Have returned to the gym.

My karate classes are through a local organization that used to be a YWCA. They're an independent operation now. I signed up for a basic weight-and-treadmill-room membership so as to be able to take the karate class, and for a while I haven't actually gone to the gym.

Last week's trip to Ubercon changed all that. I've never seen so much horrible food in one place - namely, the bank of vending machines - and the fact that the nearest Decent Food was basically either a TGI Friday's or from an expensive restaurant meant that most people were eating stuff straight out of Fast Food Nation. I got the willies realizing how fast my diet could disintegrate into that kind of thing, and what it would do to my poor pathetic body systems, so I resolved to go back to the gym once it was open again.

I do not seem to be nearly as out of shape as I had feared, either on the weight machines or the aerobic portion of the room. I did lower-body work yesterday and upper body today. There's something very reassuring about being able to use the abductor/adductor machine on the sixteen-weight-plate setting, even if you're only doing ten reps because it's your first day back, and I can still do decent upright rows. Okay, maybe that's not the right name; you take a dumbbell in one hand and bend over a bench, balancing yourself with the other hand on the bench, then draw the dumbbell straight up to your shoulder. I don't know about anyone else, but my fitness goals include being able to draw my 40-pound Hoyt Custom Pro recurve without tiring, and my fitness dreams involve using the fifty pound hickory longbow my uncle gave me, so the training of all the muscles in that part of my shoulder and back is important. Once I get back into the swing of things I'm going to add in the pull-the-springs-apart device you see in old muscle magazines. I bought it on eBay for a buck plus s/h, at the recommendation of an article by Gary Sentman on how to train for pulling big bows. Pumping iron is important to get muscle mass going but he says live weight, like the springs, requires different strength capacity than merely lifting dead weight.

I also did twenty-five minutes on the stair climber. Normally I would have tried the treadmill for about fifteen minutes, as I know I'm out of shape and fear not being able to handle twenty minutes of just running, but I had a book. The climber had a device to hold the book in place. I set it to a decent difficulty and varying intensity and it made me sweat a lot. At no point did I want to give up or stop early or collapse, so that's a good sign.

Probably going back tomorrow and doing leg work again. I still have books to read, so I may still use the climber. It's good to be doing this again.

Things I wish I could say to my co-workers

Please don't call me by a nickname unless I have given you explicit permission to do so. Or unless the nickname is really cool. The nicknames my family and friends have given me are not for you to use casually.
Please don't walk silently when you are coming to my desk for help.
Please don't wait until you are just outside my door to announce your presence.
Don't - DON'T - touch me unless it's for a medical reason or a real emergency. This includes fire, flooding, auditors, kaiju, anything involving a DSHR recruitment, or a meeting with Board of Directors or higher-up Red Cross staff.
If you haven't even bloody well logged in yet, please do not tell me you can't connect to the Internet. I don't care if that was a problem on Friday - conditions might have changed since last time, so bloody well TRY to connect to the Internet before telling me about it.
Please, please, don't pester me within two minutes of my entering the Chapter unless it's for a real emergency. See above for definition. Exceptions will be made if you are the Chapter CEO but are unlikely for anyone else.
If the lights are off in this part of the building and there are people working here, leave the damn lights off. It means someone has a migraine or doesn't want to waste the electricity and it doesn't bother us, so if you're coming in and going out within five minutes, leave the goddamn lights off.
Please don't bother me on my lunch hour except for the abovementioned circumstances that constitute real emergency. CEO also has permission but that's it.
Make sure you've actually got YOUR name in the login ID blank before asking why your password doesn't work.
If you don't know how to spell a word, use a smegging dictionary instead of calling me to ask.
You're grownups. Quit calling it 'the potty'.
Flush. (Okay, that's probably not my co-workers, that's more likely to be our clients using the same commode.)
Please do not laugh about how much I must hate hearing from you and expect me to join in. I understand that laughter is a defense mechanism, but I am trying to be polite to you, and hearing you expect me to think your jokes about how little you know are funny does not help me be polite.
Do not grovel. Say what is wrong, or what you think is wrong, and let me do my work.
Please do not phone me up and say 'It's giving me a message' and then fail to read off the message accurately. In fact, I would prefer it if you would email me when machines are giving you trouble, but I will settle for an accurate reading of what it says on screen.
Please don't talk to me about politics.
Really don't talk religious stuff, particularly if we're on a disaster job. The Red Cross is a neutral organization and has been so since 1881. I get so uncomfortable with people who put the Christian radio station on real loud or offer to pray for everyone in sight that I'm almost tempted to learn Pali and start reciting Buddhist scriptures as a countermeasure, even though I'm technically a Catholic. But aside from that I don't want to get into religious arguments, so please don't try to discuss that with me at the workplace.

That's about it for now. Just trying to let this out before I turn into someone from the scary devil monastery.

(no subject)

From a BBC News article on 'E-mails you wish you'd never sent':

"One of the things that frequently amazes us - even now - is how naive people are about e-mail," says Clive Carmichael Jones, of Vogon Computer Forensics.

A-huh. I won't freak out about this but I swear, if Cybermen Office Support Systems shows up in the news next, I'm leaving.

A little something from the Life of the Iron Dog.

Y'all can ignore this if you want to. Been a little twitchy with VicMage.Asia ideas lately, so I figured I'd go back and put some of Zheng He's early life story together. ( This is only a small fragment, from back near the beginning. )