…you just go faster”
–Greg LeMond, on cycling.
“When it gets easier, you have to do more?!”
–me, on weight training
So yeah, I started lifting recently because I represent the double-threat of having the typical upper body strength of both a cyclist and a woman. Which is to say that I have noodly little chicken-girl arms. No damn use at all, these wings of mine, so I figured that I ought to do something about that.
Plus, I was inspired by a friend of mine who does a crap-ton of Yoga and has the prettiest arms I’ve ever seen anywhere. Honestly, I’d love to have arms that looked half as good as Jen’s do, so I’m hoping that my basement sessions with the free-weights will pretty-up my arms a little while also making it easier for me to sling milk-jugs at work.
As yet another bonus to my new-found fitness regimen, I’m finding that I get my laundry done a whole lot more efficiently, and I’ll tell you why and how.
My washing machine is slowly and annoyingly dying. It started getting glitchy about switching cycles nearly a year ago, and finally gave up the ghost about three months ago.
For those of you new to the chronicles of Meetzorp, I was unemployed for about half a year, so the machine crapped out halfway through my span of joblessness. So replacing it was out of the cards, and Joel learned that the part needed to fix it cost as much as, if not more than, another used washer, so…
Whenever we need to do laundry, whoever’s doing the wash has to keep running down to the basement and switch the machine’s cycles manually.
I’m a really crap multitasker, so I’ll start a load of laundry and forget about it.
3 hours later, and the machine’s still churning away at the wash cycle. Or spin, spin, spin, spin, spinning its little metal guts out. I’m amazed that it hasn’t broken the rest of the way, really.
But with the advent of me taking up weight training, I find myself spending more quality time in the basement, and I have discovered a set of things I can multitask at brilliantly.
Weightlifting and laundry!
It turns out that one full circuit is about half a cycle of wash. So I start the wash, do two circuits, switch the cycle, do my third cycle, switch it to rinse, go upstairs, have a cup of tea, go back down, switch it to spin, go back upstairs, do the dishes, go back down, bung it in the dryer. It times out almost perfectly!
And since I lift every other day (it’s working out to be Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, most generally, I can do two-three loads a week & stay ahead of the game.
I don’t see myself ever joining a gym; I’d never get the laundry done so efficiently.
Try setting a kitchen timer to remind you about the laundry. That works for me.
I have a spare washer and dryer. . .
Sis, I am going to keep that in mind! I’ll warn Joel that we may be toting
a washer back from your house. What would you want for it?