Moxie

Yesterday morning (Friday, July 18, 2008), at the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym, I am quietly cranking away on the arm bicycle.
Right next to me are what I call the sand-trainers, the fabulous new exercise machines that mimic running in sand. There are only two.
The sand machines are sort of an elliptical, in that they require back-and-forth leg motion.
But they ain’t following a track, like a normal elliptical.
You can also use them as a step-machine if you want; that is, up-and-down vertical motion.
Or you can do what most do, which is what I do: back-and-forth combined with up-and-down.
You can vary the step resistance. I run it at about five; Amazon-Lady runs it at twelve or so.
Back-and-forth combined with up-and-down mimics running in sand.
There also are arm-levers connected to the foot-levers, allowing arm-swing to coordinate with leg motion, like running.
In my experience you can tug on the arm-levers to increase leg motion.
There also is a meter that indicates stride-length.
Up-and-down (the step-action) is nothing.
I try to keep it in jogging range, and mostly can.
Whatever; this trainer gets my heart-rate higher than anything else.
The target heart-rate for someone my age is 126 beats per minute. At first this machine was getting that, but now that I’ve used it some, I get 113-116.
An older gentleman mounts a sand-trainer: “Guess I gotta try this thing,” he says.
“Now what?” he says. He’s cranking it back-and-forth.
“Push ‘Quick-Start’ or ‘Program,’” an adjacent lady says.
“I do that, and it’s still going back-and-forth,” the old man says. “I can’t get it to do what you were doing.”
Around-and-around they went. “Try ‘Manual,’” the lady says.
But back-and-forth it still goes. “I can’t get this thing to do like everyone else.”
Finally, after about five minutes of diplomatically keeping my mouth shut: “Step up-and-down and it’ll do that,” I say. “It cycles the way ya tell it.”
Back-and-forth it continues. “What button do I push?”
“No buttons,” I say. “Step up-and-down and it’ll do that.”
“I give up,” he says. “Guess I gotta use something else. I never can figure out these new gizmos.”
“Worked for me!” the lady says.

It seems to me all in my family would have never given up that easily.
We’da kept pumping until we figured the sucker out.
That’s how I figured it out. Nobody showed me.

I could tell stories, perhaps my best example being about —1) Excel.
I don’t have a manual — I’ve had to figure it out by trial-and-error.
Excel has a chart-function, that automatically updates as you add to your spreadsheet.
I was using it to keep track of my running times. It would automatically update a chart displaying the ups-and-downs of my running-times.
So I decided to try the same for our car mileages, which I keep track of with each gas fill-up.
I set up a spreadsheet with -a) rows for both our two cars, and -b) each purchase would be a column.
Inadvertantly, each purchase column would be one or the other car; and I noticed my chart wasn’t doing connecting lines. All it was doing was single-point values for each gas-purchase per column.
My running-time chart connects all the point-values with lines — I can follow the ups-and-downs looking at the line.
So where are my lines on my mileage chart?
Then I made a trip to Altoona, Pennsylvania in our minivan, and that required two consecutive gas-purchases. That means side-by-side columns for the minivan-row in my mileage spreadsheet.
VIOLA; a line connected the two.
So I surmised the reason my mileage-chart lacked lines, was because it couldn’t chart across an empty cell.
Perhaps the way to get lines was to do separate spreadsheets for each car, so consecutive purchase-columns could be side-by-side.
Worked, of course.
The unmoxied person woulda thrown up their hands and given up. But not this kid.
WHOA! I got a line here. There must be a reason.
Cranka-cranka; smoke from ears. Trial-and-error. He surmises a solution and it works.

Next example: —2) Our swingset; which is a bear to assemble. It’s heavy, and twists beams out of alignment.
-a) It has a cushion-set that can be installed either rightly or upside-down. After assembling it wrongly at first, I ain’t doin’ that again. I’m markin’ the top.
-b) There’s gotta be some way of jiggin’ this thing so it doesn’t twist out of alignment. Lessee; jig everything with C-clamps and plywood, and perhaps it won’t be as troublesome next time.
A moxie-person does that. It’s called “guile-and-cunning.”

—3) My sister in south Floridy gets misled by a newspaper article into thinking all analog TVs will need conversion to successfully process the new digital signal after the transition next February.
Immediately begins a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth among her siblings about how supposedly this only effects TVs using the antenna signal, not those that get their feed from cable or a satellite-dish.
Instead of throwing up her hands, my sister dials up the cable-company, to see if all those in her condo-building need conversion. They all have cable-connections.
Am I the least bit surprised?
NO! Like me she figures things out.
That newspaper-article had led her astray.

—4) My all-knowing, blowhard brother-in-Boston, the macho ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, observes a stray roll of duct-tape in a water-filled nuclear reactor vessel. It can’t be in there; and has to be extracted.
He has two options: -1) empty the vessel, so he can extract the errant roll; or -2) fish the roll out.
Option-1 is of course very costly.
So what does he do here? Fish the roll out, or throw up his hands?
Cranka-cranka. Whirr...... Smoke from ears.
He fashions an extracting-hook, probably from a coat-hanger, installs some wadded-up duct-tape on the end, and fishes the errant roll out.
Hellooooooo. “Why thank ya, Mr. Hughes.”

—5) In 1993, my brother-from-Boston and I videotaped an excursion railroad steam-locomotive in West Virginia. I noted recently I wanted to put that video on You-Tube. My brother suggested his son could do it.
NOTHING DOING! The Keed wants to figure out how to do it himself. No cheap-shots.

It’s called “moxie,” chillen. Guile-and-cunning.
Some have it; that old guy at the Y didn’t.

I work out in the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym.

Amazon-Lady is a YMCA-employee. We call her that because she is extremely muscle-bound.

The trip to Altoona is about 250 miles. Our gas-tank was half-empty when I started — gas is cheaper in Pennsylvania. Altoona is the location of Horseshoe Curve, by far the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is a national historic site. It was a trick used by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. (I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child.)

“My sister in south Floridy” is my sister Betty (Elizabeth). She’s second after me, 62 (I’m the oldest at 64). She lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

“My all-knowing, blowhard brother-in-Boston, the macho ad-hominem king, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say,” is “Jack Hughes.”