Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Yoga is my strength training (green #3)

    There is a new gym in town, Joust Strength and Fitness, and a pal has been having a good time training there. Joust has a nice program of classes and one-on-one training. But, I’m not going.

    Now, I know strength training is an important part of health and fitness. I also haven’t really been doing it. There are just too many things to prioritize, daily meditation, professional society participation, social life, knitting, cardio, yoga, blogging, etc. So, I was intrigued by the classes, and the promise that they’d work with my scoliosis and help me train better and more efficiently. I believe every word of that.

    My limitation – I simply refuse to drive to exercise. I walk to work. I have many workout options within walking distance of my work and my home, three of which are already in my rotation (RussaYog, spinning at Vie, and the Ann Arbor YMCA). And, I want to keep a lot of options within walking distance, so I simply can’t add another gym, particularly one I can’t walk to, to the list.

    I struggled with this for a little while, tempted and overwhelmed at the same time. And then I remembered the advice in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Barry Schwarz argues that fewer choices are better, easier, and more satisfying. He advocated deciding what you’re going to decide. So, I recall that my choice is to live lightly on the earth, and driving to work out certainly doesn’t qualify, no matter how good the trainers and facilities. Joust is out, no regrets.

    rope climbing originally uploaded by estherase

    And then, I realized, I am not not doing strength work. In my rope yoga class, we use the ropes for balance, but also pull against them. Pull-ups on the ropes, while not a huge part of the class, is certainly strength work, and there’s a lovely mixture of release and effort that I haven’t yet mastered (not to mention the core work). When I heard myself explain my current workout situation to a friend, I realized that I was getting a lot out of the core work and strength work in that class.

    So, I need to renew my commitment to the strength work I’m already doing, instead of adding a new commitment and car rides to my schedule.

  • Sustainable (green #2)

    heart originally uploaded by nodie26

    I have learned how to exercise sustainably. I use a heart rate monitor when I do my cardio, and it helps me calibrate my workout. It keeps me honest when I’m slacking, and more importantly, it keeps me from burning out by overdoing it.

    I’m afraid that I’ve noticed that happen. I have a habit of getting all intense about whatever it is and then overdoing it. I might either stop having any fun because I’m unprepared and ambitious, and I might need to take time out and recover, and then in the lull, I wander away to another activity.

    Lesson learned, at least for sustainable exercise.

    So, how to approach sustainable living? It seems tempting to create some feedback loop, a scoring mechanism by which I rate my activities: points for walking to work, points for taking the stairs instead of the elevator, points for shopping in walking distance instead of driving, points for composting and recycling and reusing and not buying. It’s just, I’m not sure what the units and the score should be.

    So, maybe I need to make it simpler. Set myself a quota for doing certain activities:

    • Walk up to the 5th floor office instead of taking the elevator (good for me, saves energy)
    • If I’m going out for lunch, eat lunch at the People’s Food Co-op cafe instead of somewhere less conscious of the environment and local foods.
    • Let myself “score points” by research as well as doing.
      • For instance, I live in a wonderful old house (built 1912). It has miles of character, but it is not well insulated. I saw an insulation service truck at my neighbor’s home. What if I researched the costs and benefits of adding extra insulation to the house – said to offer 20-30% energy savings…

    Essentially, I have to start small and do-able, so I can maintain the momentum to keep going.

  • My 2009 theme – not a green roof but a green life (green #1)

    "Green" Roof_5-29-08 originally uploaded by jimbrickett

    So, after a few conversations and some reflection, I think my vision of a green roof in my “what is your life’s work” post was metaphorical rather than literal.

    • Do I quit my job as a project manager and Director of Happiness and go back to my “roots” in ecology? Farm a bunch of roof turf? Evangelize strengthening supporting beams? Develop a new variety of roof turf? The action items weren’t flowing. So I decided to be less literal.
    • Was the vision of a green roof really about aligning myself with my yearning to live in greater harmony.

    Although I had one flight of fancy in which I shocked a friend when I described an ecosystem including bears and wolves on top of our homes and offices, I think the realistic goal is the latter. So, if my work to align with my green instincts manifests as a rooftop garden, fine (though the pitched roof of our home and our backyard shed are going to make that a particular challenge), but it is more about greening my life up in all aspects, not just the rooftop.

