January 20, 2018 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: January 20, 2018

Here is this week’s list of comic strips, poems, and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

Five Good Ideas Science Fiction Teaches Us to Fear via mythcreants. I hope you enjoyed Five Bad Ideas that Science Fiction Teaches Us to Love last week. As promised, here is the follow-up to that post.

Duct Tape 101 via LenieHokansson. A certain sibling of mine is a whiz at anything related to fixing up his house. He’s constantly coming up with weekend projects to make his home even nicer than it already is. I know he reads this blog, and I wonder how many of these tricks he’s tried.

How Mr. Spock Helped a Bi Kid Learn How to Fit In. I loved this story.

Treebound. Maybe this is what really happened to the Ents long after the events of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. At any rate, I prefer it to what happened in the canon.

The Strange Case of the Dented Forehead via ‪StuartRWest‬. I really want a follow-up post to this one that explains whether Stuart really has a dented forehead and, if so, where it came from.

From The Stick Is an Unsung Hero of Human Evolution:

Sticks are probably where the story of craft begins—the point at which our very distant ancestors progressed from animalistic existences to lives materially enhanced by the objects around them.

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January 18, 2018 · 1:00 am

What I Missed the Most About Working Out

Its’s been a long time since my last workout thanks to a stubborn cold I caught weeks ago that only now seems to have faded away for good.

There are many other things in this world I can sit patiently through:  obscure jokes I don’t understand; long lines at Service Canada when I need to update my identification cards; medical tests that require you to remain perfectly still for a certain amount of time; an animal or small child who insists on following the same routine over and over again.

With that being said, I never enjoy being sidelined by an injury or illness that requires me to stop exercising for a while. I’ve been feeling restless this past week as my cough faded away and I slowly healed. It’s hard to stay sedentary during this part of the healing process because of how many different things I miss about my regular workouts when I’m not able to do them.

Today I thought it would be interesting to talk about the three parts of exercising that I miss the most now that I’m poised to finally get back into my regular routines.

Better Sleep

I fall asleep more easily and sleep more soundly when I get some form of exercise every day. It doesn’t have to be a strenuous  workout either. Even something as simple as a thirty-minute walk has a positive effect on how I sleep that night.

Some of my sleeping issues over the past few weeks were definitely related to being ill and would have happened regardless of what else was going on in my life. It’s impossible to sleep through a sneezing or coughing fit, and I slept better once most of these symptoms had gone away.

With that being said, I’m going to sleep even better now that I’m getting back into my normal routine.

A Sense of Accomplishment

There’s an app on my smart watch that gives me regular updates on my fitness and activity goals for the day. When I’m not sick or injured, I make those goals so reliably that I can pinpoint exactly when I’ve been under the weather in the past based on when my stats dip below my goals for those particular days or weeks.

My app gives me friendly notifications when I reach a goal or when I’m close to reaching a specific goal for the day. Seeing those updates not only makes me happy, it gives me a small sense of accomplishment as well. It’s easy to discount all of the other things I accomplish every day as a writer and volunteer because of how abstract many of those goals are, so it’s nice to occasionally be reminded of something I’ve done in a more concrete manner.

A Reason to Watch TV Shows

I’ve spent so much time exercising while watching TV shows over the past several years that it now feels incredibly strange to me to sit or lie down quietly while watching them.

Yes, I watched a few shows every day while I was getting better, but I found it a little more difficult to pay attention to their plots while my body was so still. The healthier I began to feel, the more restless I felt as well. I had the urge go run around outside in the freezing Ontario weather, not lie quietly and watch another episode.

It’s going to be so nice to at least be able to move again while I’m watching TV shows this winter!

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January 15, 2018 · 1:00 am

4 Things I’m Hoping to See in the New Twilight Zone Reboot

A few days ago, I heard that The Twilight Zone is going to be rebooted. This was incredibly exciting news since I watched reruns of many of the original episodes of this series when I was a kid.

While I am growing a little tired of watching rebooted shows in general, I’m also curious to see how The Twilight Zone is going to be re-interpreted in 2018. The world has changed quite a bit since the first episode aired in 1959, after all.

There were so many parts of the original series that I loved, from the plot twists to the clever re-imaginings of what society could possibly be like.  It would take many posts to talk about all of them, so I decided to concentrate on the four biggest ones for today.

If this reboot really impresses me, I do reserve the right to blog about this topic again in the future.

