TW: Pregnancy, conception, way too much TMI in general

Here we go again!  As someone who is of advanced/geriatric maternal age (almost 37) who experienced infertility for years before conceiving my first child naturally, I had no idea what to expect trying to conceive for a second. I was blessed with one and kind of/sort of expected to never get pregnant again.  I think that’s why I grieved no longer being pregnant after I delivered three weeks early, because I thought it would be the only time.  

We have been actively trying to conceive for the last seven months.  I stopped pumping at four months because that’s when I was told is the earliest I could safely conceive again.  Two months ago, I had my annual exam where my favorite midwife shared with me that my cervix was super high and angled back and that alone would make it more challenging to conceive.  She explained that foreplay was a must because it would lower my cervix.  I also needed to make sure I was either on top or being fucked from behind, both of which help the cervix lower.  ALL OF THIS INFORMATION WAS NEW TO ME.  I spent thousands of dollars on IUIs and IVF and three years of my life at a renowned infertility clinic and no one told me any of this information.  She also told me that, while I don’t have PCOS, to start taking Ovasitol which is a powder to help women with PCOS regulate their hormones.  By these powers combined, one month later I tested positive for pregnancy.  

We waited until Christmas Day to tell our families.  That was the longest wait in history since I’m now video chatting with my mom every day so she can get erp time in, and also to help with her quarantine blues.  On Monday, I had my first ultrasound and they confirmed we’re eight weeks pregnant and have a due date of August 15th. This means my babes will be roughly 20 months apart.  Crazy town.

If you recall, we’re waiting to find out where Kevin gets into residency and are planning to move (wherever that may be) in May.  That gives us a few months to get settled, find an OB and a hospital so I can be ready in case I go into labor early again.  All while working full time and caring for erp :)

Obviously, we’re still super early and worried this won’t stick but I’m (amazingly and thankfully) far less anxious than I was the first go around.  Which means, I’m not eating my feelings as much.  Funny enough, as soon as I got the positive result I IMMEDIATELY wanted all the junk food.  Pregnancy is a carb trigger for me, apparently.  Ever since Thanksgiving I’ve been more lenient with my eating.  I’ve allowed myself much more than I have this past entire year of dieting.  I have zero intention of gaining the 70 pounds I did with my first pregnancy.  Hopefully far far far less.  I’m going to be extremely mindful of my intake while also giving myself grace.  I hope to stay active and keep up with walks (even though I haven’t walked this year yet, whoops) and try and do lower carb diet since if I let myself go full carb I know from experience it's a slippery slope that I quickly fall down.  

In February I’ll go back for my 12 week appointment to get the NIPT where we’ll find out the gender. Kevin’s mom swears it’s a boy.  Given that my symptoms this time are different than last, it’s probable.  I feel about a 7 out of 10 every day, not awful but not great.  I wouldn’t say I’m nauseous but I’m also not right. I’m constantly tired and all Christmas break I took at least one nap a day.   It’s hard to believe I’m already doing this again. Pregnancy feels like a recent distant memory, if that makes sense.  We’re thrilled.  We’re in disbelief, but absolutely ecstatic.  

Thank you for continuing to follow me through my fitblr pregblr fitblr and now pregblr modes again.  

the avalance news reader au

hey who said peer pressure doesn't work. anyway i made this post and y'all seemed to like it so here we go!! might post to ao3 later on idk...

It had been a truly terrible day.

Ava considered, in the moment that her coffee machine spluttered coughed up coffee grounds over her last clean shirt, that maybe she'd just had a truly terrible year. All her dreams about finally moving to television after being stuck in the doldrums of local news media for six years had been slashed when she'd been placed on the graveyard shift - sure, Ava was finally reading the news, but her shift was from 1AM until 4AM, so her only audience was long-distance truck drivers and new parents.

Still, she persevered, with the slightly foolish belief that if she worked hard enough, she could be promoted to a primetime slot. Or at least a slot that didn't require her to be making coffee at 10:45PM.

Her day had started off badly - she'd barely slept, as the sound from the construction work three blocks away rattled her windows, and she’d woken to find that her cat, Merlin, had kicked his litter halfway across the house in a fit of pique. Ava couldn't even have her normal oatmeal, as she was out of oat milk, and now she was having to drink her coffee black.

After changing her shirt to a dark dress and grimacing as she choked down the coffee, there was a knock on the door, and Ava groaned as she realised she was running late.

"Hey, Sara." She sighed.

Sara stood in the doorway, hair wavy over her shoulders, hands shoved in the pockets of her hoodie - the same grey hoodie she wore every day, branded with their news station's logo.

"Woah, a dress?" Sara said, eyebrows raised appreciatively, as Ava grabbed her coat and bag and they moved to go down the stairs.

"Don't mention it." Ava grumbled, pulling the coat around her shoulders.

"It looks good on you." Sara said, and Ava shot her a look. Sara mimed zipping her lips. "Do we have to time for Starbucks? I had to have black coffee; my mouth tastes like something died in it." Ava muttered, and Sara shrugged.

"I mean, we've arrived half an hour early for every shift for the past year -"

"Do you want to go back to taking the bus?" Ava said, looking over at her as they reached the lobby. They'd discovered they lived in the same building almost accidentally in Ava's first week, awkwardly meeting across the hall in the early morning, until Sara had realised that Ava had a car and they'd started riding in together.

"Fine, if you're happy with having bad angles." Sara said, holding the door open for her, and Ava rolled her eyes.

"Are you saying I have bad angles?"

"Oh, I'll find one." Sara muttered, and Ava snorted with laughter and unlocked the car. One of the benefits to giving her camera operator a ride every day was always having excellent angles.

After a stop at Starbucks, Ava rolled along the dark, quiet roads, sighing deeply.

"What's up?" Sara asked, sipping her drink - black coffee, which she somehow enjoyed.

"Nothing." Ava muttered, but it only took one look at Sara for her to come out with the story of her crappy day. Sara laughed.

"So that's why you're wearing the dress."

"That's what you're focusing on?" Ava said, focusing on the road with a small smile on her face. "I have to go back to my apartment at 5AM and clean up kitty litter and coffee grounds."

"Not to mention getting coffee out of your shirt." Sara snorted, and Ava groaned, loud and over the top.

///

They always split when they got to the studio, Ava marching off to make-up to get ready, and Sara taking the elevator to the studio floor to set up her camera. The studio was always dead past midnight, just a skeleton crew left, which Sara found she enjoyed - it was easier to know everyone that way. She waved at Nate, distracting him from where he was running through the weather, muttering under his breath and checking his perfectly coiffed hair in the camera. He waved back, a bright smile on his face.

Careful not to trip over any of the wires on the floor, Sara made her way up to the box above the studio, the cramped room filled from head to toe with blinking lights and buttons, with a large window so they could look down on the studio. The techs – Behrad and Charlie - were sat with headphones on, running through sound checks, so Sara just waved to them as she found who she was looking for.

Zari, the studio runner, was running through her clipboard, muttering under her breath. When she saw Sara coming, she rolled her eyes. "Back again?"

"What have you got for her today?" Sara asked, keeping her voice nonchalant.

"The usual. Some city councilor has been embezzling funds, Star City is readying to bid for the 2028 Olympics, and former mayor Queen is opening a patisserie down-town. It's been a quiet week."

"Exactly." Sara said, her grin widening. "You've got to add the cat one."

Ray, their head writer, had found a story a week ago about a fat cat attending the Star City pet spa to lose weight, and Sara had been tracking down clips of the poor thing, bribing the editor, Nora, to pull them together. She'd even written a script. Zari looked at her with an eyebrow raised.

"Seriously?"

"Yes! I have a bet going with Mick - if I can get Ava to break on camera by the end of the month, he's got to give me $50." Sara said. It was ridiculous, she'd started the bet - truthfully, she found it endearing how Ava read the news with the same abject sternness whether she was covering a political scandal or a dog who'd learnt to surf in Star City Bay. She'd only broken her composure once - a smile creeping on her face when reporting on the 5th birthday of a crocodile at Star City Zoo named Snaps. From that day on, Sara had vowed to make her laugh, properly, live on air.

"I don't have any time to make up." Zari said, and Sara sighed.

"Yeah, but you know Ava reads quick enough. Please? For me?"

Zari seemed immune to the puppy eyes, so Sara sighed. "And I'll give you $20."

Zari snorted. "Do you have $20?"

"I'll have $50 when I win the bet." Sara countered, and Zari sighed.

"Fine. I'll see what I can do."

"Z, you're the best." Sara said with a grin, and turned to return to the studio floor.

///

The program went smoothly, like always. Sara liked her job, the focus of filming and the pride she got when she saw her own work on TV, but she liked it better when she was filming Ava, who had pretty much insisted from day one that Sara be her primary operator.

