I had thought about maybe getting an exercise bike or something because 1. it's getting cold out 2. the wifing unit could also use it and she's desperate for exercise though she'd prefer swimming but that's not in the cards with what's going on. The feedback here was that it's probably better to get bikes and a trainer. After looking at options, I concur: to get a good exercise bike is remarkably expensive because the cheap ones tend to have really annoying features, like they fall apart or are horribly loud or aren't useful for anything more than easy paces. Meanwhile, you can get bikes that are perfectly serviceable for this purpose for fairly cheap, so even if you splurge on a high quality trainer (and why not do so?), you're ahead. The downside is that there's no really good way to have two bikes in this house, I don't think. Maybe I'm just not good about thinking of the space, we could probably manage it. Especially since they wouldn't be going outside (at least for a long time), so you don't have to worry about tracking in a mess.

Relatedly: over the last 12 weeks I've averaged 33 miles/week of running. Also I don't know what the deal is but my "easy" pace just suddenly dropped ~0:30-0:40/mile in the last month. I think it's mostly the weather, but perhaps also a little improved fitness and a little improved efficiency. The heart rate monitor confirms, though, that I'm not just cheating by running harder and thinking it's easy. "Easy pace" of course is not something that you need to care about pushing, it's your easy pace, nobody cares what it is, it doesn't matter. But it does make getting the miles in take less time.

One thing I've thought about instead of indoor cycling: getting into kettlebells. downside: biking is something that certain other people in the household know how to do on their own and can do while watching TV and shit, while getting kettlebells requires getting some kind of instruction for the other people in the household and also there's no guarantee they'd be into it. while with biking, it's fairly easy: get on the bike and watch TV for half an hour instead of getting on the couch and watching TV for half an hour. under absolutely no circumstances, though, will I give advice or instruction on exercise.

still haven't voted - only one place to vote early in this county (the elections office), and though they've been open for it the last couple weeks, still getting reports that the wait is ~1-1.5 hours. Nuts to that! I mean, congrats to all those folks who care to get it taken care of early and all that, but I'm not driving somewhere to wait an hour and a half to vote and then driving home. That sucks. may even wait for election day. Having only one location in a county of 100K for early voting isn't so bad, really, when you have essentially an entire month of early voting, so I'm not complaining too much. But if they process 100 ppl per hour and have like 25 days of early voting, that's 20K early votes.

also a weird thing: they only do vote by mail if you have a valid excuse, which cuts down the number of mail voters substantially, but they also have a completely nutty rule that the mailed ballots have to be received by noon on election day. a rational thing would be postmarked by election day or maybe the day before, but specifying the date of receipt and putting it at a specific time is a really weird requirement: what if the mail delivery is a few minutes late that day???!?

things are getting nutty in politics. things blowing up in the pandemic.

had anniversary last weekend. got some food for it, it was the first time in quite a while we had gotten some Good Food (for takeout, of course). turned out to be mediocre quality, actually, but that's fine.