"It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..."

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Saturdays leading up to Christmas are always busy…and they become even busier when you put off some things early in December that you should have been doing. That’s me. I still had to get stuff out of the attic to decorate the house…including the large, white plastic, manger figures that I’d place outside, in front of the picture window. It’s really about all I have to do to decorate for Christmas…I don’t string lights or decorate inside…but I always drag my feet on it. Well…this year was going to be different.

I grabbed Ash and Jack and prepared to empty boxes from the attic to the rec room…the designated location from which Holly would empty them and decorate the house over the next week. I took Jack down and pointed to the specific places I wanted him to put the boxes since I would be in the attic feeding them down and unavailable for consultation about this important issue. I should have taped off the area like they do for dead bodies…because he got it wrong. He was talking about some video game while I was explaining…and that should have been my clue. Oh well.

The attic was empty and the rec room full in a little over 15 minutes. If it was my job to decorate, everything would fit in a box the size my cereal came in. Thank God it isn’t…because I love the way the house looks when Holly’s done. I brought my boxes with manger stuff out front and did what I had to do…which is very little. I have a ‘Mary’, ‘Joseph’, ‘a shepherd, Three Kings, a couple of barn animals and, of course, a ‘baby Jesus’. I’ve built a little cradle/bed thing for the baby to lie in and each piece lights up. My biggest challenge is plugging them all in and wrapping the power strips so that snow doesn’t soak the whole operation. It really shouldn’t take that long…but it does. I move them around a few times, have to replace burned out bulbs, and wrap the cords in white garbage bags. Then Holly has to come up and tell me what I’ve done wrong…which is always something…I’m a man, after all.

I finished up and headed in to put some time on the trainer. I’m re-watching the first five season’s of ‘Lost’ since there so many times when, after watching an episode I said “huh?” It’s an hour show so I figured I’d be riding for at least 50 minutes…no commercials…so I was quite surprised when it ended to see that I’d only logged 39 minutes. That’s right…for those who watched this particular episode when it was aired…they spent 21 minutes not watching ‘Lost’. I put in a couple of minutes more and called it a workout. Hopefully tomorrow I’d get back to the park for another run. I want to start getting them back to back to see how the ‘old man’ injuries are doing.

Bike duration: 40 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 130 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 600.