The Gym

The Boy and I have been going to the gym for the past month, early in the morning and every other day. In that time I have gained and lost 4 pounds three times. That's twelve pounds people! What is the deal!

I got an A in the first Spanish class!

My dislike of the setup of the cardio equipment at the gym as it relates to my fear of yoga in high school.

A few weeks ago, I promised some posts on a few things. One being the title of this blog.

First a little history. For two months a year in high school, one of our gym units was yoga. We would go to our locker rooms and the boys would go to theirs. No matter how fast we girls tried to change we could never get out of the locker room before the boys. Which meant they crowed the back of the area in front of the TV. (Yeah, we watched yoga on the TV, neither of our old men gym teachers could do yoga.) We girls would come out and be forced to be in front of them. The yoga video would start and the boys would half-ass their way through the video and snicker at our bodies while we half-assed our way through. Because multiple gym classes were happening in the gym at the same time and our class was watching a movie, the teacher didn't spend much time watching our class...which meant the boys had ample time for snickering and staring. Really frustrating. But the boys were smart...they were never obvious enough for us to tell the teachers what was going on.

The Boy and I have started going to the gym every other morning during the week. (After about a month of this, I lost four pounds, slowly gained them back and then lost four pounds again...buh?) This is our third attempt in a year to make a real routine of going to the gym and sticking to it. I think what's making it work this time is that we are going early in the morning, before work and school. That way we can't come home tired and decide we don't want to go. I used to run on the treadmill but my overweightness and the shinsplints I've had since I was a kid made the treadmill unbearable for doing anything harder than walking on an steep incline. I have moved to the ellipitcal machines and have found a routine I like.

The cardio area that we exercise in has three long aisles. Up against the huge pane glass windows sit the treadmills. (This is where The Boy works out and where I used to work out which is why I haven't disliked the set up until now.) On the wall just above the pane glass windows there are six big TVs tuned to different channels. The treadmills have their own TVs attached to the machines but they can also watch the big TVs. There is an aisle walkway and then there is a line of ellipitcal machines and stair machines. These don't have tvs attached to them, but there is a little converter you can plug you headphones into to hear what is going on the six big TVs. (I just listen to WAMC, my public radio station back in MA, and watch the subtitles on the tvs if I'm intersted in what's on the screen.) After another aisle there is a line of bike machines, the ones you sit back in, not the spinning bikes and a rowing machine.

The other morning, looking and feeling sweaty and gross after a half an hour on the ellipical, I stepped off being careful to keep my balance. (Getting off is like sking for a whole day and then trying to walk in your regular shoes.) Upon getting off I noticed two men on the bikes staring at me and the region just below my waist. Once I turned all the way around, their eyes settled on the upper middle part of my body. I felt like I was fourteen again in gym class.

After getting over the embarressment, I started to get steamed up. Why the hell are the bikes (where you sitting the lowest, closest to the ground) in the back?! If the bikes were up front, the people on them could see the big TVs even better because they sit further back. There are chairs with backs on them so no one could stare at their backside region. The ellipitcal machines can stay in the middle, they can still see the big TVs and can see out through the pane glass windows better because the bikes are lower and don't have tvs attached to the equipment. The treadmill line should be last because their view forward is a bit skewed by the TVs attached to their equipment and so would be less able to stare at other peoples' lower regions. They have the tallest machines and therefore would make more sense in the back anyway.

I would bet a large amount of money that a man put this set up together. Not necessarily because this particular set up makes it easy for men to stare at girls (that was probably subconsious) but because the set up makes absolutely no sense. After I explained to The Boy why I was so steamed all he could say was that if he was working out behind me, he would be staring at my lower region as well. He was not at all sympathetic to my cause, but he encouraged me to go talk to someone in charge if it really upset me.

Now I'm not much of a complainer, though I'm more likely to speak up now then when I was a freshman in high school, but I'm a little nervous they wouldn't take my complaint seriously and that they are going to think I'm some sort of crazy feminist. (I don't consider myself a feminist but that's a topic for another post.) The more I think about it, the more the set up is ridiculous.

Oh and Palin? I never liked you but still. WTF? I'm so confused.

My Boyfriend is Awesome!

The Boy just bought me a fantastic sushi dinner. This after being turned away from the Manny Ramirez game here near La Pasa (we were going to heckle) because we had tickets for the wrong day...tomorrow. Dinner was complete with large sake and complimentary dessert (because we go there all the time and the waitresses love us!) and since it was raining, he gave me the keys the house and walked to the co-op to buy me my favorite orange dark fairly traded and organic chocolate bar! That my friends...is love.

I got my first B in Espanol. We had to write a short composition about our families and I wrote a great one, except that I didn't type it. So far everything we have turned in can be handwritten, so it never dawned on me that I had to type it. (And so I lost ten points...TEN POINTS...that seems a little excessive to me.) I guess it was written somewhere in the syllabus that it needed to be typed. I ended up with an 88. *sad face* I felt completely tonto!

Today was the first day that it was hard to get up for the gym. After two weeks, I say that's not bad at all. The bed was so warm and comfy...the news was on...I was the perfect temperature. It was REALLY hard to get up. But I did. Worked out. 30 minutes in the zone, gained a half a pound. I'm only one pound away from being where I started. LAME.

