece of information that we can leverage is that 45 minutes equaled 0.8 gig on Day 20.  That suggests that we could throttle his usage by putting the modem on a timer so it automatically turns on for about an hour sometime in the evening.

Kubota will still have to modulate his usage but it puts up some guardrails.  He might still drift a little bit into overage but we can recover more quickly and he might get 15 calibration cycles per month.  Therefore he has more opportunities for learning.

Other budgets stuff

One of the things that has helped me stay on track for my budget is to avoid temptation.  Some of it has been as simple as not looking at all of my email.

This is a screen shot of my mail account.

Not popping open my "Promotions" folder has been instrumental in staying on budget this month.  I am still recovering from the cost of last month's dog bite incident.

"Geneva" apple rootstock availability

Geneva 16.  Photo from HERE.

Cummins Nursery has limited quantities of Geneva series apple rootstock available for pre-order.  Some of these rootstock produce beautiful "crabapple" trees in their own right.

All of the rootstock, B9 and above in the listing NEED support.

All rootstock G.202 and below BENEFIT from support.  Supporting the trees reduces the risk of the graft union snapping on windy sites.  It also induces precocious fruit bearing as carbohydrates are not "suck" into growing a beefier trunk.

All of the Geneva rootstock are cold hardy, fireblight resistant and collar rot resistant. 

Eighty-seven Minutes (fiction)

Jimmi glided along the assembly line in his three wheeled, electric scooter.  Scooters were a mark of prestige and Jimmi having one was a bit of a mystery.

He killed the power and coasted to a stop outside the AGV Team room.  AGV was the section of line where 600 pound powertrain “packages” were horsed out of the backs of trucks and placed on Automatic Guided Vehicles which then carried them to the line.

The supervisor looked up from his computer and grunted, “Whaddya want?”  The supervisor was surprised to see Jimmi because Jimmi spent most of his time on first shift and it was almost midnight.

Jimmi said, “I need to see Monster.  Canya get him off the line?”  The question was a formality.  People did not mess with Jimmi.

Jimmi poured himself a cup of coffee so he would have something to do with his hands.  It would take the supervisor a few minutes to shuffle his people around to get Monster off the line.  The coffee was burnt and bitter.  There were not many coffee drinkers in AGV on second shift.

Jimmi was a “Document 46 appointee.”  Contractually, Document 46 appointees were selected by a team of management and union officials.  In Jimmi’s case, the union drove the selection.  Management was willing to let the union pick 'their guy' as long as the union guys played ball on other issues.  Ostensibly, Jimmi was the Plant librarian.

Jimmi was in his mid-forties.  His skin was the color of café au lait. He had softly curled black hair and incredibly long eye lashes. He had a gift for gab. He did well with the ladies.

He had played college ball but had been a half step too slow and three inches too short to start.  Players like him had other uses, though.  He was the defender the wide receivers ran patterns against in offensive practice.  He carried bags, wrote papers, took tests and peed in the cup for the starters.  And he made some friends along the way.

The plant library consisted of a hundred old, paperback books and fifty VHS tapes.  Jimmi’s real job?  He was the Plant bookie.

Management was blind to this function.  The blindness may have been real or it may have been willful blindness.  The point was that the Plant ran more smoothly when one person coordinated the tournament betting pools and the fantasy football league.  Knowing that everybody was betting the same line kept workers from wandering away from their work area looking for a better spread.  With Jimmi running the show winners were paid promptly.  There was no drama.

It is possible that Jimmi benefited from the arrangement.  Nobody asked.  Nobody messed with Jimmi.

Jimmi was sitting at a picnic table when Monster walked up.  Six feet, eight inches, three-hundred twenty pounds of muscle and mean.  “What the fuck do you want?” Monster challenged.

Jimmi did not twitch. He had played six minutes against Wisconsin after both of the starters had their bells rung.  He was not scared of big.   “Eighty-seven minutes.” was all he said.

Part of Jimmi’s magic was that he could mirror whoever he was talking to.  He could speak like he was a graduate of a Big Ten University, which he was.  He could talk like he had been raised on the mean streets of Flint…which he had been.  He always talked like he was just a little bit smarter and a whole lot more in control.

“What the fuck?” Monster said.  Witty conversation was not Monster’s forte.

Jimmi said, “A renta-cop saw you gut out one of the candy machines with a piece of pipe last night.  She saw you take the candy.  She reported it to her boss.  The boss called the owner of the vending machines. 

“Seems like they have been losing three or four machines a week.  Always happens at the end of second shift.  Somebody has been smashing them just like the one you smashed.  It is getting expensive for the owners.  Those machines cost a lot of money to fix.”

“So, what does that have to do with ‘Eight-seven minutes’?” Monster asked.  “And I ain’t sayin it was me.”

Jimmi shook his head sadly, “Monster, who else is as big as you, shaves their head and wears white, wife beater shirts?  The plant has everybody’s ID photo on the computer.  This is not a time to be stupid.”  Jimmi did not mention the bad teeth.  It did not seem like the time.

Monster said, “Ok, but you still ain’t explained ‘Eighty-seven minutes’”

Jimmi said, “Its like this.  The owner of those machines is mobbed-up with one of the Detroit families.  He handed out a dozen phones to a bunch of druggies.  The next candy machine that gets hit….well, a text message goes out on those phones.  The first druggy that uploads video of you taking a bullet or of your dead body gets ten grand.”

“A house on Woodward is making book.  Eighty-seven minutes is the ‘line’ on how long it will take for the video upload once the message goes out.”

Monster relaxed, leaned back and folded his arms.  “I think your blowin’ smoke up my ass.” 

Jimmi calmly looked at Monster for the count of three.  Then he asked.  “When was the last time you saw an AMC Gremlin?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?” asked Monster.

“There is a Gremlin in the back corner of the parking lot.  You can see it from the window.  Coupla twenty year old punks in it smoking cigarettes.”

Monster grinned.  “I ain’t got time for this shit.”  He did not walk over to look out the window.  He had already decided Jimmi was lying.

“Hey, Monster, another thing.” Jimmi added, “The owner of those machines is kind of fond of that renta-cop.  He would hate to have her fall and bump her head.  Anything happens to her, it’s the same as if it was one of his machines.”

Monster was enjoying his time off the line and wanted to stretch it out. “Just sayin it wasn’t me.  What if another one of them machines gets busted and it ain’t me that did it?”

Jimmi said, “Folks in Detroit don’t care.  If you know who is doing it you might want to drop them the word that you feel kind of protective about those machines and that cop.  Let them know that it will be healthier for all of ya if nothing gets broke.”

Monster said, “So I still don’t get why people is betting on this?  Why?  It don’t make no sense.”

Jimmi explained, “You don’t think the man in Detroit is paying for this hit out of his own pocket, do you?  He is turning it into a self-funding proposition.  He is calling this bet his ‘derivatives contract.’”

Jimmi nodded to the supervisor who was hovering out of earshot.  “I’m done.” was all he said.

Jimmi made a call as he got on his scooter, flagrantly ignoring the plant rule about talking on the phone while driving. 

“I told him.”  He listened a little bit, then asked “What odds will you give me for twenty minutes or less.”  Jimmi bet $200 at 110-to-1. 

Jimmi didn’t see how he could lose.  Monster would either get smart and protect those machines with his life or Jimmi stood to make $22k. Regardless of what happened, the plant would run more smoothly next week than it had run the week before.

Jimmi just hoped the punks in the Gremlin would not get so excited that they forget to shoot the video.