Stealth Health Ninja

I haven’t written a blog post for a while, because I’ve been trying to write my novel. When I say ‘write my novel’ I mean telling the (slowly developing) plot to anyone who will listen, and thereby reducing, slowly but surely, the number of people who might read it, should it ever be published.

It turns out this writing a book lark is harder than it looks and, like so many things in life, not made easier by having two small children about your person much of the time.

Neither is it made easier by going on a demented health kick, which is what I am doing at the moment. I am exercising to the point of great agony and simultaneously reducing my brain fuel. I am pretty sure I am losing brain weight, which is not where I have it to spare.

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RUN NOW!

Baffling contraption

As we are wont to do from time to time, H and I have started a small health kick. It’s not a high kick. We’re not idiots; we don’t want to put our backs out. It’s more like the miniature kicks you use to move a school bag to another room when your arms are full of laundry and mail.

Our motivating forces are vanity and pain. We’re not getting any younger. One of us has just turned twenty-one for the second time. And while he doesn’t look much older than the uni student who used to drive a campervan to parties that he was the first time he was twenty-one, his sore back is telling a different story.

As for me, well, I recently read one of my stories live at a comedy club for the first time (you can listen to the podcast here, if you’re so inclined), and let’s just say the official photographs made me look further up the wrong end of the Bardot-Brando Continuum than I’m happy with, jowel and chinwise. And as Presidential Candidate Trump has shown us, bronzer is only going to trick people so far. So, it’s time for action.

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New Year’s Resolution: Face The Truth

For 2016 I have made only one New Year’s resolution: to face the truth. It’s a big one, but it’s nice and versatile. It covers a multitude of things I think could be improved about my life.

I will face the truth about the Pilates DVDs. This is the year I will stop taking Pilates DVDs on holidays with me. I’ve been dragging the same two all over the world for about nine years and do you know how many times I have done Pilates on holidays? Zero times. They make me feel guilty for not doing Pilates on holidays when I don’t even do it when I’m at home. This foolishness has got to stop.

I will face the truth that I prefer exercising indoors. I wish I liked running out in the fresh air, with the dogs and the show-offs, but honestly, it’s too hot and sunny, there are too many people watching, and the television screens are too few and far between. The only way I can justify watching the kind of crappy TV shows I like is to watch them while riding the exercise bike or doing crunches or squats. So that is what I shall do.

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Save The Horses

In about three weeks we are going on a Big Trip. We’re heading to the USA to see my side of the family, and spend a week on a beautiful ranch on the border of Colorado and New Mexico, then stopping for a few days in Hawaii on the way home. We’re very lucky and very excited. We’ve been booking and planning and discussing for ages, and this week H and I began the most important part: a twenty-four day fitness and diet kick. We’ve realised that although we are truly fine specimens of man and womanhood, there’s just a bit more to us at the moment than we’d like, in an ideal world, and we’re a bit wary of being the two people at the ranch who need a crane and a winch to be loaded onto our mounts. And we don’t really want to turn up and see the wranglers’ eyes widen in horror before they lead away our svelte stallions, Dazzle and Spry, who could easily outrun a bear, and lead out two solid old draughthorses named Ironsides and Sherman Grizzlysnack.

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The Mysterious Chocolate Cookies of Misery

What follows is less a recipe and more a warning. Today I made some cookies for the kids out of really healthy ingredients. They loved them, and also all hell broke loose.

I made the cookies using an amalgamation of recipes on the internet, which I found by googling ‘cacao almond cookies’. They all contained the following ingredients, in seemingly arbitrary quantities:

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The Gymlazium

It took me fifteen minutes to find a suitable illustration for this post. This is a dessicated frog on a spatula. It’s a metaphor or something. Best I could do.

Right now, there is nothing stopping me from going to the gym, except for, oh, you know, everything. It’s 4.30 pm on a Friday. Following is a list of my standard excuses and why they do not hold right now.

1. The gym is closed.

The gym is not closed. It is open. It probably isn’t even very busy, since it’s a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. There will be about ten old guys there easing into post-op treadmill walks after knee or hip replacements.

2. I have no child care.

My children are, at present, naked in the backyard, painting under the supervision of their amazing babysitter. She’s sixteen, so she has heaps of energy. She doesn’t own this house so she doesn’t give too much of a shit how much paint they get on the outside french doors, where we stickytape the paper for them to paint on because we are too mean to buy an easel. She hasn’t spent all week with them so she can, with grace, manage the fighting and screaming that occur when Garnet launches incursions into May Blossom’s palette, or adds his own sneaky slash of pink to her carefully designed tableau of a scene from Frozen.

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We Sneeze In The Face Of Danger

May Blossom’s Self-Portrait With Gastro

It’s winter here, and with each new and sparkling dawn comes a new illness. I’m quite serious: since April, when we went on a dream of a holiday to Fiji, one of us has always been sick. May Blossom may laugh in the face of danger (as she told our neighbour the other day after having the dangerous heater pointed out to her), but she is defenceless in the face of every common virus that does the rounds.

Garnet kicked it off on the trip with hand, foot and mouth disease. I realise that for people not in the throes of life with little kids that sounds terrifying and the sort of thing that should bring a team in HAZMAT suits to your door to euthanase your livestock and condemn your farm, but it’s actually a reasonable mild viral illness. The affected sprog gets small blisters on their hands, feet and in their mouth. Garnet was basically fine, if a little spotty, so we responsibly parented him by not saying anything and plonking him in the sea for hours every day. His mouth was largely unaffected so he was pretty happy muddling about in the shallows, occasionally taking bites from the apple we left bobbing beside him as a snack (What? We were nearby on deck chairs but we weren’t going to put down our pina coladas and traipse down to the water every time he wanted a nibble. That’s just an inefficient use of vacation time.) The tropical fish shared his apple, but as they have neither hands nor feet they probably didn’t catch the virus.

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