By the way, don’t click on any of the links I’m about to share if you’re planning to watch the original series and want to avoid spoilers for them. All of the links go to Wikipedia summaries of the plots of these classic episodes.

Social and Political Commentary

For example: The Eye of the Beholder, Time Enough at Last, and The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

As I mentioned above, one of the things I loved the most about The Twilight Zone was their commentary on American life in the 1950s and 1960s.

The original scriptwriters weren’t afraid to critically examine any number of social ills, especially when it came to exaggerating or inverting them in order to show the audience just how ridiculous or unfair those issues were when viewed from the perspective of outsiders or of people who were most seriously affected by them.

I would be very surprised if the new writers didn’t continue this streak, but I’m hoping they push the envelope much further than it was pushed decades ago. I’d love to see much grittier episodes about the very real dangers of xenophobia, for example, or why blindly following authority figures is so dangerous.

Creepy Children

For example: Mute, Stopover in a Quiet Town, and It’s a Good Life.

Children whose personalities and/or supernatural abilities are creepy are one of my favourite tropes in the horror genre in general.

While there weren’t a ton of examples of this in the original series, the small number of episodes that included children who weren’t what they seemed give me hope that this trope will be used again in the reboot.

Horror in Ordinary Settings

For example: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, To Serve Man, and Long Live Walter Jameson.

There’s something about encountering a monster or other malevolent entity when you least expect it that makes such an experience far more frightening to me than it would be if the characters and audience knew from the beginning what was coming.

The original series did a fantastic job of finding ways to scare the audience without relying on traditional props like a haunted house, a cemetery, or other spooky places. I could have listed many more examples of this kind of storytelling in this section. It was something that the original writers returned to over and over again, and for good reason. Suddenly being shocked by the turn of what sure seemed ordinary events is one of the cornerstones of this series.

Hopefully that means that the new crop of writers will continue this trend. I strongly suspect that this is exactly what they’ll do, but only time will tell if my prediction is correct on this point.

Purposefully Questionable Science

For example: The Midnight Sun The Last Flight, and The Little People.

While I normally expect the science fiction I read to at least attempt to ground their stories with some kind of scientific explanation for why such a thing might occur, I won’t be too annoyed if the new The Twilight Zone occasionally releases episodes that doesn’t bother doing this for the sheer joy of asking questions like, “what would happen if the Earth began moving closer and closer to the sun?” instead.

I’m not a sci-fi purist by any means. There is plenty of room for silliness in the genre if you ask me, and I hope we see it in this series. It’s not like modern science fiction is always accurate! I’ve read and watched plenty of contemporary sci-fi that bends the rules of biology, chemistry, astronomy, and physics just as much as folks did 50 years ago.

Are there any other fans of The Twilight Zone in my audience? Will you be watching the reboot? What do you think of rebooting old shows in general?

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January 13, 2018 · 1:05 am

Saturday Seven: Fictional Food and Drinks I Want to Try

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

How often do food descriptions in books make you hungry? This is something that happens to me regularly, especially if I happen to be reading a description of a delicious snack or meal right before it’s time to make my own dinner.

While most of my cravings can be satisfied by the same or similar dishes as the ones I’ve read about, some authors describe food and drinks that don’t actually exist in our universe at all. Their imaginations have created all kinds of stuff that I’m dying to taste. If only there were a way for me to really try them!

This is what I’d want to eat and drink first if I had a magic wand and could make imaginary food and drinks appear in our world.

1) Fizzing Whizzbees from J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”

A Fizzing Whizzbee is a large sherbet ball that makes people who eat it float a few inches off of the ground.

Ever since I first read the description of this treat, I’ve been desperately wishing that our muggle society had the ability to make such a thing.

While there are non-magical versions of this snack out there, they’re obviously not going to make anyone float. A sherbet ball that doesn’t have that exciting side effect doesn’t sound quite so fun to me.

2) Lembas from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

There weren’t many parts of Samwise and Frodo’s perilous journey to Mount Doom that I wished I could have experienced, but eating lembas was a huge exception to this rule.

I love many of the kinds of bread that we humans are able to make, so I can only imagine how much better Elven bread would be. Imagine only needing to eat a few bites of it before you felt satisfied!

Elvish food also appeals to me quite a bit in general. I believe in choosing quality over quantity, and the elves seem to agree with me on this point. All of their feasts always sounded so high quality and delicious in the novels.

3) Tru Blood from Charlaine Harris’ “Dead Until Dark” (Book 1 of the True Blood series).

