My car is fit

My car is fitter than I am, if for no other reason than that it’s certified fit. Getting to that point consumed a chunk of my day yesterday, and yet, it was better than in previous years. It may also have suggested a way forward for next year.

Most vehicles used on the road (including trailers) are required to get a safety inspection, and a "Warrant of Fitness" (usually called a WOF or a Warrant) is the version for cars (there are different versions for different vehicles). It has to be done every year for most cars. The inspection involves inspectors looking for rust in the car’s body, whether the brakes are good, whether the wheels rotate freely, whether the indicators (“turn signals” in Americanese) work, whether the seatbelts all lock (or whatever it’s called…), and even whether the horn works. They also look in the boot (“trunk” in Americanese) to see if there’s a spare tire, and to make sure the metal at the bottom isn’t rusting through (that happened to my previous car, and it failed it’s inspection because of it).

I went to a testng company called VTNZ, because of reasons I'll get to, and the first thing I needed to do was check-in at reception (about which more in a bit). After I was done with that, I went and sat in my car until the inspector was ready for my car. All up, the whole thing was over roughly 1:40 after I arrived, which is actually faster than it’s been in the past. Of that, around 10 minutes was waiting to pay (and it felt like an hour…), and 40 minutes was the test itself (all of which I know because I took notes to ease the boredom). The rest of the time was spent waiting in my car for its turn to be checked, but it’s air conditioned, has a radio, was a good spot for my selfie (above), and that also gave me a chance to charge my phone.

The guy who did the test was VERY nice—they aren’t always—and they had the air conditioning on in the waiting/reception area, where I waited, so I was pleasantly cool.

I think I’ve said before (here or on my personal Facebook) that the most annoying thing about the whole process is how ultra slow the check-in process is, mainly because of slow computer systems. Still, I suppose it’s nice to see that VTNZ found a use for antique CP/M computers, WordStar, and SuperCalc…

I had little choice but to go to VTNZ because I forgot my warrant expired yesterday, so I didn’t have a lot of options. VTNZ recently began accepting bookings for these tests, though I couldn’t do that because it was last minute. There was a guy in front of me who’d booked a test, and he had to go through the same check-in process as everyone else, so at first I thought it wasn’t a big improvement. However, it turned out he was gone well before my car was tested, so it definitely seems like a good option for next year.

After I was done, I went to Woolworths (supermarket) on the way home “to pick up a few things” (yeah, right…), and I went a more direct route avoiding Te Rapa (the main North/South road in my part of Kirikiroroa-Hamilton) and a very busy roundabout. It was so much faster! So, all joking aside, it was a much better experience this year than the past two. I take that as a win.

I think safety inspections are important, though Im not sure that every year is necessary for relatively new cars. However, I continue to be appalled that New Zealand doesn’t do tailpipe emissions testing (or decibel tests for tailpipe noise, especially for motorcycles…).

Still, I do think these inspections are both necessary and important. I do think the whole think could be improved (especially by VTNZ—it’s 2025: Computers should not run so slowly). The important thing is I got my warrant done on time. Another year sorted!

The Warrant of Fitness testing cost me $85 (around US$47), plus an additional $1.70 fee because I used payWave (contactless payment). Using payWave is much faster than swiping a card and entering a PIN, and getting to that point had already taken too long, in my opinion.

My Dad would be 109

This week had my father’s109th Birthday. I remembered to blog about it, even thought I didn’t have time to follow through, only because I decided to get organised: Almost a year ago, I wrote a post in which I talked about setting up a list of certain posts I wanted to be sure to write and publish. When I set up this year’s list, this post was on that list.

Life has been unusual for quite awhile now, and I continue to fins it difficult to find the time to actually get blog posts and podcast episodes done. Nevertheless, I’m getting to this in my dad’s birthday week, which right now, is a huge win.

