Saturday, July 27, 2013

Birthday lessons: Keep the glasses out of the pool

I celebrated Birthday No. 46 last week, in a very low-key manner. What did I learn? Let's take a look at that.

-- Morning workouts at the Y are good. Rolled out of bed and went straight there, where I saw a friend and let him give me a little strength training coaching. During our conversation, he wished me a happy birthday and asked how I was celebrating. "Just hanging around. Nothing special." His response is lesson No. 2.

-- He said, "I tell (my wife) on my birthday, "Just let me do something I want to do." It's good to make the extra effort to help others and do things for them, and it can bring you a lot of joy, too. But sometimes, you need to pick a day and make it your own.

-- And finally, do not swim with your glasses on. Seems simple enough, and you might be wondering why it
would take me 46 years to learn that one. Before heading over to some friends' house for a swim on the birthday evening, I took my contacts out and put glasses on. When I got to Maridene's house, I took off my shirt and left my glasses on. I don't know why. But I wasn't really swimming. Just standing in the 4 feet of water with Jodi and Jessica, and holding/playing with Paige and Parker. Seemed harmless enough. Until Paige started shooting me with a squirt gun, and I responded by pretending to go down with a direct shot to the skull. When I came back to the surface, Jodi looked at me and said, "Phil, are you missing a lense?" I said "No," and then tried to touch my left lense and watched as my finger poked myself in the eye. What the heck? I just gently fell backward into the water, nothing violent. So then we spent an hour gently walking across the bottom of the pool, hoping one of our six feet would bump into a lense that was impossible to see. No luck. We looked to see if it was floating, we looked to see if it was hiding around the ladder posts, we tried opening our eyes under water to see it, and we tried lining up side by side to better cover the area. Nothing worked. I called off the search and went home frustrated. Jodi called the next day to say she had found it, and all is well now. But you can bet the next time the Adamses invite us over for a swim, I'll leave my glasses in the house.

About my health: I recently hit the 30-pound mark for weight lost in 2013. That put me close to 180 pounds, and I'm excited to see a 7 as the second number in my weight. Exercise has been really good the last couple of weeks, and I really like the elliptical machine now. Last night I had the wife take pictures of me to compare myself to the beginning of this journey toward better health. Definitely can see some changes, so that's exciting.