The other day we put in about a 2.5 mile walk on the Clear Creek Trail in Coralville. We haven’t been there in a long while. It gets really quiet along the wooded trail. Sometimes even the birds don’t sing.
It was pretty quiet except for some strange knocking noises. You know, Sena has taken the lead in spotting Bigfoot in our walks in three parks, counting our latest trek. She saw Bigfoot in Hickory Hill Park, Terry Trueblood Recreation Area, and now again on the Clear Creek Trail.
She’s a Bigfoot hunter, there’s no doubt. This Bigfoot we saw a couple days ago was different. It obviously was interested in helping the Hawkeye football team with their offense. It eats plant-based cheese for some reason. I always thought it preferred beef jerky.
OK, today another drain tile lid flip. We made a decision yesterday on this. We’re going to have the installers return and screw down all seven lids. Sure, it’ll mean I have to unscrew them to clear out the debris. Whatever.
The guy we called said this is happening because of an over-eager squirrel. That may be the case.
Let’s see if squirrels carry screwdrivers.
I have searched the internet for a solution to this problem. All I ever find are links to my blog posts about it.
We just got our upstairs doors picked up by the painters yesterday. They took all the doors off the hinges and taped numbers on them to keep track. They’ll probably finish them and return them by the end of the week. Two guys removed the doors and one of them had a dad joke for me:
“A man was driving along the motorway when he noticed a chicken running alongside his car. He was amazed to see the chicken keeping up with him, as he was doing 60 mph. He accelerated to 70, and the chicken stayed right next to him. He sped up to 75 mph, but the chicken overtook him.
Then the man noticed that the chicken had three legs. So, he followed the chicken, speeding all the way, and ended up at a farm. He got out of his car and saw that all the chickens on the farm had three legs.
When he spotted the farmer he asked him, “Where did you get these chickens?”
The farmer replied “Well, everybody likes chicken legs, so I bred a three-legged bird. I’m going to be a millionaire.”
The man was impressed and asked him how they tasted. The farmer said, “Don’t know, I haven’t caught one yet.”
Now, he didn’t tell it exactly that way, but it was just as funny. It was the first time I heard the 3-legged chicken story. Of course, as with any sort of hairy dog (hairy chicken?) story, there are different versions of it. I looked this up on the internet and Ronald Reagan told it. It was posted 12 years ago, has 2 million views, 32,000 likes, and about 1800 comments.
I wonder if that painter will tell me the 3-legged pig joke when he comes back?
We found out we missed the wheat paste murals posted on various buildings in Coralville this past summer. It’s the 150th anniversary of the city of Coralville in Iowa this year. You can find out more about it on the Coralville Public Library web site.
We drove around and found some of the murals were still up. They generally last about 2-3 months. There were murals on West Music and the Coralville Recreation Center, but they were gone.
In our YouTube, the murals we found are in order of appearance on the video:
The ice block mural is on Randy’s Flooring on 2nd Street. It’s a picture of the Jacob C. Hotz Ice Company Employees circa 1900s-1910s. They’re on the Iowa River. Workers were paid 10 cents an hour. Talk about your minimum wage.
The mural of 3 ladies who we don’t know anything about and the “Watch It Grow” image are on the Coralville Public Library in the 5th St. Plaza.
The long timeline mural is on the Coralville Community Food Pantry on 13th Avenue.
The Blue Top Motel mural is on Chong’s Supermarket on 2nd Street. According to the Coralville Public Library, the Blue Top motor court was built in the 1940s. No mention whether lodgers were abducted by extraterrestrials.
The mural of two fishermen with the two huge flathead catfish as big as a man’s leg they landed in the 1920s in the Iowa River is on the Iowa River Power Restaurant on 1st Avenue. This is my personal favorite. All I ever caught in my wasted childhood were bullhead as big as my fist.
You can see fishline and bobbers floating in the Iowa River. You can even see a handsome sculpture of a dragonfly sitting on a bobber on one side of the river. We saw one guy with at least three fishing poles rushing around to different spots next to the Iowa River Power Restaurant. I think he was hoping to land a big flathead—but all we saw him catch was a snag.
Now there are 4 tile drain lids that have been flipped. A couple of others were flipped last night. Sena put them back on and put a rock on one of them. The two others with rocks on top of them were undisturbed.
Four of the seven lids have now been flipped this season. We still don’t know what causes this. I suspect it’s an extraterrestrial playing a prank on us.
Harvest Preserve made the Screaming Barn of Iowa City rise from the grave only a couple of days after I mentioned it after our autumn walk on October 2 (Monday). Halloween is the inspiration!
It looks great! There were enhancements in addition to the returning theme of grisly epitaph dad jokes.
It should be visible to a lot more drivers on Scott Boulevard in that area, mainly because of traffic detours from street construction.
What’s also different is a safety barricade which is for the safety of walkers. It stretches across the street entrance to the barn from Scott Boulevard. You can get great pictures from across the street near the Harvest Preserve entrance gate.