I’ve been thinking about my dad a lot lately, because of what I’m going through now, a few years older than he ever managed to reach. I’ve talked about how my single biggest challenge emotionally and existentially about aging is that I have NO idea what to expect. My Mom and Dad both died younger than I am now, so I don’t know how they would’ve been as they aged.

My father’s siblings all lived to be old, though with the health problems of old age, and my grandfather was a nonagenarian. My mother’s parents died relatively young, but her uncle had good innings. So, because I have few examples to turn to, I don’t know if I’ll have mobility problems, cognitive decline, or any of the other things I worry about.

Which brings me back to my Dad. I remember when he was in his 50s how he couldn’t walk far at all. There were a lot of reasons for that, but he was certainly unfit, too. Over my life, I’ve seen several older people slowly decline, and watching them made me wonder how avoidable (generally speaking) loss of mobility and flexibility is.

All of that made me realise that I have some agency here: If I get fitter now, it’s bound to at least help me as I age, and maybe age-related decline might not be too bad. At the very least, it will probably (?) improve the quality of my life now because I’ll be better able to do physical things better.

As I said in my blog post about my walking, I already find it easier to get up off the floor, and even my knees seem more reliable. So, yay, I guess. And, in a roundabout kind of way, my Dad was one of my main inspirations.

Still, I often wonder what my Dad would’ve been like in old age, though I know he’d almost definitely be gone now regardless, and his too-early death left me with no example to look to in order to guess what my own old age might be like. However, there’s also everything that came before his death that’s helped build the foundation on which modern me is still being built, and that’s an important thing. As I said in my 2021 post about my Dad’s birthday:

Mainly, though, I’m grateful for the base he and my mother gave me, the framework to build the me I would eventually become. I get some of the credit for that, of course, as do other family and my friends (and, again, especially Nigel…), but the fact remains that he and my mother laid the foundation on which I would one day build me. Open eyed, aware, and certain that I may be, I nevertheless acknowledge where I come from, and my Dad was an important part of that.

All of which remains true, but it would be handy to have an inkling of what I might be facing over the next 20 years (or so?) years I may have left.

Nevertheless, as always, thanks, Dad. And Happy Birthday!

Previously:
My Dad would be 108 (2024)
My Dad would be 105 (2021)
My dad would be 100 (2016)

Related:
Sunday Quiet (2009) – What Sundays were like when I was a kid
Like father, like son (2009) – A reflective post about sons imitating their dads and the freedom my dad gave me
Easter (2009) – Where I talk about my dad’s stage management
Good Friday Flashback (2011) – More about his stage management, with a photo
Arthur Answers Again, Part Two – Religion questions (2013) – I talk about being a preacher’s kid
AAA-14 Answer 7 – Loss and memes (2014) – I talk about the death of my parents
New Year’s Eve 2014 – In which I talk about one of my favourite memories of my dad

I’m going to live

I can remember the precise moment I realised that I’m not going to die. I was walking down the hallway that connects all the bedrooms to the living areas, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a painting a friend of ours painted and gave to us for our Civil Union. Our friend died from motor neurone disease in the year before Nigel died, and as I paused to look at the painting, I thought about how she was gone and Nigel was gone, and then it hit me: I’d spent all of my time since Nigel died expecting that I could die at virtually any moment, but clearly that was no more likely for me than for many others. I realised that if I wasn’t about to die, then I’d better focus on the business of not merely living, but having a good life. That, in turn, meant redoubling my efforts to have a good aging.

That was the moment everything changed.

I’d been thinking about what government officials like to call “ageing in place”, that is, growing old in our own homes, with support services gradually added as we need them, all designed to help us live long, healthy lives in our own homes, without having to go into care until/unless it’s truly necessary. Seeing the painting that day later helped me focus on what I needed to do.

I chose my house because it’s one storey (no steps), and after I moved in I installed the solar power system so that it could help keep my power bills as low as possible so that I’d have more money to pay for living, not merely existing. I have further plans to upgrade this house to make it even better for me (and, to be honest, for the eventual resale, in case I need or want to sell it, even if that’s not until well in the future).