La Prueba Segundo

Second Spanish Test: 96

Gym:
In the zone: 28 minutes
Pounds gained: 1/2

La Prueba segundo!

Second Spanish test: I did not do as well as I did on the first. I didn't to badly. But I doubt I'll receive an A.

This morning at the gym:
In the "zone": 28 minutes
Pounds gained: 2

First Day of School! First Day of School!

*Said just like Nemo!*

I had so much fun today. I love being a student, it's so much more fun than being the teacher.

The Boy had a symposium starting today at the same time my class started (which means we get to ride to campus together every day this week!)

Actually, I have to start over. I need to preface this post be stating that I, Ms. Knitter, do not do directions well. Sometimes, even after going a place a few times I still have a hard time. (For instance, my mother still has to draw me a map so that I can get to the dentist's office back home.) This has been well documented by both The Boy and my family. In fact, the first conversation The Boy and my dad had (for which I was 2000 miles away, another great story) involved my dad saying that one of the reasons he was "reluctant" for Mum and I to drive to New Mexico was "Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but that girl doesn't have much sense of direction." The Boy said, "Yeah, I might have noticed that." The understatement of the year.

The UNM campus doesn't make this particular trait of mine any easier to deal with. All the buildings look the same. Same pueblo style outside, same height for the most part, same brown wooden accents, etc. On top of all that, for the most part, you can't see outside of campus from the inside of campus, which doesn't make much sense. What I mean is that I can't tell which way is North, South, East and West. (Which took me about eight months to get a handle on anyway.) All of this is really to say that I was really glad that The Boy could ride to campus with me because that meant that I had a dinaymite (is that really the correct spelling for that word...spell check seems to think so) escort to the first class and I wouldn't be late because I ended up getting lost.

According to my schedule my class started at nine. Being a true northeasterner, I was there promptly at 8:45. The Boy got me to my class and we peeked in. There was only one other person, a girl, sitting inside. The Boy looked at me and smirked, "Only you and another Non-Trad (non-traditional) would get here early." Then he smiled, walked away and I was on my own. I walked in, eyes searching for what I thought would be the only left hand little chair-desk in the world (my college had one...for the whole school...in the science building) However, I found a plethera of them in this classroom. (To which The Boy replied later; "That's because UNM is ADA compliant." Stinker!) I picked one second row back right in front of the teacher's desk. (Yes, I'm a nerd, I asked a lot of questions too.)

I made friends with the girl inside and then with the boy that walked in after me, who informed the two of us that class didn't in fact start until 9:20. We had a good time laughing and joking with each other until more kids walked in and to continue talking and laugh just seemed odd. So everything got quiet until the teacher walked in and began. I was relieved the moment I heard him hablando espanol porque a veces it's hard for me to understand people I don't know very well. I enjoyed class and by the end had homework, a lab to go at 1:00 and a placement test to take. So I ran home for lunch because after gym early in the morning, the bike ride, the brain work and the forgotten apple, I was hombre!

Ran home for a quick lunch and reading of the blogs I follow (eeeeala...def. a nerd) and then back to school. To a building that could have been located in Munich for all I knew. I had gotten spotty directions from fellow classmates and was just hoping to wing it. HA. There was no winging. Actually, there was parking the bike way farther away then need be, walking around campus in circles trying to get my bearings and then going to the two places that I knew for a point of reference and starting over. Finally found the place.

Only my friend from class and one other person showed up for the lab session. I took the placement test afterwards. I scored at a 301, which for my other Bennington friends means that technically I should really be taking Espanol Tres. That is so totally not true. (Which is exactly what I said to the proctor btw.) My reading skills are really high, because I spend a lot of time reading it at school. However, this does not mean that I can speak and write it as well as I can read it.

Came home, sat down with my homework right away. I'm so into this. I can't wait to be fluent.

Still love going to the gym in the mornings.

Moonlighting!

Today and tomorrow, I'm giving presentations on Standards Based Checklists for a lady I love working with. I'll call it Moonlight Consulting because hey, that's what I'm doing, moonlighting!

I've done some longer presentations for her before, some in state, some out of state, but these two are only about the one topic and will last two hours each. I really look forward to these opportunities because it reminds me that teachers are versatile and I don't HAVE to be in the classroom for the rest of my life if I don't want to be.

Today I'm speaking at a BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) school. It's always interesting going there because the cultural education those students receive is more intense than the one that the students at ADLR receive. Which in turn is completely different from the what I received in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. I always feel a little nervous addressing these teachers because I'm so young and so anglo and so blonde and we're coming in and "helping" (though more often forcing because the principal has made a certain decision) them change the way they do things.

I remember the first long presentation I gave was in Arizona and it for a school that was completely changing their tracking (yes, tracking in an elementary school) and report card systems. I was on my own that day too. (Usually, the owner of the company is with me, which is the case for today and tomorrow.) The teachers didn't want the change, but the principal made the decision and now they were being forced to stay after school and learn this new way of doing things after using the same old (bad) system for years. I was so very nervous. I began by talking about the states that I personally knew of that were making these sorts of changes; Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. They looked at me skeptically, but when I said Vermont they perked right up and took me a little more seriously. That was such a nerve racking afternoon for me. But each one after has gotten a little easier.

Off to make some notes!

*Also, have discovered that I love going to the gym first thing in the morning.