Since my last fitness post I’ve been progressing at making progress.

With a 5K run at the local Stadtlauf in June as a goal, I started running every other day following the run/walk program in The Beginning Runner’s Handbook. That program is actually for a 10K, so the 5K at the Stadtlauf should be a piece of cake (although it’s on asphalt and might be hot), right? The program calls for 3 runs a week, however I’m cheating a bit by sticking to every other day. As a result I’m already on Week 9.

I actually did the 5K at the Stadtlauf in 2010, but I didn’t train sufficiently or correctly and nearly died was very sore the following week. My run yesterday was 55 minutes (with 3 1-minute walking breaks) and nearly 7K and I felt fine (slow pace with pulse in the 130s the entire time). The Stadtlauf should go just fine. And the 10K training won’t go to waste, I’m intending to keep it up for the Volkslauf in Jesteburg in September (through woods in fall weather).

On the days I don’t run I’ve been working out at the fitness center, so except for one day last week when I hurt my foot I’ve been doing fitness everyday for 8 weeks, since the week before Easter. And I have the results to show for it. I’ve lost a further 3 kg in the meantime, my weight is at 90.x (sounds like a radio station frequency), and my body fat is down too. My goals are 89.x by the end of June and 84.x by the end of September.

This was also a test of fargo.io for posting to WordPress. (Note: to separate paragraphs you seem to need blank line directly after each one.) I promise my next post will be about something more interesting than my improving fitness.

One of the cool things about 30 years of marriage (yes, it’s going to be THIRTY YEARS this September) is that it’s still possible after all that time to discover minuscule areas where you have irreconcilable differences. Or maybe “re-discover” is the better word, since for all we know we already knew all the things that annoy us about our partner but had conveniently forgotten them.

Take, for instance, salt. My mother is a health-conscious nurse, so even in the ’70s when I was growing up we didn’t eat a lot of salt. She always cooked with a herbal mixture to replace salt. I never got in the habit of adding salt at the table, and don’t think of a salt shaker as an essential piece of cutlery.

My wife, on the other hand, will salt everything, often without tasting it first (especially if I have cooked it). She gets nervous if she sits at the table and there is not a salt shaker within reach. We sometimes have 3 or 4 salt shakers on the table at one time, since she often brings one to the table herself to make sure there’s one there. And by my observation, her use of salt is moderate compared to some in her family and in Germany in general. I sometimes think that the heavy use of salt can so deaden the taste buds that one forgets food can have taste other than salt.

So when my nutrition class mentioned that cutting down on salt was not only healthy, but good for weight loss, I had no problems putting that into effect for myself. It however opened up a new source of conflict. I would cook a healthy dish without salt, my wife would grimace and reach for the salt shaker, I would roll my eyes, and our entertainment was guaranteed for the rest of the meal.

Some peace has been restored to our household through the use of a salt substitute (which, strangely enough, is sold by the publisher of the nutrition class). It’s based on potassium chloride, and tastes something like chicken soup.

It doesn’t work that well at the table, though. The last time my wife asked me to pass the salt (which I had conveniently placed at the opposite end of the table from her), I instead handed her a newspaper article with the headline “Millions of deaths from excessive salt consumption”. Just my way of saying I love you, honey! (And after she threw the newspaper in my face, I handed her the salt.)

Forgive me, internet, for I have sinned. It has been over 3 months since my last blog post.

And about the time of that last blog post I noticed that my weight and fitness were both leaving much to be desired. (I’m sure my wife noticed long before I did, and I’m sure she tried to let me know about it, and I’m even more sure I did my best to ignore her.) My weight was brushing up to triple-figures in kilograms (that’s 220 pounds in dog years), and that was my wake-up call.

For the past couple of months I’ve been trying to put myself first as far as diet and exercise go. Instead of just thinking about going to the gym, I actually went to the gym three times a week. As motivation I bought a Spotify subscription for my cell phone and a set of Plantronics BackBeat Go wireless sport headphones (as recommended by vowe… with gadgets you can do much worse than to buy what vowe keeps).

I also retook the MyLine nutrition course at our gym. Having taken it once before, it all sounded familiar and I was able to take more of it to heart than the first time. The first change they recommend is to eat 5 times a day. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Avoiding alcohol is also a challenge.

But between the workouts and the nutrition and the positive motivation I was able to see results after two months. 6 kilos lost. Body fat reduced by nearly 3 percentage points. Waist and hips 3 cm smaller. Not bad for a guy who just turned 51.

If you’re doing the math, you’ll know my weight is not yet ideal. (To help you calculate BMI, my height is 174 cm. As my trainer said, if I were 15 cm taller my weight would be ideal.) So’ll I’ll be sticking with the program for another 3 months.

