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.

The Proper Sequence of Clicks.

Had I but one, just one, measly million dollars:

For the fifth time, I'm making my way through Tim Ferris's '4 Hour Workweek'. Apparently it takes me five times to notice just how much of the book is dedicated to properly spending the money as opposed to properly making it.

For a reader not initiated into entrepreneurship, falling under the illusion that effortless money is but a few clicks away wouldn't be difficult. After my first reading I created a tarot-reading website.  I charged $50 per reading, had zero customers, and made exactly nothing, minus the costs of setting up and hosting the site. Net: -$400.  Not awful for a failed business venture as a fortune-teller. It fleshes out my resume. 
 

Click on the image and win either a million dollars, or a larger image of a water bug!!!!!!!

One of his exercises in the 'four hour work week' is to 'dreamline'. This means creating a list of things you want to have, to do, and to be within the next 6 months to a year. Write as if money were no object (this is the 'dream' part). Then, calculate how much money would actually be required to do this.
So I lay here, before you all, my hopes and aspirations:

Want to have: Gibson Les Paul ($1500), Nikon wide angle lens ($2000), Nikon telephoto lens ($1000).
Want to do: Spend a couple months training in Muay Thai in Thailand ($2000), shark diving in S. Africa ($1500).
Want to be: Conversational in Korean (free, requires effort), a writer (free, requires effort), self-employed ($2500/month).

I calculate this to be $40,000 dollars spent for the year--and it would be the best year ever. $3500 a month would do it; it's my "target monthly income". 

And now the looking-in-the-mirror part:

Honestly Answer This: Is this a real goal, or is it a reason to throw in the towel and accept wage-working for the better portion of my waking life, taking joy & excitement in small doses if and when it comes?  That's the real existential question. Do you notice that with the better path, there are risks? Not only financial ones, but for me, there is risk in disappointing myself. Since I often live under the delusion that I'm special, not subject to defeat, impossibly intelligent, etc., opting for high ambitions is the sort of thing that will either pop my bubble or line it with titanium and diamonds.

From Nowhere, Spring Cometh:

It's true.

I arrived in Canada mid-April and bore witness to the stoic silence, the lake still iced over, trees naked of leaves and random, quiet eruptions from the fireplace, obedient to the clicks of the thermostat. Rack up on my list of wants, "spring". It goes a few slots under "just one million dollars".

Small buds on the trees surprised me weeks later, as if I had honestly thought that winter were not going to let go. Eying the tiny shoots, I kept thinking, "you know, I ought to take time lapsed photos of the budding branches". I wasn't done procrastinating on this project before spring abruptly summoned not only leaves in full bloom, but the birds, flowers and heat. The frogs croak their laughter in the night, as if they'd known all along about the inevitability of seasons and about the snakes that would abandon hibernation to eat them.

And then I have to deal with it: the sweat beading on my brow, the bugs crawling out from under the rocks. My allergies are in full bloom; beery weekend warriors cannon-ball into the lake screaming, mosquitoes and similar pests eat me as I tote my camera wheezily to the pollen-spewing wild flowers for a picture. This is what I wanted, I say. Dodging the wasps and spitting out spiderwebs I think, "ah. If I only had a million dollars, then I'd be happy".