Plus 50%, Wednesday night at the bar, too many ticks

I have been laying off pushing exercises at the gym this week, hoping that doing so will provide some relief for the chronic shoulder pain I have had for a long time.  So far it hasn’t made a difference, my shoulders, especially the right one still feels shitty.

Anyway, instead of doing my mini-push up, dip and pull up routine before my weight work I have just been doing pull up variations.  For whatever reason I have been feeling strong with my pull ups this week.

On Monday I equaled my all time best with a 22 rep set.  On Tuesday I did 15 slow and controlled reps non-stop in a knee raise position.  Yesterday I hit another milestone, completing a pull up while weighed down with half of my body weight. (85 pounds)

Doing heavy weighted work at Retro is sort of a pain in the ass since they don’t have a dip belt which is the normal way to add weight to your reps.  Instead I have to awkwardly and uncomfortably suspend a dumbbell between my legs.

My one rep max pull was done after I already had done some additional weighted pull up sets so I was somewhat fatigued so that made it even better.  I am not quite sure why I have had a sudden elevation in my pulling power/endurance but I hope it sticks around.  A 25 rep set would be the next big target.

Last night after the running club board meeting, which was one of the shortest I can ever recall attending, several of us headed to a nearby popular hangout for some beers and food.  It felt quite foreign sitting at a bar smack dab in the middle of the week but I had a real good time just hanging out and shooting the shit.

Surprisingly I was not the subject of some grand inquisition, I thought there would be attempts to extract additional details about Ali and my separation.  Instead it didn’t come up at all which was cool.  The group I was with are some of my favorites in the club, I expect I will be hanging out with them on a more regular basis.

I couldn’t believe the platter the one guy ordered, bacon macaroni and cheese.  It had to be a 3000 calorie dish although I heard repeatedly how incredible it is.

I was there pretty late, leaving shortly before 10.

This morning I got a text from Ali, saying that she found another tick on Nicki.  This one had actually latched on and was filled with blood.

It seems that the grounds at Ali’s new place are simply infested with ticks.  In the scant couple weeks she has been there she now has discovered almost double digit ticks, some on the dogs, some on the furniture  and some on Ali.

The tick latching onto Nicki of course is worrisome.  We applied Advantix to the dogs after they moved in but this tick apparently was not deterred.  I told Ali that she really needs to push the property managers to get pest control in there to spray the grounds for ticks.

I gave Ali some tips to get the tick off like covering it in Vaseline to suffocate the sucker.  Ali was hoping the tick would just fall off but it didn’t.  I knew she would be freaked out about pulling off the tick so I offered to stop by on my way to work to yank it. Ali took me up on my offer.

It took a few minutes for the dogs to calm down enough so I could take a look at the tick which was on Nicki’s chest.  I first tried to yank it with my fingers via a paper towel but was unsuccessful.  Ali had a tweezers as well.  I was able to easily get the tick off with the tool and it looked like the tick came off intact.

I’ll be heading over to Ali’s place this weekend to help her with some more stuff.