Tru Blood is a bottled, synthetic blood substitute that ethical vampires drink in this universe.

While I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to stand more than one sip of it, I’d love to know if it’s as unappetizing as certain vampires claim it is. It might taste better to a human.  Either way, I’d want to find this out for myself.

4) Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from Douglas Adams’ “The HItchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

I haven’t tasted any alcohol in years, but I’d break that record for a small taste of this volatile and unbelievably strong drink.

The instructions for making it are as creative as they are alarming, so I would definitely stop after that first sip.

5) Ent-Draught from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

If only all of you knew how tempted I was to make this entire post about the meals in the Lord of the Rings trilogy!

Ent-draught is made by mixing river water with possibly magical ingredients that only Ents know about. There is one type of ent-draught that refreshes the tree people of this series and other type that nourishes them.

Merry and Pippin, two fully-grown hobbits, were once given this drink. They each grew a few inches taller after that experience, so I’m eager to see if what would happen if a human drank it.

6) Pale Purple Melon from Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games.”

The reference to this melon happened briefly and only once, so I’ll quote the section that mentions it to refresh the memories of everyone who has read this book:

While the table is empty, a long board off to the side has been laid with at least twenty dishes. A young man, an Avox, stands at attention by the spread. When I ask if I can serve myself, he nods assent. I load a plate with eggs, sausages, batter cakes covered in thick orange preserves, slices of pale purple melon. –  The Hunger Games, page 87.

Would pale purple melon taste anything like watermelon, cantaloupe, or muskmelon? I’d like to think it would be every bit as delicious as all three of those fruits. After possibly being grossed out by Tru Blood and Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, this would also be a nice change of pace.

7) Wonka’s Everlasting Gobstoppers from Roald Dahl’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”

I enjoy the real-life version of this candy quite a bit, but I’ve always wondered what it would be like to suck on a gobstopper that truly did last forever.

How about you? What fictional food and drinks do you wish you could try?

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· 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: January 13, 2018

Here is this week’s list of comic strips, blog posts, and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

Illegal Immigration. This is one of those links that works best if you don’t know anything about it ahead of time. Enjoy!

Five Bad Ideas Science Fiction Teaches Us to Love via mythcreants. Next week I’ll be sharing another link from this blogger about good ideas that science fiction teaches us to hate. In the meantime, go read this post from him. It’s a good one.

Oracle. Who else thinks this would make a great full-length novel?

Still Not Shutting Up via EricaVerrillo‬. I wonder how often this happens on Facebook?

The Problem with Curated Photos on Social Media. What do you all think of this? I have mixed feelings about whether or not I believe it’s actually a problem. So much depends on who you follow online and what kinds of stuff they share. Most of the people I follow post a lot of pictures of their pets, kids, and what they made for dinner. On the other hand, there have been a few times when I wished my life was as exciting as other people’s lives when they post more unusual stuff!

From How to Set Better Mental Work-Life Boundaries via ‪parentsinbiz‬:

The first thing that you need to do is to set better mental boundaries for yourself. But how do you do this? How can you make sure that you set better mental work-life boundaries and get the best of both worlds?

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January 11, 2018 · 1:00 am

An Update on My Difficulties with Meditation

Wow, it’s been six weeks since I last blogged about meditation. I knew it had been a while when I first began working on today’s post, but I had no idea that so much time has passed.

The last time I blogged about this topic, I talked about the possibility of taking a break from meditation. It turns out that I was far too stubborn for that option.

I didn’t want to make any drastic changes to my meditation habits until I’d figured out if I was going to continue meditating or give it up for a while. There are a lot of fantastic apps and other services out there, but I don’t want to pay for something I won’t use regularly.

If there was a way to begin feeling more relaxed after my sessions again, I was going to keep using my current app until I figured it out.

Now that I have the answer to that question, I have to decide how to change this part of my daily routine.

No, I’m still not back to my regular habits yet, but I am still meditating and I have noticed an improvement over the last two months. Today I’ll share the techniques that worked for me. I’ll also talk about some other ideas I’ll be trying in the near future.

Going Through the Motions

While I know that going through the motions is generally used to negatively describe how someone is performing a certain action, I don’t think of it that way for this particular situation. Sometimes going through the motions is a perfectly valid response when something isn’t working out the way you hoped it would.

There were days, especially back in early December right after What Should You Do When Meditation Isn’t Working? was first published,when I listened to my guided meditation app without consciously trying to clear my mind or participating in the process at all.

