Upper-Body Workout

I have friends who swear by Pilates, others who frequent Yoga salons, some who swear by going to the gym and still others who wouldn't miss their sessions with their personal trainers.

I'm a little more low-key in my exercise regimen, relying mostly on walking up and down the steep hills of our little town for an hour or so each morning, but while it's great cardio-pulmonary exercise and is slowly shrinking my derriere, it doesn't do much for the upper body, so I was delighted when East Bay Municipal Utility District came up with a new exercise to help their customers get in shape.

We have been catching the water that falls into our shower stall as the water heats and lugging it all over the house and garden to put to other uses. Our bucket is a five-gallon beauty from some big box hardware store. Because water weighs approximately 8 pounds per gallon, we are lifting about 30 pounds (we don't fill it to the top) each time we heft a bucket of water for the garden or the dishes. Isn't that great? Instead of pumping iron, we are pumping water. Who knew that EBMUD was so into the fitness craze? The bonus is that it saves water in this dry year, too. Isn't that handy?

Next time you see us, I will be ripped and My Beloved will be buffed - ready for the summer beachwear!

Swirling Incentive

Like many Americans, I am too sedentary for my own good. Mine was mainly an office job, I sat all the way to the city on the BART train and, although My Beloved and I have gone through periodic fits of getting up in the pre-dawn dark to punish ourselves before work by tramping up and down our hilly town streets, we quickly gave them up in favor of vigorous TV viewing.

One of my aims in retirement is to get daily exercise both to trim the caboose and to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine but it's a hard habit to start. Once I'm out there striding along, it feels good, and you'd think that alone was incentive enough but on some mornings, especially cold, foggy ones, the spirit is weak.

On those days, thankfully rare, I fall back on the incentive of morning buns. Morning buns, spirals of cinnamon in flaky pastry, are available at our local Starbucks, which is down a steep hill from our house. The coffee isn't great and the calories may negate most of the good the walking is doing, but the incentive of a latte and a morning bun is enough to get me out the door and tackling the hill to bring back a reward for having Just Done It.

There's a kind of rightness to the idea that the morning buns are helping to reduce my aging buns.