Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I don't know if I said on here, but when I moved back in 2020 I had the medium term goal of, once my moving costs were defrayed, joining a gym and paying for personal training in order to learn how to safely Do Weight Training. I do not think I am LIKELY to Become Swole, because I am starting from such a low baseline (and indeed worse now than it was in early 2020), but I would kind of like to Become Swole, honestly.

I had got as far as realising, in early March 2020, that the 24/7 gym chain I used in Geneva only serves Suisse Romande, and that the only chain which crosses the Rostigraben is the Migros gym - which didn't have a branch convenient to either the university or my house. So my hope of joining a chain, and travelling to a Francophone site for introductory instruction, tanked. And then COVID happened, tanking ALL my plans. And tanking my overall fitness.

(Sidebar: who know how much 'just walking around the office and stuff' was maintaining my fitness? Aside from minor exercise benefits, without wearing shoes and walking around corridors my feet have become IMPOSSIBLE. If I wear anything other than runners or my sketchers sandals outside I get excruciating foot cramps - and today, when I had been wearing NEW runners for a few days, then switched back to the old ones for the gym, taking the insole with me: foot cramps again! I can't wear my fabulous collection of Docs anymore. I have to take preventative naproxen to wear the heels that I wore all day five days a week in Japan.)

Now, double-vaxxed, and masked despite the fact that gyms are now exempt from the mask mandate (why, Switzerland, why), I have joined an Aggressively Feminine Gym. It is very pink. It is called, I kid you not, "Mrs Sporty". Turns out it's a German chain. I had an intake session with the franchise owner and she assured me they would preserve my 'weiblich' figure.

Me: das ist nicht wichtig für mich
Her: Wir sind ein FRAUENfitness!

Nevertheless, I have signed a year contract with them. Why? Because the women's gym, unlike either the cheap mixed gym or the Very Serious Gyms, offer extremely entry-level services as part of the package. What do men who don't know a barbell from a beardtrimmer do? What to men whose knees turn in and who cannot stand on one leg do, curl up and die in shame? The only men I've ever seen talking about starting from sub-zero with weight training were able to afford a one-on-one ongoing personal trainer.

Dealing with the gym owner gives me The Genders, but my plan was and is to let the very pink gym have their best shot at *finding* my feminine figure (I am increasingly shaped like Grimace), while I learn both the vocab and the entry-level skills. Seriously, my assigned trainer (more on her in a mo) had to give up and reach around and adjust my wrists (despite the no-contact COVID rules) holding the dumbell (a one-armed bicep curl to overhead press, if I understand Weights Internet correctly) because I just cannot interpret the visual guide correctly or follow her (in English!) corrections. I know enough from doing physio and yoga to know that I would be at less risk of injury with a weight machine BUT that I should not use them, because my stabiliser muscles are my weakest, and with freeweights you work those while you're working the major muscle groups.

So, the Pink Gym Ladies are here to correct me. I grit my teefs through the BMI talk (seriously, you're a LADIES GYM, and both boobs and muscle skew BMI). I was given a simple diet tips worksheet, which was amusing because it was very Germanic - advised three serves of dairy per day, and only on the yoghurt suggestion did they specify low-fat.

Very Good Things About The Aggressively Feminine Gym

The trainer I've been working with - the starter pack gets you three personal training sessions before you're set loose with the regular subscription, and you get three-to-six weekly workout revision sessions - is lovely. Quiet but significant dyke energy. *She* didn't assure me that I wouldn't get unsightly muscles.

The main daytime clientele are older ladies. Difficult to be intimidated when the person next to you is using the 1kg dumbbells off the special rack.

They've invested heavily in workout guidance tech, rather than machines. There are these stations like a 5ft 6 tablet: you QR code check in, and it has your routine logged. The bottom half of the screen shows you a demo video of someone performing each move, and the upper half videos you and has little circles and arrows showing you where you need to move the weight or move your body. At the moment I'm struggling to keep up with the demo speed, but I can see the pacing element being very important - due to the lack of stabiliser muscles when I CAN do something I tend to jerk it, which is Bad, Actually. And due to the ADHD I get bored doing things slowly.
Alongside that, the whole room is set up for interval training. There's an overhead 'move to the next station now' three minute timer, and one is supposed to alternate between the tablet with your set routine and a variety of other activities - cardio (jogging on the spot on a slightly soft surface, a step block), balance work (wobble board: i am bad at it) and there's a screen demonstrating assorted bodyweight exercises one could do. Plenty of those stretchy rubber resistance bands, broomsticks, and weighted basketballs, for whatever it is one uses those for.