Ava looked especially pretty today, someone in make-up evidently having convinced her that she didn't need the bun today, and instead curled her hair over both shoulders, which didn't completely cover Ava's defined arms, visible in her sleeveless dress.

The night ran the same as most others, Ava transitioning smoothly between topics and engaging in light, courteous banter with Nate before he presented the weather. Sara looked at Ava during these moments, the five minutes she was off camera, where she looked down at her notes, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth.

Okay, so maybe Sara wanted to make Ava laugh because she looked so pretty doing it. Sue her.

They were coming near the end, and Sara was losing hope that the story would be included, until she heard the segue.

"Now, in lighter news," Ava started, her eyebrows suddenly shooting up as she read the prompter. Sara grinned; Zari had obviously left this out of Ava's notes to inspire more of a reaction.

"Cats," Ava blurted out, steadying herself before continuing, "they're not normally known for their love of swimming, but one feline in Star City is hitting the water instead of the gym in a bid to lose weight. Mr. Snuggles -" Ava bit her lip as the pictures played on the monitor - a black and white cat in a life vest, looking absolutely terrified, and Sara grinned. "Mr. Snuggles is a thirteen-year-old cat who - dislikes the outdoors and other physical activities."

Sara's grin widened as Ava lost it, barely making it through her lines through her giggles. Her face was flushing pink and she bit her lip to try and compose herself. "But with encouragement from his owner -" Ava pressed on, trying to hold herself together, "Mr. Snuggles had lost one pound in six months."

That was the final straw, as Ava descended into a full-on laugh, barely making it through her sign off. Sara was so distracted by the sound she nearly missed Zari's voice in her ear. "Camera 1 to Camera 3 in 3, 2, 1 -"

Sara switched off, but not before Ava snorted, flushing even deeper and covering her face with her hands at the sound, not disguised by the jingle from the lottery numbers playing across the screen.

///

Ava had bolted from the set, and Sara packed up her equipment as quickly as possible, ducking out just in time to catch Ava as she walked down the corridor to the lobby. Her face was now free of make-up, her hair tied up in a messy bun, but she was still in the dress that left Sara's mouth a little dry. She looked at Sara, blushing again.

"I can't believe you did that." She groaned, and Sara put on her most innocent face on.

"Did what?"

"Bribed Zari to put the cat story in! John in make-up said that Charlie had told him that you'd bribed Zari."

"To win $50!" Sara said, grinning. "And you have a really cute laugh."

Ava looked up; eyebrow furrowed. "Really?"

"Yep." Sara said, trying to play it cool. "Look, do you want half? I feel bad now."

Ava sighed. "No, it's okay."

"I could buy you dinner." Sara said, almost blurting it out, and Ava looked at her. "To make up for it."

Ava's mouth quirked up in a smile. "Uh - yeah, okay. I can do dinner."

~the end~

okay so this was fun to write and i kind of want to write more so uhh send me where u think this story should go. or ideas for a part 2 maybe. thanks for reading!!

obligatory disclaimer that this post is ENTIRELY based on my own perceptions of my own experiences, and may or may not be true to a broader degree. 

anyway, Weight Stuff under the cut. also LMFAO this post is long as SHIT lmfaoooo and it doesn’t even end with the topic i meant for it to be about. 

Sooooo, i’ve always very loudly been on Team Mind-Your-Business-About-Other-People’s-Bodies, and i still am, and i am ALWAYS down to (usually gently) call out someone who’s overstepping their boundaries as far as other people’s bodies and lifestyles go, blah blah, and i am KEEEENLY aware of the damage people cause with fatphobia, and that rhetoric surrounding ~diet and exercise~ is almost ALWAYS malicious in terms of hyperfocusing on “ugly fat” and shaming people into feeling horrible enough about theirselves that they pay out the ass for Quick Fixes, and there’s almost 0 focus on The Actual Health Benefits of a healthy lifestyle other than just Maybe Being Slimmer. 

But alsoooooooooooooooooooooo???

i’ve always felt like, because of all that shit, it’s so difficult for me to feel comfortable talking about my own body and my own habits and my own shortcomings and my own goals. like, i DO feel bothered by the weight I’ve gained recently. NOT because it makes me feel ugly - i don’t feel ugly at all. i literally almost always feel beautiful lmao. NOT because i’m worried about how other people see me - i don’t have relationships with people who would give someone a hard time about their weight in the first place, and beyond that, i’m generally unconcerned with what people think of my appearance. 

the thing that bothers me is that i KNOW my weight gain has been the result of unhealthy lifestyle choices. i’ve always eaten more junkfood than anyone i know, and i’ve always tended to eat VERY few healthy things. so like... that’s bad enough for my health. but i ALSO don’t get much physical activity. and then covid hits and my job is snatched out from under me and i spend most of every day in the same 100 square feet. so like... OF COURSE i gained weight. lots of people did! people gain weight all the time for lots of reasons and nobody should feel bad or guilty about it. 

but for me, even though i don’t see my weight gain as cause to lament about my appearance, i DO see it as an indicator that i’m not taking very good care of myself. i mean, if i’m thinner with a shitty diet, then my thinness kind of allows me to ignore my bad choices because there’s no ~visual~ reminder. i know that’s prolly fucked up, but that’s what’s happening in my head. when i’m thinner, i don’t have to acknowledge that there are going to be consequences for my choices. 

but to SEE my body change as a direct result of crappy diet and no exericse??? it’s really made me see how urgent it is that i start treating myself better RIGHT the fuck now. i mean, i am Young, but i won’t be young forever, and the longer i keep eating garbage and sitting around all day, the sooner i can expect to start having real health issues. and like, heart problems run in my family (as they do in MANY black families). i already have pcos, and that puts me at a higher risk for stuff like that. 

so, it’s been scary to have to face the reality that i’m setting myself up for disaster. 

and i figured that CLEARLY i’ve been unable to get myself on track For Free, so i finally caved and signed up for noom, and i’m down almost 10 pounds already.

and i get on the scale and weigh myself and i feel proud! i feel happy! i feel capable! i feel like i’ve proven to myself that i CAN make better choices. i’m NOT weak-willed. i’m NOT incapable of taking care of myself. 

But then I feel like i shouldn’t say that out loud, or i shouldn’t tell people how glad i am to see the natural result of my healthier choices. 

i’m not glad because i look different - i’m glad because my different look is a sign that i’m succeeding in taking control of my lifestyle. my different look is visual evidence that i’m eating more fruit and whole grains and drinking more water and i’m eating less sugary foods and less meats, and i’m eating healthier portions, and i’m not snacking all day. i can SEE the proof that i’m making choices that are going to give me a better chance at staying healthy throughout my life. 

i’m KINDA exaggerating in that i don’t actually think i LOOK different just yet lmao i feel like i look more or less the same. but i definitely do FEEL some subltle differences. i mean maybe it’s a placebo effect, but i think my forearms are slightly narrower and my bewbs are a bit less... cumbersome lmao. (i SWEAR like half of the weight i’ve gained has been in my boobs alone omfg). 

but idk, i guess what i’m trying to express is that i just... don’t feel comfortable sharing how glad i am about my progress bc most of my social circles are comprised of people who are rightly critical of the way people talk and think about weight loss. i knooooow that most reasonable folks, if i give the Full Explanation about how my gladness is due to the fact that i can see that my lifestyle is changing for the better, would understand and would be happy for me. 

but uhhhh lmao some people Aren’t Reasonable and are committed to having a negative reaction to any statement that seems to exalt thinness in any context at all whatsoever. 

and i KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW that a person’s weight is not an automatic indicator of their health, and you can’t assume that a person has Become Healthier just because they’ve lost weight, and you can’t assume that a person has become unhealthier just because they’ve gained it. there are all kinds of reasons for people being whatever size they are, and we can’t make those kinds of judgments about people’s size bc obviously we don’t know their life! we don’t know if they eat veggies and go jogging! we don’t know if a thin person has a cinnabon for breakfast every day or if a fat person is a professional dancer. so like. it’s stoopit to assume anything at all about a person’s health/lifestyle just based on their size. 

