About that walking in the sand thing...

I've heard for years that walking in the sand, like along a beach, is a wonderful form of exercise.

Turns out that not so much if what you're doing is hauling shovelfuls of it across the back yard.

I sort of thought I had "simulated" the walking-in-the-sand thing when I made myself a pair of "rice socks" a few weeks ago. That actually started a couple of years ago, I guess, when I found a pair of "footwarmer booties" at WallyWorld and really like the experience. The "booties" were a rather normal-looking pair of houseshoes that had muslin inserts with rice in them. The idea was that you could pop the inserts in the microwave and warm them for a few seconds, then slip them into the booties to keep your feet warm. Since my extremities tend to be cold anyway, I thought they were a pretty cool—warm?—idea.

The only problem with them was that the inserts had only a little rice in them, so it just sort of sloshed around and didn't keep my feet nearly as warm as I thought they could. I sent them upstairs to my sewing room so I could recreate the inserts (and, potentially, even remake the booties in some color more interesting than muslin) with a healthier stuffing of rice.

Sending anything to the sewing room around here lately has been more accurately consignment to a black hole, so I don't have a clue what happened to them. But when the weather started to get chilly this year, I figured I could buy a fun pair of booties and make new inserts. I found a pair of socks for a dollar, poured in small amounts of rice, and sewed across the socks to keep the rice in "pockets." I can stick these into the microwave for a minute and drop them into a big pair of socks or a pair of fuzzy booties and enjoy having warm tootsies.

Walking on them is interesting, too; as the rice moves around under my feet, I get a lot of the same feeling as I get walking on sand, so I like to pretend it's actually good for me. Of course, taking 100 steps a day or so on them is probably not exactly a workout, but I've always been a huge fan of play-pretend.

And I can walk on real sand anytime I take a notion to. When my Soldier Son's dog Tank moved in with us a couple of years ago, I had an invitingly green spread of Asian jasmine covering my back yard. Jasmine seemed to be a good choice because I have had too much shade to encourage grass to grow back there, and the sprinkler system was never designed to reach anywhere near my back fence. Turns out jasmine doesn't hold up too well to large-footed dogs charging around the yard, so within a few months of Tank's arrival, my lush green had become mostly ghostly gray sand. Not too good for my housekeeping, but plenty of opportunity to walk on sand if I want to.

Not that I really wanted to this afternoon, but duty calls. Tank, it turns out, loves to play fetch, and his favorite spot for waiting for the ball is right at the edge of the built-up patio. But the patio—like the deck I had before it—keeps sinking. With the deck, I'm pretty sure at least part of the problem was that sand and detritus from the forest built up around the uprights and caused them to rot from the bottom; with the patio, the only thing I can figure is that the sand is gradually seeping out through the walls. Or, in the case of the corner where Tank likes to wait for the ball, maybe under them.

I had asked Number One Son, the current resident, some time ago to move some bricks around to form a sort of "landing" under the patio to keep the dogs from digging out more of the sand and helping it escape from the under the walls. Since I had finished a couple of projects this morning and had a bit of spare time on my hands, I decided that this was the day to make that happen.

I grabbed a rake and a shovel and hopped off the deck to see what I was going to have to do. Raking up "available"sand was clearly not going to make a dent in the hole the dogs had dug just by taking off from the "landing" to chase balls. But the other end of the chase has often entailed skidding to a stop next to the back fence, and walking around outside the fence shows that they've built it up over a foot in some places—plenty of dirt to level out a "landing" that would be less inviting than dirt.

I happily set off to get a shovelful of dirt and thought how healthy it would be to make a few trips over the loose sand between the deck and the fence. My Darling Daughter gave me a yoga mat for Christmas last year as part of a plea that I vegetate less and exercise more, and I sort of pledged to myself this year to work out every day until I get my weight down a few pounds as sort of a birthday gift to her. I didn't do the prescribed exercise video today, but I figured the hikes across about 15 yards of sand would do.

Logically, this should have taken only a couple of trips; after all, surely no self-respecting do-it-yourselfer would try to survive long without a wheelbarrow, and I have one, too. Except at this time of year it is doing duty in the garage keeping outdoor plants in out of the cold. Given the choice between trekking across the yard with shovelfuls of dirt or unloading the wheelbarrow to save myself a few trips, I opted for the exercise.

Mostly, it all went pretty well, too. I trudged back and forth across the yard probably 30 times with loads of dirt, and mostly the dogs only watched. There was that one time when they decided to play chase across the yard, and they thundered past me kicking up a wall of dust that made me think of a west-Texas sandstorm. I thought fleetingly that they had come pretty close to knocking me down, but as I lugged the dirt the rest of the way back to the patio, I realized that I probably should have been more scared that they might have knocked me down and left me bruised or broken or something—my sedentary life for the past several months probably hasn't done much to ensure bone strength—but instead I had thought that I might have to kill them if they caused me to lose my load of dirt.

Other than that, the activity was pretty uneventful. My face felt gritty, my hair turned stiff, and I still have sand between my toes, but I do have a sort of a rudimentary landing to try to hold some of the dirt inside the patio.

And I'm just sure I'm going to wake up in the morning feeling all exercised from walking in the sand.

Or in my rice booties, since it's supposed to freeze tonight.