Last year, the gym I go to replaced all of the old equipment with bright shiny new machines that had TVs attached to them. This has its drawbacks (we are all working out together in isolation), but there are many benefits to this as well. One is that you can watch whatever you want without inconveniencing anyone else.

From what I’ve observed in the several months that we’ve had them, men in general watch mostly sports or CNN, young women watch MuchMusic, MTV or Slice, and older women watch HGTV, FoodTV or Diva. However, the one channel almost everyone has in common is TLC.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, I went to my usual machine, started my routine and then began to flip channels until I settled on something I wanted to watch for the duration of my workout. After a while, I look around to see what everyone else is watching, since it was mostly women in the gym at that time. The vast majority of them were watching “Say Yes To The Dress” [1. It's a show about a wedding dress boutique in New York. ], while a few were watching the news. And what had I settled on?

The Empire Strikes Back. NEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRDDDDD!

Moving forward! A wrap-up, if you will:

1. I have had to give up on the running for now. Around the end of August, I started getting awful pain in my left calf and knee which would leave me in pain for days and make the whole prospect of being active unattractive. My workouts would get shorter and fewer and farther between, which defeats the purpose. It didn’t help that the new treadmills at the gym didn’t have the same “give” that the old ones had [3]. Finally I made the switch to just using the elliptical machine and started using the arc trainer and haven’t had any pain problems since then. Better still, I’ve been able to increase my endurance on both machines. Yay for exercise!

2. You may have noticed that I haven’t done many “what I’ve been reading” -type updates lately [4]. Back in October, I thought about sitting down and doing just that, but couldn’t find the notebook I usually use to keep track of my reading. This did not bode well. Not only have I not made any notes in it since February, I hardly remember what I’ve read between then and now.

Since then I’ve finished two books, The Dragon’s Eye by Stephen King which was tense and slightly creepy and really good, and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. It was okay, but it cheesed me off slightly – why does it seem like almost all books that are considered critical successes contain copious amounts of personal tragedy? Just once, I’d like to read a book about something happy that does really, really well and isn’t considered chicklit. Grrr… it’s a rant for another day, though.

3. Around August, someone asked if I was considering doing NaNoWriMo again this year. For a while, I really wanted to but wasn’t committed to the idea of starting something I wasn’t sure I would be able to put a good effort into. My blogging has dropped right off the last few months, which makes me sad because I enjoyed having this as a creative outlet. Plus, the more often you write the easier it is to do, and because I wasn’t blogging that often I wasn’t sure I would be able to do the 1770 words EVERY DAY for the month of November. I decided that instead commit to writting a 50,000 word novel, I would start smaller and do a short post every day – way more manageable, right?

Oh no. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had left the story from my 2006 attempt unfinished, and that there was a whole middle part I’d skipped over, and it bugged me that I didn’t really know what happened to get the cast from point A to point 3.14159 [5]. And the more I thought about it, the more I kept thinking up a story. Fast forward two more months and, yep, I reactivated my NaNo account. Today’s word count: 1954. That’s all of today’s words and almost 200 words for tomorrow. Woo!

That’s it for now. I will put an effort into posting more often, even if it’s something silly and trivial, like “today I saw a dead squirrel in the road, and I hope it was the one that ate the ONE TOMATO I got on my tomato plant this summer.”

[1] Bloglines, you have messed up my feeds for the last time! Good riddance!
[2] And since I hadn’t actually opened WP, I didn’t realize I had comments waiting for approval – sorry Sarah and Julie!
[3] Plus, they vibrate when you run and that just exacerbated the whole problem.
[4] Well, I haven’t done much updating period.
[5] This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the post (but isn’t that the beauty of footnotes?) – my favourite cheer goes something like this:

Cosine, secant
Tangent, sine
3.14159
Gooooooo nerds!

Anyways, a few weeks back on a day off, I went to the gym for a run [1] in the middle of the day. Usually, if I don’t go in the evening after work, I go in the mornings. The evening crowd consists mostly of men on the weights, who run to the mirror or over to their friends to flex/pose after every few repeats, and the televisions are mostly set to news channels or sports channels. In the mornings, it’s a lot of seniors and university students who are all in WAY better shape than me, and the televisions are on news channels or things like TLC or the Food Network or HGTV. I’d never been in the middle of the day, so I was curious about both the crowd and the television viewing preferences.

The crowd was a lot of middle-aged men in great shape, mostly on the treadmills, ellipticals or stair-stepper thingy [2]. The televisions? All but one were on soap operas. I kid you not. Which is how I ended up watching The Young and the Restless for the first time since I was, like, 15. I recognized two characters [3] but still managed to get sucked into the plot despite not knowing who anyone else was [4] and ended up staying on the treadmill slightly longer than necessary to make it to a commercial break.

As soon as I had wiped down my machine [5] and moved on to the elliptical, the guy on the treadmill next to me grabbed the remote and changed the channel to a sports show. I don’t know how long he’d been enduring the soap, but I really appreciate the fact that he waited until I left to change the channel, because I’m not sure I would have let him change it while I was watching.

[1] I’ve been running almost four months now, and have thrown in work on the elliptical now too.
[2] No idea what it’s really called.
[3] Completely misidentifying one of them – I thought it was Cricket but it was actually Nikki. Thanks Dr. Beth!
[4] Nikki! Caught Rafe and Adam! Making out! And Jack! Doesn’t trust Rafe not to screw over the Newmans somehow! (I think – it was a few weeks ago)
[5] I am a big fan of gym etiquette!