Star Trac Elite CrossTrainer

My favorite machines at the gym are the new Star Trac elliptical machines. I was skeptical at first because I liked the old ones just fine, but I'm finding I like the new ones better. The only thing I like better about the old Lifefitness ones are the sensors that measure your heart rate are right on the poles where your hands are all of the time anyway. The new Star Trac machines just have them on the handles you grab onto if you let go of the poles. The drawback is you can only know your heart rate whenever you grab the handles with the sensors. It's not a big deal I guess and I'm getting used to just checking my heart rate off and on, but I still like to see it the whole time I'm working out. One of the better things about the Star Trac machines is the fan they have. It's just a small fan that sticks off the very top of the display and even though it doesn't exactly blow you away I think it's still a great thing to have.

Until I read it at the Star Trac website tonight I didn't know what SPM meant on the display. It's fairly obvious once you're on this machine it has something to do with how fast you're going but I was never been able to figure what it stood for. The Lifefitness ones have RPM on their display, but these Star Trac ones have SPM in its' place. Whatever SPM was I knew I was doing about 130 to 140 of them at the top end. It turns out it means strides per minute. That makes sense because I'm doing about double the number of them as I was RPM on the other machine.

My least favorite machines at the gym are the Cybex Total Body Arc Trainers. They look like this... I only was on one of these evil machines once but I'm nearly certain I will not be giving one a second chance. I spent maybe 20 minutes on it and everything seemed OK until I got off of it. I wondered as I was on it if I should be because I thought the motion might be hard on my knees. When I got off I found out I was right. The pain didn't last long but why would I put myself though it at all when there are fitness machines there that aren't so hard on my knees?

For the time being and until it gets warm enough outside to that point where I can ride my bike again, the Star Trac Elite CrossTrainer is my machine of choice. I'm going to continue to use one several times a week for a half hour to 45 minutes at a time while I listen to headphones and watch TVs with the closed captioning turned on. The headphones are to partly to drown out the crap music they play on the speakers in the fitness room.....but maybe that's another post for another day.

Jimi Hendrix

I just heard some Jimi Hendrix on a radio show I downloaded. I haven't listened to any of my Hendrix CD's in a while and I'd forgotten how friggin amazing that music is. These are a few of my all time favorite Hendrix tracks in no particular order:

Machine Gun - from Jimi Hendrix: Live at the Fillmore East
If 6 was 9 - from Axis: Bold as Love
Fire - from Are you Experienced?
Third Stone from the Sun - from Are you Experienced?
Crosstown Traffic - from Electric Ladyland
Born Under a Bad Sign - from Blues
Voodoo Chile Blues - from Blues

Hair is overrated

That picture on the right in my header that looks like a negative is me. I took that picture of myself not long after I first trimmed off all of my hair. Or maybe I should say remaining hair. I can't remember exactly when my hair first started to thin out but once I hit maybe 30 it was increasingly obvious that I was eventually going to loose a lot more than I had at first thought. I didn't really mind when my hair started to thin out some, but the problem was it just didn't stop thinning. I got to a point that I wouldn't call "bald" but you could definitely see more of my head through my hair than I liked and I decided something had to change. I decided to just buzz it all off and I did that in May last year. For a while I used a trimmer that I got at Target on the shortest setting it would go to. I had to do that about twice a week to keep it short. For a while now about once a week I've just been shaving my head completely. I'd have to say I don't miss having hair at all. I wish I had cut it all off much earlier. Hair is completely overrated. Even if I could grow back every hair I once had I'm not sure I would want to. I never did spend inordinate amounts of time on my hair but now that I only take 10 or 15 minutes a week shaving my head I think it's been a real time saver. It's very low maintenance. I don't need to keep track of a brush or a comb and I don't need to spend money on hair care products or haircuts. My mother may disagree, but I think my decision to start shaving my head was one of the best decisions I made in 2005.

