I went to the Lititz Recreation Center today, an amazing thing to have in a town the size of Lititz. It has two pools, a huge exercise area with treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, rowing machines, free weights, resistance machines, bosu balls, bands, dumbbells. As much as I’ll ever need.

And courts. Lots of courts. And training rooms. And pickleball.

I went because I have signed up for personal training. A friend recommended it and it turns out that I love it. I am exhausted and will be incredibly sore tomorrow. I know this because I am incredibly sore right now. 

I’ve been doing ok with exercise. I am going to do a triathlon in May with Wendy, who will do an aquabike–the triathlon without the run. So I’ve been running and biking without much of a plan. This set time to have someone guide me through training is just what I need.

I’ve struggled to be the retired person that I pictured myself being. I don’t exercise as much as I anticipated. I don’t read as much. Heck, I don’t write as much either. I don’t do as many projects as I have go through my head. I haven’t reached out to as many friends as I want to.

It all comes down to discipline of some sort. I don’t sit around watching television. I don’t while time away on my phone, though I have been spending time playing chess on my phone.

I just wasted a few seconds of my twenty minutes to write looking up “while away” vs “wile away”. Turns out both are correct, but “while away” is more correct.

That’s where my time goes–into following a thought, something in the moment that turns into several moments.

Last spring I was working on a wood project in the basement when I started thinking about magnetic belt buckles. That oddish thought led me to think, well, could I make one? I had some rare earth magnets, and a 3D printer, so . . .

Two hours later I had created a very nice refrigerator magnet. There were more problems to solve, but I finally came to my senses and realized I had other things to do, things that had been on my list for a while.

I don’t want to squash that impulse, nor to suggest that I really mind the time I lose to such a tendency. 

Sometimes it is just a way to occupy my time, a thought project if you will. Today in the car on the way to the rec center I started to think about the passcode that I would need to enter to get into the adult locker room. I can never quite remember it so I have to go back to my membership card where it sits in a largish yellow or green sticker. 

The number is 17231, a zip code length. Actually it’s probably an actual zip code. It also isn’t the real number. In case any non-adult members are reading, I can’t be the reason they can get in the adult locker room and cause mischief.

So I was thinking about ways to memorize numbers. I used a memory test called the digit span as a middle school teacher, trying to come up with a quick thing that students could become better at if they practiced.

The idea was to help them understand the need for controls and variables in experiments as well as how to write an hypothesis. 

Digit span measures your ability to remember numbers given in sequence. So if I say those five numbers you would listen then repeat them, or write them down. Next we’d try six numbers. Then seven, continuing until you could not remember them all. 

Anyway, it was a fun lesson for me, and I think the students. It’s fun to learn a skill and test yourself, especially in a way that doesn’t really matter.

It turns out seven is about the average digit span for humans. So for these five numbers, I should be able to memorize them, then, relatively easily.

What came to mind, though, was to think of them as a line graph going from left to right, the line rising and falling depending on the number. Why not just memorize the shape instead of the five numbers? 

I was driving up a hill at the time, which connected the dots. I can think of the line as a series of hills. In this case the number 17231 starts out at sea level, rises steeply, comes down not quite as steep, rises a bit, then falls back to sea level at the end. 

I’ve drawn a picture for this entry’s image. 

It turns out that because they are doing construction on the rec center right now and are letting everyone use the adult locker room. There was tape over the number pad. 

I didn’t even need to recall the number at all. 

Life laughs at us sometimes. I just try to laugh along.