Tag: home gym

Flying high

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The gym is done. And it works. Final touches this morning, like altering the tension on the cables and checking all the connections, but it’s finished and it’s all good.

Now, I just have to decide what’s best to do with all the leftover nuts and bolts that we have. Do you save them, just in case you’ve missed something (although it is all completely functional, so how could I have done?) or do you sell them on the pisspoor local version of eBay?

I actually started using the unit after I had done given it the once over, but next door are relining their swimming pool and the chemical fumes are quite something. The gorgeous combination of polyester resins and methyl ethyl ketone peroxide is sending the neighbourhood as high as the proverbial kite.
There have already been several messages on the local WhatsApp group from residents claiming to have seen fairies, and at least two of them have taken up yogic flying (the residents, not the fairies).

I’m just marveling at all the colours. So many colours.

Later, more gym and some more Champions League football.
I don’t think there could be any more colours.

Flatpack avoidance

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Not flatpackED avoidance, although wouldn’t that be a useful thing to have? A couple of screws (careful now) and a bit of banging (oi!) and you wouldn’t have to do anything like assembling a Chinese-made (but SA-imported) flat pack home gym.

Because that’s what I’m going to be trying to do this week month year.

Bought because I want to get back into my pre-Covid shape (or better) and the actual public gym is expensive and will be chockful of every subsequent Covid variant for the next few years. Let’s face it, it was never the most hygienic of environments, but that was entirely manageable with just your normal, run-of-the-mill, endemic pathogens around the place. Lob in a novel, airborne virus and it’s just not as much fun. With this fancy new home gym, we can get fit, toned and muscular without risking Covid, the common cold or athlete’s foot.

If… I can build it.

Because, as I mentioned yesterday, I don’t mind flat packs. They are designed with nerdy, methodical, practical, analytical people like me in mind. I would happily set up a business going to people’s house and building their flat pack furniture for them. It’s relaxing, even possibly cathartic: creating function and order where once there was chaos.

But this one is nasty:

It’s insanely complicated: the diagram above is far from the whole thing, there is very limited assistance from the instruction booklet, there are occasional parts missing (nothing crucial so far), and there are some bits which… um… “could have been manufactured with a little more care”.

Diplomacy can like to be my middle name.

And so the beagle has been bathed, that leaking irrigation pipe has been fixed, the dishwasher unpacked and repacked, payments have been made, a load of washing done, and a blog post (almost) written.
I’m thinking of making dinner, even though it’s only 9:30am. Anything to avoid going back out there and tackling… that. Perversely, procrastination is actually a great way of getting jobs done.

Well, some of them.

Look, I will prevail, but by the time I do, I might well have had enough heartbeats for the whole year, and therefore not need any more exercise anyway.