Powerlifting in a blacksmith shop

[DickyPitts]

Anyone else do this? I haven’t had time to go to the gym as much as I’d like lately due to work/kids and such. I don’t have any equipment at home to lift, but I do have a lot of rocks and heavy steel tools laying around in my shop. A lot of the old powerlifting routines can be adapted to work with just about any old chunk of heavy stuff as weight, and it takes me 2 min to walk up the hill to my shop instead of half an hour to drive to the gym. I did get some funny looks doing front squats while hugging an anvil, but my neighbors all think I’m nutty anyway.

[Frosty]

Sounds like you have a system going there Richard. Please stop by again I'll be proud to help with your routine; I'll point you lift move and place. The shop's even less neat than the last time you saw it. Of course if you get it past worthwhile workout state we have a lot of tag alder that can be whacked down, cut up and packed to the burn pile. I'll attend the fire so you don't have to spoil your routine. 

Doesn't everybody in Colorado think the neighbors are nutty? 

Leaves are starting to break out here and it's supposed to rain in a day or so, it'll be green in a week. How's spring there?

Frosty The Lucky.

[DickyPitts]

Spring? Frosty we just barely have buds on the trees. I saw a mom and baby deer knitting sweaters to keep off the chill last week. 

In all seriousness, it’s beautiful up here in the high country, we had a spring snow storm on Sunday and got to watch a red tailed hawk weathering the storm on a tree branch not 30 feet from the window. I got pictures. Bugger was about a foot and a half tall! Nothing like the seagull...no I mean eagles up there where you are, but a pretty sight none the less. 

I know picking up heavy stuff sounds silly to you, but I picked up the habit in the navy and haven’t managed to kick it yet. It was easier to quit smoking.  In part, I’m doing PT to work out an imbalance, apparently I’ve been doing it wrong for a decade and my shoulders don’t like it. I have to strengthen my rotator cuff to avoid chronic pain. 

Everyone in Colorado thinks their neighbors are nutty, because we are. The only places I’ve ever been with a higher percentage of fruitcakes per capita than here are LA and Big Lake Alaska!

[Frosty]

Weather guessers keep suggesting a chance of snow showers but they're as accurate as ever. Saw a little sleety something coming down with the rain yesterday but it was a thunderhead like storm cloud. Ground is actually drying up, even the soft spots aren't. Nice wet heavy snow you have there, very picturesque with the hawk. It's a little cool here today, it's only 48 out!  

I'm really glad I didn't do myself more damage drilling, even with the injuries I'm only in old fart pain, a little arthritis in my thumbs. Rotator cuff problems sound un-good. Hope you're seeing a specialist, soft tissue problems are a special field.

Mmmmmmm. Hard to beat a good rum soaked fruit cake and Big Lake has the rep. LA?  Is Louisiana known for fruit cake? 

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[rockstar.esq]

On 4/16/2019 at 6:17 PM, DickyPitts said:

Everyone in Colorado thinks their neighbors are nutty, because we are. The only places I’ve ever been with a higher percentage of fruitcakes per capita than here are LA and Big Lake Alaska!

Having spent eighteen years here, I can say that it still seems very strange to me that so many adults born and raised in Fort Collins have valley girl accents.  

I spent a year in Northern California, and only encountered that accent a couple of times, each one was a native of San Fernando, and none were older than mid 20's.

This is the only place I've ever been where 40+ year old adults speak like they're in the movie "Clueless".  

[Frosty]

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and nobody had a Valley girl accent, Mexican would be the choice if there were A Valley Accent back then.

I've only ever visited Colorado and would've spent all my there in rock shops and walking the fossil beds. Did you know some of the rail road cuts were in fossilized sand dunes? They're actually quite pretty though the Sundance formations are far more vibrant.  I discovered the old boys at the local cafe's coffee club were pretty "regular" guys unlike . . . some of my Sister's friends and acquaintances. 

Still not really strange,  you can find as or more weird here. . . Say, Homer Ak. 

Richard: Did you say you had to QUIT smoking!? YOU!?  Remember giving me crap when I lit up?  Thank you, wish I could've returned the favor. It's too easy to get hooked and WAY too hard to kick. Good for you. Don't give it ONE ore chance, it'll be a do over.

Frosty The Lucky.

[DickyPitts]

Yep Jerry, it’s been about four or five years now since I gave up nicotine, picked up that habit around the same time I started drinking beer and hanging around women with less than perfect reputations. Smoked for 7 years or so in the Navy and after. I quit a year after I met my wife. I won’t touch it now, don’t even want to anymore. 

Funny you should mention the sand dunes, I spent a lot of time studying exactly those in reservoir engineering classes for my petroleum engineering degree. They’re really interesting when you see them in central to eastern Utah too.  Those dunes are classic reservoir rock and are very useful for showing things like anisotropic behavior, gradational traps, and even the mineralization process that occurs with post deposition fluid movements. Those are key concepts even in the unconventional reservoirs we spend most of our time in now.

[Frosty]

That's how I started smoking, something to do while drinking beer, talking with women in a bar. I smoked for more than 20 years, spent probably 10+ trying to quit. The tree turned the addiction off like a switch, I highly discommend that stop smoking plan though. I had it knocked down to a couple smokes a day by then but it was hard going, I was always thinking I'd forgotten something so carried my cell phone or something in a breast pocket. 

Vaping should be illegal, it's nothing more than a fast way to addict folks to nicotine just like nicotine patches just keep you addicted so you can't quit. The tobacco industry is as close to outright evil a thing as I've ever seen.

Sorry about that, end rant. If you're  tobacco farmer, grow something that doesn't kill the consumer. I'd say, "no offense intended" but I don't care.

I would've loved to get off the train and take a good long look at the dune formations. Permeable and impermeable capping formations were a factor when designing bridge foundations so I've never needed an explanation regarding well drilling. I was supposed to run the drill not actually know geology but the geologists depended on drill reaction information and I literally had my hands on the drill so I was one of their sensors. 

I was steeped in geology and mineralogy since before I learned to speak, Dad was a rock hound, one of the founders of the Boeing rock club in fact. It was a main topic of conversation on vacation road trips and often where we were going on vacation. The happy (rock) hunting grounds was the norm. Dad could've earned degrees in geology and mineralogy if he'd graduated high school, the depression said go to work before he completed the 8th. grade though. 

He had to grapple with plate tectonics, it wasn't the working theory when he was actively reading and rock hounding he researched and studied like it was finals week any time he wanted to learn something. I'm a LOT more relaxed about learning, I was a lousy student. It was a Kodak moment period getting to "teach" him some geology, I'd even brought a couple good text books and gifted them to him. It was great to see his expression when things he'd questioned about the old (I can't think of the term) theory that mountains wear down, fill low lands which push the mountains higher. concept. Plate tectonics make sense and he got it immediately with a little explanation of how it works. 

Did you and I ever go to the coal mines?

I know just enough to look things up when I need details. 

Jer

[ThomasPowers]

Are you think of Isostasy?  I was wowed when the survey of India was off closing the final triangle and someone came up with the idea that the Himalayas had attracted the plumb bob  causing the issue---Then someone calculated the weight of the Himalayas and found that the error should have been greater and so the theory of Isostasy was developed to explain why they were lighter than they should be...   (Geology course in the late 1970's...)

[Frosty]

5 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

Are you think of Isostasy?

Maybe but it's not ringing the bell. Superposition maybe? but that isn't ringing a bell either. It was a clumsy way of explaining seashell fossils in the Himalayas, pre-Victorian science maybe?

Frosty The Lucky.