January 9: Exercise Is Tiring and Outside Is Broken

There's this thing you hear from exercise gurus: "if you exercise, you'll have more energy." I have literally never found this to be true. Whether I am riding a bike for thirty miles or doing an aerobics video for 10 minutes, the only way exercise has ever affected my energy levels is to make me more tired. And it's not like I feel more energetic on the days when I don't exercise if I've been exercising regularly. No, my energy levels are low when I don't regularly exercise, and lower when I do regularly exercise because I'm worn out from exercising.

It snowed last night, enough to accumulate a few inches. Snow continued to flurry about through much of the day, without much more accumulating on the ground. In mid-afternoon, I decided it was time for me to exercise, and if I was going to exercise anyway I might as well shovel the driveway. The snow had looked like a light, fluffy three-or-four inches from inside. When I went outside, it turned out to be a very dense two-or-three inches. So heavy. Usually I can sweep a few inches of snow off the porch steps with the broom, but today it barely budged. Had to use the shovel the whole time.

The road in front of our house hadn't been plowed and it had hardly even been driven on, which was especially surprising. I discovered why after I'd cleared a path to it. A tree blocked the street a hundred or so yards north of my house. The street beyond had been plowed, but the length of street from the downed tree to the intersection was untouched. Based on the tire tracks, a few cars had been by before the snow stopped accumulating and before the tree went down. But after the tree fell, cars either realized at the intersection and didn't turn, or backed out as soon as they spotted the downed tree. You could see recent tracks going just far enough up the slope to have a clear view of the tree, and then just. Stopping. And going back the way they came. "Nope. Nope nope nope."

Anyway, I shoveled the driveway anyway because exercise, and it's not gonna thaw any time soon. (Often I can wait out snow during the winter and it'll melt off within a few days. But the forecast shows no days above freezing for the next week).

Lyric is extremely disappointed in our failure to fix outside. She keeps going to one door or another and mewing to go out. If I open it, she goes outside and stares about in dismay while waiting for me to fix the cold and snow. After ten or fifteen minutes, she gives up and comes back inside. And then repeats the process an hour or two later, just in case we've fixed outside finally. Or maybe outside it only broken at the living room door and it's working if she goes out the kitchen door?

It is not working outside that door either, cat. Sorry.

Let's see. I have done other things in the last few days! Not very many other things. On Sunday, I got some exercise when Telnar called and I paced about the house. (I pace very quickly! My fitness app even registers it as exercise.) I spent an hour or so painting a miniature and made barely-perceptible progress on it. (This Shadow Seer is getting painted So Slowly; it's incredibly disheartening. And I have like eight more miniatures on the team to paint and assemble before I can actually play with them UGH.)  Took a nap, watched some more of The Bad Batch with Lut, did two illustrations for Apothecaria, and made imperceptible process on notes for the outline I'm supposed to be making this month. I also did a bunch of administrivia for my Time Princess society: figuring out who was underperforming and kicking someone who hadn't logged in for almost a week and advertising for a replacement and so forth.

Yesterday, Lut and I watched Top Gun: Maverick, after we finished a game of Kill Team. I have never seen the original Top Gun. It wasn't that I was avoiding it. But no one ever suggested watching it with me and I hardly ever care enough about movies or videos to watch them alone. Anyway, Maverick was pretty fun. Completely unbelievable in so many ways, but entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised by how much of the movie was devoted towards 'watching people train for the mission.' It's the sort of thing that's usually handled in a montage if not simply part of the backstory, and it was nice seeing it be more like the core of the story.

I got in one Apothecaria illustration before Kill Team and one after the movie. I also finished one of the side stories in Time Princess. I like the interactive-fiction part of the Time Princess main stories, but the side stories often have no choices and almost never have meaningful choices, which makes them generally much less interesting to me. So I never get through them very quickly. Also, some side stories are gated by time, so you read one stage and then have to wait 20 hours for the next stage to unlock. It's the least enjoyable way to read a story.

Today, I wrote a few Apothecaria entries because I have actually run out of Apothecaria entries to illustrate.

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That's fixed now, though, so I can illustrate them. Which I will go do now, since I've finished this post.