How Not to Die from Sitting

I recently read this article about how sitting all day is really bad for you. It listed the usual reasons like standing burns more calories, muscle metabolism changes, and you are at increased risk for various cancers. To top it all off, each hour of sitting results in a loss of 21.8 minutes from your life expectancy. Seeing as how I've been sitting most of my life, I probably have minutes to live.

After crunching some numbers, it's fair to assume that I've lost over four years of my life expectancy. I knew I had to put a stop to it. Not only that, I had to figure out how to get those four years back before it was too late. So I decided to alter my habits and keep a diary to hold myself accountable:

Friday July 11

4:00 p.m. Let's get started!

4:01 p.m. Since I've already been sitting here for the last six hours, we'll just wait and start the diary tomorrow.

Saturday July 12

11:00 a.m. Stood in my office thinking about my next blog post.

11:20 a.m. Sat down to write blog post then realized since it takes about an hour to write one, I'm sacrificing 22 minutes of my life for my dear readers. I hope you appreciate it, all five of you.

11:25 a.m. Decide to take a walk to offset my sitting problem. Walk to refrigerator and pour myself a glass of wine. Maybe alcohol isn't the best choice for my new lifestyle, but I believe it greatly improves my mental outlook so that offsets any bad effects from sitting.

11:26 a.m. Try to stand and type my blog. I do not have a standing desk. Ouch, there goes my back. I take a sip of wine.

11:30 a.m. A brilliant idea! Some exercise should get me some time back on the lifetime clock. I get on a stationary bike and start pedaling. But now there's a new problem: although I am exercising, I'm still sitting down, so the two acts just cancel each other out. I've got it! I take my laptop and get back on bike. Although I'm not gaining any time, I'm not wasting 22 minutes of life writing this blog. 

11:32 a.m. Sweat starts dripping onto my laptop. I'm now worried about getting eletrocuted. I put laptop back on my desk and get back on bike.

11:34 a.m. This is boring. I get my glass of wine and sip wine while riding stationary bike.

11:45 a.m. Lunch time! Prepare a big healthy salad of spinach and spring mix. Pour half a bottle of bleu cheese dressing on it.

11:57 a.m. Maybe that salad wasn't so big as I'm still hungry. I fix a large plate of bacon (it's okay, I'm on a low carb diet and can eat all the bacon I want). 

12:15 p.m. I happen to glance in the pantry to see a bag of Fritos. I grab a handful, but I eat them while standing. Unfortunately, you can't have just a handful of Fritos. I take the entire bag out. But I walk around the block while eating the bag. I'm starting to get the hang of this.

12:45 p.m. Feeling a little sleepy. Decide to take a nap. That article said nothing bad about laying down or sleeping.

2:30 p.m. St. Pauli Girl hands me a grocery list. The store is too far away to walk to but I really hate the thought of sitting while driving to the store. While driving, I open the window and poke my head outside the window. I believe that trying to keep my head still against the speed of the car offsets the sitting in the seat. I stop at a traffic light with my head still outside the window. A dog in the car next to me pokes his head out and barks at me. I bark back.

2:55 p.m. A genius move! I have the checkout kid bag my groceries in plastic so I can strap them all onto my arms. I load up all twelve bags on my arm and with my free hand pick up the 12 pack of pop. The cashier asks if I'm sure I don't need a carryout. "No," I grimace. I get to the car and realize I have to drop all of the bags to the ground to get the keys out of my pocket. I don't care; this exercise has probably added a solid 90 seconds to my life expectancy.

3:30 p.m. Decide to watch some golf on tv but while standing of course. To make it more interesting, I imitate all of the players' swings as they happen. I've never played so well in my life.

5:35 p.m. Happy hour! St. Pauli Girl and I sit on the patio and discuss the day's events over a glass of wine. I want to stand but my heels are actually killing me. I come up with an idea:

"Let's arm wrestle!" I challenge her.

"What?"

"Yeah, we're killing ourselves by sitting here. So let's get some exercise. I'll even go left handed!"

"You're stupid."

"You'd be stupid not to play! I'm going left-handed plus I'm pretty sore from golfing."

"Why don't you be useful, and cook dinner," she finally said.

6:15 p.m. That was a great idea; I can easily man the grill while standing. We have three grills, so I choose the manly Weber charcoal grill. I light the fire and stand next to the grill as it burns down.

6:45 p.m. I throw some hamburgers on the hot grill. I lean down and inhale deeply that wonderful charcoal hamburger cooking aroma. Then I slap myself on the head. I sit down next to St. Pauli Girl.

