If you’re reading this sitting down, you might consider standing up.
That’s the first line of a Wall Street Journal article about a study on the health hazards of sitting and watching TV. We all know that being a complete couch potato isn’t good for our health, but the interesting thing about this study is the participants got between 30 and 45 minutes of exercise every day. That wasn’t enough to mitigate the effect of long periods of sitting.
Just another reminder to get up and move every so often, even if it’s just shaking and wiggling our bodies. I use this as a motivational video:
Which is more exhausting for you, talking or listening? My gut reaction is “listening” because if someone wants to talk I usually “overoblige”. I’m apt to let them dominate the conversation and indulge in a monologue. This cartoon points out I need to be less passive and take more responsibility for creating a meaningful dialogue.
On the other hand, I too have been guilty of monologues. They’re a lot more fun for me but I need to work on that for the sake of my poor listeners. Communication isn’t always easy.
If you could take a test that would tell you how long you had to live would you take it? I wouldn’t. My choice would be to keep living fully until I quietly slip away in my sleep. I also don’t believe that a quiz about lifestyle can predict longevity.
According to a recent study people who
avoid smoking,
exercise three and a half hours a week,
maintain a body mass index of less than 30 (i.e, who aren’t obese) and
eat a diet emphasizing fruits, vegetables and whole grains
cut their risk of diabetes, heart attack, stroke or cancer by 78 percent.
I do all of those things but my chances of living to 98 are still pretty slim I think. Two of my grandparents died in their 60s, my parents died in their 70s, one grandfather made it to 81 and only one grandmother made it to 98. And that grandmother was obese, got her exercise moving her fork to her mouth and ate anything that tasted good. Go figure.
Geek: a slang term describing a person as peculiar or odd because he/she is deeply interested in one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc.
I’m sure some people think I’m a geek because I have some technical expertise. My husband, on the other hand, is happy to let me handle the TVs and VCRs in the family. He just wants to watch the local weather every day and wants the process to be simple. “Just tell me which button to push, Jean.” If we’re going to be gone when his program is on he lets me do the taping.
So when the TV stations switched to completely digital this past summer and I had trouble recording some of them he said it was probably because the stations didn’t have enough power or bandwidth (I can’t remember the exact explanation) and forgot about it. His station came in fine. His background is in experimental physics and he knows a lot about electronics, so I accepted his explanation.
Until the new fall programs started I didn’t care enough to check our assumptions. When I did I found out we had been completely wrong. The stations were doing just fine, it was my new recorder that couldn’t pick them up.
In the meantime our faithful, repair-free old CRT TV was finally acting flaky after 25 years of service. Sometimes the picture would keep rolling upwards, sometimes the picture was half “snow”.
So I started to look online for DVD recorders and TVs. They had to have a good tuners, and the sellers had to have satisfaction-guaranteed policies. Then we had to go to Santa Fe last Monday to check on a car that had been in the shop for six weeks (that’s another story that I’ll write about later), so we started looking at DVD recorders and digital TVs there. I had assumed we were still gathering information, but when we went into Best Buy and asked the salesman about tuners, he phoned one of the fellows on the Geek Squad. The fellow came and took over. He was quiet and knowledgeable, our kind of salesman, so we ended up buying both a new recorder and a new TV, with two-year Geek Squad support for each.
That’s our kind of store, one that respects technical expertise. It understands that it’s good business to use the term geek with pride.
One of our magazines had the following puzzle: Remove eight letters from the following to reveal a common garden crop.
Okay, there are 20 letters there. So there would be 12 left after we remove 8. But what common garden crop has 12 letters? I couldn’t for the life of me think of one. I had to wait for the next issue to learn the answer.
To see the eight letters that need to be removed and the garden crop, click here.
Duh! I had to laugh…I “should” have thought of that. It was a great reminder that we can’t always believe everything we think…it’s a good idea to check our assumptions from time to time. And I’m doing just that right now, thinking about what other assumptions I habitually make that may not be true.
How important are goals to you? They’re often touted as great motivational tools… they’re one way of spicing up our lives. But the activities that have brought me the greatest joy have been the ones that I’ve made long-term commitments to, e. g., participating in a marriage, raising a child, blogging, etc. They’ve been activities that have kept me learning and growing with the added advantage of valuing the process, the present moment, rather than chasing after some future achievement.
What about you? What makes you feel fully alive? What has brought you the most joy in life?
We all know the power of positive thinking, but is it enough? When the universe doesn’t meet our expectations do we need something a bit deeper? I sure think so.
I’m like the fellow in the cartoon, I like to have choices. I have a lot on my plate right now, but I never make To Do lists. They make me feel pressured and my Inner Rebel starts dragging its feet. So instead I write Possibility Lists and things go a lot smoother. The trick for me is to put things on the list early enough so I don’t forget anything and I have plenty of time to choose to do them when the time is right. After a while I get an itch to cross some of the less fun ones off, and I feel a great feeling of satisfaction when I get them accomplished. It’s a simple little trick but it works for me. I like to have choices.
What About You?
Do you have any tricks for motivating yourself?
Never do unto others what you would have others do unto you. They might have different tastes.
—George Bernard Shaw
Some kind of help is the kind of help that helping’s all about. Some kind of help is the kind of help we can all do without.
—Marlo Thomas in Free to Be Me and You
bikehikebabe has been experiencing the difference in kinds of help lately, as she recovers from her hip replacement. She has been listening to books on CDs and asked her husband to pick some up at the library for her. She told him to just look for women authors and don’t read the description on the back of the jacket, because if he would like it, she wouldn’t. She would take her chances on random women authors. Unfortunately he couldn’t resist reading the descriptions and brought home CDs that he would like in her situation…stories about international intrigue.
In fairness he did bring home one story by a woman author, as she requested, and it turned out to be too mushy with no plot. The ones he picked were actually better. So who’s to tell how one’s efforts will turn out? Still it’s usually a good idea to try to listen to what the other person thinks she wants.
Do you have any suggestions for books bikehikebabe might like? What are some of your favorites? She would appreciate your ideas.