As it turned out, my next goal has been handed to me on a silver platter. Our business co-sponsors the local “Stadtlauf” (city run) in June, and the organizer told (not asked) my wife, “and your husband will run 5K this time”. I’ll take that as a challenge.

I’m not a particularly materialistic person. It’s said that it is more blessed to give than to receive. If that’s the case, then I had a particularly blessed Christmas. I’ve been blessed by a ratio of approximately 10 to 1.

A part of this is due to the arrangement that my in-laws have with one another, to not arrange gifts among the adults, but only for the nieces and nephews and then with a strict price limit. In this arrangement everything is systematic and pre-arranged without any risk of surprise or forethought. The suggested gifts are specified to the last detail, usually accompanied by a ISBN number or an Amazon link. Those who have no specific wishes simply wish for iTunes gift cards. Larger suggestions can be combined among families or with Oma, with a complicated accounting of how the costs are shared and who pays whom for what.

As you may know, our gift for Christopher this was a somewhat expensive musical instrument, a set of small pipes imported from Canada. My idea was that the in-laws could give a share of the instrument as their gift to Christopher: the set budget for Christmas and birthday would cover one-twelfth of the cost. I assumed this would be entered into the post-Christmas cost-of-gift accounting. But for some reason, perhaps because the small pipes did not have an item number at Amazon, the in-laws had all instead prepared envelopes with cash for Christopher. That was somewhat awkward as he already had gotten the pipes on Christmas Eve, so I had to snatch the cash from the cards. One of them had even pasted the bills with double-sides sticky pads to the card, which could only be removed with 10 minutes elbow grease and nail polish.

For my gifts within the family I did my best to break the rules about avoiding surprise and forethought. For Christopher I found a couple of his favorite US groceries (Honey-Nut Cheerios!), for my wife some Brazilian jewelry and her specific wish for a bag for eyeglasses on her running belt (she lost a pair in the woods a couple of months ago; if you see a wild boar wearing bifocals you know who they belong to). For both I found a print of a hand-drawn map of London to remember our recent trip.

I’ll admit I’m being selective about counting gifts received. I’m not counting cash from the US (saves on shipping and I can pick out what I want), and I’m also not counting the colored sugar-and-spice calendar given to both my wife and me. I will also admit that the 50-year-old male is not the easiest to pick out presents for. I probably wouldn’t know what to get myself.

In the end my best and only present is a blue terry-cloth bathrobe. I already had a blue terry-cloth bathrobe, but it was 10 years old and my wife decided it was too ragged to look at anymore. The new robe is longer but not as warm. It will also be a constant reminder of how blessed I was this Christmas.

In the wake of the awful shooting in Newtown, Connecticut last week I’ve been searching for the perfect words to say. I still haven’t found them, and I may never will, but my high school friend Beth posted her thoughts on Facebook. They are pretty much the most reasonable words I’ve read so far, and with her permission I repeat them here…

There is something missing from the discussion about guns and violence and mass shootings going on this past week. The underlying assumptions about people. The “guns don’t kill people, people do” folks assume there are two clear distinct groups of people: criminals and good people. If good people are armed, they can thwart the criminals. We can’t “punish” the good people in our attempts to control criminals.

I reject that view of the world. We are all just people. We are all capable of being loving and caring. We are all capable of being selfish and fearful. We can all be overwhelmed by grief, terror and yes, even rage.

I readily confess to my darkness. I get pissed off while driving. I become too protective of the ones I love. I rage against the machine. I reach the end of my rope and become irrational. And when I do, the world is a safer place because I don’t have a gun on my person.

I enjoy shooting. I really really do. And I have pretty decent aim. But I think we are all safer for me not having a gun on my person at all times.

When does a “good person” who deserves to have a gun become a “criminal” who we need guns to stop?

I maintain we are all a bit of both.

We just bought one of these at Amazon to try out for our restaurants… if it works out we might buy 3 more. It’s an battery-powered alarm clock with siren and flashing police light. Can anyone guess why we might want this? Hint: we’re not waking up any sleepers.

Here’s the German title at Amazon: Signalwecker ‘BLAULICHT’ mit Sirenenalarm – Tatütata… Aufstehen… Der bekommt jeden wach!

Update 10 Dec 2012 Our product has arrived, and as you can see it’s not half bad (although difficult to operate with one hand).

Watch this video on YouTube.

Some random points from our visit to London last month.

