What do may flowers bring?...Pilgrims!

Yesterday was the greatest day in recent human history. After three years in darkness, suffering through television garbage like that show with Wanda Sykes, Family Guy premiered with a whole new season of shows! It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in years, and the GF will testify that there were several moments where I was laughing so hard I was in tears (five words: “And knowing is half the battle”). It was awesome. They started off the show with a little short where they rattled off all the crap titles that Fox has started and cancelled in the three years that FG has been off the air. It was a long list, and must have taken then at least 2-3 minutes to get through them all. While most of the list was utter drivel, (e.g. the Wanda Sykes show…aside: who on earth finds that woman funny? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) there were some shows I remember liking very much (“Andy Richter Controls the Universe” and “Undeclared”). I blame Fox for killing them off through bad scheduling, just like they’re currently doing with “Arrested Development”.

Other than that, the rest of the weekend was pretty quiet (I mean what wouldn’t pale by comparison?). I spent an hour or so yesterday morning pulling weeds in the backyard. Or, at least I was pulling everything that I could easily identify as a weed. See, whereas both my parents and my little brother have been gifted with some sort of innate gardener gene, I received some recessive gene that means I kill plants faster than a tidal wave of Roundup. Because of this, my parents learned that there was no point to having me help in the garden when I was growing up. So, other than dandelions and thistles (which are ubiquitous) I’m not really sure what’s a weed and what’s supposed to be back there. It doesn’t help that the developer of my building planted “perennials” back there where some of them are probably weeds to begin with. So I pulled all the dandelions and thistles, and I’ve got my eye on a couple other suspicious-looking characters who are showing weed-like behaviors (bullying the ivy, picking fights with the violets, stealing the fern’s lunch money, etc). I was a little surprised that the weeding itself took almost an hour. And it seemed longer.

Also yesterday, I finally had my “unfitness assessment” at the gym (remember, the one I joined about a month ago?). Turns out that I’m not in as horrible shape as I thought I was. My body fat is above average for my age, but my aerobic conditioning is in the 80th percentile. I’m still horrifically inflexible though, so I’ll be doing lots of stretching, but that was really not that much of a surprise. Still, I wonder how bad I would’ve scored had I not already been hitting the gym for a month. In a way, I’m glad it took this long.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Did they make you do pull ups and the shuttle run?
grrrbear said…
Nope. The assessment actually was quite enlightening in that none of the fitness activities I learned in gym class turns out to apply when one is assessed. No pull-ups, no shuttle runs, no burpees, no dodge ball, no freeze tag, no kickball, and most surprising - no square dancing. This has taught me that my entire gym class education would be completely worthless for standardized testing, because the test would apparently consist of nothing but riding an exercise bike in a small, windowless room.
JYates said…
As far as your gardening "adventure", you should just do what I do, run them over with the mower or trimmer. Flowers, weeds, doesn't matter. Sometimes I can even do this with my wife's permission.