I must be losing weight: I look even more like my sister than usual.

Reading: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood; also Ghosts of Everest

Moving: walked 2.7 miles and did a full circuit of weights

Watching: magpies feeding their mates; the gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous day; banks of red tulips nodding in the breeze; Blake preening

Listening: Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

8 May 2001: Muskle

Jumping jehosaphat, I nearly just saved an email of Jessie's over seven years worth of compressed journal entries. Yoikes.

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It's spring! Over a week ago it was already summer, Denver having skipped, Denver-wise, straight from cold to hot. Since the rain stopped, though, it's been spring. Saturday as I left for the movie, watery sunlight managed to filter through clouds; and Sunday dawned sunny. The fact that it rained again in the evening is moot: that's summer, and allowed. The three days since have been lovely: mostly sunny but cool enough that you don't broil in the sun. Having as much sun as Denver gets is nice to look at, but I don't have the right blood to be active in it. I'm from Hibernian and Teutonic stock and, reptile-ish, cannot be too active in the heat of the sun. Which is considerable; Denver is so dry that the air doesn't hold heat, so a passing cloud gives true relief.

Anyway, it's spring. The rain's made everything relatively lush; the grass has sprung up and all the leaves are out. I didn't walk yesterday (I didn't last Monday either, which is why I'm glad the Sopranos are over in two weeks and I'll get to bed before 11) but did today, for the first time in a week. I had wondered if lilacs don't smell as strong here either because it's so dry or because, in the aridity, only less-fragrant varieties manage. I still don't know about the second supposition but my first seems to hold; the blooms seem to be emitting more perfume. I love lilacs. The tree I love--also because of its scent--is fully leafed as well. It must be a native or apt variety, since it has the sense to wait a little longer than the maples and other non-natives to bud. Now I can take a branch to the Botanic Garden to be identified, and then, somehow, somewhere, I'm going to find a sapling at a nursery and plant it and call it Treebeard or something.

There are at least four magpie nests on my walk to work, and I saw activity in two. In the second, I watched as one arrived with food for I think the other parent, not babies yet. If the babies had hatched I assume I would have heard, that both parents would be scavenging, or that, were one babysitting, its tail wouldn't be still but would be moving along with the rest of it as it fussed over its chicks. Bird babies are so demanding, I state with authority based on my one, whom we adopted at two months, weaned, but in whom we certainly rewarded cute, infantile behavior. I can't wait for the babies to fly, so they can come to my yard and eat cherries.

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I love my Total Gym (that's the 1000 model; we have a 1500). It's so fun! It's groovy. (This is, heaven help me, an adjective I've been using lately. A lot.) My butt hurts. I have definition in my arms even at rest.

Arm progess (I see a tricep!):

(That's not an arm at rest.)

So. Right now my circuit is approximately

• 2x15 leg pull (calves, hamstrings, lower and upper abdominals, hips, and thighs)
• 2x15 arm pullover (shoulders, upper back, triceps, upper abdominals, chest, and lats)
• 2x15 butterfly (front shoulders, chest, biceps)
• 2x15 seated rows (upper back, trapezius, biceps)
• 2x10 one-legged squats (quadriceps, buttocks, calves)
• 2x15 seated bench press (chest, shoulders, triceps, abdominals)
• 2x15 seated curls (biceps, forearms, shoulders)
• 2x10 triceps extension (triceps, forearms)
• maybe ten hip and thigh extensions (so few because this one requires you to support your immobile upper body on your hands flat on the floor, that is, on your bent wrists, and maybe my right ulna never recovered but I can't do that)
• 2x10 pull-ups, palms down for biceps
• 2x10 pull-ups, palms up for lats (laterals?)
• 2x10 front press (shoulders, triceps, chest)
• 2x15 pulley ab crunch (upper and lower abdominals)

and as many hamstring pulls, inner thigh pulls, and leg extensions as I can manage without ripping my bones apart, many more than 15 but after that I stop counting.

Of course if I did all this more than twice a week, or remembered at which angle (there are seven or eight degrees of elevation) I kept the apparatus for each, or actually did each of these every time, I might have better results.

Besides that my arm is just pasty white anyway, that photograph reminds me of Ghosts of Everest. The book documents the search for Mallory and Irvine, who attempted to summit Everest almost 30 years before Edmund Hilary summited and survived. Because the 1924 pair died, there's uncertainty as to whether they summited and died or just died. But there's a photograph of Mallory's body, which seemingly incredibly but actually perfectly reasonably went unnoticed by climbers for almost fifty years. He was freeze-dried, his body very well preserved. He looked, as the researchers said, like alabaster, like a statue.

The wind had scoured away much of his clothing, but his skin and musculature were nearly intact at the time of his eventual interment, by this research team in 1999. He lies face down, feet downslope, arms overhead, to me as if he tried to stop sliding downhill. Also one leg is broken. So perhaps he had fallen and was trying to climb back up to a feasible downhill route when he expired of exposure or shock.

I am taking a sick day off tomorrow to mollycoddle RDC, who is having something done that is, woe is me, not a vasectomy.