Jack's seventeen...

Friday, July 22, 2011

It had been a solid two weeks since I’d last taken a day off from working out and this was shaping up to be another. It was Jack’s birthday and we were having family over for dinner right after work…which meant I should go straight home instead of heading for the park…to help with the preparations. I was also responsible for picking up Jack’s new bike. He’d been riding his sister’s mountain bike since he was 10 and at 6’4”, it no longer fit him well. He doesn’t ride much and had little interest in a road bike so when Kim had shown me a bike she was selling on Craig’s List for $100…an excellent hybrid she’d hardly ridden and big enough to fit Jack…I told her I’d take it if he wanted it. “For Jack? You can have it for fifty bucks,” she said. I showed him the bike and he showed all the enthusiasm a 16-year old teenager can muster for something that isn’t a video game. “Sure…looks okay to me,” he’d said

Anyway, I picked it up and brought it home. We had also bought him an office chair for his room…a nice one with arms and a back. I’d left it in the box so he could learn how to assemble such things and when he opened the box, was surprised to see it needed assembling. Now…the box was narrow and rectangular…kind of the way you’d expect a box to look with a disassembled chair inside. I don’t know why he thought he would open the box and find a chair in the proportions chairs come in…inside that box. I figured right there I would be assembling the chair…and I did.

Jack’s favorite meal is noodles, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy on everything. There is nothing Paleolithic about the meal…except the chicken…which I ate in abundance. The ice cream cake that followed was un-Paleo as well, but I had a piece…to be sociable.

I never did work out. I could have made my way to the track and done some bleacher work, but the knee is still sore and that seemed not to make sense. Instead, Holly and I got in the neighbors’ pool after dark and just enjoyed the cooling night air after another scorching day. I’ve got a big day of calorie-burning scheduled for tomorrow anyways.