Keeping (sorta) Fit 11/17/22

Our exercise series this week starts with a comic about fitness watches in general. An Apple Watch, a FitBit, or the Google and Samsung equivalents. The idea about these damn, stupid, I mean watches are that they give you gentle reminders to get off your ass and start walking, weight lifting, counting calories, etc. It gets particularly annoying when you’re driving a car or flying in a plane, going to a theater for a show or a movie and the watch tells you, time to get up and move. A short 5-minute walk will get you closer to your “stand goal”. And what is a stand goal, pray tell? You have to stand for a certain amount of minutes each hour. Well, I can’t stand in a theater. What would the people behind me say (probably not much since I’m only 5’6”)? The thing is most healthy people look at a watch deliverring a message as only a minor annoyance. Not yours truly. I shout at it. “I’m driving damnit! Why don’t you earn another hour to your stand goal? I’m just trying to not get into a car accident, is that okay, you dumb watch?” After I broke my ankle this summer I put my Apple Watch in a drawer and never wore it again until I was healed. Everyday there were these messages: “You’re usually much further along by this time of the day.” And I’d look at my “move ring” and see it say that I’d achieved only 1 minute of exercise that day. I switched to my old normal watch, the kind that only tells time, instead. I remember John telling me about chopping down a dead tree in his yard to then chop into firewood. It’s hard, physical work, but halfway through the process he noticed he had forgotten to wear his watch. Hence, he got no credit (at least as far as the watch was concerned) for any physical activity, when in fact he had done a tremendous amount of aerobic and strength training, only he was chopping wood. I am prone to thinking like that myself. I once in a while forget to wear the damn thing and find myself on a 4-mile walk. But my watch thinks I’ve moved 3 steps that particular day. And yet, as soon as I recovered from the ankle and started hiking 2 then 3 then 4 miles a day, I went right back to my annoying digital watch. I wanted to get credit for my exercise. Finally, we ask the existential question of all fitness watches: If you chop a tree down in the forest and forget to record it on your watch, does it really count?

Our next effort was about a date. And our single character, Craig, was scoping out a potential new woman friend who seemed athletic, which he liked. But maybe she was a little too athletic as Craig realized she would kick his ass in the game of squash. Now this thought came from discussing a couple of my youthful experiences I shared with John. I once met a girl at a gym, and we made a date to play racquetball. I had to use every bit of my strength and speed to barely beat her. I don’t think she was very impressed, which is probably why she refused a second date (this time, just dinner with no athletic competition). Another antic occurred when I played a couple of seasons of co-ed softball in my late 50’s. I was standing on third base, attempting to run home when the batter hits a ball to the short fielder (in co-ed softball you usually play with 4 outfielders instead of the traditional 3) and teams usually put their weaker players at that position. Not this team and not this woman. The fly ball was hit, she retreated a few steps, and then started running in towards the ball. She caught it on the run and threw a perfect strike to home plate. If I had run from third, I would have been out by 20 feet. After the inning, I asked her if she played in college, and without missing a beat she said, Yep, starting center fielder at Notre Dame. Okay then. I played intramural sports. Does that count? John, however, was an honest to goodness varsity soccer player, so there. But I digress. As liberated as we like to think of ourselves, most guys don’t like losing to women, even if the woman is 10 times better than he is. There, I’ve said it, so shoot me. Whaddya want? I’m in my 60’!

Enjoy this beautiful, if cold, late fall weather and we’ll see you next week with two new ones.