As odd as this might sound, listening without trying to participate in any way was helpful. I like the soothing voice of the woman who narrates the sessions on the app I use, so it was nice to hear her talking even if I wasn’t reacting to the routine the way I typically would.

The more I listened to her without expecting myself to join in, the more interested I became in trying again.

Comparing Meditation to Exercise

This section could almost be expanded into it’s own blog post, but I’ve noticed an interesting correlation between meditation and exercise.

Both of them require effort long before you see many results at all. It takes time and dedication to build muscle or lose weight. Even then, there have been times when my progress slowed or even temporarily halted in those areas for any number of reasons. Training your mind requires the same level of determination. There’s no quick fix for it.

The last few months seem like they were a plateau for me in this area of life. Yes, it was frustrating, but once I figured out what was going on I wasn’t nearly as annoyed with the process. I expect it to take a while to notice a difference in many of my fitness goals, after all.

Meditation should be held to the exact same standards.

Remembering What December Is Like for Me

December is my least favourite month of the year for a few different reasons.

One, I live far away from my family, and I miss them terribly over the holidays.

Two, my mood dampens a little bit every year between the end of Daylight Savings Time and the Winter Solstice. My body doesn’t like having that many hours of darkness in a day.

Three, I used to work in a field whose busiest time of the year was between October and the beginning of January with December being the peak of it all. While the actual number of hours I worked in December were only slightly higher than normal, there were multiple times when I stumbled into bed at 2 or 3 am only to go back into work at 11 am the next morning.

The shifts themselves were hectic, too. We dealt with many furious people over the course of the average day, and there was never enough time to do half of the things we were expected to do. I still associate those memories with that month, and it’s not a pleasant association.

Due to these factors, everything is a little tougher than normal for me in December. I should have thought of that when I was blogging about this at the end of last November, but for some reason it didn’t cross my mind until I began working on this post.

Now that I know more about why this plateau happened, I’m ready to start tweaking my meditation routine to see how it can be improved even more than it’s already improved for me since last November.

Other Adjustments I Want to Try

I’ve been doing guided meditation exercises since I first began meditating regularly. My very first attempts at meditation from years ago had been without any guidance at all, and they didn’t go well at all. I quickly became bored and gave up on them. Maybe it’s time to try self-guided meditation again now that I’m better at releasing stray thoughts when they appear?

Right now I’m meditating every evening. As much as I love winding down my day that way, a morning or afternoon session might work better. I’m even thinking about meditating for short periods of time more than once per day to see how they affect me.

If I do continue to use guided meditation, is it time to start exploring other meditation apps, Youtube channels, or other services? I’m using the free version of my current app, and it only offers the same few sessions to people who haven’t paid for a subscription. A few years ago, I signed up for a subscription to my current app, but I didn’t find their premium content worth the expense.

I don’t know how long it will take before I update you on this development in my life again, but I will let you know what I find as I continue to play around with my meditation habits.

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January 8, 2018 · 1:00 am

5 Classic Science Fiction Books That Everyone Should Read

There’s something about the snowy days of January that makes me want to curl up with a classic science fiction novel and not lift my head up again until April.

I’m not entirely sure why I have this urge. Maybe it’s because burying my nose in something that was old and often assigned in English class a few years after I’d read it was exactly how I used to spend cold winter weekends when I was a kid? There is also the joy of discovering a story you’ve heard lots of references to in other places. I was positively thrilled to finally get the real version of the first entry on this list. As interesting as movies and TV shows are, they often make changes to the characters or plot that anyone who isn’t familiar with the original might not even notice.

At any rate, if you haven’t read any of these classics yet, I can’t recommend them highly enough. Yes, I’m playing a little loose with the definition of the term classic in this post. I believe that the more modern books I included are going to be as highly praised a century from now as they are today.

“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley.

Ignore everything you may have heard about Frankenstein from TV shows and movies. Frankenstein wasn’t even the name of the creature that was created by nineteenth century science and ingenuity. That name actually comes from Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist who first came up with the idea of stitching the bodies of various corpses together and seeing if he could bring his creation to life.

What I appreciate the most about this tale is how much attention it paid to developing the characters. No one was perfectly virtuous or villainous in the storyline including the monster himself. Yes, this is part of the horror genre, but it probably isn’t the same type of horror most people imagine when they think about this genre.

All of the fear has a purpose here, and it’s not simply to frighten you. It wants to make you think.

