I'm brewing a political rant and a product review for later in the day. Meanwhile, I'll just note a few random thoughts.
Rowers don't really like it when you yell, "Stroke...stroke...stroke" at them. If you're a large bunch of ROTC types about to start on a training run, complete with BDUs and backpacks, the rower in question is likely to be tempted to yell back, "What are you, practicing before you go off and torture some prisoners?" At least, if the rower is me. Fortunately I managed to restrain myself, as that didn't seem either prudent, safe or fair to them. I'd like to believe our military is not all tarred with the same brush.
Exercise-induced brain cell attition continues. Yesterday I manage to tell a coworker about it twice, convincing myself in the course of the second telling that I had forgotten to list the conference room for a meeting I'd called. I hadn't.) Meanwhile, the resources diverted from the brain are going to my muscles. My shoulders and arms are noticeably -- to me -- bigger and I think my abs are too. Unfortunately, the surface fat is still there, so they're not more defined or better-looking, just bigger. All this means is that armholes are tighter and when I row my arms rub against my sides, which gets old after a thousand strokes. Maybe the next thing is that the muscle will burn more calories and so I'll start to burn fat and show some definition. That's what they claim is supposed to happen, anyway.
I get a couple of long weekends in a row at the end of this month, because first we have the regatta, for which I had to take Monday off to drive home, and then it's Memorial Day. I get three weeks of vacation (two is standard in the US) as well as 11 holidays, but it's still not nearly enough. Five would be better, but I wouldn't want to pay European tax rates to get it. Some time, though, I really should do that math: add in my health insurance costs to my taxes and figure out the effective percentage. I do have decent insurance through my company, so even with reacent years' raises, I suspect it's still lower than in most of the countries with socialized medicine.
That's an interesting point, by the way. I keep hearing horror stories about health care or lack thereof in the US, and I'm not denigrating those stories, but I've always had good insurance through work. So has Rudder, and granted that we're college-educated engineers and all that, but then so have my parents, generally through Mom's job as an admin. In fact, even when I was in college I stayed on my parents' insurance because I was in the same city and theirs was cheaper than Student Health. So there are a lot of us for whom the system works -- but even for us, costs have gone up quite a lot in the last few years, and I've never been a believer in the "I've Got Mine" school of poltical thought.
Posted by dichroic at May 5, 2004 11:02 AM