Numbers game

On Saturday, the professor and I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op and spent $610. Yes, in case you’re wondering, it is one of my goals to single-handedly keep the economy going. It’s also one of my goals to hate winter less. It’s a tough one, to be sure. Usually, I get through it by watching a lot of TV, reading magazines by the plow load, and making things like banana bread and soup. But when you’re trying to get a calorie deficit going, suddenly, those don’t seem like great coping mechanisms any more.

And so, to MEC we went. The professor wanted a high performance fleece and a puffy vest; he ended up with those, plus a knapsack to carry his laptop around in. I wanted a fleece, high performance or otherwise, a jacket that would keep me warm while doing sportif things like hiking and city walking, and boots that would let me clamber over Nova Scotian rocks like a mountain goat. I got all those, plus a nifty little wool hat.

And now that I’ve spent all the money in the world on outdoor gear, I have to actually, you know, use it. So on Sunday, the Professor and I and a few of our friends piled in the car and drove out to a place called Dover, which is a rocky moonscape kind of place right on the Atlantic Ocean. We hiked over the rocks and through the scrub for about an hour, and it was magnificient. Coldish and clear and so, so beautiful. And made all the better by proper outdoor gear, which, it turns out, makes a huge difference. It seems to me it’s all part of that looking after myself thing that I’m still learning how to do.

And I’m so glad of it. It was fantastic to scamper around on the rocks and feel like my shoes had my back, you know? Amazing to feel like the place I belonged on Sunday afternoon was on the rocks at Dover.

I’ve actually been on a real tear lately, exercise wise, which is great, because I crave it the way I used to crave french fries. I’ve been walking most mornings, and hitting cardio salsa, cardio strip and body bar classes at night. My muscles are pleasantly sore most of the time, and I feel tall, which is a real challenge for someone who stands no more than five foot three in shoes. However. The fucking scale is convinced that I weigh somewhere between 206 and 208 pounds, and have for several weeks. The fucking scale, of course, is a notorious liar. I am inclined to believe it when, once a week, it shows me at 202.3, though why it should be honest then and not any other time is frankly beyond me. I should probably stop weighing, or at least throw a five-pound weight on the damn thing to see if it shows it weighing five pounds, but I haven’t gotten any farther than stepping on the fucker each morning and then cursing it roundly. I will admit that most days I step on it two or three times, not in a row, but in the course of getting ready for the day, and most days it shows me a range of weights between 205 and 208 and THOSE ARE NOT THE WEIGHTS I AM LOOKING FOR.

Perhaps I will purchase an analogue scale, instead. I know I shouldn’t rely on it for all my feedback, and I don’t. I’ve bought new clothes lately at non-plus-size shops, and I am, as I say, enjoying the hell out of exercising. But the scale is part of the progress picture, and mine is really behaving like a bastard these days. It will give me great pleasure to consign it to the trash one day real soon.

Meantime, Basic Training and Kickboxing classes await.