• Taking the cheap train from Gatwick to London makes a whole lot a stops and is probably not worth the trouble
• If you are at all claustrophobic and get cold shivers from the elevator scenes in Speed, you certainly want to avoid the Covent Garden tube station at all costs. Only way out are crowded elevators or 193 steps.
• If you’re German by nature and get to Buckingham Palace 90 minutes before the Changing of the Guard, the friendly bobbies will make sure no late-coming tourists will cut in front of you.
• The employment profile of the hospitality industry in London is dominated by Eastern Europeans. Pub food is, however, tastier and less expensive than we had been led to believe.

• Rob Roy is a Scottish pub near Paddington where you can be served haggis, if your pipe-learning son is so inclined and you can wait for the cook to come in for the evening shift.
• People in London are colorful in every sense of the word. Quite refreshing.

• The streets and train stations are impeccably clean, even by German standards.
• The tube stations seem to have been planned to ensure the longest possible walk when changing lines.
• Greenwich is a bit out of the way but a nice quiet base to stay. The DLR gets you to central London in 20 minutes, and Sainsbury’s Local will meet all your basic food and drink needs. Plus you can head to the Royal Observatory and stand on the Prime Meridian.
• The Tower of London lives up to the hype. The Making of Harry Potter studio tour is expensive, but worth it if you’re into Harry Potter.
• EasyJet is a cheap airline in every sense of the word.
• We’ll be back.

I was somewhat stunned to read that today is the 25th anniversary of the Minnesota Twins winning the 1987 World Series. Given that I am now 50, that is half my life ago. And while a sports event certainly didn’t play a direct role in our lives, it marked a milestone. 1987 was an important year for us that eventually brought us to Germany.

For one thing, we actually saw a lot a Twins games that year. We lived in south Minneapolis, we could easily bike to the Metrodome, and the bleacher seats in center field cost just $3. And they were the best seats in the house, since we were right behind the center fielder Kirby Puckett, and could see him make his spectacular catches. We watched at least a dozen games live, maybe even 20, but did not attend any playoff or World Series games.

For me, that fall of 1987 was the beginning of my PhD program at the University of Minnesota. But I was beginning to have my doubts as to whether I was cut out for an academic career, and the choices involved to get academic funding. As an Agricultural Economist, let’s just say the locations for research are not among the metropolises of the world (Davis, Iowa City, Norman, College Station, etc.). So it was really the beginning of the end, and 6 months later I dropped out.

As for my wife, in the fall of 1987 her first boss was in the process of selling his McDonald’s franchise in Minneapolis to move to Arizona. Her superior and many of her colleagues would move to Arizona too, and after a year of sticking it out with the new franchisee, we ended up moving to Arizona as well. We weren’t able to find a place with her old boss in Arizona, but made the connections that brought us to Germany in 1990.

So October 1987 was a turning point in our lives, and it just happened that the Twins won the World Series that month. Was it really 25 years ago?

Despite my attempt to start a travel blog a couple of months ago, we don’t actually get out and about that much. Owning a business and having a school-aged child just cramps our style somehow. So it’s somewhat unusual that this month, we have not just one, but two (count ‘em. two!) foreign trips planned.

The first is this week and actually a business trip. We all (we’re taking number one son out of school for 3 days) fly to Antalya, Turkey, for the annual fall franchisee meeting at some luxury hotel built for Russian oligarchs. It will be warmer than home, though, and we are extending our stay by a night so we have all day Saturday to ourselves before flying back just in time for school and work on Monday.

The second half of October our son as fall break from school, and I’ll be cashing in my birthday present from my family, a 5 night trip to London. Of course, “birthday present” means 1) the entire family comes along, and 2) they only come up with the idea and I get to do all the planning myself. Despite having lived in Europe for over 20 years, we’ve never been to London so it will be all new to us. All I know about London is that it’s wonderful and expensive, so we’ll be staying in Greenwich and be taking the train a lot to see the sights.

After that we’ll be all travelled out for while.

Hennepin County Government Center – The Scene of the Crime

Twenty-nine years ago today was the Tuesday after Labor Day when, as Bruce Springsteen put it, “the judge put it all to rest”.

These days we can only joke about how long it has been. We can still quote the English German (whatever) TV classic “Dinner for One” to one another: “You look younger than ever, love! Younger than ever!” Of course, the line may wear out someday. If someday this blog ceases to be updated and you hear about a particularly gory family drama* from northern Germany, you’ll know I tried the line once too often.

*Family drama (Familiendrama) is one of those phrases that in German means something completely different than in English. For us it might mean a TV show suitable to watch with your kids, or perhaps the “discussion” that ensues when a teenaged daughter tells her parents that she is pregnant. In German it refers to a murder (often a murder/suicide) within a family.