History and Energy in Everyday Ramblings

If you look carefully in the distance, you can see Mt. Hood not fully covered in snow. I took this yesterday on my way back from getting my annual hearing test. It was up on the “hill”, and they are doing a bunch of construction up there making it almost impossible to navigate as a pedestrian.

There are two huge cranes, parts of the roads are torn up. It has always been a maze up there but now it is a maze with obstructions. One way to get up there is to take the tram that goes over my neighborhood. But to do that I would need to go down to where the tram originates and then come up over where I live. It was an option I considered.

This last week I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out the best way to do this logistically. Normally I just walk up. There is a shortcut. It takes 17 minutes. It is effortful though because up is the operative word. Serious up.

When I got up yesterday, I was looking at my Fitbit metrics and they were telling me that my “readiness” score was low. Unusually low for me. My heartrate variability was way down, my resting heart rate up, and my blood pressure had been above normal. Hmm. I thought. Maybe I should actually take these markers seriously. I was tired from the weight workout (with performative grunting) and much walking to in person meetings and the like.

98% of the time I would just power my way up anyway but with the construction that meant an even longer walk to the other side of the complex and the VA Hospital. A place I became quite familiar with when Mr. Finch was ill. There is a long skybridge from the VA to the hospital clinic where Otolaryngology is. I was trying to remember what floor the connection was on.

In a few weeks it will be five years since I “retired”. I did retire, but it was in the form of quitting the awful, no good, very bad job that so many of the people I worked with made it. The Hill is full of complicated memories. Not all of them bad by a long shot.

Anyway, taking the metrics into consideration I ended up walking up a much smaller hill, the one by the track, and taking a bus to the VA. The place is much as I remember it, including some of the people. Wow. I found the skybridge and walked across it. Looking out I was so glad I didn’t try to walk up. To say the construction is disruptive is an understatement.

My hearing test went well. My hearing loss is stable. I don’t have access to a few new to me low tones, but my ability to distinguish words is still strong. So yay, no change there.

I walked home.

Later in the day I taught my Weights and Bands class exclusively with resistance bands seated in a chair as another nod to my low “readiness”. I am not troops about to be deployed, but I guess I can think about it as an indicator of my energy resources.

I slept well and thought, awesome, I am all refreshed. My “readiness” this morning was much better, as was my blood pressure so I thought cool and did my cardio workout. Just as I was finishing that, whoa, I felt depleted.

There is no punch line here. I didn’t test positive for Covid or have some big revelation.

Even though I felt depleted, I taught my morning class, went to the grocery, went to the garden and did some League stuff and chores before sitting down for a two hour Zoom meeting on the “Columbia Corridor and Industrial Lands Environmental Overlay Zone Project” presented by a very knowledgeable and well-spoken staff member of River and Environmental Planning from our city Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. His boss was on the call too.

I know this sounds deadly boring, but it wasn’t. This is the place I live. This group is working in concert with the Economic Opportunity people to see if they can carve out land for the projected future needs for industrialization while taking into account the fact that we need to protect our waterways and wetlands. Although there are concerns, this sure as heck is something I wish folks had done around here, oh say 100 years ago.

So many fascinating things to think about embedded in there.

At some point in the future, I need to plan in some time for creative pursuits. People keep asking me about poetry. I was actually thinking during the presentation if there was a way I could make a poem out of this. They were talking about using lasers to map the areas for protection zones and how they are way more accurate than earlier mapping techniques.

I know there is a stream running down from “the hill” that used to run right near the street I live on. I bet the LIDAR would see that stream, now well-hidden underground.

Layer upon layer we build our lives. At least this evening I have the energy to contemplate this.