    So, my new theme is green living, little ways to align better with my years old resolution of living in a more sustainable and healthy manner.

  • When you look at your hands, what do you see?

    I attended the RubberBand Dance Group performance at the Power Center in Ann Arbor on Friday January 9. I enjoyed the choreography, the staging, the mixture of video and music and dance, and the play of the dancers and choreography with the audience. I had a great evening, and I came away energized.

    My hands
    My hands are just like my mother's hands

    I wanted to write about a particular moment during the piece Hasta La Proxima, Choreographer and Dancer Victor Quijada led the audience through a kind of contemplation via video projection. In it, after asking us all to breathe deeply and look out at the world with softly focused eyes, he asked the audience to look at our own hands and asked what we thought when we looked at them. He said something  poetic about the people he’s loved, and those he has hurt.

    I had such a clear thought when I looked at my hands, that I knew I had to write it. 

    I have my mother’s hands. I realize I am a mixture of my mother’s and my father’s DNA, but it appears as if I got some pieces whole and unsullied by the other parent. In the case of hands and feet, I got mine directly from my mother. We both have long fingers and a big knob at the wrist. I recognize the veins on the back of my hands in hers. Years after their divorce, my father once gasped when he saw my bare foot. “You have your mother’s foot” he said. 

    When I look at my hands, I see my mother’s hands. When I look at my hands, I see love.

    When you look at YOUR hands, what do YOU see?

  • A year of gratitude posts (gratitude #52)

    A year ago I decided to deepen my commitment to acknowledging all that I have received by writing posts on gratitude. This is the last post in the series.

    Over the last year, I’ve written about large and small things that have made me happy: knitting, food, local pleasures, yoga, meditation, family, going up north, nature , and friends. By setting a goal of a post a week, I’ve increased the frequency of my posts. I have learned a lot over the year, through persistence and practice I have made myself a better writer, and I have set aside a little storehouse of items that open my heart and make me glad.

    Practicing gratitude helped me appreciate all that 2008 contained. What will 2009 bring?

  • My very own Nostepinde! (gratitude #51)

    What is a Nostepinde, you might ask? I asked the same thing when I was searching online for a ball winder. For reasons I’ve never quite understood (letting knitters view the yarn in a relaxed state?), yarn stores sell yarn in completely useless skeins, which must be wound into a ball before use. Otherwise it turns into a tangled ball of mess.

    Well, I’ve checked out yarn winders and swifts online, and these mechanized contraptions must be fixed to a table and seem kind of large for my cozy house and not at all portable. One of my favorite aspects of knitting is its portability. I tried weaving, but the thought of lugging a loom around with me (down to my sister’s, up north, on an airplane…) was untenable. Knitting is great, some needles, some yarn, and a bag is about all that is required.

    So, clunky mechanized ball winders and swifts wouldn’t do. Through a web search online, I found out about nostepinde (or nøstepinde or nostepinne or nystepinne), which are simple, non-mechanized ball winders. Essentially, it’s a sloped wooden wand around which you wind the yarn. It creates a center-pull ball, so that I can double up the same ball of yarn for my next project. Portable, simple, and beautiful.

    winding my nostepinde

    I looked online for nostepinde, and I found some on Etsy and around, but then it occurred to me to ask if a friend of mine on twitter, the fine custom woodworker Keith Burtis of Magic Woodworks made them. He was willing to try, and he turned the one in the bottom photo for me. Keith broadcast the woodturning live, and I was able to watch him make it. Cool!

    winding my nostepinde

    I got it and another for my mother-in-law before Christmas so I kept it quiet until now. Hers is a beautiful walnut nosty. Anyway, I broke out my lovely cherry with a streak of rosewood nosty tonight and created a lovely little football from my new Cascade garnet yarn. It’s surprisingly firm and even with my neophyte winding, the ball is unwinding smoothly as I knit.

    Go Nosty! It works great. Thanks Keith!

    My nosty and the ball of yarn it made