New Year's Calculations

I resolved this year to walk every day, which really means to go on a walk every day. So far, so good. I added a new ap to my phone to help me keep track of my progress. It's called walkmeter. According to the ap, I walked 12.33 miles at an average pace of 17:57 minute miles. Somehow in my flat neighborhood I managed during the week to ascend 53 feet, yet descend 54, so by the end of the year I will be 52 feet below where I started. . .

I also went to an athletic shoe store and had some analysis done on my feet, stance, and gait. Lots of graphs and colors. I joined their club, bought some shoes, a bell was rung. It felt like smoke and mirrors, but my feet are happy with my new shoes, insoles, and fancy socks. I am willing to go along with some degree of hoodwinkery, if in the end I have happy feet.

After one week of walking (on average 1.54 miles per day), I can tell already that I will need to concoct some extra complication to keep me interested. Some experiments or assignments. I heard on the radio (NPR Costas Karageorghis, a sports psychologist at Brunel University in London) that listening to music while you exercise can enhance your performance. Might try that for a week. Question: will I walk better or will I get mugged or hit by a car while wearing earbuds?

Maybe one week, I will go on protest marches every day, carry hand-made signs declaring my unhappiness with some thing or another. Or go on walk-athons. Pull out my old Save-the-Whales pendant. Wear tube socks.

For this first week the goal was not to fail in the first week. Not sure what I'll do next week. Maybe walk with my son's dog who has spent every day since Christmas stealing our holiday treats off the counter. So far she has consumed an entire bag of reindeer kibble, a handful of Peppermint Patties, a batch of cookies, and one of those chocolate oranges (dog owners, worry not, she does not get sick when she eats chocolate).

I welcome other suggestions.

Going Commando

After a decade in captivity on my kitchen counter, Crabicus has begun to practice public nudity. The first time I caught him out of the shell, I thought he was just in the process of changing. Hermit crabs will discard a shell for a larger one as they grow. In the wild they will meet in droves on the beach for a big swapapalooza. These changings are part of a hermit crab's natural behavior. But in ten years, Crabicus had always been very private about his lower half. Then I see him just standing around sans shell, his pale lower extremities curled like an uncooked sweetrole. I leaned in for a better look, being curious about things I know exist in my kitchen but that I have never seen. My glance was enough to get him to scuttle over to a shell and crawl inside. That night I checked in on him and to my horror, and a little relief, he was hanging like an over-dramatic Shakespearean actor after a death scene, upside down, half in half out of his shell, motionless. Alas poor Crabicus. We all swarmed the scene to witness death at its freshest. We chattered about possible causes. The nudity? Madness? A suicide? I reached in to lift his corpse from his climbing branch.

Then he moved.

He hasn't repeated his death pose since, so I've ruled out Harold Chasen Syndrome, but he continues to go commando. We've pondered theories and have settled on this: he's an old man and, like old men do, he's just doing whatever the hell he damn well feels like. So my kitchen counter, between the toaster and the sink, has become his post-retirement naked room.