What a prickly tree...

Monday, January 03, 2011

This was to be my last day off. I hate going back to work on a Monday after a vacation, so I took the extra day, which proved pretty useful for Christmas clean-up and for exercising.

I began by tackling the tree. It was prickly as hell and I continually stabbed my fingers while removing ornaments. I’d purchased one of those tree bags when I bought the tree, but had twisted it somehow when putting it under the tree and now it wasn’t covering the branches.

“How tough can it be? It’s nothing more than a giant garbage bag…how did you screw it up so badly?” Holly asked as we struggled to pull it over the branches.

“Have you ever seen me pack up the garbage? Screwing this up was child’s play,” I said as I tore a gaping hole in the side I was wrestling with. We finally had a semblance of coverage, but when I pulled it from the stand and started to drag it from the family room, the bag caught on the arm of a chair and tore open completely, spilling needles on the floor for the rest of the trek out of the house.

I tried to return ornaments to their proper specialty boxes…which since they come in packing that kind of matches the ornament…and Holly writes on the inside of each box a description of the ornament that goes there…should have been pretty easy. It wasn’t. “Do you have some kind of learning disability? These ornaments match up with specific boxes,” she explained.

“Um…maybe? I suppose you’d rather I didn’t help anymore?”

She was good with that and I headed for the trainer where I managed to complete two more episodes of ‘Lost’ while riding 87 minutes. I showered, put away some more Christmas stuff and headed with Dakota for the Metroparks and another off-trail hike. It was close to dark when we began and completely so by the time we finished. We managed to scare up a coyote, which I suspect was trying to lead us away from her den…I’ll have to check that out on another night. I managed to break a good sweat and it was eerily serene as we made our way through a briar patch towards the end of the hike where I scared up more than one animal that wasn’t expecting us.

The hikes aren’t the calorie burners I will be getting later in the year when I have to get really serious about training for the triathlon, but they’re better than a kick in the head…or an old Christmas cookie. I’ll take what I can get for now…

Bike duration: 87 minutes. Hike duration: 65 minutes
Training Heart Rate: 130 biking. 70 hiking.
Calories burned during workout: 1300 biking. 350 hiking.