Exercise thoughts

I'm trying some mindfulness/awareness-of-the-moment stuff, in the hope that it will help with anxiety and mood generally. I realized while doing one of my gym exercises that exercise seems to be my best focus-on-here-and-now thing: yes, I spend some time thinking about other things, but I'm also paying attention to the movements and the way my muscles feel, and the verbal part of the brain is often going …4, 5, 6, 7,… or "see if I can do another set of these" rather than thinking about plans for the rest of the day, or news, or such.

Also, I have been saying now and then that living in Bellevue and spending time here and in Seattle, without a car, is an exercise program in itself. Not a complete one, and I'm not trying to use it as such, but some amount of cardio and leg exercise. I think this is true; at the same time, it may be either an excuse for not doing as much other exercise as I believe I should, or a form of "I don't mind all these hills, they're good for me." Mostly I don't mind them, but some of the steeper bits of downtown Seattle are still no fun, especially when I'm tired. (Fortunately, if I'm tired I'm probably going uphill: up is just strenuous, down is more likely to be dangerous if I slip, at the level where it's a steep sidewalk or staircase rather than actual mountaineering.)

( This morning's exercise numbers, cut as usual )

A brief reading post

I actually finished a couple of books in the last week (rather than short stories, blog posts, news articles, all of which I can read without getting up to stretch or have tea or play with the cat and thus getting distracted].

So:

Recently read:

The Story of Ain't, by David Skinner, is actually the story of Merriam-Webster's Third International Dictionary. I'm not sure of whether Skinner doesn't weave that together with the other twentieth century intellectual history as well as he thought, or if this suffered badly from being read a (short) chapter or two at a time over several weeks. There's probably too much on one of that dictionary's main detractors, the intellectual and political essayist Dwight Macdonald, and his changing positions over time, for this book, and not enough to serve as a bio of Macdonald in case the reader wanted one. This might be worth reading if you're interested in dictionaries as a cultural artifact (as distinct from enjoying browsing in them or following cross-references; it won't tell you much if anything about that much-maligned contraction ain't except that a lot of people condemn it, which is unlikely to surprise any possible reader.

Digger volume 1, by Ursula Vernon: the title character is a talking/sentient wombat (her people have thousands of words for different kinds of rock), who finds herself a long way from home, having adventures (in the sense Bilbo Baggins would use the term). adrian_turtle recommended this one, and cattitude and I both liked it, and are looking forward to reading more.

[What I am reading now is two books I am in the first chapter of each, and a kindle book that I don't know when I'll next pick up, having spent half an hour in a doctor's waiting room with the sudoku app on my phone instead.]