However, there was more to this planning than merely making my house elderly-me friendly, there’s all the time between now and then, too. So, I decided to work on myself to try and keep mobility and flexibility as I age. This led to my biggest work on myself, probably ever.

Last December, I started walking two or three times a week. Then, on Monday, January 6, I began walking every single day, which means that this past week was my seventh consecutive week of this daily routine. There have been positive results, some subjective, but at at least one that’s clearly measurable.

Before talking about what I did and why, it’s important, if obvious, to note that this is about my personal journey in health and aging, and shouldn’t be taken as advice. I will say, however, that any exercise is better than none, but how much is enough—or too much—will vary from person to person. It’s a good idea, especially for us older folks, to talk to our doctor before starting any exercise programme—but I didn’t do that, even though I absolutely should have.

That out of the way, here’s what I did and why.

My Apple Watch tracks minutes of exercise (the green ring), movement (the red ring, and an estimate of kilojoules/calories burned), and whether I stand for at least 5 minutes every hour fir 12 hours per day (the light blue ring). My progress throughout the day is tacked on those rings, and the goal is to close all three rings every day (there’s an example at left, from February 21, 2023). My Apple Watch’s week is from Monday through Sunday (I have no idea why or if that can be changed, and I frankly don’t care), and that’s why my daily walking routine began on a Monday.

My routine was to walk two kilometres (1.24274 miles) every weekday, and one kilometre (0.621371 miles) on Saturday and Sunday. On weekends, I actually walk a bit farther than one kilometre per day because, generally speaking, my watch requires a “workout” to be at least 15 minutes to register it as a workout, and since my average pace for one kilometre is faster than that, I keep walking until I pass 15 minutes. I also end up walking a bit more than two kilometres on weekdays, too, mostly because I can.

My Apple Watch also sends me rewards badges, first for each ring on my watch as I close them, then another when I close all three rings, plus badges for a perfect week (closing the ring every day), and a perfect month (closing them every day of a month). There are additional monthly challenges, and there was one more I never got: Doing seven workouts over that Monday-Sunday week (the watch can track many different kinds of workouts, including both indoor and outdoor walks). Getting those badges every day and week is a surprisingly strong motivator for me.

For some reason I assumed that the workout challenge was to do workouts on all seven days of a week, but this week I suddenly realised that it’s actually seven workouts total, not per day. So, this week I experimented with doing two shorter walks on both Wednesday and Friday of this week, each walk a bit more than a kilometre. This meant that I did seven walking workouts on Monday to Friday, and, as I suspected, I got my reward badge on Friday (the image at the top of this post). That means I could’ve taken the weekend off from walking if I wanted to (I didn’t, but in the future I may use one of the two days as a “rest day”).

I first felt my walks affecting my calves, then my thighs, and finally my hip flexor muscles, all of which felt stronger. Over time, I noticed my balance had improved, that I was easily able to stand on one foot. My knees seem more reliable, and even my lower back doesn’t get sore like it used to, and I also noticed that it had become somewhat easier for me to get up off the floor (like after I scrub the shower floor). Gaining flexibility and greater balance is precisely what I was trying to achieve, but all of that’s entirely subjective. Fortunately, there’s now an objective improvement.

I’ve been getting annual blood tests for years, and I have a spreadsheet with the results dating back to 2011 (though there’s a five year gap between those first results and the next ones, probably because I lost the forms for some years’ results. Nevertheless, one of the consistent things has been that my HDL (“good cholesterol”) has always been too low. It’s supposed to be greater than 1.00 mmol/L (“millimoles per litre”), however, mine has never reached that. My worst (lowest) reading was 0.64, and my best was 0.90. Last year’s result was 0.88, but my most recent blood drawn on February 5 showed my HDL was at a new high of 0.92—the best reading ever, as far as I know. I’d always been told I needed to exercise more since it’s the only way to significantly improve the HDL level, and my new result came after I’d been doing daily walks for around a month, and doing walking workouts at least some days for roughly six weeks. If I keep walking/exercising, I may eventually finally pass 1.00 mmol/L.

