2024.04.24 05.38 090825 nearly autumn 090616 i ran 090507 zipcar 090400 april 2009 090300 march 2009

090825 nearly autumn 1 I'm not used to writing anymore. I guess I need to hear from you if you read this stuff, so I can decide exactly who I am writing this for (or who I'm not writing this for). I use gmail. Write to daveb 416. I suppose I should check f1d0 email some year. I'm daveb there. 2 Last time I wrote I complained about prices of gyms, and such. Now I'm a member of Extreme Fitness. I love it, but still have so much trouble finding regular time to go. I know I have to do this daily, or on alternate days to get real benefits. 3 I went today. I seem to go to the gym about once a week right now. I can't motivate myself yet to go before work. I go during my weekend days off, but not during every such day off. I guess I like the idea of having weekends, especially summer weekends, for doing summer things. 4 What do I do there? I try to make sure I take a fitness class. They always exhaust me to the max. I got there around 4pm today, and the class I wanted (step class, with a nice leader) started at 630pm. So I did some leg exercises. I grab a ten pound weight, and walk around the club doing a squat walk until I sweat. Once I feel satisfactorily warm, I continue by using one leg machine after another, making sure I keep working hard. If I cool down, I get the weight, and squat again until I'm warm and sweating. Or today, since I had so much time to use, I biked for 30 minutes, used a life fitness step climber for 15 minutes, used a weird skating machine for 15 minutes as well. I used a variety of weighted pulley machines too. Arms, shoulders and legs. 5 That means that now that I'm home, I'm exhausted to bonk. I wonder if that is a real word. I use that to describe the elated feeling probably caused by dehydration. I had a 1-hour nap, then decided maybe I should document a bit of my life. 6 Last Friday was the first day of "The Ex", that is The Canadian National Exhibition. I've been going there almost every year since I was seven. My folks actually let me go on my own. Nobody does that kind of thing now. But I liked it. I would take my free pass from school, and my parents gave me $20, a fortune back in 1963. Even as a young person I didn't go on many rides. I'd try one, and then remember how much they didn't appeal to me. Even as I write, I recall a year I went alone, and they sat me next to another guy. He was so very drunk. The ride was called "The Zipper." It's still there! You and someone else are locked inside a small cage where you sit, and can rock round and round. The whole thing moves you up and down in an eliptical path, about 30 feet off the ground. As you have probably guessed, the guy next to me threw up everything he'd eaten and drunk. While I didn't get any of it on me, I still remember the whole thing so clearly. 7 The old Colliseum Building has become the Direct Energy Centre, essentially a huge flat room divided off into vendors. How huge? Think of an airport, and imagine the large walking corridor with freeway signs above directing you this way or that way. This building has the same kind of corridor and signage. The first room has electronic things, massage things, cosmetic things, publishers remainders, and snake oil. The next room has vendors from the distant Asian countries. There are two large rooms with outlet centres from stores around Toronto. Superdogs has a room to itself, set up as an arena (but didn't see them yet this year). 8 The barbecued corn was perfect. The ice cream sandwiches were perfect as well. Meat in any form was costly, or had very long lines (Maggies had only one shop in the Food building, where you could get a hot dog for 1.50). 9 We've had good and bad weather in Toronto. Perfect days recently. It was cold for the summer during June and July. The sweltering days have only just started, and even then, are rather mild for us. Global warming. But nothing highlights this better than the tornados we had last Thursday. 10 I was working at my Starbucks, and only saw the terrible rain. Our store faces east, and we can look South. If I were able to look North during the storm, I would have seen the terrible devastation in Vaughan. We lost power at the store for about and hour. And when I got home, our flooding was bad. Living in a basement has it's problems. 11 The wetness might stem from something else. It's been a few days. It's dry outside the house. But the puddles in the carpet here are getting bigger. At this time about half the place wet carpeting. With some good luck, the landlord will find the expert he needs so we can get this fixed before anything is really damaged by the water. For now, sandals or shoes are mandatory. 12 The Ex is always bittersweet for me. It means the end of the summer, and that fall is coming too soon.

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