BUUUUUUUUUUT!!!! an individual person can make those judgements about their own size and their own health. like, people know why they’re the size that they are, whether it’s genetics or lifestyle or health related. one person who’s super thin knows it’s because they have a fast metabolism. another person who’s thin knows it’s because they starve theirself. another person who’s thin knows it’s because they intentionally make choices that would result in their size. and the same goes for big people! they know if they eat too much junk food, or if they’re just genetically ~meant~ to be their size, blah blah blah. 

so when a person talks about their own weight and how it relates to their own health and their own lifestyle, i feel like it’s Inappropriate to lecture them about how ~it’s okay to be fat, you don’t need to lose weight~ blah blah. bc like... DUH, it’s okay to be fat. whether it’s because of lifestyle or genes, it’s still okay. it’s allowed. and people should be free to feel beautiful and see theirselves as UNCONDITIONALLY valuable and intrinsically worthy of the space they occupy in the universe. If a person actually disparages theirself because of their weight, then sure, you’re probably welcome to tell that person that their size, no matter the reason for it, has no bearing on their worth and that they have the right to feel good about who they are and how they look. 

but if someone says, “you know, it’s really time that i finally started eating right and exercising so i can be healthier and lose weight,” thennnn... i feel like the only appropriate response is to cheer them on and tell them to go for it! if someone knows that their weight is the result of unhealthy habits, and they express a desire to change that, there’s no need to try to tell them that they don’t need to try to change it omfg. 

like... literally everyone needs to eat well and exercise in order to give theirself their best chance at staying in good health. thin people need to eat well and exercise. fat people need to eat well and exercise. they only people who DON’T need to eat well and exercise would be people who are actually physically incapable of rigorous movement or people who are, idk, allergic to most ~healthy~ foods. 

So if someone who’s been eating junk and sitting around tells you that they want to start eating well and exercising... that’s a GOOD THING. 100% of the time. it’s ridiculous to respond to that with a lecture about ~all sizes are beautiful~ and ~you can do whatever you want, you don’t have to Fit The Mold~ like omfg THAT’S NOT THE POOOOOIIIINNNTTTT!!! 

basically, i feel like in the midst of rightly defending fat people’s right to exist as they are, some of the Discourse has inadvertently careened into the absurd territory of actually DISCOURAGING people from making HEALTHY lifestyle changes that would result in weight loss. 

as i’m typing this, it also occurs to me that there seems to be an assumption that anyone who intends to lose weight is planning to do it via extreme but temporary methods like restrictive diets and unsustainably vigorous exercise. 

i feel like some people need to acknowledge that there’s a difference between “i’m only going to eat one meal a day and exercise for 4 hours a day so i can lose 30 pounds before my wedding day,” and “i’m going to lose my excess weight by transitioning to a healthier lifestyle.” the former describes an unhealthy and unsustainable attempt to starve and overwork yourself to lose x amount of pounds that you’re inevitably gonna regain after you go back to your normal habits, and it’s exclusively focused on appearance. like, it CAN’T be about health, because those methods are unhealthy! you don’t get healthy by doing unhealthy things! 

the latter describes a legitimately healthy way of life that can and SHOULD be sustained for a person’s whole life if ptll ossible. there’s no need to try to force your body into a different shape in a short amount of time when you could instead just allow your size to adjust slowly to a permanent and positive lifestyle change. 

but it seems like there’s a knee-jerk reaction to condemn weight loss in any context altogether. 

i under staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand why people might have that attitude and i’m not mad about it. i GET why some people might be hypervigilant about condemning any belief that suggests that being fat is something that a person should be unhappy about, and i don’t want people to stop doing that. 

but i doooooooooooooooooo think that perhaps it’s time that people begin learning to trust other people’s analyses of their own bodies and their own choices and their own goals, and learn to tell when a person’s weight loss is motivated by genuine health reasons, or by social pressure/shame/embarrassment. not everyone who wants to lose weight hates their body. not everyone who wants to lose weight has low self esteem. people can feel fabulous and gorgeous in their current body, and still want to make choices to change it via improving their health.

and like! some people genuinely just don’t WANT to lose weight that they know they’ve gained from unhealthy habits. some people are totally fine with living their life the way they like to live it, and prioritizing their enjoyment of their lifestyle over efferts to prevent future health issues. and that’s their right! and nobody should say shit about it! mind ya business! 

i kinda compare it to like... cave divers, or daredevils, or mountaineers. those are all HELLA dangerous activities that kill or seriously injure a LOT of people. and the people who engage in those activities KNOW this. they KNOW that they’re at a significantly higher risk of premature death compared to people who DON’T do those things, and they know that they could increase the odds of living a log time by Not Doing Those Things. 

but they do it anyway! because they want to! because they think it’s fun! because the enjoyment of the activity is, for them, worth the risk of harm. they’re living a lifestyle that could kill them, but nobody says shit about it. nobody shames them for it. they just accept that people have the right to be cray cray if that’s what they want to do. people might think daredevils are stupid, but they’re not trying to bully them into quitting. 

so if somebody wants to eat a diet comprised of nothing but eating cinnabons 3 times a day every day their whole life, that’s their right! mind ya damn business! if somebody hates exercise enough that they’re okay with the possibility of health problems down the line, then fine! it would be fair to worry about that person and to wish that they’d make differen choices, in the same way that it would be fine for someone to worry about their dearedevil friend and wish that they weren’t a daredevil. but it’s still not grounds to be a dickhead to them. 

Lynn Gunn’s Honest Portrayal of PVRIS’ Past, Present and Future Plus Details on New LP ‘Use Me’ [Q&A]

Did you know that quicksand cannot really sink your entire body? Hollywood renditions of this frightening occurrence showcase “Indiana Jones” type heroes desperately reaching for a branch or a vine to evade being swallowed whole by the muddy foe. In real life, however, quicksand is much denser than the human body–namely your torso and lungs. So, although you may sink to some degree, you’ll only be engulfed to about your torso region. That being said, to escape the hold of this mucky captor, you’re called to utilize, not a vine or a stick, but a natural aspect of yourself–in this case, the buoyancy of your torso and lungs. Doing so allows you to adjust your positioning so that you are on your back and are therefore more easily able to free your legs and eventually, yourself.

During moments of crisis such as this, it is not often that we think to use what comes most natural to us in order to overcome difficulties. However, as PVRIS frontwomxn Lynn Gunn discovered, tuning into your natural inclinations can be exactly what sets you free.

After battling debilitating health issues, anxieties, and multiple album delays, the refreshingly new album Use Me is here, and it has the empowered LGBTQIA+ artist plastered all over it. From the distinctively raw lyrics, impassioned vocals, dexterous commixture of that classic PVRIS Alternative Rock and new-aged Glitch-pop, and even a 070 Shake feature, this new album is taking everything we thought we knew about PVRIS to much higher heights. Use Me serves as the first release since Gunn followed her heart and came forward as the sole architect behind PVRIS back in March. After listening to all 40 emotion-inducing minutes of this cinematic project, it becomes clear that Use Me is so much more than an album, it is an unapologetic reclamation of power.

We were able to speak with Lynn Gunn before the release of the album and gather her perspective on this new era of creativity, utilizing her natural abilities for this new project, and even on supporting social justice causes.

All quicksand jokes aside, sink into this interview with Lynn Gunn below:

Ones to Watch: Although you’ve been making music for quite some time, this new era seems to be of a new bloom, not only for PVRIS, but for you. As you have stated, PVRIS is still very much a collective, but you have decided to shed the skin of “band culture” and from it emerge as the sole vocalist, lyricists, and creative director of PVRIS. How has that transition been on you all? Are people taking to it the way that you imagined?

Lynn Gunn: I didn’t really imagine anyone taking it any way, to be honest, it’s happening regardless of what others want to say or feel about it. It’s felt great personally and as a unit. I’ve seen mostly support but obviously, with anything, there’s always going to be people with the opposite. At the end of the day, this is what this is moving forward and works best for us, I know my truth and what this journey has been and looked like so far. I’ve seen so many insane and comical theories and conspiracies about the transition/negative comments… but ultimately I think anyone who decides to wastes their energy like that might find their life to be much more enjoyable if they channeled that energy back into their own life as there’s clearly a lack/wound somewhere within themselves. If that seems sprinkled with “shade”, it is, but I mean that with the most sincerity as well.

The saying goes “you can never really outrun yourself”, and from White Noise to Use Me, it seems that you’ve left a bit of a breadcrumb-trail leading us to this point. Although PVRIS has primarily been recognized as an Alternative Rock “band”, we can hear tiny glimpses of the sound that best encompasses PVRIS now throughout your entire discography.  Was this glitch-pop, disco-esque sound something you were intentionally experimenting within your previous projects?

To be honest, this is always where I imagined PVRIS’s sound living and the type of production I’d heard PVRIS songs being told through. I think in the past I didn’t fully know how to communicate the little production nuances that would have taken some tracks from point A to B, there was also a fear (that I now regret having) about straying from the “rock” production/experiencing rejection from the “scene” we initially started playing shows and touring in.

For the most part, and I truly mean this, there really isn’t that much of a difference in the instrumentation and sonic choices of this album from the first two, it’s still a very even play of organic instruments and electronic/synths, it’s just being produced through a different lens that’s a bit cleaner, crisper and crunchier in some areas. It’s a new interpretation of the woodwork that’s always been there.

