Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

Walk On

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Nordic_Walking_im_Wald

So today I read about an exercise craze called “Nordic walking.”

This is like regular walking, only it requires the use of two sticks – you’re meant to use them like ski poles and push yourself along. Not just ordinary sticks of course, but carbon-fibre poles that retail for £70 (US $126).

Experts say that Nordic walking is better than regular walking because it forces you to move your upper body more, providing mobility, flexibility and a higher caloric burn. Oh, and because walking like a Nord is such hard work, gloves are required, to prevent blisters from handling those carbon-fibre poles.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of reading the news every day and learning that once again, I’m in the wrong business. So as of right now, I’m starting an exercise craze.

I’m going to call it “Canadian flailing.” There will be three kinds of Canadian flailing.

First, there’s beginner mode. This is where you stand in one spot, pretending that you’re experiencing a -30C Canadian winter. You must simulate the need to keep warm, so you gently bounce up and down in place, and make a patting, self-hugging motion with your arms.

Then there’s intermediate mode. This is where you must pretend you are cleaning the snow off your car with a brush. You must bend at the waist, stretch out, and make wide, sweeping motions. After each brush stroke, you must do a few minutes of the beginner mode.

Finally, there’s advanced mode. In any good Canadian winter, the ground around the car will be slick with hidden ice patches. So as you make your way around the car, you will suddenly find ice, and in order to keep your balance, you must flail your arms.

To recap then, the advanced mode of exercise will be: 1) Bounce and pat-hug, 2) Stretch and sweep, 3) Step, slide and flail, and 4) Repeat.

Clearly, to maximize the benefits of this hot, er, cold new exercise regime, you must purchase accessories. First, there is the ThermaParka Plus – a body suit weighing about 10 kg. This makes it difficult to move, forcing your muscles to work harder and burn more calories. The flail is particularly difficult in the outfit, which will help improve your balance and coordination. Of course, people new to Canadian flailing should purchase the Butt ProTech padding system for when a flail goes awry. Naturally, both accessories will be made of advanced, space age materials, which moisture wick, protect against UV rays, and emit ions to increase your, um, endorphins.

A genuine, weighted, Canadian snow brush will also be a must-have accessory. It will be hand crafted by the Inuit peoples of Baffin Island, with a handle made from only the finest polymers, and a brush constructed of durable nylon fibres. A deluxe version will be available for the truly discerning flailing enthusiast, made of moose antler and walrus whiskers.

For the truly rich, I shall create special Canada Units. For a mere $25,000 (Canadian dollars, of course), you will be able to recreate the cold of a Canadian winter in the comfort of your own home. It will come with ice and snow making machines, a turbo Newfoundland Blizzard Fan attachment and it will have three settings ranging from cold to coldest: Wimpy Minnesota Weather, Canadian July, and The Toronto Maple Leafs Win the Stanley Cup (also known as When Hell Freezes Over).

Since technique is very important, I’m starting a certification program to train flailing instructors. When you sign up for flailing classes or workshops, please ask the instructor to provide evidence that he or she is a Genuine Canadian Flailing Guru.

For those of you who live in thoroughly unhip neighbourhoods with no access to flailing studios, I’ll produce a series of flailing DVDs. Titles will include: Classic Flailing Techniques, Flailing For Life, MTV Flailing, and Flail Now! with Jim Carrey.

I mustn’t forget the Internet! I will start the Flailing Blog, and release flailing podcasts and ebooks. Obviously there must also be a flailing mailing list. I’ll try to keep the Hot Flailing Mamas Video! email spam to a minimum.

Does all this sound ridiculous? Maybe. But just remember…

This was the industry that sold you “exercise steps” for $70, even though you could have used the complete set of stairs in your home … for free.

Photo Credit: Rosa-Maria Rinkl, via Wikimedia Commons

Get Smart

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Want a brain workout? Try a sudoku. Or maybe a couple of these babies. (Photo credit Piafheleco via Wikimedia Commons)

The good folks over at the BBC thought they had worked out a way to make us all smarter. In a television show called “Get Smarter in a Week,” they had several dozen volunteers follow a regimen which included eating better food, adding more physical activity to their routine, and most importantly, doing “brain exercises.”

They even produced a booklet, available online, describing the program. Rumour has it that a major publishing company approached them to produce a print version, but the British Broadcasting Corporation turned them down. Apparently, they objected to the likely title: IQ Boosting For Dummies.

I’m generally skeptical of things that promise simple fixes and amazing results. But I have to say I applaud the BBC just for trying. If the BBC’s show was designed to make us smarter, one has to wonder about the purpose of NBC’s “Celebrity Cooking Showdown,” or worse, ABC’s “Micro-Mini: I Didn’t Really Wet My Pants.”

And as it turns out, the show had some interesting results, with participants performing up to 40 percent better on tests. The neat thing is that the “mental exercises” didn’t involve pages of math drill or tedious lectures the use of glaze in pre-common era pottery. They were simple things that you can incorporate into your daily life.

For example, the show suggests that you try doing a Sudoku puzzle from time to time, or that you should memorize phone numbers instead of putting them into speed dial. It also suggests your brain functions can be improved by doing things like taking a shower with your eyes closed, or playing charades, although I have my doubts about these two recommendations. Showering with your eyes closed is a good way to get a concussion, and if acting were good for your brain, Hollywood would be full of geniuses.

