My birthday today

I turn 45 today. A rather alarming number, when you consider that I'm in the early stages of perimenopause, but we won't think about that. Instead, we'll think about how I'm entering my prime as a woman and a natural leader. Alpha females age well. (Still waiting for my followers to show up, but they will.)

My birthday is always a good day to sum up the past year and look forward to the next, checklist in hand.

Dear Santa: All I want for Christmas

1. A minimum wage high enough to support a single person who doesn't have family or roommates to pool resources with. What we have now ain't gonna do it. And yes, all this money will go straight back into the economy, into food, shelter, entertainment, and other stuff, much of which is in industries that hires people at minimum wage. So some of it will find its way back into employers' coffers again.

Heart rate monitor, day 1

The goal
Regular relaxed walk-about-town: pulse no higher than 90.
Serious workout: pulse no higher than 120.

The reality
I need help. (I'm laughing at myself, here.)

In search of the zone

I overexercise. I do it a lot. And I'm tired all the time. Funny how those two things always seem to go together, in some order or other.

So today I sprang for a heart rate monitor - the kind with the chest band that will drive me nuts in no time, as opposed to the one I could never wear in the first place. (I spent more for the more comfortable one, and am test driving it now. Gotta see how much this chocolate bar I picked up on the way home will make my heart rate spike.)

Using a man's name to get ahead in a man's world

There's a brouhaha in the blogosphere lately about a woman (who prefers to keep her real name private) who blogs and works online as a writer using a man's name. "James Chartrand" says she switched to using a man's name because she found that she earned much more money and respect for the same amount of work when all she did was use a different name, something that does not surprise me at all. She blogs at Men with Pens, a site that to me looks ridiculously overmasculinized, but if that's what you have to do to be taken seriously, no wonder I have problems earning a living.

Anemone's theory of the three + levels of parkour

I started parkour a little less than four weeks ago, and I have had quite a hard time figuring out how to get started. I checked out girlparkour.com, especially their introductory videos, and that helped, until I tried to actually do those exercises. Not as easy as it looks. And, my goodness, my hips are stiff! Also, going to the weekly meets here in Vancouver, I have discovered that even when I can do something, I may be too tired to do it again the next week.

This is not good.

It is my policy to work or exercise in "flow" as much as possible. Remember the stress curve? How do I do this when for me it seems like almost all parkour is outside the curve, on the too-hard side?

More Dollhouse headdesking

I am not a Joss Whedon fan, any more than I am an M. Night Shyamalan fan. I was impressed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I liked Serenity, but I am not an automatic fan of Joss Whedon's work, any more than I like all of Shyamalan's films just because I liked The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. (They went downhill after that.) And Shyamalan, dark skinned by Indian standards, has a problem with whitewashing both his own and other people's work (making the good guys all white even though he's brown).