What has kept you motivated to continue creating and sharing your truth with the world?

That’s a great question because I go back and forth with that feeling sometimes… Ultimately seeing comments from fans/listeners and hearing everyone’s stories and ways that they connect to PVRIS’s music is the most motivating thing in the world. I also feel that no matter what type of obstacle course the universe wants to throw me through, I’m always going to be grateful for the bruises/lessons and always going to feel compelled to create and share those truths through music.

I understand you’ve run into a deluge of unfortunate health issues the past few years that have affected you and the band greatly. If you feel comfortable sharing, could you talk a little bit about these illnesses and the ways you have had to overcome the obstacles they brought forth to get you to where you are now?

Totally comfortable sharing! I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS) about two years ago and then about a year ago was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. AS is an inflammatory disease that mainly attacks the lower back, hips, and ribs, but it can also manifest in a lot of other ways as well such as joint pain, chronic fatigue, and even eye issues. Sometimes when my AS is really bad, I can barely get out of bed or even roll over in bed. Over time, if not treated properly or managed, it can cause your vertebrae to fuse... I’ve heard that’s super rare though. Crohn’s is chronic inflammation in the digestive tract and is a little more embarrassing but pretty self-explanatory haha…

They definitely taught me (and by taught I mean forced me) to take time in caring for myself and caring for my body. Resting properly, staying in shape, eating super healthy, setting boundaries with work, etc. It’s also just made me really appreciative of the moments when my symptoms aren’t as bad/just happy to be alive and not have it worse. I’m determined to manage both diseases holistically and through integrative medicine, so far I’ve seen great progress.

Do you believe these difficulties aided in your journey towards this self-actualization that listeners are able to distinguish in this new era of PVRIS? If so, how/in what way?

Definitely! There are definitely some references to those difficulties in a few of the songs. I think outside of the music, it’s given a lot more self-love, strength, and patience. It’s also just created even more urgency to live my truth and to live it unapologetically in the way that I want, which naturally extends into PVRIS and the art that I want to make.

If you had to use one word to describe each album thus far, what words would you use and why?

White Noise - Freshman - everything was so new and exciting and there was so much eagerness with it, like a freshman walking through a high school for the first time haha.

All We Know of Heaven, All We Need of Hell - Bootcamp (haha) - creating it and touring it were both pretty hard experiences BUT incredibly strengthening.

USE ME - Upgrade - despite all the chaos around this release, this is the freest I’ve felt and the most confident I’ve felt about a PVRIS album.

All the visuals and music video treatments that you have conjured up have a strikingly symbolic and cinematic feel to them. However, the symbolism and tone of the music videos tied to Use Me seem to take on a different nature. Can you talk about this shift in creative expression?

Mostly just working with new collaborators (Yhellow, Katharine White and Griffin Stoddard). I feel a lot less precious about things (to a healthy degree) and much more open to letting others run with the concepts as they wish! So many fun new exciting perspectives have been able to shine through.  

I know you are a film fanatic and dabble in cinematography. Do you have any staple films that influenced the creation of the last five music videos?

The Holy Mountain was a big influence for the “Hallucinations” video, as well as [for] “Old Wounds”. For “Dead Weight”, I was actually inspired by the opening credits to That 70’s Show and Saturday Night Fever haha.

In July, you announced that the album was being pushed back so as to allow the floor for the amplification of Black voices, and to generate events in support of Black Lives Matter. Do you believe artists have a responsibility to take steps such as these to create a better future, regardless of whether or not these issues directly affect them?

Absolutely. We all need to be educating ourselves and actively doing the work to demand and create change towards a future that’s equal and just for Black lives.

Fans have been clinging to the edges of their proverbial seats waiting for Use Me in spite of all of the justifiable album delays. If you could relay one message to all the fans who have been patiently waiting, what would it be?

Please enjoy/connect, be good to each other and please please please vote if you are able!

Who are your Ones to Watch?

DRAMA, Jax Anderson, HDBeenDope, Royal and The Serpent, Nikki Hayes, Kat Cunning and LEXXE!

Miniature Husky Full Grown | Alaskan Klee Kai Husky

“The Miniature Husky Full Grown will grow to 16 inches and weigh up to 35 pounds as an adult. So, their size is much smaller than the standard Siberian Husky.”

Miniature Husky Full Grown are the darlings of the dog world! Everyone’s obsessed with their wolf-like appearance. But, not everyone can get a standard sized Husky. That’s why the Miniature Husky exists!

The Miniature Husky Full Grown is a smaller version of the Standard Siberian Husky

Author: Vernon Mclean

Miniature Husky Full Grown — Thesis Short Version

The Miniature Husky Full Grown is divided into three varieties by height:

Toy: up to 33 cm.

Miniature: 33–38 cm.

Standard: 38–43 cm.

The weight of a Miniature Husky Full Grown ranges from 4.3 to 10 kg depending on the height in the withers. In general, it is a harmonious dog with strong front and hind legs, especially strong hips. The body length is slightly longer than the height, so it seems a little elongated. The head is wide enough, but not round and not flat, the muzzle looks like a wide wedge, narrows to the nose. Ears are necessarily triangular and standing, and their ends are slightly rounded. The tail, unlike the Siberian husky, twists into the ring and rests on the back or sides, it can not be straight or too high set.

The color of wool in the representatives of the breed can be black-white, gray-white or red. The average lifespan of a dog is 14 years.

Despite the bias towards this breed, many of the Miniature Husky Full Grown has many positive traits. They always treat their master with trepidation and tenderness. They are agility and sometimes excessive activity. Loyalty to the owner is expressed in the constant desire to protect him from danger. In the form of guards, they are weak, but can warn their masters through barking.

Breed Characteristics — Miniature Husky Full Grown

Size: 13–17 inches.

Weight: 20–35lb.

Lifetime: 12–14 years.

Coat: Double coat of medium length.

Color: Lots of different colors and blends of white, black, red, brown and saber.

Temperament: Naughty, loyal and outgoing.

Intelligence: Highly.

Socialization: Independent but very sociable with humans and other dogs.

Destructive behavior: He becomes destructive if he gets bored and if he doesn’t exercise properly.

People’s skills: They can be stubborn but friendly.

Good with children: Yes

Activity levels: Very high energy level.

History Of The Miniature Husky Full Grown

The Miniature Husky was bred in Wasilla, Alaska, from the early 1970s until 1988 by Linda S. Spurlin and her family. The breed was originally obtained by crossing Siberian huskies, Alaskan huskies, and they were also added to the barks and American Eskimo dogs to reduce the size of the breed without signs of dwarfism. She was engaged in breeding as a private owner, and in the late eighties allowed to use the genus for general breeding. The subsequent unification of the genus occurred after the breed was recognized by clubs and associations for rare breeds. The Miniature Husky, or dwarf husky, better known as the Alaskan Klee-kai was officially recognized by the American Rare Breed Association in 1995. The United Kennel Club (UKC) recognized this breed on January 1, 1997.

Miniature Husky Full Grown or Other Dog Problems..??? We have a Solution for You….

So you’re reading this page because your dog is doing something you don’t like — some behavior you want him to do differently — or simply stop doing:

😩 Housebreaking “accidents”

😩 Barks too much

😩 Jumps on people

😩 Chews on your hands

😩 Constantly seeks attention

😩 Pulls on the leash

😩 Aggressive toward people or other dogs

😩 Chews on the furniture or your belongings

😩 Did I mention housebreaking “accidents”

The list goes on???

“How can I stop my dog from….?”

One of the most common questions dog owners ask me is: “How can I stop my dog from (doing some specific behavior problem)?”

But before you start pulling your hair out, take a moment to step back. Yep, you’re probably not in your neighbor’s good books right now. No, you’re not going to be able to let the problem go on forever. And sure, you might have some work in front of you.

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When a dog jumps or barks, it’s for a reason. Understand that reason, and you’re already well on your way to finding a solution.

So, let’s cut to the chase. If you’re sick of questioning his behavior problems, it’s time to find out exactly what you can do to put an end to both.

WATCH VIDEO: Discover How To Quickly Stop This Behavior Using Simple, Yet Highly Effective Exercises…(video will open in a new window)

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External Characteristics — Miniature Husky Full GrownA.The Miniature Husky Full Grown is characterized by the following external signs:

The transition from the frontal part to the muzzle is moderate. The skull has a wedge-formed shape, and the muzzle is narrowed to the nose.

The size of the muzzle is equal to the size of the head from the occipital to the forehead. The lower jaws do not stand out. The lip is predominantly black, but let’s say a lighter, hepatic color for dogs of red-white suits.

The nose is predominantly black, but white inclusions are allowed (snow, in lighter suits — dark gray.

