The Weekend Plans Post: The New Year’s Resolution Thing
The first week in December was the last week that I went to the climbing gym in 2018. There was just too much stuff to do. Too many errands to run, too many people to see, too few hours to do it in.
So I thought that I wouldn’t be climbing anything.
Except… well, the smoke alarm from heck started alarming that its battery was dying.
Most of the smoke alarms in the house are easily reachable if you’ve got a stepstool. Just bust it out, up two steps, reach up, swap out the battery, and you’re done. Easy peasy. But not the smoke alarm at the top of the upstairs. That one is *AAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL* the way up there. Like, the first time it started beeping about a year or two after we bought the house, we had *NO* idea how we were going to deal with it. Call a guy? What the heck could we possibly do? It was, seriously, 15 feet off of the floor. Maybe we should just move.
So, all the way back then, I went to Home Depot and bought a ladder. One of those 20 footers that folds into a 5 foot ladder (that is four ladders thick) and we took 10 minutes to set it up the first time and then the ordeal of climbing it and reaching up and realizing that, no, I had to go up one more step first… no, two more steps… and freak out about heights and ladders and oh-my-gosh I’m not supposed to be up this far off of the ground.
Seriously, it was terrifying. I felt like the dad on a hackneyed sitcom.
Well, in the middle of the night, the smoke alarm from heck started beeping. (Why don’t these things start beeping in the middle of the day and you can come home to them beeping? Why do they always wake you up?) So I grabbed the ladder, set it up, and thought “oh, this is like climbing at the gym on easy mode” and shimmied up the ladder, swapped out the battery, shimmied down, and, get this, IT WAS EASY.
I felt like the dad on a Lifetime movie.
So it was then that I knew that, yeah, I was definitely going to get back to the gym. But only once January had gotten going again.
Well… it’s January.
So I went back to the gym. And it’s January so not only is it full of all of the people who can’t get to their favorite corners of The Big Blue Room, it’s full of all of the people who said “My New Year’s Resolution Is To Get Back To The Gym!”
Darn them all anyway.
So… what’s your New Year’s Resolution?
(Featured Image is “New Years Resolutions (1/52)” by Chris. Used under a creative commons license.)
The route setters have been busy since we were at the gym on Tuesday. Lots of new stuff, and they finally took down that motherfishing green V4 I’ve been flailing at since before Thanksgiving (was it really up that long?). I was so grateful that it was gone that I stopped by the front desk and , with a snarky grin on my face, thanked them for taking it down.
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. I figure I subconsciously lie to myself enough already. Why add to it?Report
And with that it is revealed that I skipped going to the gym last night.
In my defense: I had a very good excuse.Report
Well, a dad in a lifetime movie would sit down all of his kids and explain how there are life-lessons in all sorts of activities and that we shouldn’t underestimate the value of diverse experiences…
Oh wait, you *are* the dad from a Lifetime movie. 🙂
Analog Fire Alarms are why engineers aren’t allowed in polite company.
In fact, old-school fire alarms are so bad, that as a dad I’ve voluntarily given up one Christmas present a year just to get a Nest alarm that tells me the battery status… and *which* alarm might need a new battery via a discreet email and/or notification on my phone. To date, not a single alarm has ever notified me that it needed a new battery
Ours are wired with back-up battery… but still, the old ones constantly needed new batteries. Wait was it the one in the hall or the one in the girl’s bedroom?… no, it was the boys room, er, maybe the laundry room… yep, definitely the laundry room. [Changes battery]. Beep.Report
That little chirp can be eliminated, I am told, by automatically swapping out batteries every Daylight Saving Time switch.
I refuse to give the government that much power over me, though. You’ll take my hour. You won’t take a second one.Report
I have a first of the month list: change the furnace filter, clean the toilet bowls no matter how clean they already look, etc. I have a first of the year list: weigh myself, replace the batteries in the alarms, etc.Report
Exactly. Designed by engineers for engineers.
The rest of us are playing whack-a-chirp and disinviting you to our parties.
