In the late Summer of 2004, we moved to the suburbs; immediately Kathy signed us all up with a family membership to the local YMCA. I knew right away that we should have stayed in the country.

“It’ll be great,” Kathy enthused. “We’ll meet you at the Y on your way home from work, and we can all exercise as a family. What a good example to the children, to see us both taking our physical fitness so seriously.”

Who wouldn’t want to run, with such good company?

She painted a rosy picture. Healthy, smiling children and their thin (but muscular) parents, running effortlessly in single-file around the brightly-lit indoor track, or smoothly operating the gleaming exercise machines, to the envy and admiration of dozens of onlookers. Tired but laughing, we would drive home together, united as a family in this common goal.

After stalling for some months, I finally agreed to actually go to the YMCA and get my membership card. Inside, the rank smell of sweating bodies and the sensation of universal despair struck me like a blow to the face. Nervously, I let them take my picture, and immediately fled, before I was inadvertently sucked into this gloomy vortex of fitness. My worst fears were confirmed: joining the Y was like joining the Army, or at least it included many of the same odors.

Each week, my children go to the YMCA for Homeschool Physical Education, a program offered free to members, and the major reason we joined. They have taken classes in gymnastics, swimming, and a variety of sports and physical activities. Most of the time they really enjoy it, although they tend to dread the annual focus on Presidential Fitness testing. Cleverly remembering lessons from my Army days, I held aloof from such things, although I did unbend enough to drop the kids off at the Y when Kathy was at Bible Study Fellowship.

After more than eighteen months, Kathy convinced me to play Wally-Ball with the family after work, and I actually darkened the door of the YMCA for several weeks, trying to teach my children (and a few passing urchins) how to play this interesting game. It didn’t take, though, and I soon happily returned to my sedentary ways.

Today was a big day. After more than three long years of YMCA membership and not-so-subtle hints on the part of my wife, I finally went to the Y and actually used an exercise machine. Sadly, the paparazzi were not permitted inside, and there were no pictures taken of this momentous event. You’ll have to take my word for the fact that I logged a good 35 minutes in on a fiendish device my wife calls an ‘elliptical’.

We did, however, capture David and Sarah’s running-while-holding-hands act.

A man of my years and girth tends to take a philosophical view of life; hopefully this will prove to have been a passing phase, like many before it. As Mr. Bennett said in Pride and Prejudice, “Don’t worry, it will pass more quickly than it ought.”

Tim
Project 366, Day 31

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This morning dawned clear and cold, unusual for Washington, even in January. We’re having a cold snap — that is, it sometimes falls below freezing. I know, this is nothing compared to weather in the Midwest or Northeast, but it feels cold to us. Many people don’t have any kind of a jacket other than a raincoat, and hardly know what to do when it gets this cold. Personally, I wear a fleece sweatshirt.

One of the interesting things about our house is that it has a view of Mount Rainier. It wasn’t something that was really advertised when we bought it, but it is, after all, a mountain view. It is even more breathtaking from Daniel’s window, but you’ll have to take my word for it. Here it is:

Oh, for those who couldn’t find it in that last shot, here it is a little closer. Now if I could only get Bob to bulldoze his house …

Bob always was rude about blocking my view.

Have you ever noticed that the moon changes size? I’ve seen days when the moon seems about to crash into the earth, and then there are days when the moon seems nowhere to be found. This morning, the moon was out, but hardly more than a big planet … or so it seemed.

Look at all that big sky, and what a pathetic moon — almost full, too!

We had the opportunity to paint this evening — our church’s toddler and preschool rooms badly need renovation. A bunch of folks from our small group Bible study painted with us, but since I don’t have permission to post their pictures, I’ll just show pictures of my own children and pretend we did all the work.

David, armed and dangerous

“We were supposed to paint the radiators, right?”

Come to think of it, based on the number of spots on the carpet and the quality of the painting, perhaps we’d be better off to implicate others.

“Um, David, I think you missed a spot.

Tim
Project 366, Day 25

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After more than a year of begging and pleading on my part, Rachel finally finished painting a sign for our front door. I had commissioned Joshua to make me a wood-burnt version, but something went wrong and he subcontracted to his sister on the job. The project languished, partly because I had been so foolish as to pay in advance.