In summary, my legs feel stronger, my balance and flexibility has improved, and I’ve raised my HDL levels, all of which gives me an incentive to continue (that and getting those Apple Watch badges…). However, I haven’t noticeably lost any weight, but that wasn’t goal at this point; that will come over time. This is a process, of course, and I still have a long way to go.

I have a cross-trainer (also called an elliptical) in the garage, but I don’t yet feel anywhere near fit enough to use it—although, it’s been way too hot in the garage to use it, anyway. The elliptical also helps with upper-body work, though I have other plans to help with that, too—after I take off my training wheels, so to speak. My plan is to slowly build my strength and stamina, then add more and different routines to target different areas, all with the same goal of strengthening the muscles associated with balance, stability on my feet, and even pain avoidance (lower back, for example). I want to be as mobile as possible for as long as possible, and I’m the only one who can do anything to help make that happen.

It’s still early days for all of this, but I definitely feel better, stronger, and more flexible, to varying degrees, and that’s more than enough incentive for me to keep going. All I really want is to have the best life I can have, regardless of how many or few years may be ahead of me. I finally understand that I’m not going to die, after all, not right now, and that it’s up to me if I want to be able to live whatever life I still have to the fullest. I think I’m well on the way to making sure that happens, one step at a time.

A deliberate absence

I haven’t been blogging much so far this year—I know that will come as a huge surprise. There are many reasons for that, but this has been a mostly intended time away. This post is about why that’s been the case.

The story begins, really, last year. I said that was a challenging year for me, and it definitely was, for all the reasons I blogged about. However, there was also the death of a friend I never talked about here, for a lot of reasons, but partly because my friend’s death happened shortly before what would have been Nigel’s 60th birthday, and about a month before the fifth anniversary of his death. I was already dealing with a lot.

At the same time, I was dreading the outcome of the US election because I had a feeling it would be a disaster. Then, like so many people, I was profoundly—and badly—affected when the USA’s election disaster actually happened. All that year, I felt like I was watching the land of my birth committing slow-motion suicide, even as I fervently hoped voters would come to their fucking senses. I managed to hold back my dread of the disaster as well as I could, but that denial couldn’t last forever.

All of that was followed by this year starting out badly with technological problems I wrote about on January 2. That, combined with the USA’s upcoming coronation of the convicted felon, should’ve warned me that this year could be bad, too, but there was more.

Late last year, certainly by Christmas, I was aware that my sister-in-law, Carolyn, was beginning what would be her final battle, leading ultimately to her death. At first, just as with the US elections, I tried to ignore what I I knew was going to happen, but reality again conquered my attempt at optimism.

I didn’t talk about the US elections in part because I couldn’t pretend that my fears were unjustified. However, it wasn’t my place to talk about my sister-in-law’s health battle while she was still waging it, and then I didn’t post anything about her death until after her immediate family did. After that, it was normal blogging issues: I wanted to include a photo of her with my post, and didn’t find the one I used until late Saturday when I was looking through my photos.

What all of these stories have in common is that I found them personally challenging for a lot of reasons. The tech problems were challenging mostly because they’re still not actually solved, just a little bit better. The disaster caused by the US election results is ongoing, and getting worse, of course, and I’m still working my way through all that. The death of my friend was hard, but it also happened at time when I just didn’t have the emotional space to talk about it. That, and especially the death of my sister-in-law, were also difficult for me because they brought up the trauma of Nigel’s death and my emotions around that. I tried as best as I could to keep everything in perspective, to compartmentalise when necessary, and I often succeeded. Still, it was nevertheless six months of waves of emotion washing over me.

All that said, it was absolutely NOT unrelentingly bad: I had fun during those six months, even if sometimes it was despite everything, and I achieved some things that made me feel happy, accomplished, proud, etc. It was, in other words, a period of time with good as well as bad—pretty much like every other time in one’s life.