 

“Out of the Silent Planet” by C.S. Lewis.

What if the Earth isn’t the only planet in the universe that contains intelligent life? What if we’re not even the most interesting populated planet out there?

That’s all I can say about this storyline without giving away spoilers, but this trilogy was full of delightful plot twists. C.S. Lewis really knew how to play around with the common tropes in the science fiction genre and come up with a new approach to them.

“Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler.

I wish Ms. Butler had lived long enough to finish this series. She wrote so many incredible things, and “Parable of the Sower” is honestly one of the best science fiction stories that’s been written in the last 50 years.

Imagine what North America would be like if their societies crumbled slowly instead of overnight like it does in, say, The Walking Dead. (No, there are no zombies in “Parable of the Sower,” though)

The characters in this tale did watch their financial and social prospects dwindle for many years before their home literally burns down and they’re forced to march north and hopefully find a safe place to live.

“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. 

The warnings in this tale about what censorship and totalitarianism do to a society are as timely now as they were when Mr. Bradbury first released this work.

I also enjoyed the descriptions of how the government in this world got people to stop reading books and thinking for themselves. What I assumed they’d do to shut down the flow of information was the exact opposite of how it actually went down.

There were a lot of reasons why I enjoyed the storyline, but this was one of the biggest ones. I never would have guessed that the average person could be so complicit in creating a new government that wasn’t actually what they wanted at all.

“Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley.

On a somewhat silly note, the cold, clinical scene that showed how babies are gestated in this society still haunts me. It’s not gory or anything, but it was nothing at all like how humans reproduce in our world. I read that section two or three times in a row to fully understand how it worked the first time I picked up this story.

One of the other reasons why I recommend this tale so highly has to do with how it approaches the idea of prejudice. No one is born with prejudices. They’re something that have to be directly or indirectly taught to a child. How this happened in this society was as creative as it was disturbing.

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January 6, 2018 · 1:05 am

Saturday Seven: Cold Weather Reads

Saturday Seven is hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Since this is the first Saturday Seven, I’ll explain it briefly for my readers. It’s a weekly meme for writers, bloggers, and book lovers in general. Every week you pick any book, writer, or author-related topic you’d like and make a list of seven things that fit it. Go click on the link above if you’d like to learn more about this meme or if you want to read the contributions from other bloggers.

I talk about science fiction and fantasy quite a bit here, so many of my future Saturday Seven posts will probably be related to those genres somehow. If hashtags were a thing in blogs, I’d end this paragraph with #YouHaveBeenWarned. Ha!

It’s been bone-chillingly cold here in Toronto over the past few weeks. Temperatures like -25 C (-13 F for you Americans) have often been our daytime high when you factor in the windchill. We’ve had multiple extreme weather alerts, and our city government has opened extra warming shelters to keep everyone who is living on the streets alive through this cold snap.

I feel very grateful, indeed, to have a warm, safe place to live. While we’re waiting for the weather to warm up a few dozen degrees, I’ve been thinking about books that are best read when it’s far too cold to go outside for non-essential reasons.

1. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

As freezing as Ontario is at the moment, at least we know that our winter weather generally ends by April. The citizens of Narnia had no such guarantee!

2. The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel.

While this is the second instalment in the Earth’s Children series, they can all be read as standalone works. This tale follows the adventures of a teenage girl named Ayla who attempts to survive in a harsh Palaeolithic landscape on her own for years on end. I wasn’t even allowed to ride my bike past a certain point in our neighbourhood when I was her age, so I’m always fascinated by how someone so young survived all of the challenges that came her way.

3. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.

Wang Lung and his wife struggled so hard to survive. I always enjoy reading about how closely their well-being was tied to what the climate was like and how their crops did in any particular year.

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

The chapters that dealt with Jane’s years as a student and teacher at Lowood School are an especially good read on chilly days. Even something as simple as a cup of hot tea and a piece of fruit feels like a luxury when you’re in that section of the storyline.

5. Robert Frost’s Poems by Robert Frost.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Mending the Wall,” and of course the classic “The Road Not Taken” are a few of the best poems to read from him on days like today.

6. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

While I’m not a huge fan of gardening in real life, I did enjoy the descriptions of how Mary and Colin coaxed the abandoned garden back to life in this story after winter passed. They made it sound like such a magical process.