"I don't know. I just can't win," I say.

"What's the matter?"

"Charcoal has carcinogens. That breath probably cost me four seconds of life expectancy."

We sit quietly for a minute before St. Pauli Girl refills our wine glasses. She holds her glass out to me, "Here's to life."

"Every single day of it," I reply with a smile. Clink.

Baby Kitty, R.I.P.

Baby Kitty passed away yesterday. It was neither unexpected nor tragic by any means; she had lived a long, full life.

Baby Kitty may seem like an odd name for a fifteen-year-old cat, but we inherited her by odd circumstances. She came from our previous cat Socks's final litter that Socks squeezed out just before we could get her fixed. Baby Kitty was wild, the only wild one of the six in the litter, and so was very shy around people. We gave away all of the kittens except for her only because we simply could not catch her. By the time we could catch her, we'd already had her for several months. She had long since passed the adorable kitten stage and so, well, I guess we were stuck with each other. But because we were ever hopeful in her early days that we would eventually find a home for her, we never officially picked out a name. She was simply The Baby Kitty by default, and the "The" fell off after a while.

I was the first to eventually earn her trust. By sitting in the garage for several hours a day over a few weeks' time, I waited for her to approach me. After a while I could pet her, and finally I could carry her with only mild complaints and a few scratches. But she never did totally lose her wildness; Baby Kitty would only let us pet her on her terms: we had to be sitting down, and once we started petting her, if we stopped, she would bite us.

Baby Kitty lived a good cat life, chasing tennis balls, birds, and squirrels, and she even bonded with our dog BooBoo when we trained him about a decade ago to do Cat Round-up at bedtime. Of all our cats, she was the most elusive, but BooBoo has a good nose and always managed to find her hiding spot.

Once, Baby Kitty pulled off a stunning feat when she jumped from a sitting position to about the five-foot mark as an escaped parakeet swooped across the room. As much as we mourned the unexpected and unfortunate passing of Sheila, we had to marvel at the super-cat-hero leap executed by the quiet and shy Baby Kitty.

She put up with us through five moves but finally let us know that enough was enough by refusing to come into our current house for the first four months. She spent the entire winter in the backyard. Within the past month, we noticed she had gotten quite thin, and in the past week had become mostly bones. Then she stopped eating completely, and her breathing worsened. As her health went downhill, we debated what to do.

I remember ten years ago when we lived in a lakeside neighborhood surrounded by trees and wildlife, the community took rabies very seriously, and once a year a local veterinarian would offer rabies shots at the community center. We took our pets down there along with Baby Kitty in a pet carrier. When I brought her up to the veterinarian, she refused to come out. We shook the carrier upside down but she managed to hang on. Both the vet and I tried to reach in to grab her, but she came at us swiping razor-claws and hissing and biting.

Finally, the veterinarian had me lock him in the car with the pet carrier. He bravely reached in, grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, pulled her out, shot her up, then thrust her back in the carrier, all in about ten seconds. I think he suffered a few scratches; the next year, his rabies clinic was noticeably absent on the community calendar.

So when we discussed our options as her health declined, the thought of putting her in a carrier and taking her to a place she feared and hated just didn't appeal to us. I could imagine her getting chased around the examination room until three or four of us cornered her so she could get her final shot. She would probably have narrowed her green eyes at us as if to say, “I knew it! I always knew you would do this to me in the end!”

When we came home the other night, her last night, she walked around shakily and somewhat delirious with ragged, heavy breathing. We tried to feed her bits of chicken by hand, give her water with a teaspoon, but she demurred. St. Pauli Girl held her in her lap for awhile before passing her over to me. I held her and thought her breathing was a little easier. She seemed almost normal for those few moments, albeit very skinny. She sat in my lap for an hour then stood up, ready to leave just like she always did. I tried to hold on to her, but she had other plans. I put her on the ground, and she made her way to a cool hiding place in the shed where she spent the night. She passed away the next morning not long after sunrise, as if she had purposely waited for us to wake up and come say goodbye.

I'm not going to say that she had a peaceful, painless death. But spending her last few minutes in terror at a place she hated wouldn't have necessarily been more peaceful. In the end, I think the three of us agreed it was the right way to go. We got to spend some quality time with her, and she got to go out on her own, in her own home.

So the death of a fifteen-year-old cat isn't really that sad; it's the stress, the agony of those final choices that you have to face. And really, that's mostly a just a harsh reminder of similar decisions we will someday have to make with our human loved ones.