Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll is FIT TO BE TIED. Subhead: A Mental Health Break From Unbearable Politics…She writes:

Every week I plan to work out with weights on three alternating days. Most weeks I actually do it once or twice. I want to stay strong enough to rack the slide on my Sig Sauer P227 .45. Not to mention carry my go-bag filled with my three favorite guns and several boxes of ammo in various calibers. My weight workout usually takes about 30-35 minutes, so you can readily see how a person such as myself, retired, an indifferent housekeeper, responsible for a once-weekly column that may run to several paragraphs, could have difficulty finding that crazy kind of leisure time in any given day.

Most days the intention to work out goes the same way as my intention to learn Spanish. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. And getting weaker by the minute. Especially in the triceps area.

It is also ever thus with my Bucket List resolution to reread Moby Dick, without skipping the boring technical parts about the ship or the stupid whale this time. Mr. Ammo Grrrll assures me that it is a great book and I will like it better than I did in 11th grade. Though long ago he did put the ki-bosh on my suggestion that we name our first-born child Queequeg. How cool would that be to have a name with not one, but two, “q’s”?

In Arizona, each day dawns with a fresh new opportunity to work out. There is virtually no chance that you cannot get to the gym because of bad weather. Well, in my case, that’s particularly true because I work out in my living room. A borderline agoraphobic, I kind of invented “sheltering in place.” The house is sometimes messy, but I can almost always navigate from room to room.

But assuming that I DID go to a gym, there’s still no hope of being rescued by inclement weather. Back in Minnesota you could always count on freezing drizzle or a blizzard with white-out conditions to provide a perfectly acceptable excuse. In Arizona, hoping for a haboob is not a realistic option. But when they do come, they are spectacular and usually make the national news. In time-lapse photography.

(And another great name: “I’d like to introduce our son, little Haboob. You remember his older sister, Queequeg. And their baby sister, Orange, whom we named after reading about Gwyneth Paltrow’s child, Apple. Some day we hope to compare Apple and Orange just to see if it can be done.”)

I do better on the aerobic part of my workout. As I’ve mentioned before, in the cool months (both of them), my walking partner is our neighbor, The Paranoid Texan.

But for many months a year I walk alone INDOORS when the temperature hovers around 200 Degrees in the shade. I may have that slightly wrong. Doesn’t water boil at 212 Degrees Fahrenheit? (They don’t call me ScienceGrrrll for nothing…) OK, from mid-April to late October, it’s a few degrees off the boil, but not many. The wussie-pants snowbirds and Canadians flee in terror. Even our permanent residents take off for higher elevations.

During those months, I like to walk at Walmart. Seven times around the inside perimeter is about three miles. Not only is it temperature-controlled, but there are drinking fountains, multiple bathrooms for when you’ve overdone the drinking fountains, and doughnuts to keep your spirits up. There are also many inspiring examples of what one could look like if one does not work out. Many. Perhaps I serve as a cautionary example to someone else.

Our little Geezer Enclave in the Dusty Little Village (DLV) also has a very nice swimming pool. I do swim sometimes anticipating the glad day when the 100-Meter Flail becomes a sport in the Olympics. Reserve my spot on the winners’ platform! Many of my fellow Geezer-Americans prefer to just stand in the pool and chat, blocking all the lanes for swimming laps. Which reminds me again it’s time to tackle Moby Dick.