My, my, my.  Time sure is flying. I’d really planned on doing a better job updating here.  Sometimes, silence is better than saying something to fill space.  On the other hand, silence can imply something ominous.  For any of you inclined to worry, I’m not dead yet.

It’s been a busy week away from writing and revision.  I’ve managed to get my daily to do list of items down into the teens.  It’s been averaging about 40 items for I don’t know how long.

Earlier this week, we loaded the open car trailer with five gallon buckets of rocks, tree shreddings, and linoleum tearings and headed to work on the ranch roads.  We always have to take the chain saw, bow saws, and nippers on these treks, because there’s no telling how many trees have fallen since the last time we were there.  It’s been a long, long time since we were there last, so, not surprisingly, we had to haul out the chain saw four times.  In addition to that, there’s always some smaller stuff that can be dragged or trimmed off the road.

First, our neighbors have been doing a tremendous job of upgrading our hay field.  So far, the little bit of income we get from the hayfield covers our total cost of ownership for the ranch, so that’s nice.  It also keeps our agricultural usage valid.

Second, we have a lot of fence repair work to do.  We saw at least three places where our cow neighbors to the east have been trespassing.  We’ll have to go back another day, because a huge tree is down across the road on the hill up to the house site – where our large enclosed trailer and the motorhome sit.  There’s at least two days of work waiting for us to get back to.

Third, something, probably a rat, has gotten into the motorhome had trashed the interior.  I’m wishing we hadn’t pulled the rat snake out of there when we found him.  We’ll be taking trash bags out and cleaning out as much loose stuff as we can (fortunately, hubby had removed much of the smaller stuff some time ago).  Then, we’ll have to analyze if the local wildlife has chewed through any vital wiring before replacing batteries and trying to fire it up to move it into town.  We want to get it moved into town to do serious renovations (that were already planned before the critter mess).

Fourth, the shed and the enclosed trailer appear to be undisturbed by local wildlife, so that’s the good news.  With the tree down across the road, we had to leave hubby’s Vietnam era Jeep trailer out there a little while longer.  We want to bring everything stored at the ranch into town and store it indoors at the shop.  That is a time consuming process.

After finishing ranch work, hubby had to head back to San Antonio — he has some things to do there.  That leaves me here in Central Texas for a couple of weeks, and I’m determined to tear myself away from the computer and get some things done around the house.  Which has resulted in chopping my task list down to a more reasonable size.  One thing that is useful is a free app from the Apple App Store called Time Out Free.

If you find yourself getting sucked into computer time and need a reminder to tear yourself away (and if you use Mac OSX), Time Out Free can help you.  By default, it’s set up to gray out your screen for a ten minute break every fifty minutes — you can delay the break for 5 or ten minutes or skip it altogether.  This time is user configurable, so you can adjust it to meet your needs.  It also has the capability to remind you to take micro breaks — these are for a brief 10-15 second duration which encourages you to stretch, flex your hands, breathe, something like that.  I’ve found it extraordinarily useful in reminding me to get up and work on my non-computer tasks for a little while.

Finally, I began a very modest exercise plan at the beginning of the year. Almost modest enough one might think it wouldn’t do any good.  I committed to riding my recumbent bike for ten minutes one day a week.  I have a custom program I call the mountain set up.It looks something like this (well, sort of):

^

/

/     

/             _______/—-____

When I first tracked myself on December 21, 2010, my max heart rate for the 10 minute ride was 171 (right at the max heart rate for my age — not really a good thing).  Each week I’ve ridden the bike, my max and average heart rates for the ten minute period (on the same mountain program) has declined.  This week, it was 140 with an average heart rate of 120.  I’m overdue to increase my time, because I said when my max heart rate got down to 153, I’d increase my time (I hadn’t checked my notes).  That happened last week, so the next ride will be for a longer time — probably 12 minutes to see if that gets the heart rate back up into the target zone.

What this proves to me (and should be of interest to others as well) is it takes very little extra effort to pay big dividends in heart health.  My lungs need to catch up, but they will.   I should note, I don’t feel any healthier, but the reduced heart rate for the same level of resistance is a positive sign.  Additionally, I’ve felt more like getting on that bike and riding and have gotten on the bike twice this week in addition to the work at the ranch (which brought my daily step count for that day above 10,000 — a good thing). Which, if your simple math skills aren’t honed enough to note, that resulted in three days of exercise this week.  I have a long way to go, but building on small success is a good thing.

Time Out is telling me it’s time to go.