Thursday 01/20/2022
Did my resistance exercises about 8am, and my have overdid them. I raised the resistance on several, small changes, like from 220 to 230 on the leg press, 45 to 50 on something else, etc. Have I mentioned these are air-pressure devices, where you operate +/- buttons to feed pressurized air into the cylinder that resists your motion? I was trying to find the resistance level for each, that makes it difficult to finish 20 reps. Now, thing is, I’m taking a fairly high dose of a beta-blocker, intended to keep blood pressure down, but it also has the effect of putting a cap on my heart rate. So the signal that I’m overdoing things, which would ordinarily be my heart rate going over 150, doesn’t happen. I just find myself suddenly tired and have to stop and rest for a minute or two.
So after this session I walked up from the basement to the ground floor to pick up a pastry, and then, heading to the elevator, I got a wave of dizziness, similar to vertigo but not quite the same. I made my way carefully to my room and had a nice lie-down on the bed and soon felt OK again. Only after reclining for 10 minutes did it occur to me to take my BP, and it was 117, not a record, but unusually low for me. Chances are it was lower still before that, and would account for the vertigo — but that’s speculation.
I felt normal the rest of the day, so this wasn’t a case of the aortic valve starting to collapse or anything serious, but probably just over-exertion.
Something I could do with minimal exertion was a long-delayed chore: I got out the script for my CHM Docent talk, which I had last edited in … 2017. And read it aloud, timing it. Yeah, it hasn’t got any shorter and still runs over an hour. Well, what would I expect? Anyway, got to go over it at least once more and I’ll be ready to docent again. The Museum currently plans to reopen the 2nd week of February.
Afternoon, I took the car out, first to get beer, then to get it washed. The car, not the beer. My fave beer, Rogue Brewery Dead Guy Ale, has very spotty distribution. Rogue has a “beer finder” map, you put in your zip code and they show you the retailers nearby, to which their products have been delivered lately. And it’s like their distributors are playing a game, or randomizing for fun. Six months ago, I found Dead Guy at BevMo in Menlo Park. Next time it was not at BevMo, but at a grocery store on Alma in Palo Alto. This time it wasn’t at either of those places, but at Whole Foods in Mountain View. That’s where I went, and found one six-pack in the “craft beers” chiller. Well, that’ll do me for a couple weeks, maybe more. Then I’ll find it somewhere else.
Back up to Palo Alto to have the car washed. Surprising how dirty a car can get when it spends 90% of its time in a garage. Lozano’s car wash, which I patronized since the 1980s, has closed. But Ducky’s car wash is closer and does a good job.
Codgerville 