Nevertheless, for a lot of that time I simply didn’t have the mental or physical energy to blog or podcast, nor the ability to say why that was. Because of all that turmoil, I missed out on blogging about things that I very much wanted to talk about, completely non-political things, of course, things that were personally important to me (like anniversaries). I may talk about most of those things in one one post (kind of like my old “Internet wading” posts). I also have other topics leftover from last year that I still want to talk about, including some that have reached their own first anniversary in the past couple months (whether I mentioned them at the time last year or not). On top of that are some very good things I’ve been up to starting back in December, and that topic, too, deserves my full attention.

The thing is, though, that because I don’t know when things will get better, I also don’t know when I may have a shot at being even slightly more productive—in everything/anything, actually. I guess we’ll find out together.

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 2

Seven weeks into 1985 a new pop song reached Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100”. It was only the third song to do so in that timeframe, and it, too, had a multi-week run. On February 16, 1985, “Careless Whisper” (video up top) hit Number One. The song was credited in some countries to “Wham! Featuring George Michael”, and in the UK, Ireland, and other European countries to George Michael. The song was also the second single from the second Wham! album, Make It Big (the first single was “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”, which was the subject of “Weekend Diversion: 1984, Part 17” back on November 17 of last year). Like the previous single, “Careless Whisper” would stay at Number One for three weeks.

Michael originally wrote the song when he was 18 and on his way to his job as a DJ at a hotel. He said that as he paid the bus driver, he came up with the famous sax riff, and then wrote the rest of the song on his commute. His bandmate, Andrew Ridgeley, was a co-writer.

I very clearly remember this song and its video, which was directed by Duncan Gibbins, who also directed the video for their previous single, "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go". At the time this song was a hit, we still didn’t (officially…) know about George Michael’s sexuality, though there was certainly speculation. That doesn’t matter for the song itself, which isn’t gender specific, but it’s a key part of of the music video. Music videos tell a very specific story, and in the case of “Careless Whisper”, while the song itself and the video are about the same thing (cheating on a partner), the video leaves no doubt it’s about a man cheating on a woman, something one could ignore in the song. That didn’t matter to me, but I did prefer the song to the video for that very reason.

I’ve talked before about “filling in the blanks” in pop music to make them a song a better fit for me as a young gay man, to make it something I could personally identify with. I assumed that sort of thing never crossed the minds of young heterosexuals, and it’s probably something that only mattered, to the extent it did at all, to an LGBTQ+ person—or who intensely disliked those who were LGBTQ+. Times have changed, and nowadays there are songs and music videos with positive LGBTQ+ storylines, something I couldn’t have even imagined way back in 1985.

Personally, I mainly just liked the sound of the song, that sax riff, and the words, especially the first two lines of the chorus: “I'm never gonna dance again / Guilty feet have got no rhythm”, which to me was a very evocative phrasing. This wasn’t unusual for me: I’ve often had my attention captured by a couple lines of a song—even the choice of one specific word—which is probably because my own creativity, such as it is, centres on the written word (I know nothing about music composition). I suppose this just reinforces the fact that songs are a very personal thing in many different ways.

“Careless Whisper” reached Number One in Australia (2X Platinum) and Canada (5X Platinum), Number 3 in New Zealand (3X Platinum), and Number One in the UK (2x Platinum). It was also Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” and on their “Adult Contemporary” charts. The song was also 7X Platinum in the USA.

The album Make It Big reached Number One in Australia (Platinum), Canada (6x Platinum), New Zealand (Platinum), in the UK (4x Platinum), and on the USA’s “Billboard 200”. It was Certified 6x Platinum in the USA.

This series will return March 9 with the next Number One from 1985.