And, greatest wonder of all:

There are no open changing spaces. Despite being a "women's gym", they have three individual changing cubicles, with heavy curtains. Each has a chair, a long mirror and a small shelf. There are IKEA Kallaxes to store your stuff in, but no locker-room benches. Two toilet cubicles, and the shower not only has a curtain but ALSO a locked changing cubicle.

My last gym didn't even have curtains on the showers, so, like: !!!. I probably won't shower at the gym, because I can just do so at home, but I would be much happier to do so in this environment. I'm just so struck by the fact that not only do they *have* changing cubicles, they've designed those to be standard - no 'here's the normal people space and here's the cubicle for the excessively shy' vibes.

I'd be really interested to know if other Mrs Sporty gyms are designed the same way. Even if not, it feels like the person who designed this one designed it this way not in spite of it being a "women's space" but because it is a women's space. Just. An awful lot of women do not enjoy changing in public, so why make them? (Why make anyone? But women are more likely to TALK about their self-consciousness, so I know it's a thing even for straight, cis, white, relatively thin women.) Something I think about a lot as the Bathroom Discourse inevitably comes around and around.

As for my fitness, I am bad at: interpreting physical instructions; standing on one leg; jumping sideways; lateral lunges or anything involving stretching sideways really; squats; having stable wrists for any dumbbell exercise; and co-ordinating my arms and my body movement when attempting to do the squat-with-arms-out thing. So, pretty much all the things you can be bad at. Also the vast disparateness between the two sides of my body shows up a lot, as does the fact that some of my major muscles do the work of their neighbours (the bicep curl to overhead press thing, for instance, I feel that in my back, not my arms. The weight is potentially too light for my arm strength while being a hard workout for my back).

Good news: I find it much easier to tolerate being bad at these things for half an hour than to slog through a 20 minute run - probably because the variety at least changes the WAY things are bad, so I'm not getting bored as well as failing at all the things.

Further bonuses: the Very Pink Gym is in my old neighbourhood, which is good for my ongoing access to the one coop supermarket that reliably has gluten-free pizza dough. Also the renovated bakery-café is next to the gym, and while it's the same chain as the one in the shopping centre near me now, the staff are nicer down there. Plus I can go check on my favourite local cats sometimes. A+

Mousecow is on the early shift and I take that as a sign that I should be enthusiastic about morning, too. I'm not, but I'll try. It's snowing the worst half-arse snow you ever saw.

Today's German teacher, on seeing my attempt at a writing task (very convoluted): "Mache deine Sätz kurz und Stupide"
Me, a language teacher who knows this is good advice: Don't wanna.

Meanwhile, househunting is presenting a. few prospects and b. an internal battle between my desire to stay in my current neighbourhood, and my desire not to have to "call the current tenant" to view flats.

Imperfect
David Kirby

When the first half of Hamlet ends,
the schoolkids rise, pull on their jackets,
and gather their trash as their teacher
says wait, the play’s not over, there’s more.
The kids look at each other in disbelief.
More? There’s already been a murder,
a ghost, incest, and worst of all,
the rejection of a devoted girlfriend.
There’s even been a play-within-a-play,
which means they’ve seen not one
but two plays this evening. In life,
the number of beginnings is equal
to the number of endings, but in art
there are so many more endings
that we can’t even imagine it.
Hamlet was sent to England with
the two men who were to kill him,
but he discovered the plot and killed
them instead. And now he’s back.
He’s mad. Isn’t that an ending?
What did you think he’d do,
take up his robe and staff and start
preaching non-violence? Nabokov
says a man once lost a cufflink
in the wide blue sea, and twenty years
later to the day, he was eating a fish,
but there was no cufflink inside.

