Thursday, August 11, 2005

Alliterative Anecdotes

(Some stuff that happened over the last few weeks)

1. End July: Weather Warnings

The weather was terribly hot all over the world: Switzerland, China and Malaysia all had indicated to me the weather was unusually hot.

Then in the middle of the week, about July 27th, the weather finally broke! Whoooohoooo! But boy did it break!

Around 630pm, noticed very very strong winds outside, rattling the windows. Didn’t think twice about it except to say thanks for the change in weather. Blasted out of tv-watching fest by the bellowing of sirens: hey, aren’t those the tornado warning sirens?

Turned to a local channel, where they were keeping tabs on a major system passing through the area… there had been reports of a tornado having been seen on the eastern outskirts of town, hence the sirens. Tornado watch for the area for another 15 minutes.

If a tornado were to visit, the best we could do would be to hang out in the bathroom with the door closed. So we kinda continued with one eye on tv, one eye at window, all the while hearing the furious beating of rain outside.

The storm abated soon after, to wreak havoc upon other towns sitting in its path to the east of us.

Later, found out that there had NOT been any tornado over at the eastern outskirts of town: funnel clouds, yes; actual tornado, no.



2. 6 & 7 Aug: Workout Weekend

It was a particularly active weekend. My own indoor aerobic workout, followed by racquetball, and swimming. Yeah, the sports complex where we do racquetball has a recreational pool, and we finally dragged our sorry asses over there.


I call it a "recreational pool" cos it's not the pools I'm used to seeing: It's not a boring rectangular thing, so you can’t quite swim laps, but you *can* play pseudo-water basketball, enjoy lots of jets & bubblies, or sliding down the water chute!

The water’s warm too!! There’s even a separate spa, where the water composition is different and the temperature much higher, to relax your body before heading off to the changing rooms.

I think all that exhausted me, though: only today, Thursday, am I able to drag myself to start my indoor aerobic workout again!




3. 8 Aug: Trek of Torture

The day before, had gotten myself a pair of Adidas Slides, which essentially is a pair of slide-on slippers, with the surface of the slippers being riddled with those little prongs; what I call reflexology-type slippers.

I wondered just how far I could walk with them, so on Monday, decided to use them for a short walk to the post office & library.

No problem getting there… but of course, once I’m at the library, I will wanna browse thru their books and DVDs… which involves standing still for a few minutes at a time.

All of a sudden I realize my feet are in PAIN! I don’t think I’m supposed to just stand in these slippers, gotta keep moving! But now that I had been stationary, the harm was done… I could barely walk!

Limped over to a chair, after passing by the young adults section to grab a short book, and proceeded to just sit and read while trying to rest my feet (sans slippers, of course).

Worked for the short term… but by the time I made it to the front desk to check out some DVDs, I was limping again. Made it to the bench just outside the ‘book detectors’ and sat down again.

After perusing a newspaper for about 10 minutes, tried to walk out of the building; made it as far as the bench just outside the door. Rested again.

This is getting ridiculous! But I didn’t wanna go barefoot: there’s always broken glass or something on sidewalks… but I did do a short trek across a parking lot barefoot… but was not gonna cross the road a la chicken feet, so put on those slippers again.

…Limped along.

The pain became kinda bearable, tho my breathing was definitely laboured… Managed to make it all the way back to the apartment, taking it one limping step at a time…

It felt like heaven to take ‘em off… and the carpet felt SO soft after the slippers….

The soles of my feet were riddled with marks of the ‘prongs’…

And my feet felt warm for hours after that… in the end put ‘em on cold/ice to reduce the inflammation.

So yeah, this (didn’t) help keep me off of my exercise till today, I suppose (i.e. not just the swimming’s fault?!).

Lesson learnt: use the slippers for short distances, and KEEP MOVING when wearing them!

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2 comments:

  1. The haze there is quite bad. I'm glad Singapore is unaffected, I meant for now. Hope everything is Okay there.

    ReplyDelete

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