Garden Hobbies and Hair Loss.

No Gym Membership, No Worries:

Almost daily marinated pork before bed in Korea.
Daily starch in India; wine and gyros in Turkey. 
Burgers in Canada.  No exercise.

Result: happy memories and a pot-belly w/ love-handles.

And now, living in a forest, I want to get in shape. 

One of the busier intersections where I'm living.

What to do, what to do?

I think I've come upon a solution.

Here is my new gym:

My Gym

It doesn't look like much, but it manages to kick my ass twice a week.

My Routine:

Warm up: (approx. 15 minutes)
1) 50 body weight squats
2) 50 jumping jacks.
3) stretching.

Body-Training: (approx. 35 minutes)
1) Use the triangular rock to do as many clean & presses as possible in 20 minutes.  (i.e. lift the rock over my head, and put it down again)
65 repetitions is my current max.
2) Use the cinder blocks to do 4 sets of deep push ups, all max.
3) Use the rafters of the deck to do 4 sets of pull ups. 

Warm Down:(approx. 10 minutes)
1) light movement (swing body & arms around) until breath stabalizes
2) light stretching.


My diet is loosely based on Tim Ferris's idea of 'slow carbs', which you can read about if you want to.

From me, expect before and after shots, as well as more detail of my experiment with this, if the results are worthy of bragging about.

Forehead:

I saw my aunt the other day for the first time in 6 years. She gave me the look over, saying that I'm "pretty much the same, except a little thinner on top". My ego wanted to take "thinner" to mean, "less fat".  Alas, I knew what she meant. I cannot be accused of having an excess of hair...

I gave myself the look over in the mirror.  And it is true. My hair is going away. This fact was one that I'd been deliberately ignoring for weeks! (years).  So habitual was my denial that it almost surprised me to hear the news of my own baldness.

The sunburn on my expanding forehead, which I got the same day, seemed to highlight the inevitable recede. 

I'm lucky, I admit, to have made it into my thirties before it came to this, given my genetic lineage.  Less grooming, less money spent on hair-care products: I guess these are the advantages of my new life as a bald guy.

Eulogy:

I hated to part with you even at a young age, at the barber shops. How much more do I hate it now. To you I owe my first attempt at creating a social persona. I had picked up a rock-guitar and let you grow and, surprising us all, you came down in spiral locks. Charming spiral locks they were.
I apologize for my trespasses, for dying you purple and flirting with the idea of perming you so that I could look a little more like Slash.
It's the changing of the season. You're gone and I grow older. I shall miss tucking your behind my ear, and each empty follicle shall now be a tombstone. Good-bye.