Previously in the “Weekend Diversion – 1985” series:

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 1 – February 2, 2025

Another loss for the family

This past week, on Waitangi Day, we lost Nigel’s sister Carolyn after a battle with cancer. She was an immensely kind and loving person, always ready to help folks in the family—and she gave the BEST hugs! Nigel felt a special bond with Carolyn, and she sometimes turned to him for advice, so really they were there for each other. Naturally, she was also always there for me after Nigel died. Of course.

I drove over to visit her the week before she died, and that was a really good day: She was in good spirits, relatively comfortable, though she’d lost a lot of weight and was clearly weakened by her health battle. It was a lovely afternoon with her. We just chatted about nothing and everything, joked, laughed—all the things we’d always done. When I left that evening, I knew I might not see her again, though I didn’t think we’d lose her only a week later. I’m so very glad that I went to see her and that our last time together was so awesome.

The photo of us above is from January 2010, and we’re sitting on the deck of the bach (holiday home) they had at the time. I went there with one of my other sisters-in-law and my mother-in-law to stay with Carolyn for a few days (I don’t remember why Nigel didn’t go, though he might’ve had a work function or something). I had a great time! Her family asked for photos of Carolyn, and when I went through mine I was struck by how in so many of them she and the family were laughing or engaged in some sort of hijinx—that, and karaoke singing. This photo, though, is the only one I found of just us two, which makes it special to me.

As I’ve said many times, I am so lucky to have married into this large loving family, and everyone will help each other through this loss. I have a long-standing policy of not referring to people, especially family members, by name on social media. So, I’ll just say my heart goes out to her husband, my brother-in-law, because I know what this loss feels like. I also send my love to their son and daughter, their own spouses, and their children. I hope they all feel the warmth of this large loving family, even when we’re not in the same room, because that will help them all a lot. I know what that feels like, too.

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 1

Well, well, well: Here we are in a new year and today we begin a new series about pop songs that reached Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” 40 years ago this week. It turns out that 1985 had quite a lot of Number One songs that I liked, and this week’s is one of them.

On February 2, 1985, ”I Want to Know What Love Is” (video up top) by British-American rock band Foreigner became the first new Number One song of 1985. It followed ”Like a Virgin” by American singer Madonna, which was Number One from December 22, 1984 until February 2, 1985—a pretty good run, that.

Originally released in November 1984, “I Want to Know What Love Is” was Foreigner’s first Number One in the USA, though before that—dating back to1977—they’d had ten Top 20 hits, including five in the Top Ten. The song was the lead single from their fifth studio album, Agent Provocateur.

Like a lot of folks I grew up with, I knew and liked Foreigner from the beginning, and I bought their first four albums, though I never bought Agent Provocateur—or any later album, either. While I really liked their songs dating back to 1977, by the 1980s—mid-1980s in particular—my tastes had changed, and I was more into electronic pop music, European in particular.

I was aware of this particular song, though, and I liked it. A guy I quite fancied at the time listed the song on a list of his favourite songs, and that probably made me like it a bit more. I lost contact with him many decades ago, but I still like the song and I still remember him.

My music tastes in the early 1970s had been mostly “Easy Listening” and “Adult Contemporary", but by my high school years (1973-77), I started liking more rock. After 1977, I began to like “alternative music”, New Wave, and their descendants. Today, I like all of that and more—plus some contemporary pop songs. Put another way, my tastes didn’t change as much as they evolved to include all sorts of music. And that’s both my connection to this week’s song, and it’s place in my personal pop music universe.

“I Want to Know What Love Is” reached Number One in Australia, 9 in Canada, Number One in New Zealand and in the UK (2x Platinum). It was also Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” and on the Billboard “Mainstream Rock” charts, as well as Number One on the Cash Box “Top 100”. The song was also Platinum in the USA.

The album Agent Provocateur reached Number 2 in Australia, 3 in Canada, 4 in New Zealand (Gold), Number One in the UK (Platinum), and 4 on the USA’s “Billboard 200” chart (3x Platinum).

This series will return February 16 with another new Number One from 1985.