A microbial neck sprain, loitering at the gym, and turning laundry a social event…

~Tuesday~  I stepped outside at 8:20 with every intention of hopping in my car and driving over to the Wolfline stop, but decided to take a chance that the city bus was destined to arrive at its mode, 8:22. Not that the concepts of “bus” and “destiny” should ever be conflated.

The bus arrived at 8:26, and once again, the girl with the defiant hair was one of only a few people aboard. And once again, she kept her hands at bay from it. I’m officially declaring that Friday she played with it so much a fluke, and no longer refer to her as the lady who plays with her hair.

There was another lady on board who looked a little bit like the actress who played Mila Kunismother in Friends With Benefits, only rougher like a lady recently shown as missing on our local news site. So, a cross between these two:

Actress Patricia Clarkson Missing woman on local news


The lady sitting in the seat in front of me had a notebook and a textbook, both of which she was thumbing through. I about sprained my neck trying to read her notebook—it’s not easy being a yenta—and then to see the name of the textbook she was reading.

In the notebook, in fairly nice handwriting I might add, she had a page of vocabulary words, which included: ecology, incidence, and epidemic.

While I wasn’t able to get the name of the textbook, I did see the name of its tenth chapter: Microbial Ecology and Microbial Biotechnology.

When I got off the bus, I stepped off the sidewalk—near the bush growing the grill-ready baked potatoes—to let the person walking in front of me and smoking a cigarette get enough ahead of me so that I was no longer in her carcinogenic wake.


Mid-afternoon, I had a Granny Smith, and these were the remnants (Hover over image for metadata.):

Johnny's Apple Seeds


My work day was uneventful today, for which I was grateful.

Late in the afternoon, I opened an account a tadalist.com, on which I made a “Near-term” and “Longer-term” to-do list.


At home I had a killer salad, with some of all those ingredients I chopped up last night, as well as dicing up a cooked turkey burger to add for some protein.

It was all topped with Olde Cape Cod Toasted Sesame Soy & Ginger Vinaigrette dressing, and it was all most delicious.


On the way to the gym, my sister called, and we talked about trying to accommodate my parents during the five or so days (assuming everything goes smoothly) that she’s going to be in the hospital for a hip replacement.

While I was stretching beside the ab crunch bench I was going to use, after already having removed the weights from it and placing my workout sheet and pen on the floor next to it, a lady plopped herself down on it, where she proceeded to just sit and watch TV for the next ten minutes. I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she assumed I was going to use the bench on the other side of me.

When I was on about my 200th crunch, she looked over at me as if I were bothering her—or perhaps taking up a primo TV chair unnecessarily long to exercise—and took a long drink of her bottled water. I guess you don’t need electrolyte replacement if you’re not actually exercising.

I’ve said this before, I just don’t understand people who go to the gym and just sit there, or just stand there and yammer for minutes on end.

Oh. What a segue into the upper body area that I moved to next.

There were four guys standing in the fly-weight area, taking up a machine (or a couple of machines in this instance), not unlike missy on the ab crunch machine, and they just stood there talking for well over ten minutes. They talked through my 5 sets of 15 reps on the chest press machine, followed by 5 sets of 15 reps on the overhead press machine.


At home, through the wonder of social media I made a social event out of doing a load of laundry:

While the washer washed, and the dryer dried, I checked off some Ta-Da To-Do list items, answering an email to Carl & Michael, and posted a response to Hugh’s newsletter article about praying:

Also thorughout the evening, I played Scrabble online with Robert via Facebook, a game which was pretty competitive all the way through.

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