I cannot deny how my blogging pace has evinced quite a slouch, lately. I months ago fell behind my long-held mandate to post one article per week four articles per month. It feels pedestrian to say that I haven’t had the time, so I’ll instead say that my life has felt thick with good things lately, and they are all happening at once. Sometimes it works out that way, and if I did have more wherewithal to write, I would write no complaints.

In January I wrote a post called “I got a job”. One week later I actually started that job—and I would write only a couple of posts per month thereafter. I now spend a few hours every day researching peculiar technology and then writing descriptive documentation about it. I feel so good about this career shift; I put my all into it! And after I wrap my daily labor—well, writing more, even if for myself, doesn’t carry the same level of personal-fulfillment priority that it did before.

A poor excuse, of course, and an incomplete one: I know that I have to learn to balance my time again, returning to the salaried life after more than 15 years away. I’ve also found other activities to fill my downtime—including fighting every day to keep our pandemic-worn apartment clean and decluttered, and spending significantly more time with exercise and meditation.

An Apple Watch I purchased in February guides me through these latter activities; yes, I have become a thrall to Closing the Rings. A newer “Series 6” model, this is my very first smart watch or wearable fitness tracker of any sort, so I get to skip right into the fruits of this technology’s many years of public development. I have to say I like this little glowing wrist-critter very much.

What’s more, it came with a three-month trial subscription to Fitness+, essentially a streaming service for Apple-produced workout videos that lightly interact with the watch, displaying your heart rate and such in an on-screen overlay. That trial ended today, in fact, and I have gladly paid the eighty bucks for another full year of it.

I visit my fitness-trainer “friends” most every day, letting them lead me through HIIT and yoga in 10- to 30-minute sessions. Just like I felt a weird, sweat-induced intimacy with Wii Fit’s animated trainer a decade ago, I have come to know Apple’s actual-person coaches by their names and on-camera personalities. I’ll talk to my wife over lunch about the shade that Kim threw at Bakari that morning when his lateral-lunge form got a little sideways. After years of using only my own homemade workout program, I felt very ready to hand it over to professionals for a while. I’m into it.

So these daily workouts—plus additional hour or so I clomp around the park every evening to hit my wrist-mounted 750-calorie goal—take up yet more time. I regret none of it! The little gadget’s guidance makes me feel more confident that I’m treating my body the way it wants, and that feels great. It just comes back to me to sit that body in a chair a few times a month and write something longer than tweet-length in public—even if I have to treat this, too, as a kind of workout, where once I practiced it as pure pleasure.

I want to tell you about some of those other good things going on! And they’ll have to wait for my next interval at the keyboard. Right now it’s 11:15 PM, and my watch’s red Move ring wants 95 more calories burned up before midnight…