7. The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

This was my least-favourite Little House book the first time I read that series. I couldn’t imagine how Laura Ingalls and her family would survive such a long, snowy, and bitterly cold winter while they were also running out of food. My subsequent readings of it were much more enjoyable, although I still always wince when I reach the scene where Almanzo risks his life to leave town and buy wheat to keep everyone alive until spring.

What are your favourite cold weather reads? I don’t host comments on this blog, but I’d love to discuss it with you on Twitter.

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· 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: January 6, 2018

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, short stories, and other links from my favourite corners of the web.

Victorian Advice for a Dry January via MimiMatthewsEsq. I was fascinated by how much the Victorians knew about the dangers of drinking too much alcohol. I’ve always kind of assumed that their resistance to it had been for moral, not medical, reasons.

Healthy vs. Sick Goals. From what I’ve read, this flu season is worse than usual because the dominant strain of the flu is a nasty one and the vaccination is much less effective than usual. Stay healthy, readers! If you do become sick, this comic strip might help you crack a smile.

Perfectionism: The Art of Getting Stuck via ‪thinkspin‬. This blogger had some very interesting thoughts about ADHD, perfectionism, and how we should actually be speaking to ourself.

City Squirrels Prefer Organic Peanut Butter via laura_perras. I’m sharing this with you for one simple reason: it made me laugh.

Romanticizing the Hunter-Gatherer. Confession: I’ve been guilty of this for years. There is something appealing to me about living in a world where you get to spend all of your time with your loved ones working as a team to survive. I’m lucky enough to have a spouse, parents, siblings, a sister-in-law, and niblings (which I recently learned is the gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) who are all a joy to spend time with.

How One Couple Saved Their Marriage By Asking Each Other a Simple Question. Click-bait headline aside, this article was fabulous.

From Two Years Dead:

When I opened up my OKCupid profile, I was already two years dead.

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January 4, 2018 · 1:00 am

The Cold That Stuck Around (Or Why I Haven’t Lifted Weights in Ages)

Every once in a great while, my body meets a cold virus that decides it likes living in my body and becomes reluctant to leave it. I’m talking about the kind of devotion that some people are never lucky enough to experience once in their entire lifetimes. If it didn’t involve so much coughing, I’d be much more willing to feel sorry for those poor viruses who hang around for as long as they do.

I like to blame this on the fact that I didn’t grow up in Canada as well as the fable that I therefore have yet to mingle with some of the more virulent germs floating around up here. When Canadians emigrate to the U.S., I’m sure they’re occasionally just as surprised by our fierce American germs down there. (I will now wait for my mother, who has worked in the medical field for over 20 years and has no doubt forgotten more about these things than I’ll ever know, to shake her head and laugh at the idea of Canadian vs. American viruses.)

For the past few weeks, I’ve had about as much stamina and energy as the sleeping cat in the picture on the left.

There were a few beautiful naps to be had in the early stages of The Cold That Stuck Around™, and I was grateful for every one of them.

After the sneezing, fatigue, and congestion finally began to fade away, I started thinking about weightlifting again. I miss it every single time I have to take a break from it to heal from an injury or illness.

As usual, I waited a couple of days until after my cough finally faded away before tentatively doing a light bodyweight fitness routine that I normally find pretty easy. I was otherwise  feeling well by this point, and I really wanted to get back into my normal routine before the new year.

Something tells me The Cold That Stuck Around™ was expecting this, because I began coughing at the end of that workout. It wasn’t a hacking cough, but it did bother me off and on for the rest of that day.

The next morning I was still coughing, so I took another couple of days off to rest. Yesterday, I decided to try to reach my daily step count goal without doing any weightlifting. Maybe that fairly small amount of exercise would be acceptable while I healed.

I’ll give you the amount of time it takes to read this sentence to guess how that turned out for me.

Yes, I had another coughing fit this morning. It was milder than the last one, but I clearly haven’t shaken off The Cold That Stuck Around™quite yet.

I otherwise feel perfectly healthy. It’s hard to justify the idea of not getting my normal amount of exercise in, but clearly my body isn’t quite ready for that yet.

So now here I am staring wistfully at my weights as I wonder when I’ll get to use them again. In the scheme of things, it is a very minor problem to have. I honestly shouldn’t even be complaining about it at all, but I’m going be very happy when the-virus-that-shall-not-be-named finally wanders away for good and I’m no longer coughing at all. There are many things in life I can be perfectly patient about,  but this isn’t one of them.

I hope that all of your fitness routines are going much more smoothly!

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