Thursday: after stressing all morning because the maintenance men who were supposed to come at 10 didn't come until 1.30, it turned out they had a master key, and therefore I could leave them in my flat while I went to Basel.

Basel was hot! I acquired about 15 books from the main library, which is an excellent library with multi-storey open stacks. I met up with Hobbit S and, briefly, their boyfriend. Boyfriend fits exactly Type 2 of Polyamorous Men (the probably harmless type with bad hair). Hobbit S is delightful, and showed me the mysteries of the library, and then chatted to me for a while in Tibits after.

Friday: I had only medium success at salvaging my workload, but I did interview N. re the Lords of Misrule audio production of the Canterbury Tales, which was vr interesting. I took more naps than is really normal?

Saturday: I had a video date with Shiny lined up, and dinner with J and her partner Y scheduled for my place in the evening. J had been disappointed I couldn't make it to go swimming with them Thursday or Friday, so we planned to visit a museum on Saturday afternoon. I'm actually quite glad this plan fell through (they overslept and their dessert plans took longer than expected), because although I got my whole house vacuumed before calling Shiny, I did not get the chicken in marinade or the vegetables pre-prepared. A quieter afternoon let me do that.

J and Y are both a delight to talk to; dinner (roast chicken with plums) turned out deliciously. I forgot I had set the table outside, though, so we ate inside in front of the hot oven! Ooops. They brought wine with, and I broke my streak of abstinence - my goal was never complete teetotal, and I do intend to resume comfortable social drinking once I feel like I've broken the mental pattern that was leading to drinking too much at home. For now, though, I'm resetting the 'a month dry gets you a reward' calendar, so no reward for august. Nominated reward for September is a printer, and I really want a printer at this point, so that should prove reasonable incentive.

Sunday: Has been quiet. Podcasting. Knitting. Ordered some brightly patterned fabric, so I really need to get onto sewing some stuff with the LAST brightly patterned fabric I ordered. German class happened, and was pretty boring.

Probably because I didn't see anyone, and didn't go anywhere except around my neighbourhood looking for naminals. Admittedly today that was a 2hr mini-hike, but hey. I did call Shiny TWICE, and K once. Shiny has sewn masks. K has new feline housemates, and videos of said nosy ginger boys trying to get into Stellacat's food tray are a great amusement to me.

Work: Listened to MF's segment on BBC Word Service 'The Forum' last night while making dinner. She did very well, but I know some stuff she wanted to get in didn't make the final cut.

Language: I've now had two more lessons on acc/dat prepositions, and I now *understand* the difference when I read and can use the correct w-question words. Producing the correct case and indeed gender when speaking is still a bit hit and miss. I was trying to figure out why this is so HARD, when it was a cakewalk in OE and fairly easy in Latin, and then I realised: in OE I never had to do production exercises, and in Latin, only fill-in-the-gap written ones and i think some tiny 'write a sentence' exercises later on. That's wildly different from having to assemble all the moving parts of a sentence.

Fortuitously, I have been doing these wo/wohin lessons, and the topic is moving house. Fortuitous, for I am to go help J move house next weekend, and while I think her partner speaks English, her flatmates do not (they speak Russian, Arabic, some French and some German). Anyway, I will have an amusing story to tell come mid-august when I have a private lesson booked for the speaking-wrap-up of the 'moving house' unit.

I have a Dr appt this week with a doctor who speaks EITHER english or french but I don't know which. I don't have German class tomorrow, but i shall be doing language work: prepping speaking notes for My Medical History in French, with a rudimentary gloss in German (in case the doctor speaks on English and German). Do I go as far as trying to explain The Family Genetic Bag of Doom, I wonder? I haven't before, in Switzerland, but I might need to for the psych evaluation the week AFTER so perhaps I might as well prep it anyway.

Foods: I made a gratin yesterday and it was disappointing. The potatoes didn't cook through, and I put too much stock in so it was sloppy, and a lot of cheese stuck to the tinfoil.

Once again I have Too Many Leftovers and need to embark on several days of eating down the leftovers. This despite the fact that I still have fresh veg. At least I've eaten up all the peaches and only one had gone too manky to eat before I got to it.

