Things I have learned

1) If you are lace-knitting in the dark, using burgundy yarn, while trying to read a chart, you’re going to have a bad time.

2) It takes thirty seconds to rip out half an hour of semi-distracted knitting.

3) If while knitting you were watching the animated “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” based on the Frank Miller comic, you will be shocked by how much it is a product of the 1980s. Especially if you lived through the 1980s and read it the first time then. So many of the themes are reflections of the questions we as a society were asking right then.

4) If you want to jog and are given three warm December days in a row by God, and you know your heart rate leaps up in jaw-dropping fashion when you try to jog, you can take comfort in realizing that Jarvis will call home if you do something stupid to yourself.

5) You will look like a dork if you shove a heart rate monitor down the front of your shirt, but it’s the best place to keep it while jogging.

6) I was stressing about the time-intervals of the Couch To 5K program (yay week one! even though I’ve been biking up to 25 miles a week for the last year, I’m still starting on Week One because I’m a wimp) until I realized I didn’t have to time sixty seconds of jogging and ninety seconds of walking. Because they’re about the same distance — so I just picked two landmarks and walked uphill, then jogged downhill.

7) This looks like an elaborate form of pacing. My neighbors now know I’m nuts.

8 )The neighbor dog does not like this either. The mean-looking neighbor dog who frequently wanders the whole neighborhood looking mean.

9 ) Fortunately, there are other landmarks on my block.

10) The muscles used in biking are not the same muscles used in jogging.

11) Ouch.

12) To the folks who bought my books last week when they were on discount — thank you, and I hope you enjoy them!