Serratus anterior, tontines, etc

Continuing to dedicate Mondays to admin, and the rest of the week to... doing shit that I probably scheduled for myself on a Monday. Profanity is the only constant. Today I called my town's various departments, a lot more than they or I probably wanted.

Workouts are eeeeeenteresting lately. Tiny Person left for a month, with the assignment to me of finding my serratus anterior and researching the best ways to turn them on. I already told you about serratus wall slides with a ball, but these are weak sauce compared to my new trick of zombie squats. These reliably fire my serratus well enough to make them sore, which is great for knowing when they are or are not activating (the bar chokes me a little, but it's not as bad as a chest stand in contortion). I'm not going to do them today because I need to be able to do h2h tonight, but... maybe tomorrow, Satan. In the meantime, last Weds I leveled up my pressing again, and last Friday I succeeded on every single h2h jump we tried. Stupid serratus. I am angrily aware that many exercises over the last many years, from dips to scap pushups, were supposed to be teaching me to activate those things -- but the wiring was never there, and nobody stopped to do the PT-style work to put it in place. SIGH. I'm actually happy that one of my fellow Xennials wrote an angry screed about her own transverse abdominus this week, because I GET THAT SO HARD. The things I'm learning this year are just infuriating.

Some other things:

• Found out that the guy who sold me my latest rental condo (#3 in a house) is indeed planning to sell his last remaining unit (#1 in the house). Working on a few prep things like getting the city to send me, not him, the house's water bill.


• On a night when I would normally have had a squirrel-date but didn't, I used Claude to dig into a wacky idea I had for a nonprofit. Odds are excellent that my idea is dead in the water, but I contacted a not-for-profit specialist lawyer for a consultation anyway. It's original. It's just something that probably nobody wants. During the investigation I did learn about tontines and also about the Swedish pension system, in which the pension balances of deceased persons are redistributed to the survivors in their similar-age birth cohort.


• My in-laws had a house fire! Yes. They're in their 80s and they were home when suddenly there were actual flames in their bedroom. Probably an electrical fire; whatever it was, they are unable to stay in their home right now, and must live in a hotel while the process of clearing their home for occupancy again grinds on. Probably their nice new master bedroom extension is totaled and will need to be rebuilt.


• The bug got really sick on Thursday and had to cancel a bunch of things (my date with him, a Porchfest performance, tickets we had to a show on Sunday)... and I feel bad for him too. It's a rough week to be related to me by marriage. :(


• I figured out a handy new trick for doing a TGU negative when I'm not strong enough to do the positive. It involves carrying a very heavy weight up to a stair landing and... well... the squirrel covered his face with his hands and said "that's not an exercise, that's an insurance edge case".


• Elections: I signed up to send 100 get-out-the-vote postcards to Ohio, where Sherrod Brown has at least some chance of flipping a Senate seat to Democrat. It's not enough, or what I most want to be doing, but it's more than the zero I had last week


• Magnolias are mostly gone. Lilacs are blooming. I'm trying to become a little more aware of how the seasons unfold. And also, lilac (as a color) came up in kind of a sad way as I was talking a friend through a breakup he's having... it was another case where somehow their communication wasn't great. In particular, they'd never talked about whether to stay friends in the case of a breakup, then ran into their competing assumptions like a bull moose hitting a brick wall. Sigh. Sadness.

I just realized you can't spell condominium without "condom", which is a weird thing to think. I'm taking it as a sign to get offline and cook dinner.