Garten: I repotted the lavender; it has responded by drooping. Silly lavender. I have... faded the daisies? They WERE a rich red and now they're a dusty umber. Actually colour faded, not 'faded blooms' faded, which (I assume?) means wilted. I've hacked at the herbs to cut them back a bit; there are now boquets of herbs in my house. Also hacked back some of the little orange flowers to give the yellow possibly-lantana more space. All fairly tedious, but absorbing. Although I did not know when I took up flower gardening that I would spend so much time giving haircuts to plants.

Naminals: Yesterday I went on a short walk to look for goats (I had heard them on Firday); it turned out they were sheep (video evidence of sheep). I then meandered back to the Baumgarten complex, tried to read more of the signs about the Roman villa, and observed the chickens. I also met a very self-possessed tuxedo cat, who was staring down a poodle and winning. I believe this cat is the genius locorum.

Today I set off over the hills to Oberbottigen, via Niederbottigen and Buch. I did not see any farm cats, but I did see the emus from a distance. I tramped along a path through sugarbeet, which was helpfully so labelled by a big placard advertising the benefits of pesticide in sugarbeet production (I guess someone is proposing an anti-pesticide bill, because this farm had signs on its fields and its piggery explaining why a law against pesticide would be bad). Thence across some grassy fields of unknown purpose, and into a cornfield, where I excelled myself by falling flat on my face three times in 200 metres of grassed and rutted track. Eventually I made it into the wood, where I found a Good Stick. I came out above a tiny village called Buch, and turned for Oberbottigen on the road, and then home along the main road. I have kept the Good Stick, though; I intend to wash it down, dry it, and then sand it back, and take it with me on further expotitions, to reduce the number of times I fall flat on my face on even slightly uneven surfaces.

All up this took about two hours. As well as the emus I saw some cows, the pigs in the piggery, some horsies in the equestrian stables, and a llama in someone's side yard.

Internets: Instagram has locked both my accounts from liking or commenting or even putting captions on my own photos - but it seems like only when I use the mobile app? Turning on VPN on the phone didn't help, but switching to my desktop browser EVEN THOUGH IT'S USING MOBILE DATA did. Extremely weird.

I assume, since this isn't IP linked, it has something to do with my IFTTT scripts, which are all playing up anyway because gmail changed its rules again. Given the latest tumblr update ate some xkit functionalities I rely on AND since about a week before the latest update tumblr no longer recognises the 'show this photo in portrait' metadata from my camera, I have decided that my photo tumblr is now a dead blog. Spent some time twiddling email posting settings and speculumannorum will now be getting direct posts, via email. Annoyingly, one can't schedule emails when composing in gmail on one's phone, but one CAN at least post more than one photo at a time. And the weird line breaks that used to happen with gmail post-by-email seem to have gone away.

I've got a fair bit of instagram crossposting to catch up, which might take a while, but there's photos from the camera scheduled for every day of this week.

---

This has been a mundane update.

My accumulating leftovers, both amount-left-over from previous box and leftovers of cooked meals, lead me to log a 'holiday' with the service, so I got a three week gap between deliveries instead of two.

( What was in box 3 )

What that all went into:

- Endives and lettuce (box 2) and half a pack of beets (box 3) into endive, beet and brie salad. The endives roasted in balsamic vinegar and olive oil; the beets precooked, and the whole thing assembled cold.
- Celery leaves, the older garlic stem, and assorted veg-ends went into making another 1.5 L of stock.
- A number of kiwis were eaten mixed with créme vanille
- The bananas went on breakfasts
- half a zucchini from box 2 was diced and fried with mushroom and capsicum and garlic powder, to make Vegetable Content For Tortilla Wraps
- The melon was in fact a rockmelon, and provided a. morning tea and b. great enjoyment to the fruit flies that haunt the compost bin on my balcony
- Half the garlic, the fresher garlic stem, the remaining flat beans, and some celery went into a garlic and pepper chicken stir-fry, along with some capsicum I had purchased
- some of the tomatoes joined some supermarket tomatoes in roast tomato gnocchi (this time with bacon and feta cheese)
- The broccoli florets, rubbed in olive oil and paprika, were baked along with merguez sausage and some potato balls with gruyère cheese
- Some of the stock made a batch of french-style lentils, which then joined some beets in two servings of beet and feta salad
- The fennel, some tinned chickpeas, the end of the celery, and one of the zuchinis, along with stock, made a pilaf
- some of the cucumber made tzatziki
- Potatoes, carrot and zucchini joined sweet potato that I had bought in spiced vegetable bake, without the couscous accompaniment. Ate it with pilaf, topped with feta, and some of it was also served with merguez sausage
- The last of the beets, some carrot, the remaining garlic, and two potatoes went into lentil borscht. That made so much that I had to freeze some, undoing all my good freezer-emptying work.


