What the heck was I thinking this morning? We swimmers had the special treat of getting a scheduled master's workout on Labor Day. Gold Medal Olympic butterflies, Tommy Hannan, showed up to coach us and the lanes were packed with enthusiastic swimmers. For some reason that I have no recollection of really buying into the swimmers in my lane, all younger than me by at least a decade, decided that I needed to lead the I.M. sets. For some insane reason, surely having to do with excess ego and minimal common sense, I decided to got for it and lead this train of swimmers through that part of the set. The I.M.s seemed to go on forever. (For the non-swimmers out in VSL land the I.M. means "individual medley" and consists of equally dividing the distance required by all four of the competitive strokes. For example; if we were doing sets of 200's we'd do two lengths of butterfly, two lengths of backstroke, two of breast stroke and two of freestyle). We pounded through three or four rotations of I.M. sets, followed it up with some four 125 yard repeats, followed by six 100 yard repeats, followed by ten 50 yard repeats (sprinting each of the 50's all out). I successfully kept the younger, stronger piranhas I swim with at bay for the mixed stroke salad but by the time I got home at 10:15 this morning I was shot. I ate like a pig and settled in on the couch for a little nap. Four or five thousand yards of fast, hard swimming sucks the calories right out of a person. I've been grazing since I got up from that nap.....
But that rarely stops me from grabbing a camera in my free time and heading out for a walk. My camera of choice for casual walks these days? It would have to be the Sony A7ii, but with a twist.
Last time I took the A7ii out I didn't take a spare battery and only made cursory check of the battery already in the camera. The gauge told me 65% remaining and I presumed that would work for my short jaunt. But then I got side-tracked. I found more stuff that needed exploring. I found new people to talk to and by the time I was heading home, in the final stretch of my walk, I saw a great image, pulled the camera to my face and had the battery crap out entirely. This made me less than happy.
My fault, of course, for not practicing safe battery protocols. Four hours of