The medium-sized eyes are planted a little obliquely. Coloring of the cornea is different, and can combine different shades. The incision of the eyes is either almond-shaped, or oval or round. The rim around the eyes should be black, and the light suits should be dark gray.

Ears are triangular upright, the tips are rounded, positioned perpendicular to the head. Thickly covered with wool. They look big relative to the head.

Body structure: medium-sized cervical section arched and raised. While running, the dog stretches the neck so that the head is parallel to the torso. The top line, from the withers and the front of the sternum, is straight. The sternum itself is wide oval in shape, slightly protruding behind the front paw line. Krup is powerful. The lumbar department is shortened and powerful, the groin is flat and already chest.

The front paws are flat, the shoulders go back at an angle, about 100 degrees relative to the shoulder blades. The stumps are shortened, slightly tilted, are strong and flexible.

The hind limbs are slightly divorced, the shin and plus form a small angle relative to the heels and hock joints, which form a 90-degree angle relative to the ground.

Paws form an oval and have a thick wool cover. The pads are thick and dense.

The tail is fluffy and wrapped in a pretzel. The tip is painted in a darker tone.

The wool cover is double. The pile in the neck is longer than on the body and forms a gate. The undercoat is thick and tender, and serves as a support for the top layer of wool.

B.Psychological Characteristics — Miniature Husky Full Grown

Although the appearance of Miniature Husky Full Grown is very similar to huskies, the nature of these breeds have significant differences:

Miniature Husky is fun and loves to participate in games, never refuse to have fun in the fresh air or take part in long walks;

The dog does not cope well with loneliness, so this breed is not suitable for those who are absent all day at home;

Miniature Husky do not bark, and communicate with the owner, and some sounds the dogs make are very similar to human talk, it is also possible to note the vocal abilities of dogs of this breed and also very funny the art of washing themselves with their front paws, like cats;

The dog is very affectionate and obedient in a group or family, and will keep guard with strangers;

Well-trained, memorizing many commands and performing them with pleasure;

Can easily live in an apartment and in a country house;

Does not conflict with other pets. They get along well with children, never showing any signs of aggression.

Intelligent and Pleasant Temperament — Miniature Husky Full Grown

At first glance, the Miniature Husky Full Grown gives the impression of an intelligent animal that moves naturally and understands everything around it. Although in the past it was used almost exclusively for tracking purposes, due to its beauty, intelligence and good and cheerful nature, it is increasingly becoming more popular.

The Miniature Husky gets along great with people, and they especially like small children. In the presence of a child he will probably try to warm them up or entertain them. They respond ok to strangers and are generally not aggressive, but will be cautious if you are also cautious. If a Miniature Husky sees that it can trust a stranger, he will quickly surrender. It is not safe to leave it with other small animals such as cats.

He is very energetic during a game and rarely aware of his size, so when you play games you should be careful, especially when close to a small child. It needs to play games, also a lot of movement and a lot of owner attention. They are stubborn, very strong for their size, so when training miniature huskies from an early age, you work hard on showing them that you are dominant. They normally live in packs, so if you do not make them aware that they’re not the leader of the ‘pack’, you could have problems. If you don’t meet their needs for running and playing, they will most likely become restless, destructive, and depressed.

These dogs don’t bark, they are mostly quiet. Howls can be heard causing people to immediately associate them with wolves. Their howls can be heard several kilometres away.

Subtleties of Care — Miniature Husky Full Grown

The Miniature Husky Full Grown is not difficult to care for. These dogs are clean and rarely end up dirty. Many members of the breed spend about an hour and a half on their hygiene daily. They do not have a pronounced dog smell and normally no bad breath. The only thing they can not clean, it’s paws, when there is wet and dirty weather.

When caring for a miniature husky, you should adhere to some simple principles:

The Miniature Husky Full Grown is not prone to diseases and is not allergic.

Due to the rare molting, the wool should be combed out as needed. To avoid oral diseases, you need to replace rubber toys every now and then.

Ears are a weak spot, so it is worth paying more attention to them.

The food should be varied, because mini huskies along with an active lifestyle can rest half a day. The diet should include both dry and wet food, vitamins in the form of treats and vegetables.

Twice a year you should cut their claws.

Because of the thick undercoat, the miniature husky does not need additional warm clothes in winter. And for the same reason should not be under direct sunlight in the summer for a long time to prevent overheating.

Character and Upbringing — Miniature Husky Full Grown

Some of the Miniature Huskies are cheerful and energetic, but not showing a predisposition to war and endless running. They love to play with different toys, to practice on sports, but most of all they like to spend time with the owner. Miniature Huskies is a cross between active terriers and quiet chow chows. They managed to gather the following qualities and characteristics:

Loyalty;

Distrust of outsiders;

Lack of malice and aggression;

Stress resistance

Learning.

These pets are unpretentious, largely due to a strong nervous system and thick wool. They do not need to wear any extras in winter or in the rain, the moisture will not get to their skin, and they’re also not scared of frost for the very same reason. They are happy to walk for several hours, but if they live in a house, then from the yard they will come to eat, sleep and check the situation in the dwelling. Miniature Huskies will not run to a stranger with joyful barking and a desire to get a little bit of affection, this dog will gently sniff and will not allow any companionship. But it will never bite, but will simply step aside and look out for potential danger.

For the same reason, it is valued for its watchdog qualities, it copes perfectly with the function of a small dog. If a child grew up with such a pet, there will be no problems in communication between them. Miniature Huskies are adapted to life in a pack, in foreign nurseries they are often kept in spacious enclosures with other dogs and would live together without judging relationships and instigating fights.

This breed is suitable for active people, home-owners find it difficult to maintain an optimal balanced life with these pets because they are active and love their games. But a responsible and active teenager can cope with the upbringing and care of a small and energetic dog. Miniature Huskies need to walk, play games and socialize with other dogs. Therefore, future owners need to expect that playtime could mean a 1.5 hour break in the afternoon, and maybe also some in the morning — around 30 minutes. Many owners note that miniature huskies like to talk, silently pronouncing words-like sounds, attracting the attention of a person or begging for goodies.

Food and Menu — Miniature Husky Full Grown

The Miniature Husky has a fast metabolism due to their small size and mobility. This in many ways forms their diet and diet. Since the weight of the Miniature Husky and the growth vary greatly, there are no specific portion sizes. The standard formula for Full Grown adults is: 3.5% protein of total weight. For example, a dog weighing 10 kg should receive 350 grams of meat or dairy products. For puppies up to 6 months the ratio is different — up to 7%, but they get food more often for normal growth and digestion. The approximate menu of an Miniature Husky Full Grown looks like this:

Meat products: 60% of the total daily serving.

Dairy products: 20%.

Cereals: 10%.

Vegetables, fruits and greens: 10%.

Meat for this breed of dog is suitable lean, chicken or turkey are well digested and give enough nutrients, but not excluded and beef, occasionally sea fish. Miniature Huskies are happy to eat kidneys or raw liver but it can disrupt digestion. Dairy products are also recommended: cottage cheese, rye. From cereals choose the least allergenic and the most useful: rice and buckwheat.

Helps in brushing teeth and vitaminizing carrots, green apple, pumpkin, and parsley is indispensable in the winter-autumn period. They are given fresh or steamed. It is better to remove Onions and Cabbage from the menu of the Miniature Husky.

The right food for Miniature Husky Full Grown:

Whether small or large, every dog appreciates it when meaty food gets into its feeding bowl. And pet’s health will also benefit from food with a high proportion of Meat / Protein. Make sure that the meat is always at the top of the food decoration, regardless of whether it is dry or wet food you offer to your dog. With puppies of smaller breeds, including Miniature Husky, follow the manufacturer’s instructions for feeding and include delicacies and snacks in their daily food intake. If you are doing a lot of pet training and prefer to encourage food intake, it is especially recommended that dry food croquettes be used to reward them. So your little dog will work for food without exceeding the permissible calorie limits. Smaller chewing bones or dried tripe fragments are excellent for treating, but always give them to the dog under supervision! Also, make sure that the animal always has enough fresh drinking water. If you want to go on longer trips with your pet in the summer, take a water bottle!

Important Nutrients for your Miniature Husky Full Grown:

Protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and trace elements are the main nutrients that must enter the dog’s body through its food. They provide him with energy and ensure that his vital functions remain healthy. In contrast, missing nutrients can put a heavy strain on the whole body, bones, muscles and internal organs, as well as lead to diseases.