I also made pan-fried gnocchi with leek, mushroom, and brown-butter sage, but nothing in that one came from the veggie box. Along the way I consumed two frozen ziplock baggies of Mystery Curry, one of which was nicer than the other.

What is in Box 4
- About eight flat white peaches
- four bananas
- two lemons
- a probably-rockmelon
- Five tomatoes
- a bunch of small radishes
- three ... green onions? the long green ones but with a bulb at the end
- a lot of potatoes
- a PRODIGOUS amount of carrots
- five or six stalks of swiss chard (ooh, swiss chard! Never actually cooked with it before)
- another cucumber

Plus, left over from Box 3, I still have half a cucumber, and from boxes 2 AND 3, many potatoes. And some apples, and I think one orange.

Clearly I need to prioritise potato consumption! And carrots. Carrot cake, and a potato bake/gratin thing with chard in it, will clearly have to happen.

That was the end of my four-box subcription. I'm going to give this box three weeks, as well, and order another subscription for delivery starting either on the 6th or the 11th - either way, testing out what happens if I'm not home, as I have Other City commitments those days.

So it goes. My mood profile is up, my work productivity is up, but I feel like I'm struggling to stay on top of things all the same.

Work: Had a productive mentoring meeting with MF on Thursday: sketched an outline of the first chapter I will write (which, I discovered in verbally sketching it, should be the second chapter of the book) and a more vague sense of the book as a whole. Book of PhD is not coming along as fast as it ought but I AM working on it in small but steady chunks, and have found new ways to be interested in it.

This week MF and I have a series of 'advisor chats' with the external project mentors that were part of the project proposal. Today's meeting was with the prof who was her mentor for her Marie Curie, and went I think very well? I liked him a lot, and although his research field is not very related to my specific section of the project he had a lot of cool stuff to say.

Teaching prep for next semester continues to roll. I need to get back to updating the project website. And I have paper proposals - not MANY but enough - for the remote study day, so next task is to organise them and make a schedule.

Health: Physically... better? Guts seem suspiciously non-drastic although by no means ideal. Fewer aches and pains of late - I've been a bit better at regular meditation if I'm not running, and the new mattress (memory foam) clearly agrees with me.

Psych wants me to see a different specialist (a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, so i think I won't be covered - that's a supplementary insurance thing and I can't get supplementary insurance because I have A Preexisting Mentals - but I can cope with that). Today I called the person she recommended; he got back to me via text with a different recommendation of someone taking new patients who can work in English. So far, so good. Tomorrow I try THAT guy, I guess.

I have figured out the confusion with filling my scrips in Bern: when my psych writes in fr. 'valable 6 mois' i'm pretty sure in geneva they used that for six month-packets, but in bern they mean they will only dish out during that period - so the first one was 3 months and, due to finding some of my Aus supply, I didn't refill it, and that's that. Also the Bernese pharmacists have real trouble with my pysch's handwriting. But that's fine, now I understand HOW it works I can put that in my to-do-list app.

Today I achieved Going Running, and using music as my interval, 4 running-interval-songs instead of my usual 3. Next week I guess I'll switch back to... actually maybe it wasn't C25k i used last time, I think i gave up around the same point I did this time, and switched to Runkeeper, which just tells you timed intervals and distance. Switch over to 3 minutes but two-on one-off.

Social: Yesterday I attended a remote birthday party for a cat. The cat in question did not seem to care about his celebrity, but he did enjoy his birthday tuna cake. Also called R.F., who had useful perspectives on psych situation. Also I've never been in the habit of calling them and perhaps I ought to be, I miss them!