The tasks, although they sound simple, are supposed to improve creativity, spatial awareness, memory and your word and number skills. If nothing else, the show got me thinking, and I believe I’ve come up with several more brain boosting exercises.

For a creativity boost, try locking yourself out of the house. There’s nothing quite like the challenge of trying to do a home invasion without A) Setting off the house alarm which calls all three branches of the emergency services to your door and B) Setting off the nosy neighbour alarm, which calls everyone else to your door.

A good way to boost your word skills is to leave loose change in your pants pocket, and then throw the pants in the laundry. When the change jams the washing machine pump so that it overheats into a blob of molten plastic, you’ll remember swear words you didn’t know you’d heard. As a bonus, this improves your spouse’s brain: he will improve his fine motor skills repairing it, and increase his memory function by not letting you forget it.

Moving house several times in a short period of time is another good one. Indeed, us mobile night owls are probably smarter than most, because when we tiptoe around the dark house at night, we have to remember exactly which living room we’re in, and exactly where we’ve put that shin-cracking coffee table this time.

Many people would argue that being a parent is the ultimate brain improvement exercise. For example, try explaining to your two-year-old why he can’t take everyone else’s red crayons at playgroup when the other boy’s mom allowed him to swipe all the blue ones. This is especially difficult to do when you’ve just realized she’s the one who cut you off in traffic and grabbed the parking spot you wanted.

I would argue that being a parent at the same time you’re running a business is even more challenging. One minute you might be on the phone with your bank manager, discussing the Japanese exchange rate; the next, you might be discussing the various characters on Dora the Explorer with your toddler.

I like to call such mental extremes brain shifting, and I hope it’s good for me.

However, I suspect my friends would tell you that it’s not and that really I stripped my gears long ago.

 

This is for the Birds… and the Squirrels…

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Image credit: Pixabay

Somebody in my family (I won’t name names, but I’ll call him “Son”) has a real thing for encouraging and fostering wildlife.

What this means is that anyone visiting their house  feels like they’ve just walked onto the set of a National Geographic special. This is because they have no fewer than nine different feeders and about five houses, not to mention all the various bushes, flower patches, trees, gardens and other assorted habitats.

All of this would make the perfect setting for a writer, except for one problem: the wildlife is starting to get, well, pushy.

Take, for example, our little gang of squirrels. Not content with eating any one of the 3,000 pine cones that fall out of the trees on a daily basis, the little thugs have developed quite a racket.

First, there’s Rocky “Mission Impossible” The Squirrel who has learned how to strip all four cobs of corn off the ‘squirrel twirler’ in 25 minutes or less by hanging upside like a furry Tom Cruise. Then there’s Scarface Capone, last year’s embattled veteran, who figured out how to send the bird feeder in the tree crashing to the ground. His partner-in-crime is Nutsy MacPherson, who must be Scottish, because to dump out the seed, he heaves up one end of the feeder like he’s tossing a caber.

Yet another squirrel (we don’t know who, yet — because they may be rodents, but they never rat each other out), has stormed the front porch and chewed a hole in the plastic feed bin. This one mustn’t be a ‘made’ squirrel though: the little wise guy hasn’t made the hole quite big enough, and he keeps getting caught with his little squirrel butt hanging out the bin.

Their leader? Don Squirrelione, of course. I figure he must be a Soprano, because when he told me he was going to “make me an offer I couldn’t refuse” he had a really high, squeaky voice.

The squirrels don’t work alone. They’ve hired Chip “Baby Face” Munk, and his brother Thelonious to steal seeds. Pretty Boy Floyd, the oriole from Baltimore, is the lookout. The racoons, with their little black face masks, do the night burglaries. They hire the doves for mourning duty when they lose one of their own.

And the local muscle? Two hummingbirds, Bonnie and Clyde. You laugh, but ask anyone who’s ever put out hummingbird feeders — they are the single most aggressive species on the planet. I now firmly believe the birds-are-descended-from-dinosaurs theory: hummingbirds are just miniature pterodactyls.

Do I have witnesses for these crimes? Not really. The possum just plays dead. None of the birds are stool pigeons. Pepe? He’s usually drunk as a skunk, or else raising a big stink about something else. Louise is just a snake in the grass who can’t be trusted. As for the rabbits, they spend most of their time breeding like… well, you know.

Things got worse last Friday, when were visited by a deer called “Petunia” (names changed to protect the innocent). The poor deer had been orphaned; we can only assume her mother had been rubbed out by a rival squirrel gang; perhaps she knew too much. Cute as a bug’s ear this one — we were soon fawning all over her.

But we couldn’t keep her: as everyone knows, nothing runs like a deer, and there’s too much traffic nearby. So we smuggled her to a safehouse in the country, where some friends of ours prepared her for a new life. This morning, under cover of broad daylight, me and our deer friend took a truck ride to a witness protection plan centre, which uses a wildlife refuge as a front. The upside of the story? Petunia has a new friend, an even younger orphan I’ll call “Nobby” (she was all knees.) The downside? I now smell distinctly of Eau De Bambi — deer get nervous in trucks. Anyone who met me this afternoon sniffed, and said: “Oh deer me.”

So the next time anyone tells you they plan to retire to the country to write in peace and quiet, tell them from me:

Getting anything done around there is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

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How about you? Any garden antics to share? Leave a comment below.