Tuna Casserole

I made myself a tuna casserole last week. It was the first time I made it in a long time. I wasn't sure why at first but my shelf was real stocked up on the ingredients for it. Then I remembered that the last time I made it was last September when I got sick. I had a big plate of it and that same night I ended up puking everything around 3:00 in the morning. At first I thought it was something I ate (which of course would've been my tuna casserole). I didn't find out until later the next day that my dad and my grandma were also sick and my sister and brother-in-law had also been sick. Apparently my niece brought something home from daycare and spread it around. Even though it turned out that my casserole had nothing to do with being sick in the first place it's taken roughly 4 months for me to get past that association between tuna casserole and being sick. I hardly ever get sick enough to puke. Up until that night I probably hadn't puked for something like 15 years. At first I wasn't even sure how to go about doing it. I was pretty sure it was going to happen but how was I going to know when and how to do it? When the time came and I knew something was definitely going to happen it was real easy. It turns out you don't really have to do anything. Puking is more like something that happens to you. As I was heading for the bathroom I could feel myself beginning to salivate. I don't know why that happens but it does to me anyway. I'd say it was pretty violent and my stomach twisted and churned until I thought there could be nothing left in it. I felt much better when it was all over. I ended up taking 2 days off from work and 4 months away from tuna casserole. I'm glad I can eat it again because I like tuna.

Slow Speed Internet

For some mysterious reason my internet connection slowed to dial-up speed from last Wednesday to Wednesday the week before. It doesn't take a broadband connection to blog, but without it I just didn't feel like doing anything I normally do routinely on the web including posting here. I don't know how I used to handle doing things on the internet at such slow speeds. I've grown accustomed to high speed and I just don't have the patience for slowly downloading webpages any longer. Not surprisingly during this period of time I got a lot done around the house that I wouldn't have otherwise. For one my desk is clear enough that you can see most of the top of it and my file pile is nearly finished. I think I'm going put "broadband internet access" on my brand new list of things that I can't live without. I just started this list and that is the first thing on it. I suppose I could live without it, but I was pretty bummed out for the entire week without it. "Things I'd strongly prefer not to live without" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Electric Mayhem

When I originally created this blog I tossed around a few ideas for it's title. I eventually settled on "Electric Mayhem" or "Jim's Electric Mayhem" as it is in my address. It's not completely original I realize but it was much better than my other ideas. It came to me one day while I was watching television. I don't recall what made me think of it at the time, but as I sometimes do I wrote down my thought for further consideration at a later point in time. I realized later that I wrote it down because it was the name of the band on the Muppets. I thought it would be a better name for my blog than the one I had started with. And it makes sense considering my intentions for this blog are to have no specific intentions at all. I'm just going to write about whatever I feel like and most of it won't likely be connected in any way. It won't always center around politics, current life events, my thoughts on a CD or concert, my restaurant experiences or anything in particular at all. And so it will be mayhem.....electric mayhem.

63 BPM

I spent New Years Eve high on sugar. I was at my Aunt's place for our Christmas celebration and I had numerous Christmas cookies and some kind of chocolate pie with booze in it. During the course of the 4 hours while I was there I had 2 Point Root Beers which were probably also loaded with sugar. I left my Aunt's place around 4:00 for my annual New Years celebration at Kevins. I ate more junk food there including a homemade doughnut that was covered in sugar. I was also drinking the Mountain Dew that I brought along for the occasion. After all of the festivities when I was going to sleep on the couch I could feel that my pulse was high so I counted it for a full minute. I counted 63 beats. I normally range from the middle 40's to the low 50's. Sometimes during the day it can get as high as the mid 50's but I can't remember the last time it was higher than the 50's that didn't involve physical activity.

I played a new game Kevin got for PS2 called Burnout 3. I thought the game was pretty cool. It's basically a racing game. There's a couple different kinds of races but they all involve a lot of destruction. Your supposed to try to wipe out your opponents rather than just beat them like in most racing games. If I can find that game used or something I'd buy it and I don't buy that many games.

After that we watched a DVD and then we played a game called "Catch Phrase". It's kind of like Taboo only without all the words you can't say. You divide into 2 teams and you try to get your team to say a word that the little gizmo gives you. If your team gets the word you pass it on to the other team. The gizmo has a timer and whenever it goes off the team holding it gives up a point. I noticed that the timer is random so it's not always the same amount of time for each go around. It only beeps faster and faster so you know when it's getting close. There were 8 of us altogether and we rang in the new year playing that. It was more fun playing that than I expected it to be.

After everyone left or went off to bed Kevin and I watched some of the UFC: Best of 2005 show on Spike TV. They had the Liddell vs Horn fight which wasn't on TV before except for the original pay-per-view. I watched that until it was over about 2:30. Just a bit after that was when I counted my heart rate at 63.