Well, a couple of our drain tile lids were flipped last night. I don’t know how it happened. One of them was flipped and landed right side up and the other was upside down. The posts beside them were also out of place. The worm gear clamp obviously didn’t work on the one, so probably it doesn’t make sense to keep trying those.
Sena put the lids back on and put rocks on top of them. This is the second season for this mystery. It always happens at night and during the fall.
I still think some animal is responsible—and that includes human suspects. I doubt I’d catch anything on the critter cam, but I’m tempted.
I ran across this article (reference below) on the potential benefit of climbing stairs for cardiovascular health. The highlights and abstract are below:
“Highlights
This large cohort of UK adults demonstrated that climbing more than five flights of stairs daily was associated with over a 20% lower risk of ASCVD.
The associations were broadly concordant in populations with varying susceptibilities to ASCVD.
Participants who discontinued stair climbing between the baseline and resurvey exhibited a higher risk of ASCVD in comparison to those who never engaged in stair climbing.
Abstract
Background and aims
The associations between the intensity of stair climbing and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) and how these vary by underlying disease susceptibility are not fully understood. We aim to evaluate the intensity of stair climbing and risk of ASCVD types and whether these vary by the presence of ASCVD risk factors.
Methods
This prospective study used data on 458,860 adult participants from the UK Biobank. Information about stair climbing, sociodemographic, and lifestyle factors was collected at baseline and a resurvey 5 years after baseline. ASCVD was defined as coronary artery disease (CAD), ischemic stroke (IS), or acute complications. Associations between flights of stair climbing and ASCVD were examined as hazard ratios (HRs) from Cox proportional hazards models. The modification role of disease susceptibility on such associations was assessed by analyses stratified by levels of genetic risk score (GRS), 10-year risks of ASCVD, and self-reported family history of ASCVD.
Results
During a median of 12.5 years of follow-up, 39,043 ASCVD, 30,718 CAD, and 10,521 IS cases were recorded. Compared with the reference group (reported climbing stairs 0 times/day at baseline), the multivariable-adjusted HRs for ASCVD were 0.97 (95% CI, 0.93–1.01), 0.84 (0.82–0.87), 0.78 (0.75–0.81), 0.77 (0.73–0.80) and 0.81 (0.77–0.85) for stair climbing of 1–5, 6–10, 11–15, 16–20 and ≥21 times/day, respectively. Comparable results were obtained for CAD and IS. When stratified by different disease susceptibility based on the GRS for CAD/IS, 10-year risk, and family history of ASCVD, the protection association of stair climbing was attenuated by increasing levels of disease susceptibility. Furthermore, compared with people who reported no stair climbing (<5 times/d) at two examinations, those who climbed stairs at baseline and then stopped at resurvey experienced a 32% higher risk of ASCVD (HR 1.32, 95% CI:1.06–1.65).
Conclusions
Climbing more than five flights of stairs (approx 50 steps) daily was associated with a lower risk of ASCVD types independent of disease susceptibility. Participants who stopped stair climbing between the baseline and resurvey had a higher risk of ASCVD compared with those who never climbed stairs.”
This interests me because I climbed well over 20 flights of stairs pretty much every day when I was a consultation-liaison psychiatrist. Occasionally, I logged over 40 flights. The hospital had 8 floors and I was often repeatedly hiking up the stairs. I avoided using elevators because they slowed me down too much.
There was a threshold effect of stair climbing in the study, meaning the benefit was lost if you went over a certain number of “floors.” Going over 15 or 20 didn’t gain much for subjects. A flight was 10 stair steps.
I think the idea is that in those who live in homes with the right number of stair steps, you’ve got a no cost, low tech form of cardiovascular exercise. You might exert a little more stress on the carpet.
On the other hand, you could save wear and tear on the carpet (if you’re worried about it) by spending some money on stair stepping exercise equipment. You can buy a Stairmaster model for about $2.000-3,000. There are cheaper stair stepper models, which look a little flimsy and even unstable enough to raise the risk for falls, in my view.
But I would never go back to work just to climb the stairs again.
Reference:
Song Z, Wan L, Wang W, Li Y, Zhao Y, Zhuang Z, Dong X, Xiao W, Huang N, Xu M, Clarke R, Qi L, Huang T, Daily stair climbing, disease susceptibility, and risk of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease: A prospective cohort study, Atherosclerosis (2023)
Sena got some new pants with an autumn leaves print. It fit really well with the colors we saw on a walk down Scott Boulevard.
We always see something a little different along the way. We never noticed that the Sitting Man pedestal has a hole in it shaped like a heart. It could have been chipped into the stone intentionally.
There was a lot of golden rod but we didn’t see any ragweed—which I’m very allergic to this time of year.
The trees around the Harvest Preserve property are changing colors. The old barn across the street from it looks a little more weathered. We don’t know whether the staff will decorate it into a haunted house again for Halloween. They did that last year and it was a hoot.
The walk up the hill to the Sitting Man seemed a little steeper this year. I don’t remember exactly when I got so bow-legged. A runner easily ran up the hill and still had breath to say “Hi” on the way back down. He never missed a step, even though I personally know there are a lot of irregularities in the ground.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 