Good evening, friends and neighbors! Happy New Year! I hope everyone is starting 2018 off well. I’ve been starting mine off with getting a bit more reading in- and now I’m starting to look up more regarding Kabbalah.
No, not that fashionable, Madonna, celebrity bullshit. The real deal- and I started off learning about it with a book about a group of rabbis sitting down with the Dalai Lama.
No, that’s not a joke.
Hello, friends and neighbors!
The other day, I was making a supersized batch of Zucchini Bread batter at work- and in so doing, I did a 117 lbs (53 kg) deadlift from floor to chest.
Not a problem, I do it all the time.
THAT’S how you stay in shape working at a bakery- you WORK at a bakery.
I’ve mentioned before that I use a 50 lbs. (22.67 kg) sandbag for exercising at home, and that the motivation for this came directly from wanting to be a baker, but I don’t believe I ever went into any real specifics about it.
So here we go: presenting,
Otherwise known as, “I Pick Up Heavy Things and Put Them Down, but I can bake bread with them too when I’m done.”
The thing that makes using a sandbag different from barbells or dumbbells is the fact that the sand will slosh and shift as it moves. The bag also doesn’t have any handles- thus as you manipulate the bag, you will have to constantly use accessory muscle groups and reaffirm your grip in order to keep control of the bag.
Curls are good. Yes, they are infamous for “gymbros” doing them in the squat rack. Working out your biceps in the bakeshop, however, helps you get that mixing bowl off the machine and on to your table. It also helps you make mousse and meringues by hand- those take a LOT of whipping….
Stand up straight, core tensed, feet shoulder-width apart. With a firm grip on the bag, just curl your arms and hoist the bag up to your chin. Return under control- DO NOT just relax your arms and let your elbows snap straight. You WILL injure yourself.
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Yeah, if you’ve got bad knees in a bakeshop, you are REALLY screwed. Half my day is spent squatting or kneeling, with or without weight, to put things in a low oven, grab that giant jug of oil, fetch up 5 dozen eggs, and so on.
You want to EAT chicken legs in a kitchen, not HAVE them.
For both of these exercises, the keys are to keep your core tense, flex at the knees and hips, and never let your knees go past your toes- doing this prevents your ankles from taking the brunt of the weight.
While it’s generally not smart to store heavy objects higher than head-level- you tend to put things where they will fit. If you look at the rack behind me, some of those boxes up top weigh up to 30 lbs. It’s good to know your arms and shoulders won’t give out on you when you need to get a new crate of chocolate chips down.
With your core tensed and your feet shoulder-width apart, bring the bag up to your chest and raise over your head slowly, to your full range of motion. After a moment, bring the bag back down slowly and repeat.
There you go! With a sack of flour providing strength training, simply being on your feet for 10 hours a day offering cardio, and intelligent eating, this is how you can work in a bakeshop and stay fit.
Best of luck, and
Stay Classy,
I was not always me. This is how I decided I didn’t have time to not be me anymore.
Since coming home from the wedding, Emily and I decided that for the first few months of 2017, all we wanted in the world was to be boring. No sudden moves. No job changes and hunts. No weddings, no big events, no nothing. For just a few months, all we wanted to do was wake up, go to work, come home, maybe eat out every now and again, and catch our breath after the last year and a half.
Things keep changing though, and the world comes knocking.
“Things change.”
Since I was a kid, I loved folk stories and legends. One of my favorites was a story about the Magic Ring of Solomon. In short, the famous Biblical king seeks to humble an overly-proud servant of his by giving him an impossible quest: finding a magic ring that will make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. The legendarily wise king is astonished when the servant returns, claiming to have succeeded. The ring is a plain silver band, with the Hebrew for “This too shall pass” engraved on it. Immediately, the king realizes all his riches and success will one day be ashes, but that a man NOT fortunate enough to be king would take the message as a promise of good things to come.
According to the legend, Solomon rewards his servant handsomely, takes the “magic” ring, and it gives him balance and wisdom the rest of his life.
We do not all have magic rings.
We do not all realize how things can-and must- change.
We do not all know that nothing lasts forever.
I promised myself long ago that this blog would not get political- and I plan to keep to that promise. We are in a time of upheaval. There are those who would say we always have been, but don’t really pay attention.
So maybe this blog can be like Solomon’s ring- not everything to everyone, but SOMETHING to everyone, maybe everything to someone.
If nothing else, I offer a counter cliche to “things change.”
“Simple Joys”
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Baking and cooking (though mostly cooking recently, as baking is my job.) The meditative prep and emotional lift of good flavors and smells- and feeding someone else- can’t fail to ground me in some universal truth: that all people eat, and being one who feeds them is a gift. Back at the casino, I told my friend Karen that when life gets really frustrating, I find myself looking forward to going to work because that’s where I know there are things under my control. I remember her chuckling and nodding and saying, “That’s absolutely it… and no one else will ever understand it.”
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Warm Society. As I write this, I am sitting at the bar of the Liquor Store on Belmont in SE Portland. The bartenders and kitchen staff know me here. No one is really bothering or talking to me- and sometimes that’s how I like it. All the better to write. It’s a splendid thing to, every now and then, be wrapped in the ambivalent embrace of the public and carry on my day as a spectator to theirs. Perhaps they feel the same way about mine.
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Books. I read and reread my favorites, the ones that inspire and make me smile. Certain stories wrap me in their lessons and words, reminding me that there is still hope in the world. There are always heroes, and who knows where they will come from- but when I read these books, I feel for a moment that I can be one.
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Exercise. It does more than keep me healthy, it makes me feel ALIVE. It forces my body out of torpor, and so forces my brain to quell whatever it is that’s bothering me for the time being. With the sun on my face, weight in my hands, and sweat pouring, my mind can move in different directions. All of my best ideas come to me when I am exercising- it’s one of the few times I can go completely, perfectly blank.
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Whatever you feel like are your rocks in the stream, your anchors on reality- they are wherever you find them.
Stay Classy,
Good evening, friends and neighbors. It’s been a while.
5:15 AM
My alarm goes off by my side of the bed. It’s still dark in the room.- not even a hint of the dawn coming in about 2 hours. I know Emily has probably only been in bed a few hours (night owl that she is,) so I jerk myself conscious enough to silence the alarm quickly before it can bother her.
My phone alarm acts as a dim nightlight, so I can just barely make her out next to me. Streetlights and headlights glow indirectly through the tiny ceiling window- enough for me to grab my phone, check the weather forecast for the morning, buzz through Facebook, curse myself for doing so, and get up.
I don’t have to be into work till 9, but I insist on arriving no later than 8:45. I want time to make breakfast and clean up-
after a workout of course.
This was not always me.
4 years ago, this was me.
The Black Hat Baker 