Today you get to laugh at my Harold being Harold moment, when I attempted to put together a towel cabinet for the bathroom – LOADS OF FUN that was. However, I did get in a nice recovery run that predicted yesterday and while the roads were melting, they were not completely melted.

After yesterday’s tempo and strides workout, I decided today was going to be an easy run…well as easy as running down to Pepin and then coming back up Philbrick Hill can be. I started out thinking I would run in my Altra Duo’s just to see how they felt. I wasn’t a big fan last Fall and while I was walking down the driveway…let’s just say I wasn’t thrilled.

I figured that feeling will go away when I start running. Well, I am here to tell ya…it didn’t. I got a little way down the road, thought why am I torturing myself. I don’t like the way they feel underfoot and as much as I like the appearance, the comfort level sucks. Enough of this shite – I stopped turned around and walked back to the house and put on my New Balance Propels and headed out the door again.

Much better.

At least my feet were comfortable and running just felt better in the Propels. The Duo’s are not a bad shoe, but they are not a good fit at all for the way that I run or how I want shoes to feel on my feet.

As I said to start, this was a planned easy run and I forced myself to keep running slower than usual. Actually, that was not as hard as I make it sound, my legs were still pretty crispy from yesterday’s workout and I have been really tired the past couple of days. In other words, the Holidays are catching up to me like they usually do after the 1st.

It will pass, it always does.

When I got down on Pepin, I was surprised at the amount of slush on top of ice there was still on the road. A lot more than on Philbrick to say the least. The Town needed to come through and plow one more time all the secondary/tertiary roads in Town, some of them are still pretty nasty.

However, as long as I ran in the middle of the road, it wasn’t too bad. Good thing it ain’t a busy road.

Unfortunately, once I got off Pepin, there is a bit more traffic and the road shoulders are slush-covered ice most of the way back to the house, so meeting traffic is an adventure in achieving great form. Shorten up the stride, more of midfoot landing and light feet while running on slushy ice and trying to keep upright and not get run over if you fall. 😉

Just out there building character – I guess.

Thank you kindly, but I believe that I have quite enough character…oh well.

Coming back up Philbrick, I just took my time and didn’t worry about pace. The hill is the hill and you can either battle it or do like I did today, as the breathing got harder, the legs just went slower.

Overall, a nice recovery run and I managed to stay easy…most of the way. Although the heart-rate was higher than it normally is due to ice and cars – they just don’t mix.

Okay, you can laugh and chuckle at me – I don’t mind, as you can imagine me putting together a towel cabinet and some of the comments that I was muttering along the way that were not appropriate for prime time. 😉

First of all, I can usually put these things together without too many problems. The problem for me is having to follow the directions to make sure that I don’t have too many leftover parts. Engineers and technical writers create the instructions for how a right-handed person would put it together and I ain’t right-handed!

This immediately mixes up an already mixed up mind considerably and takes me twice as long to get things put together. So I muddled along and got to step 7.

Of course, after I finished screwing in the screws, I noticed that the brown part was in front – words resulting in the blue air. I got that taken care of and moved onward and upward. When I got to step 9, I noticed that I didn’t have the parts I needed. So I got to looking around and at those damned instructions.

Yep, I used the plugs for step 9 in step 7! %#@% yep! So I had to go back and take step 7 apart again and put in the correct plugs, then move back to step 9 so that I now could complete it with the correct plugs. Yes, the damn things are labeled, but I still screwed it up.

I got going along pretty good and put things together, to the point where I had nailed the cardboard backing on and stood up to admire my work. Oh, #@%$! I had put the cardboard white side up so that the brown side was what you would see when looking inside the cabinet. $#!^!!! This meant that I had to carefully rip the nails out of the cardboard, pull the nails out of the pressboard, turn the cardboard over and renail it to the cabinet.

As long as no one looks at the back of the cabinet it is cool, but it ain’t pretty on the backside. The things are every time I put one of these kits together I do this and then forget that I do this. It is just a pain-in-the-arse because I know that I know better.  Yeah, there might have been a few swear words floating around the house for a few minutes.

However, I got it put together, it looks pretty much like it is supposed to and if you aren’t looking for the imperfections that I know are there, it looks pretty good. It is the exact fit for space where we wanted the towel cabinet and looks good there. Mary has amazing taste and decorating ability. Now if I only had as much handiwork skills that would be a very good thing. 🙂

I am going to change a bit of how to report what I am reading and focus more on articles/books that pique my interest enough to share, rather than every little blog or news article that I read. It gets to be a bit too much after a while because I do read a lot of stuff over the course of a day.

What did I read that was interesting today?

I started reading Lifespan by David Sinclair – While it is not super technical, I have to go slower when reading it, because the terminology and subject matter are new to me. Right now is the wading in part where I learned a lot of new to me stuff on each page. It is interesting and it did help that I watched one of his lectures on YouTube later in the morning to hear more about what I am reading. It helped decipher some of the stuff he was talking about that I wasn’t understanding at first. Liking it so far.

 4 Workout Rules to Break This Year | Outside Online
To find the best tech for everyone, look to older adults
Produce More by Removing More: The Discipline Pursuit of Essentialism – I recently purchased the book and plan to read it when I finish Lifespan, so I found this article rather interesting.
Plates, stacks, cushioning and BLING, Not the Reason the Nike VaporFly and AlphaFly are the fastest shoes ever made – Simon Bartold — with all the hoopla surrounding the Nike shoes, I found Simon’s opinions enlightening and seem to be another part of the reason why the shoes work as well as they do.

That made things a bit easier and a lot shorter.

A good but tiring day. Putting together those “easy to assemble” pieces of furniture always gives me a headache and makes me cranky. It actually is a good thing because it forces me to focus on what I am doing for an extended time and use parts of the brain that usually don’t get all that much use. I can laugh at my efforts, but I have a feeling that I am not the only one who struggles with putting those wonderful things together.

How about you, do you struggle with putting together those “easy to assemble” furniture pieces that are needed in the house? What one was the toughest for you?

Originally posted on Aging & Retirement – My Thoughts, written by Harold L. Shaw, Jr.