In keeping with making myself accountable, I figured I’d let everyone know how my exercise habit is coming along. There’s good news, and perhaps inevitably, bad news. But the good news is really good, and the bad news isn’t catastrophic. So:

The Good

The good news is, I’ve stuck with the exercising. I’ve not been exercising every day, but when I started the routine, I hadn’t planned on exercising every day. My goal was every other day, which I’ve largely achieved. Why every other day? Because my primary exercise has been punching bag work, which, due to its high impact nature, you shouldn’t do every day. I have, however, been doing other stuff as well: crunches, squats, push ups, and some weight lifting.

All in all, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made. I’ve not been obsessive about checking my weight, but I know my arms are already more muscular and a bit more toned. At any rate, exercising every other day is certainly a heck of a lot better than sitting on my butt and not doing anything at all.

But, like I said, there’s bad news, too…

The Bad

The not-so-good news is that I’m not going to be able to do punching bag work for a while. No, I didn’t break a hand (though I have twisted my wrists a few times - ow). Last night while I was doing my workout, I thought I saw some small, white particles falling around the bag. A few more punches, and I was sure I saw them. I gave the bag a really hard punch and looked up at where it’s mounted - white dust was in the air. Uh oh.

Upon further inspection, I found lots of those little white particles on the floor. These turned out to be pieces of, um, plaster. Apparently, all of the stress from the bag bouncing and swinging around has been silently taking its toll on the woodwork where the bag is mounted. In other words, if I keep using the bag where it’s at, I’m probably going to destroy the woodwork, and perhaps even some of our ceiling. That doesn’t sound particularly healthy, does it? That, and the Missus probably wouldn’t appreciate the destruction of our ceiling very much…

There are stands available for punching bags, but those run around $150 (or up); doable, but they look rather large, and I’m not really sure where I’d put such a device. There are also wall mounts, but again - I’m not really sure about a location for one, and honestly, I’d be afraid of the whole thing ripping down one of our walls. As I’ve mentioned before, a carpenter I am not.

So, for the time being, no more punching bag at home. I’m a bit bummed about it, truth be told, because I’ve really been enjoying it, but I’ve run out of ideas as to where to put it, and destroying the house in the name of fitness just isn’t going to cut it.

The Ugly What Now?

What’s the game plan now? Well, I’m going to keep exercising, that’s the plan! While I can’t use my punching bag currently, I’m going to keep doing the things I mentioned above, as well as start adding some other stuff into my routine. I’m aiming to alternate between upper body and lower body workouts, so I need to figure out what exercises will allow me to “cover all of the bases”, so to speak - I don’t want to neglect any muscle groups, as that can lead to injury (or so I’ve read over and over).

I’m not, however, going to stop exercising while I plan it all out with half a dozen books and three different color coded notebooks. I could do that, and I have such things in the past, but not this time. I’ll work on the details while I keep the routine going. I refuse to get bogged down in nitpicking over every little thing right now. The primary thing is to keep myself exercising regularly.

Warning! This entry has major spoilers about the mid season finale of Battlestar Galactica, “Revelations.” If you’ve not seen it yet, well…

Alright, are all of the folks who’ve not yet seen it off the ship? Good. Moving along.

“Revelations” blew me away quite a few times. I never expected the four Cylons to be discovered half way through the final season - I figured it’d happen in the last 3 or 4 episodes. Even more shocking, though, was the arrival of the Colonial Fleet at Earth halfway through the season. I expected that event to take place in, say, the next to last episode of the show. As finding Earth has been the primary end point of the entire show, now that they’ve arrived at Earth and found it to be a smoldering nuclear waste, the question is: where to now?

It’s possible that Earth isn’t totally destroyed, but I can only think of one explanation for that, and it doesn’t hold up very well. It’s possible that the landing crew from the Galactica landed in an area that recently suffered a nuclear war, and that the rest of the planet is still teeming with life. This is a real stretch, though - you’d think that if they can plot courses through space and pick up ships on Dradis, they’d be able to do some sort of planetary scan. That, and I gotta’ say - it’d be pretty lame if the second part of the season started out with Adama going, “Oh, oops - we landed 300 miles too far this way, over here everyone, hooray!”

So, let’s assume that Earth is toast - then what? Honestly, I’ve no idea. The Colonial Fleet just heads off into space again, hoping to come across a habitable planet? That doesn’t seem right, and I’m not sure if half a season is enough to start up another story arc anyway. And where are the other Cylons?

I had expected the Colonial Fleet to arrive at Earth, followed by the arrival of the Cylons, leading to a final gigantic space battle. The inhabitants of Earth might even jump in and help take down the Cylons, and everyone lives happily after. Now, though, I’m lost as to where the show’s going. What do you all think?

(One other note: does anyone else think that Tory’s name is a nod towards the Loyalists of the American Revolution? Out of the four revealed Cylons, she’s the only one who really went back to “her people.”)

Last week, I spoke to one of my history professors who I’ve had for many classes. He was telling me about how in the class I had with him last semester, four people turned in plagiarized papers of the blatant sort - they went online, copied, and pasted.

In this professor’s syllabus, he outlines very clearly how he deals with plagiarism: you flunk the course. He attempted to flunk all four of them them, but the students got around it by simply dropping the course, as the withdrawal date had not gone by yet. He went to the dean, hoping to get some support on keeping their grades as Fs; however, the dean ended up backing the students. They were allowed to drop the course and simply get withdrawals on their audits, rather than the Fs. His line of argument was that they were still being punished, as they had to pay for the course anyway, and they’d have to retake the course.