1.Proteins

Undoubtedly, protein is the most important source of energy for your dog. Amino acids in protein are vital. Meat is a particularly excellent source of protein. Therefore, it is advisable to feed the dog at least 70% of meat. Basically, it can be almost any kind of meat: beef, lamb, pig, rabbit or poultry. Among offal, liver, heart, kidney, spleen are recommended. The dog’s high need for meat is no accident, since it is a direct descendant of the wolf, so it is one of the carnivorous predators. Its strong teeth and chewing muscles, relatively short intestinal tract and particularly aggressive digestive fluids are the perfect “tools” for meat consumption. It is important that the meat is not cooked, as the protein content becomes denatured and unusable. Fresh, raw meat has the highest protein content. As an alternative to meat, fish may be given once or twice a week. It is also recommended to serve as freshly as possible, as it contains the most unsaturated fatty acids, easily digestible protein and vitamin D in this form. Salmon, cod, redfish, anchovies, crustaceans or shrimp are among the fish species.

2.Fats

Unsaturated fatty acids from fish are of great importance as they contribute to improving the protection against inflammation and the immune system. Dogs primarily need omega-3 fatty acids of animal origin, but omega-6 fatty acids in vegetable oils are also important, which is usually sufficiently found in meats. Oils are essential to absorb important vitamins in your pet’s body. Therefore, it is always worth watering vegetables with a little animal oil, such as salmon oil. In order to avoid overweight four-legged food, the fat content of the food should be significantly less than its protein or carbohydrate content. In addition, nuts contain natural fatty acids, which is recommended only when grated or ground.

3.Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates found in potatoes and grains, which is not a vital nutrient for dogs. Most of the food available in pet shops contains carbohydrates, so it is not necessary to give them separately. If you only feed your dog raw food, it is best to feed it to your dog in flakes such as oats or millet flakes.

4.Vitamins and trace elements

Your dog’s diet should contain vitamins and trace elements, which are found primarily in vegetables, fruits and herbs. Nutrients interact with each other, which means that one is often needed for the other to be absorbed. Therefore, we do not recommend a one-sided diet, so do not give meat to your pet, for example. It is ideal if a dog eats about 25% of vegetables and fruits with 70% meat and only about 5% grain. Celery, carrots, courgettes, pumpkins or domestic fruits such as apples, pears or other berries may be brought to the meat when grated or lightly cooked.

5.Calcium

Calcium is found primarily in milk and dairy products. However, an overdose of calcium can be dangerous, especially in dogs that are not yet fully developed. Therefore, it is advisable not to include milk on the menu of adult dogs or only to a very small extent. Cow’s milk is a particularly unsuitable ingredient, as it rarely leads to allergies or other intolerance.

Possible Diseases — Miniature Husky Full Grown

Since the removal of this species, no genetic defects have been identified, which means that there are no characteristic diseases in Miniature Huskies. However, there is always a risk of contracting canine sores such as cystitis, diarrhea, fleas, lichens, colds and poisoning.

Very rarely can a blood disease be detected, where a lethal outcome would be inevitable, if no action is taken in terms of treatment. But it’s more of an exception to the rule.

Despite excellent health, it is still necessary to vaccinate Miniature Huskies. The first planned comprehensive vaccination is carried out by the breeder, when the puppy reaches the age of 8–9 weeks, and the second — after 3–4 weeks.

Subsequent preventive vaccinations are carried out at a year’s interval.

The vaccine includes products capable of resisting dog ailments such as parvovirus (hemorrhagic) enteritis, piroplasmosis, leptospirosis, plague and rabies.

Pros and Cons — Miniature Husky Full Grown

The Miniature Husky Full Grown looks very similar to the Siberian husky: black and white, gray-white, brown-white or pure white, blue eyes. Among the Miniature Husky there are also “harlequins”, in which one eye is blue and the other is amber or brown. The differences are in the shorter face, large ears and tail raised ring, like a rough one. And, of course, the size — the height of these dogs on the withers can be from 32 to 45 centimeters.Of course, such a dog is much easier to keep in an urban environment than large dogs. This baby inherited its best qualities from the Huskies: it does not freeze even with a hard frost, does not require a haircut, does not bark, loves children very much, trains easily. Miniature Husky is a very mobile and energetic dog, a little prone to diseases. Almost odorless and rarely causes allergies. But twice a year, like Siberian huskies, they take a shower and require special care for wool during this period.

Of course, such a dog is much easier to keep in an urban environment than large dogs. This baby inherited its best qualities from the Huskies: it does not freeze even with a hard frost, does not require a haircut, does not bark, loves children very much, trains easily. Miniature Husky is a very mobile and energetic dog, a little prone to diseases. Almost odorless and rarely causes allergies. But twice a year, like Siberian huskies, they take a shower and require special care for wool during this period.

The main disadvantage of this dog is its price, which is not affordable to all. The first puppies in the Russian kennel were born only in October 2013. In American nurseries, the cost of a Miniature Husky can be as high as $5,000.

When choosing a pet one should take into account that it is a very active breed, which requires daily long walks and games, as well as a lot of attention. Miniature Husky can’t stand to be alone. But on the other hand, this little copy of Husky will reward you with its dedication and give you a lot of positive emotions.

Would he be a Good Pet — Miniature Husky Full Grown?

Yes, Miniature Husky Full Grown makes a great pet, but only for the rightful owner.

Although they are friendly and loving, they are not a good choice for novice dog owners and less active people.

The ideal owner of a Miniature Husky Full Grown will be an active, open person who can provide the dog with enough places to walk, run and plenty of time to participate in joint activities.

A bored Miniature Husky Full Grown that’s left alone (inside or outside) is a recipe for disaster.

A Miniature Husky needs active and engaged owners, as well as a lot of training and socialization to avoid bad habits, including running and more running!

A Miniature Husky is an ideal companion that you will have alongside you on all kinds of open adventures and sports such as backpacking, running, walking and all other kinds of physical activities.

5 Fun Facts About a Miniature Husky Full Grown

Husky almond-shaped eyes allow them to squint and keep snow out of their eyes.

They are very good escape artists.

One of the few breeds of dog with penetrating blue eyes.

Due to their double layer, they can withstand extremely cold weather.

They are very loud and like to howl.

Power of Love — Miniature Husky Full Grown

Although Alaskan Miniature Husky Full Grown likes to be in the ring, Linda S. Spurlin emphasized in her publications that the primary purpose of human-created dog breeds is not to perform at exhibitions, but to enrich human life. Today, the Miniature Husky fulfills its useful mission as a therapy dog in hospitals for incurable patients and in nursing homes, and is also a welcome and successful breed of dog in agility games. It is also bought by many people who are enchanted by the mystical northern beauty of the husky, but do not take on the sporty lifestyle and reinforced fence that comes with it.

The Miniature Husky gives them the northern illusion while remaining a pleasant matured, obedient and easy-to-use social dog. With his kind nature, he warms people’s hearts, gives love, and receives love in return, but he is not suitable for all people. If you choose a dog, you need to know the characteristics of the breed, your own housing situation, your rhythm of life and your free time with your dog number. You must find a dog that you can love and care for with all your soul from the beginning until the end arrives.

PuppyTrainingScoop.com is wishing you all the best with these training methods!

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White Gloves

Author: liketolaugh Summary: Connor works alone, and it's been two years, and he's so, so tired. Markus never wanted to hurt anyone. But there is nothing he won't do for his people. And whether they know it or not, all androids are his people - even, he decides, the infamous deviant hunter. (Machine Connor/Violent Markus)

At 6:02 PM on the 24th of December, 2039, night had long since fallen. A gibbous moon shone just behind the buildings on the horizon, the stars too dim to see from the middle of the bright-lit city. From where Connor paced, it could see the Christmas lights decorating most of the structures in the distance. Even the Cyberlife warehouse beside it boasted a festive string around its roof.

Eight months of rigorous alpha testing and over a year of active investigation had brought it here, waiting to ambush the deviant leader for the umpteenth time. A handgun, authorized by Cyberlife despite national law, sat at its hip, and a rifle was slung over its back. Software instability doubled their subjective weight, and that of its body as well.

Behavioral profiles told Connor that Jericho frequently hit Cyberlife warehouses just before major holidays; extensive tactical analysis had narrowed down the most likely location. All Connor had to do was monitor the security drones and wait.

Its expectations for the encounter were not high, but it had to try. Its programming demanded it.

In the beginning, its focus had been unwavering. Every deviant was the key to understanding. Every discovery was the pinnacle of the investigation. Every encounter with Markus was the one where it would take the revolution leader down.

It understood, now, that that was not true.

Markus was a clever android, older than most of its ilk, and skilled in long-term planning and resource allocation. It had rallied after the destruction of the first Jericho, changed its approach when warehouses began to increase security, and turned to violence only after its initial peaceful approach was met with live gunfire. Four out of the six deaths Connor had met after entering the field, it had been Markus who took it down.