Until another group of engineers figured out they could take all our money if they just *told* us where the failure is. Now they have all the cool parties, but we don’t care because the fucking fire alarm works like it should.Report
Same resolution here. Exercising. So far I’m 0 for 10 but I got a feeling about today…Report
I highly recommend the smoke detectors with the built-in ten year battery.
I don’t particularly care for the wired ones, the reason being that you have to be reaaaallly sure you put it in the right place. We have a smoke detector in the pantry, right next to the kitchen. Daughter calls it the cooking detector, which is entirely accurate. I wouldn’t have installed it there, but I’m reluctant to move it because it’s a wired-in one, that talks to the alarm in the basement, so if there’s someone sleeping downstairs they’d be awoken in the event the upstairs alarm went off. Seems important. If it was just a couple of screws in the drywall, I’d move it to the front hall in a heartbeat.
I haven’t really done new year’s resolutions in a while. It usually takes me to late January to think of one, then by June I forget what it was.
My work building recently got a gym for employees, so for the first time in my life I’ve been going to a gym and lifting weights and stuff. I feel like one of those memes with a fluffy dog in a work uniform and the text “I have no idea what I’m doing.” I tried using the cardio stuff once, but they’ve got all those machines facing a blank white wall, and I can’t really bring myself to run or walk or cycle toward a featureless wall for half an hour when there’s a perfectly good outdoors I could walk, cycle, or run through just outside the front door.Report
Agree with you on the wired ones. My house is older, and the main one for the second floor is over the stairway. I can see my self going ass over teakettle trying to reset it in the early AM.
I have an elliptical trainer at home, I have it pointing at the TV, so I tend to go longer than I used to with it, which isn’t bad. It also has a hook thingy for placing a tablet or phone on it.Report
Yeah, been there with the alarms. My last house in the bay area (horrible ’90s construction) had all three bedrooms upstairs off a hallway. So, four alarms within about five feet of each other, one doing the split second super high pitched bleep at 2 am… Trying to figure out which one it was, impossible. I pulled the batteries from all of them, replaced them in the morning.
As for new years resolutions, I never make them. The wife and I have been making changes for health reasons, but we started them before Christmas so they don’t count.
No plans for the weekend except preparing for hurricane mom, who comes next week.Report
Not-fun resolutions: exercise longer than the 40 minutes 4-5 days a week I’ve been doing, and cut waaaaaaaaay back on sugar and carbohydrates and generally the sort of foods I find taste good to me. Ideally, I would like to drop 15 pounds, but in my experience the only way that works for me is to get some kind of horrific stomach issue that hangs on for months.
I’ve not built the exercise back up as far as I’d like yet but at least I AM exercising. The food, I’m okay about it MOST of the time but something just hit me this evening and I ate ALL (FSVO all: maybe about eight or ten) the marshmallows. (Yes, I know: “Don’t have them in the house” but that’s also a bridge farther than I want to take).
A more fun, possibly, resolution: dig out some of my long stalled projects (a fiddly and complicated shawl, a quilt I am hand-quilting, a sweater I kind of gave up on when I didn’t have the concentration to work on something that complicated) and try to finish them this year.
Classes start Monday. I’m not terribly excited as I was handed an arranged class on v. short notice (as in: I found out the person who normally teaches it got “kicked upstairs” on Dec. 14 or thereabouts) and it’s tough material, some things I haven’t thought about for 20 years (stats) so I’ve spent this week reading a lot and trying to review and I still feel not-equal to the task. I hate sucking at things but then again, maybe sucking at things is how you don’t get asked to do things again….
I have also had a couple of other chores laid on me because “I don’t want to bother [other person] to do it” and sometimes I admit I wish people thought they didn’t want to bother ME. I’m probably too agreeable….
I am also just feeling worn out in general from a re-entry into “the real world”Report
I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, there’s nothing special about the year rolling over.
I have lifestyle changes (work out more, donate plasma) I’m making which overlap with the New Year, but that’s a coincidence and their worth needs to be evaluated independently of the date.
In terms of batteries I suggest a multimeter; That would give you the ability to tell good batteries from bad.Report