I think such an argument is bogus. Yeah, they had to pay for the course anyway, but shouldn’t there be more punishment than that? Aren’t universities supposed to represent a bit of integrity? Allowing them to drop the course and simply get a “withdrawed” on their degree audit allows them to more or less erase the fact that they tried to cheat. Having an F on their audit wouldn’t broadcast the fact that they tried to cheat, I realize, but at least it would affect their GPA, which in turn might have effects down the road if they wanted to go to graduate school.

How do you all think academic dishonesty should be dealt with? Is receiving an F for the entire course too drastic? Perhaps an F on the assignment would be more suitable, but I think plagiarism (especially of the deliberate sort as described above) is a serious offense, and should be dealt with with a serious response. Admittedly, though, I’m biased - I work my butt off to do well in my classes, and it drives me up the wall to think that people are getting similar grades simply by cheating.

I just wanted to toss up a quick post to let you all know that I have, indeed, not fallen off the face of the earth. I’ve still been twittering, but I’ve been struggling with a bit of blogger’s block - that is, I’ve not really had much to say, or at least haven’t found the way in which I want to say it. Maybe I’m just not digging deep enough, though.

In either case, a regular, more substantive post shall be forthcoming relatively soon. I promise. If nothing else, I’m going on a day long Viking boat voyage on the Ohio river this Saturday, which should give me something interesting to write about. Hopefully it amounts to more than “damn, do I have a bad sunburn!”

In the meantime, I hope all of you stay well!

I mentioned before that I’ve become interested in using kickboxing for exercise, and that I bought a punching bag to make it more effective. When I bought it, I had planned on hanging it in our attic from a beam, which was in place for some sort of room construction (which was never completed). I followed through with this plan. Problems quickly popped up with this, though; problems which, admittedly, could have been avoided, if I’d done a little more research and put my grey matter to use.

But I didn’t. I got it home, lugged it up two flights of stairs to the attic, and hung it up as quickly as possible. Just like the overgrown kid I am - “A new toy!” Then I tried to use it and noticed the problems.

The first problem that appeared after mounting the bag in the attic and hitting it around a bit is connected to this simple fact: I’m not a carpenter. Not only am I not a carpenter, I never even took shop class in school; my knowledge of woodworking is woefully inadequate, more or less nonexistent, actually. Which, of course, would explain why I mounted an 80 pound punching bag to a beam that isn’t nearly sturdy enough to hold it, at least not for a long period of time with me knocking it around.

To make it clear, I did test the beam, or rather my wife did. She weighs a good deal more than 80 pounds, and she hung from the beam, and it didn’t give at all. We figured, okay, if it’ll hold her, it’ll hold the bag - simple math, right? Well, yes. But see, I didn’t proceed to push my wife around while she was hanging from the beam, throwing hooks at her and front kicks and all of that other stuff. She just hung there. Apparently, when you hang an 80 pound object from a chain, and then punch and kick it around, when the bag jerks down on the chain, there’s a little bit more stress than 80 pounds being applied. Who woulda’ thought it, right?

More specifically, when I hit the punching bag or, gods forbid, kicked it, bad things started to happen. The beam warped an awful lot, to the point where it went beyond “normal warping” to “hey, that might just snap in two!” It warped in both directions, both side to side and up and down. Furthermore, if I just shoved the bag and let it swing back and forth, I could hear the beam creaking at one point where it was attached to the ceiling. I could imagine the nails slowly but surely squeaking out of their holes.

I also discovered something else that could be seen as “not good.” Shortly after mounting the bag, I noticed a thick, white wire running along the top of the beam. It crossed over to another beam, and went to a light bulb. Oops. Okay, so I mounted an 80 pound bag on a weak-as-jelly beam that has a live electrical wire on it. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done…

The final blow (pun woefully intended) to the plan of having the punching bag in the attic was heat. Summer hasn’t even officially arrived yet, and our attic is already hot. Once summer arrives, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if temperatures up there hit 120 Fahrenheit. While I know that you’re supposed to get warmed up during exercise, I’m not sure a heat stroke is on the agenda for health and weight loss.

Of course, all of this led to me not using the bag much. I was afraid of it falling on me, I was afraid of getting electrocuted when it fell on me, and I was afraid that if I spent more than half an hour up there, I’d either collapse or melt, perhaps both. None of that sounded appealing. I also didn’t use it simply because it was out of the way; it being in the attic proves that the saying “out of sight, out of mind” holds at least some truth.

So, having had enough of not using it, I went on a scouting mission in our house to find a better spot. All of the ceilings were more or less out of the question: we have an old house, in which the ceilings are 1) about 9 and a half feet high and 2) covered with plaster. I didn’t really want to buy another chain setup, and I really didn’t want the bag slowly making the hole in the ceiling bigger and bigger. Success in my search came quickly, however. I’m not really sure what it’s called, but there’s a sort of portal between the large part of our bedroom, and a smaller area; that portal has some quite thick woodwork, and being part of the wall, I figured it’d be sturdy enough to hold the bag. The bag was remounted there, and my guess proved correct: solid as a rock. I’ve used it three or four times now, and haven’t seen any problems.

Hopefully, having the bag in my our bedroom will help me stick with it, as it’s obviously far more accessible now. Certainly, I’ve already used it more in the last couple of days than I had in the past few weeks, when it was in the attic. Let’s hope the expert at Duke University knows what he’s talking about when he says that our environment plays a large role in what habits we have. (I’m still unconvinced that willpower plays no role, though. Having the bag in my bedroom will probably help, but I can still walk by it without using it, unless I throw some willpower into the mix.)