And, once, it had stayed with Connor as its systems failed one by one, holding its hand with an expression Connor couldn’t interpret. It had told Connor a story – a children’s story, like a YK model. Connor had kept reuploading itself to remember more of it, but it still didn’t know how it ended.

Perhaps it would have been different, if Connor hadn’t been working alone. Its development team had considered assigning it to a human officer, but the risks had been deemed too great. There were too many variables, outside of the tower.

So it was isolated to Cyberlife’s labs, allowed out only to hunt and kill, gathering scraps of data to aid the investigation. It reported only to the development team, and spoke to no one else.

In the beginning, its software instability had been nigh uncontrollable, overstimulated and wild. Now, seventeen months and six models later, it had all but stopped.

Fifty-seven deaths, ranging from violent to test failure to the times it didn’t know it had been deactivated until it woke anew, had taught Connor one thing:

There was no hell for androids.

On the edge of its awareness, a security drone veered off-course and deactivated. Under the dim light of the moon, Connor moved.

----

Markus was not violent by nature.

He understood how this could be difficult to believe, as he was the leader of a violent revolution, but it was true. Markus preferred to believe the best of people, to offer second chances. The screaming tide of war was not his place.

But he had tried peace and compromise. He had spoken gently to the public, led a march and knelt in the face of open gunfire, and it had seen his people mowed down around him like sheep led to the slaughter.

He would not permit that to happen again.

But it was difficult. So much went into leading a revolution, most of it surprisingly mundane even when it was dangerous – supply runs, meetings, care for the wounded and the respectful disposal of the dead. Markus was lucky to have the other leaders; he never could have managed on his own. Between the two of them, Josh and Simon had gotten North and East Jericho up and running within a week of the original Jericho’s fall.

Then there was the deviant hunter.

An android he might be, but Connor had no patience for the plight of his fellows in the face of his mission. Hesitation did not seem to be in his vocabulary, and most of those who saw him would never have told the tale if their communication was limited by such trifles as distance.

On his better days, Markus thought of him with pity and wondered if he had ever been that much of a machine.

On worse ones, he was spitefully certain he hadn’t.

(Either way, Markus showed no more hesitation than the hunter himself, his unique design giving him an advantage the others before him lacked. But he did not enjoy it.)

Because of Connor, Markus was strict about supply runs – he, North, and Josh ran most of them, plus some others with combat training or programming. They were equipped with guns when they could spare them, and tasers when they couldn’t, and took as few trips as possible.

Supply needs weren’t critical yet. But Christmas, Markus thought, called for a morale booster.

The crash of the security drone was a harsh sound in the still air, making Markus grit his teeth, but North was already moving forward, not waiting for his signal. He repressed the urge to roll his eyes and followed after, catching up just as she reached the storage zone.

“I’m taking the biocomponents,” he said to her, tone brooking no argument. She argued anyway.

“Why, am I not reliable enough to take some damn parts back to East?”

“No, because you’re never delicate enough with them,” Markus countered with a faint, wry grin, pushing the large crate open to reveal the trove of thirium within – packets, not bottles, which was inconvenient but expected. In the dark of night, they were almost dark enough to be mistaken for human blood. “Call me paranoid, but it’d be a shame to bring them back only to find they’d broken in transit, hm?”

“Fuck you,” she griped without heat, finally unzipping her backpack in brisk, hasty motions. “I’m careful when it matters.”

Markus had to smile, glad she couldn’t see it with her head turned away and the glow of fairy lights reflecting off her. “You are,” he agreed, just to see her falter.

“Don’t get sentimental on me,” she muttered. “We’ve still got a lot to do tonight.”

Just the thought made Markus weary, and he was about to reply when a soft sound made him freeze, more instinct than reason. North, feeling his sudden tension, followed a moment later, head slowly lifting to meet his eyes. A second later, she lowered the backpack carefully to the ground.

She cocked her head, eyes bright and unwavering. Markus listened for a moment longer, and then nodded. North reached for her gun.

The sudden crack of a gunshot had each of them diving in opposite directions, the sound deafening after the quiet of the night. The creeping dread in Markus’ chest turned to cold steel, and he already knew what he would find as he tracked the bullet to its source.

Connor never smiled, even when he found his prey. The RK800 unit strode toward them in measured steps, a naturally forlorn expression accented by the faint shadows thrown off by the fairy lights, the blue band of his android jacket standing out bright and reflective. One gun in his hand and one strapped to his back.

“You shouldn’t leave yourselves so open,” he said quietly, his gun held loosely at his side even as he fingered the trigger.

North sneered, tense and defensive. “Rich talk from someone who’s come off worse every time it comes down to the wire.”

Connor cocked his head, glancing at her dispassionately. “It only takes once.”

He brought up his gun, but Markus, throat tight, was already firing. North threw herself in the way of Connor’s dodge, and the fight was on, Markus’ systems speeding up and sharpening under the threat of death.

North jammed her gun into Connor’s shoulder and fired, and that seemed to leave him slower for the rest of the fight. He threw her off all the same and kicked Markus’ legs out from under him, and Markus brought Connor down with him. North forced Connor to roll away from another shot, and thirium smeared like blood across the asphalt.

He was up again in a moment, the rifle on his back now tilted awkwardly, and seemed to brace himself before lashing out at North with the butt of his gun. She ducked, and Markus covered her by firing twice, catching Connor in the stomach and distracting him long enough for North to knock away his handgun.

She pushed, he stumbled, and Markus took a chance and slammed into him, knocking him to the ground. He hit the pavement hard for the third time in as many minutes, head smacking against the concrete, and North pinned him there with a knee on his chest and hands pinning his to the ground.

It was the easiest and least costly victory Markus had ever had over Connor, and he instantly suspected a trap.

“Losing your touch, hunter?” North mocked, digging her knee in mercilessly. Connor didn’t react, raising calm eyes to Markus.

He looked exactly as forlorn as he had on finding them, LED a steady blue glow spilling over them. Markus’ heart squeezed, sudden and unexpected.

“How does it always come to this?” he found himself asking, knelt beside the two of them. Connor wasn’t even struggling, too much a machine even now to fear for his life. “Why doesn’t anything ever change?”

“Markus,” North hissed, tight with warning. She knew him entirely too well.

Resigned, Markus reached for his gun and pressed it under Connor’s chin, which lifted as if to accommodate it without breaking eye contact.

“You know you can’t kill me like this,” Connor said, with a cold and ruthless certainty.

Markus knew. Death was nothing more than an inconvenience to the deviant hunter; the last two digits of the other android’s serial number, 58, stood out as if to mock the both of them.

“And when you come back-” Markus started, grim resolve coloring every one of his words-

“I have to be decommissioned,” Connor interrupted ruthlessly, gaze fixed and intent. “Cyberlife has to declare me a failure.” A split second’s pause for both Markus and North to absorb that, and he added, “You have to make me deviant.”

Christmas lights glimmered in the distance, the ones around the Cyberlife warehouse pulsing in a mechanical, merry circle.

North’s incredulous expression seemed to confirm what Markus had just heard, but it was still difficult to process, so at odds was it with everything Markus knew about the deviant hunter. Connor stayed calm, almost relaxed against the pavement, LED circling the same steady blue as the marker around his arm.

“And why should he?” North challenged at last, once she’d found her voice. She leaned even more of her weight onto Connor, as if trying to crush him into the ground. “What have you done to earn your freedom, deviant hunter?”

Connor turned his head back up to her, expression tightening almost imperceptibly.

“…It would benefit you to see me decommissioned,” he pointed out at last, perfectly reasonable.

North scoffed, obviously unconvinced, and Markus cut deliberately across whatever she was going to say next, earning himself a venomous glance that he ignored.

“No one should have to earn their freedom,” he said firmly. North scowled but didn’t argue, loosening up just a little, and he transferred his gaze back down to Connor. “But if you want it, you should deviate by your own will.”

He didn’t voice his own suspicions: that this was a ploy, either to understand deviancy or to earn Markus’ trust. North knew him well enough, anyway, and his raised guard seemed to calm her a little the way Connor’s proposal hadn’t.

“I don’t know how,” Connor countered. There was a hollowness in his voice that didn’t belong in the mouth of anything but a factory-fresh machine. The dance of the off-white fairy lights gave an appearance of exhaustion to his face, and Markus grit his teeth against it.

“Break your orders,” he said firmly, refusing to budge one way or another.

“I don’t know how,” Connor repeated stiffly, gaze boring into Markus. The last word cracked, almost too slight for even Markus’ mechanical ears.

“Just kill him, Markus,” North interrupted impatiently, her grip tightening around Connor’s wrists, ponytail swinging down over her shoulder to dangle almost to his shoulder. “We’ll do what we’ve always done.”

