Weekend Report

Tom continues to  improve, so much so that he is not obeying doctor's orders (as I understood them, at least) about avoiding work. Not that he is up to his usual lugging of boulders around and shoveling coal at the railroad, but he is asserting his independence. He drove into town alone yesterday and spent hours shopping. (Maybe he just sat for hours somewhere, but he did come home with things.) Today he made noises about doing "a little mowing." Fortunately he never got around to trying, it being foggy and then warm and sticky. This morning while I was at the health club, he made a huge pot of jambalaya that he will probably feed off of for a couple of days. I love the stuff, but right now I am watching what I eat rather closely and the sodium content alone rings an alarm.

This morning I did my half hour on the treadmill and a round of the machines I have been using, adding a couple of new ones and upping the reps on another. Little by slowly, as a friend here says. There was only one person there when I arrived, and I got my workout done, did some grocery shopping and was home well before nine.

Yesterday I took a break from the health club, mostly figuring Saturday is a busy day, but I got in a brisk half hour walk in the early morning and got my stepping total up to ten miles over the course of the day. I also worked on Wacky, mopped the floors while Tom was out of the house and caught up on some reading. 

This afternoon, Tom tried to watch NASCAR, but the race had rain delays that made it stretch out. Eventually they called it, but enough laps had elapsed that they declared a winner. It was broken up so much that it was hard to think of it as a single race, though.

Meanwhile, I was finishing up a fascinating book that I came across by chance, William Rosen's The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century. (The Third Horseman in the Apocaypse/Revelations is Famine.) It is, as one would expect, an account of the effects of major changes in weather patterns complicated by political and economic shortsightedness. It is not a case of special pleading regarding the undoubted dangers of global warming. As reviewers pointed out, it has much less in it about climate change or famine than it does about the struggles between the rulers of England, Scotland and France. But the abbreviated story of the disastrous rains of 1315-1316 do read a bit ominously when accompanied by daily news accounts about Texas being washed away ...

I was listening to the book on my MP3 player while doing my workout. Now I have downloaded one that sounds like a revisionist history of the Borgias. That should keep me entertained for a while.