Yesterday's Incidental Workout

Josh, Karl, and I went hiking on Saturday and had a great time. Josh and I went to bed that night with grand plans for exercise on Sunday: a little gym time, some weight lifting, light cardio. We were going to get the week off to a good start. And then somehow, when Sunday actually rolled around, we just never... talked about it. It was as though we had both grown reluctant to exert ourselves and both decided that the best way to avoid accidentally motivating one another was to keep oddly silent about the gym all day. Our denial produced a much-needed and great amount of cleaning up, trash removal, and gear purchasing. But we didn't get to the gym.

On one of my many trips to the trash room, I saw that someone had thrown out a healthy-looking small tree. Knowing that our deck is currently barren of living plant life, and knowing that a tree of that size would cost upwards of $100, I decided that it would be a good idea to carry the tree from the trash room to our front door, up three flights of stairs, and plant it in one of the empty pots out on our deck. I thought that such an established tree might be strong enough to withstand the rigors of direct sunlight and reflected heat that seems to kill everything else we plant out there.

Let me tell you that even a small tree is still a heavy tree. Carrying that thing upstairs was weight lifting enough for upper and lower body, complete with an abdominal workout. I was temporarily thwarted in my planting efforts by the fact that both of our really enormous pots were still taken up with dead bushes, but I rallied and got the green one cleaned out. The tree actually looks quite steady and good up there. I hope that it survives.