Called Shiny on Saturday, and Saturday afternoon was zoom playreading. Oscar Wilde's 'The Duchess of Padua' sure was an experience.

Did not call my parents, have been avoiding that for some weeks. I had been calling them during the week, when procrastinating, but between having Some Shit To Process and doing less procrastinating, I have not done so. Dad sends me occasional screencaps of the Linux fortune cookie cow.

Tomorrow a mission to the office, and coffee with the medieval junior assistant (the professor's lackey - quite literally fetches and carries. It's... odd, but hey, at least someone gets paid and it's not dumped on the phd students).

Crafts: Sewed another hem on the tablecloth. No I don't know why this is taking me so damn long, it's very simple. Continuing to crochet A Square, have not started the new coaster patterns I want to try (for making coaster/doilies to go under vases).

Other: The house is not as messy as it was, but I have also not assembled even the easiest of the furniture that arrived last week. Or COMPLETELY unpacked the trolley I brought from Geneva. So it goes.

I did repot the petunias, and put the fern into a proper pot, and the i don't know what or why I bought it exactly into a bigger plastic container (a tomato punnet, I think). The petunias, I hope, will be happier and better able to defend against bugs in a bigger pot with smaller drainage holes - they were constantly very thirsty, and some bugs specifically target thirsty plants.

The COVID situation here continues to seem... okay? Case rate is up, but still well below the 300-benchmark the health minister described as What We Can Cope With. There was a "super spreader" event in a Zurich nightclub, a great many people are in quarantine. Canton Bern's rate remains low - the highest in the past two weeks has been 5 in one day - so I'm not overly worried. Geneva likewise in recent weeks, despite the initial surge. The weekend's bump seems to have been Zurich (that night club) and a few other cantons with rates between 5 and 10 on the weekend days.

I have done two significantly non-quarantined things today: FURNITURE and BUYING AN ICE CREAM.

Done Wednesday:
- a bunch of reading, in three different work-related directions
- reached minimum tidying of house in advance of FURNITURE
- talked to Shiny for quite a while
- made a cake. It sank prodigiously. Or they did, I actually made two bar tins worth of cake; should have made one sheet pan.
- went for a run
- as per yesterday's post, back and forth with bookseller. Who ended up refunding me, even though the book is probably en route still! I have accidentally committed a Karen. I forgot American retail is trained to be obsequious.

Done today:
- was up and showered by 7
- did the morning's necessary clearing (stripped bed, moved mattress) and some extra (eg: vaccuumed a lot of dust bunnies)
- sat by for FIVE AND A BIT HOURS while varying numbers of handymen, ranging from one to five over that time, assembled almost all my furniture. There was drilling and banging and many questions in German and more people than i've dealt with for MONTHS and I was in "endless screaming at twitter dot com" mode in my brain the whole time.
- - There were three fuckups: One; i ordered only one doorknob instead of three for the wardrobe doors; two, turns out while I bought the smallest Hemnes bedframe and the smallest double mattress, the smallest Hemnes frame is bigger than the smallest mattress; and three, ikea brought me two of one piece of my desk rather than one of each piece. I have signed off on this error and the correct piece should materialise, and be assembled... at some point.
- when the furniture men left I just wanted to cry, but I did not. I put laundry on, and went and bought an ice cream
- local gelateria only has three kinds of gluten-free ice cream, but dark chocolate mousse with coconut mousse is not a bad combo. Negotiated gluten in german, even if this did mean I asked which 'colours' are gluten-free
- walked through the village centre, patted a cat, and went into two stores in search of a nice flowerpot. I did not find a nice flowerpot. I did end up in the cemetery, which is full of flowers: they mow around the plots but let wildflowers grow in the rest.
- Came home, hung laundry (someone has had what looks like the same load in the tumble dryer for days???), and bit-by-bit put most of my stuff in correct places. Wardrobe is bigger than expected, but yet I fill it, and have spilled over into the chest of drawers. There are more books on my TBR trolley than my actual shelves, but I'm fretting anyway about maybe not having enough space (brain, stop it; most of the books you have at home will go back to the office in september, chill).
- Made risotto, and set up a zoom coworking sesh for tomorrow, and a time to call Shiny again.

That is, I feel, Enough Things.