Good news, sporadic stairs, Fleming piece in rangers' room, regular miles, total teetotaling

Wednesday 1/28/26

Received the best news in a while the other day. My niece Amelia has a friend named Hattie, who had been diagnosed with cancer. The cancer spread. Hattie was a brave little girl, though, and kept doing her treatments as she went through this awful, awful, awful thing that no child should have to endure.

Well, Hattie and her family went into Chicago this weekend so that she could ring the bell! I was so happy for her. I don't know this child, but I've thought about her every day. I think about her in relation to other people. The things they invent for attention, their lack of perspective, their galling weakness, their lack of fight. That was pretty great. My uncle also got a favorable diagnosis, so I called him about that as I was walking Monday morning in the snow.

I certainly haven't been doing a great job with the stairs. Only ten circuits last week, to bring the total since November 15 to 231. These are the dog days of stairs. That time of the year when it's hardest to do them. It's ten degrees out and you don't want to walk a mile-and-a-half each way and over that bridge, all the more so when the Monument doesn't open until 1 PM and your day may have started at midnight, as mine did today.

It's also much more preferable to do the workout in a T-shirt, shorts, and headband, rather than after having trudged over there all layered up. But I need to do better. I will. I don't want to slip off the pace, even if I could make up the deficit later. This is about accountability and be able to endure so that I can beat the evil people in publishing.

The other day at the Monument, a ranger let me into the lodge early so that I could get out of the cold. I wasn't able to get started running stairs early this time. There's a camera, and he said that there's more scrutiny of late. Anyway, I was sitting there and he told me that the op-ed I wrote about stairs for the New York Daily News last summer is tacked to the wall in the rangers' break room and how much it meant to him and everyone. I thought that was really nice. I didn't know they'd done that with it.

I have been walking, though the miles totals haven't been great. You're dealing with additional factors this time of year. Three miles in eight degree weather is a bit more notable than three miles in September. It all adds up, though, and that's the point: Keep it adding up. No miles yesterday, but three each of the days prior in the snow, and six on Sunday when it was quite cold. Been doing a fair job push-ups-wise, but the effort can be better.

Sunday marked 3479 days, or 497 weeks, without a drink. Getting close to 500 weeks, which is solid. I'm not assuming it, though. Never assume the day--go out and earn the day.

Lastly, I was sent a photo of Amelia in the Boston Ballet beanie I got her for her birthday. She looks quite scowl-y and displeased in the photo, but that's on account of her parents having selected a booth at McDonald's that Amelia didn't approve of. My mother tells me that when she brings the kids there, if Amelia wants to sit somewhere else she just has them all move because it's not worth it. A couple buddies with a pretty cool matching hat!