Andy and John

Do's and Don'ts While Dining Out

Let’s face it, sports talk and dating and dining usually don’t mix. But don’t worry, because in our case they’re the subject of two completely unrelated comics. Let’s go with the genesis of the first comic (second in your scroll), about refraining from sports talk when you go out with company. A couple of months ago, my wife and I went out to dinner with another couple to a loud restaurant. In an effort to not make it boys sitting across from each other and girls sitting across from each other, I suggested mixing it up so the husband of one couple faced the wife of the other, and vice versa. This resulted in each couple talking across each other and since it was hard to hear in the first place, well… you get the idea. Epic fail, as the millennials would say. Put another way, my idea was a bad idea. At one point I was hogging the conversation, rambling on about politics, when my wife subtly smashed my foot under the table, to which I replied, “Oww, why’d you do that???” On recounting this tale to John, we reworked it so Al and Joanne made a pre-dinner deal that he wasn’t allowed to dominate the conversation with sports talk. Sports, politics, same idea. John came up with the idea of making a pre-dinner deal on the way to the restaurant. When I saw how well that worked out in the comic, I decided that it was a good idea to try at home from now on. I’ll let you know how that works.

Our other comic deals with a phenomenon that you see in fancy places. Older, distinguished-looking men with considerably younger women. I observed such a pair when going out to a special dinner in NYC with friends. Both of us guys were celebrating our birthdays. When we got seated, I noticed a banquette in front of me, with an older guy, replete with a three-piece suit, tie, pocket square, and cufflinks. If I’m calling him old, suffice it to say, he appeared as if his best days were behind him. Suddenly a cute young woman, in her late 20’s at most, slides into the banquette beside him. Hmm, I said, to my companions, check this out. We weren’t sure if he was in a second marriage and this was his daughter, or whether he was married only once and it was his granddaughter. Then she scoots over right next to him, puts her arm around his shoulder and starts whispering into and kissing his ear. And I, master of the obvious, said, that is not his granddaughter. The ending of the comic kinda wrote itself (John hates when I say things like this, because if it wrote itself, you wouldn’t need us). So it didn’t write itself but the situation was so perfect we didn’t have to do too much to alter the reality of it. My wife and my friend’s wife said Something like, “Ewww, gross,” and my friend and I readily agreed just how absolutely gross it was (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). Well, that’s it except for one final coda to the story. When we left the restaurant, the snuggling couple was still there, and my wife took a look at the young lady on our way out. When we got on the sidewalk, she told me, “By the way, she was not his girlfriend. Did you notice the huge rock on her finger? (No, I was looking elsewhere). She’s married to him.”

And with that, have a great weekend and a happy July.

Andy and John

Dating in the time of Corona 1/8/21

I was speaking to a friend of mine and asking about her son and his girlfriend. She said they were doing fine (always code for not so great) but that the girlfriend was complaining he never took her anywhere. They never went out, she hadn’t met his friends, etc. All they did was stay over at each other’s apartments and watch tv or movies and order take out. I secretly thought, “sounds pretty good to me,” and John thought it was perfect fodder for our bachelor character, Craig. We added in a few things he never did so it would seem more appropriate for a 60-something and our first comic was born. But it does speak to a deeper truth. Guys in general are happier doing less and women (again, in general) are more social and want to go out, introduce you to their friends, their family and can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want the same. Now I know, this is a sexist generalization but still…

As for me, I’d rather leave what I’m doing (whatever it is) and get back home. Of course, so I can write all you loving fans this blog, that’s the ONLY reason.

Onto the second comic which is spurred again by reality. John heard about somebody with one of these fancy schmancy home security systems which had been sitting in a box at home for a couple months. Now this system apparently has amazing capabilities. It monitors activities at your front door and sends them to your smartphone so you know what’s going on at home on those rare occasions when you actually do go out. The trouble was two-fold: 1) It looked complicated and this person was busy with a bunch of projects so the box just sat there. And 2) the user pays a monthly fee to the security company for the monitoring service, whether or not they’ve decided to take the damn thing out of the box. Fortunately, for this person, his daughter came to visit for Christmas and set it up for him so the problem was solved, but that doesn’t make for a very good comic. So, we came up with the “thrown the box at the robber “ ending which while not practical, would really hurt. Also, the fact that the person in question might be John would also hurt his ego, so we will never reveal whether or not this was based on his own experience. If you want to find out, you’ll have to read about it in the blog. Oh, wait a minute, this is the blog. Sorry, not telling.

Happy New Year and as Jackie Gleason would say: away we go (for 2021). See you next week.

Andy and John