Now that we live in the suburbs, we get a steady stream of door-to-door vendors, peddling everything from steaks to oil changes. Some are clean-cut, well-dressed, while others appear a little less reputable. Most of them visit at dinner time, but we’ve had a few ring the bell after 9 pm. My least-favorite is the kind who play the ‘poor kid from the ghetto’ card, trying to persuade me to buy some worthless merchandise ‘to give a disadvantaged entrepreneur a chance’. I guess the implication is that if I don’t buy anything from the young man, he’ll be forced to embark on a life of crime and it will be all my fault. For some reason, this doesn’t bring out my compassionate side.

Will this protect me from door-to-door vendors? Only time will tell …

When Kathy and I were first married, we attended a church in Connecticut about 30 minutes away from our home, and soon became close with ten or twelve young couples from our Sunday School class. One day we got a call: “I’m a friend of Paul and Donna, and they gave me your name … ”

As it turned out, the caller was an insurance agent, and had somewhat overstated his relationship with Paul and Donna. He somehow wangled an evening invitation out of me and arrived later that week at the door of our cozy little apartment on the third floor. He stayed for more than two and a half hours, alternately flattering and shaming us, using every trick to separate us from our money. At first I was torn between my usual sales resistance and a desire to treat the insurance agent as a guest in my home. Eventually, I became angry enough to get rid of him, but not before he tried (and almost succeeded) to get a list of names from us, apparently as a condition of his departure.

From that day forward, we made a simple rule: no sales people in our home. If someone wants to sell us something, then they’ll just have to wait until we visit their storefront or website. If they don’t have a storefront (which raises an interesting question: Why don’t they have a fixed place of business?), then they will have to propose a meeting place, and persuade us that their product is worth the effort for us to join them there.

If the first one doesn’t work, I’ll fall back to this sign.

It was a great rule, and we even extended it to sales and fund-raising calls: “Sorry, we won’t pledge anything over the phone. Please feel free to mail me information about your worthy cause.” We found that the telemarketers, especially pledge-drive callers, were not typically paid for mail referrals, and would quickly lose interest.

When we moved out to the country, even the Schwan’s driver only came to our house every two weeks. Nestled in the forest at the bottom of a 1/4-mile gravel driveway, 45 minutes from the nearest supermarket, we didn’t get a lot of incidental traffic. But now that we live in the suburbs again, it is another story altogether.

A couple of weeks ago, a man came by, wanting to sell me coupons good for oil changes at a local service station. He was a very smooth talker, and I almost bought the coupons, which seemed to be a good deal at the time. The only problem was that: (a) he insisted on payment up-front, (b) he was not actually affiliated with the service station (apart from his desire to sell their services), and (c) the service station was not open at the time he was selling. I asked him, “What’s to stop you from selling these coupons un-beknownst to the mechanic, and then skipping town with the money?” He countered with a thick stack of customers on my street, many of whom (he claimed) had done business with the service station before and had been well-satisfied. I guess the logic was, if my neighbors are dumb, I should be dumb, too. Who am I to set myself higher than my neighbors?

Kathy took down the outside Christmas lights, but they didn’t quite make it inside …

I offered to pay the mechanic later, after I got my oil changed, but he wasn’t interested in that kind of an arrangement. I suggested he sell my name to the mechanic for some kind of referral bonus, but that didn’t seem to be what he was looking for, either. I must have argued with this very persuasive man for at least 15 minutes, standing on my porch. As I came back inside, I growled, “Where’s my No Soliciting sign, Rachel?” Now that the sign is finally affixed to the front of my house, I hope the stream of pedestrian vendors will dry up.

How ’bout you? Do you have trouble with sales people coming to the door? Or, as in Secondhand Lions, are they a source of entertainment for you?

The neighbor boy was puzzled: “Why don’t you want anyone to come to your house anymore?” he asked my son Daniel. I can see I’ll be spending a lot of time on my front porch explaining what the word ‘soliciting’ means, and how it relates to the words ‘No’ and ‘Please’.

Trivia question for the day: What do these items have in common?

Tim
Project 366, Day 17

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