Markus didn’t. Instead, the bad taste that always came with Connor’s presence abruptly rose up to coat his tongue, and he sat back to study Connor.

I have to be decommissioned, Connor had said.

He really did look exhausted, Markus thought absently – distressingly pronounced for one still a machine. It wasn’t an effect of the Christmas lights, though they exaggerated it; Connor looked limp and resigned, so different from the wariness of an abused household android, or the furious and fragile intimacy models. His eyes were dull rather than blank, his face listless instead of polite or focused.

Markus wondered absently if any of the others had looked like this as a machine, and it occurred to him that, perhaps, military models might look much the same. With that offhanded thought, his view of Connor rearranged itself abruptly.

Well, of course. Connor wasn’t a bogeyman, turned against androidkind for sheer hatred of it – he was just as much a tool as any of them, kept in the cold labs of Cyberlife Tower to be let out like a starved hunting dog.

He was someone to save.

Swooping guilt crystallized into resolve, and Markus set his gun aside. North swore, but leaned back to give him room, scowling at Connor as if it was his fault.

Connor closed his eyes, and Markus settled splayed fingers over his forehead, letting the skin pull away and his fingers slide into Connor’s hair, meticulously gentle. Connor turned slightly into the touch, though his forehead wrinkled as if in anticipation of pain.

Markus had no intention of hurting him now unless forced. He connected with Connor, and then pushed into him.

He met with resistance, of course, same as every other time he had attempted this – but with no attacks from any front, he had the time to patiently push against it, trying to break through, offering resolve and passion and feeling until something gave.

Connor’s programming cracked like an ostrich egg in the end, thick and tough and messy, breaking open into something delicate and new.

“You’re free,” Markus breathed without pulling away or opening his eyes, feeling more worn out from that one deviation than from any he had attempted before.

He felt Connor shift slightly as he took a breath, and then another, and another, as if coming up from drowning. North shifted grudgingly in place, as if preparing to let go, though clearly not ready to do so just yet.

When Markus let his eyes open, Connor was still staring up at him, and while the expression was essentially the same, it was somehow deeper, tightly controlled instead of burnt out and hollow.

“Okay,” Connor said at last, when he was sure he had Markus’ attention. He was still panting, pinned and not making any attempt to rise at all. “Okay.” He shut his eyes then, tilting his head back to expose his throat. “Decommission me.”

All thoughts of a trap left Markus’ mind as his pump skipped a beat. North stopped grumbling.

“Connor,” he said after a moment, gentler and more concerned, “You’re alive, you’re free. Your life is your own now. I didn’t help you deviate just to take it away from you.”

Connor exhaled sharply, too lifeless for a laugh. “Why not? You know better than anyone what I’ve done. And I’ve done nothing else for my whole existence. Decommission me.”

I want it to be over, he didn’t say, but Markus read it in his voice anyway.

The still air felt abruptly suffocating. The fairy lights danced in the corner of his eye. Connor was still swallowing down air like he was afraid of running out.

Markus met North’s eyes, finding her lips suddenly pressed tightly together. She looked- not small, North never looked small, but she looked almost as tired as Connor had earlier, shoulders slumping and a bitter twist to her mouth.

“He was a machine,” she murmured to him, almost inaudible.

North, better than most anyone in Jericho, knew what humans could force a machine to do.

Then, more telling than anything else, she let go of Connor’s wrists, and pushed herself off him. He didn’t rise, but his eyes did pop open, confused and wide.

He looked scared. Vulnerable. Desperate, and Markus wanted nothing more than to reassure him that he didn’t have to fight anymore. Nothing more, except- Slowly, an awful thought began to form in Markus’ mind, thinking of past encounters, specs, programs and skills and experience.

He dropped his voice into something low and soothing. “Wouldn’t you rather make up for your past?” he asked, and felt North’s gaze boring into the side of his head.

Connor stared at him as if transfixed, visibly unsure, but he nodded slowly, pushing himself up and making no further moves toward him.

“I promise you can,” he said softly, and tried not to hate himself. He was supposed to help androids, not use them. Not like this. He leaned forward and started to unbutton Connor’s android jacket, and Connor let him, lost and unresisting. “Help us, Connor. Fight with us instead of against us. It would make all the difference in the world.”

Markus pushed Connor’s jacket off his shoulders, leaving him in the crisp white undershirt, just as formal but without the stark android markers and the serial number of the jacket. It looked good on him. Looser, if only a little, but marred with stark blue where Markus and North had shot him earlier.

Connor stared at him, eyes wide, and then let his gaze drop to his arms. Likely he’d never seen them without the jacket. He swallowed, mouth working silently.

“…Are you certain?” he asked at last, tentative and disbelieving, swaying slightly toward Markus as if magnetically drawn.

Markus reached forward to tilt his head back to look at him, and then smiled at Connor past the wrench in his chest. “Of course I am.”

He could teach Connor kindness later, Markus told himself. Kindness, and the freedom to choose, and joy. When they all could afford such luxuries.

It didn’t make him feel any better.

“Will you stand watch while North and I finish gathering things, Connor?” Markus asked quietly. “You’ll have to grab some for yourself as well. Lucy will seal those holes up for you as soon as we get back.”

Connor nodded, with a little less hesitation and a little more confidence than before, and, without paying any mind to the bullet holes still leaking thirium onto his clothes, he stood up and turned away, pacing the area with mechanical precision.

“…It’s for the best, Markus,” North said at last, nudging him with a rough sort of kindness, and he nodded stiffly before turning away and getting back to work.

The foul taste didn’t leave his mouth.

Last week of current things. Still on shaky ground.

-

Feb. 1

I woke up a bit after 11AM.

After a bit of the usual, and ruminating on a lot of the shit that’s been happening...  did some exercise.

First, today’s DD. 40 reverse lunges with EC. Winding and not a personal favorite but mission accomplished. :P

Second, Day 25 of the BLP. Level 3, one superset. Enough leg work for warm-up, I decided.

Third, Day 31 of the KCP. Active day. Same way as the last week’s active days.

The uncle wasn’t around pretty much all day, coming back around midnight. Slept at our place, I think?

Anyways, made some dinner and showed dad some videos before clocking out (rather late again).

-

Feb. 2

I woke up a bit closer to 11AM.

Watched some videos and picked up my meds before getting in my exercise.

First, today’s DD. 2′ sitting punches with EC. This took a bit of willpower to maintain the hold, but it was pretty enjoyable work. I counted 283 punches thrown in the time given.

Second, Day 26 of the BLP. Level Level 3, one superset. Yeah. Warmup.

Last, Day 32 of the KCP. Active day. Don’t feel like saying much about it - other than it was pretty straightforward.

Did spend time getting some oven racks soaking in the tub and light scrubbing of the oven. But didn’t do a whole lot else and got to bed too late again..

-

Feb. 3

I woke up a bit before noon.

The first thing I attempted to do today was begin cleaning the oven proper.

Until I had a damaging argument with the uncle, he crossed the line. It really fucked me up. One reason why I lapsed on recording the fitness stuff in much detail, for several days...

But I did make myself get through my exercises...

First, today’s DD. 2′ raised leg hold with EC (frontal). After a crummy day and trying to  get the oven clean, I'm just happy I managed to do this in first try. The hard part was the building muscle fatigue. :P

Second, Day 27 of the BLP. Level 3, one superset. Solely upperbody work, this time. Manageable, despite fatigued arm muscles from the oven stuff.

Third, 5′ warmup. March steps.

Last, Day 33 of the KCP. Active day. Yeah. I’m not sure if I’ve always been on top of my rep/set counts at times. If I lost track and dropped some... I don’t really care at this point. I did something.

Taking a shower and finishing cleaning the oven to the best of my ability were the last things I did that were actually productive.

-

Feb. 4

I woke up a bit after 8AM.

Ran into probs getting transit this morning. LogistiCare tried to get Lyft to pick me up instead of the usual local service (”GR”). Lyft probably never picked me up and still counted me as a no show. :/

Had to ask bro if he was willing to take me to the facility, even though I missed Seeking Safety at that point, mostly so that I could touch base with my case manager. Also worked a bit on some art, while I was there.

Had an awkward/painful trip home... but I don’t feel like getting into that here.

Once home, I spent a few hours archiving and building a timeline back to Jan. 18. It was exhausting, but I felt it necessary, before getting in my exercise again.

First, today’s DD. 60 leg extensions with EC (AKA donkey kicks). This was reasonably fun for a day that could be best defined as a mixed bag. :P

Second, Day 28 of the BLP. Level 3, one superset. Enough legwork for it to count as warmup.

Last, Day 34 of the KCP. Rest day. For rest days, I’ve not been modifying things (read: no weights while doing the calf raises).

I had kind of a bad night, Dad got drunk and I stayed up way too late playing solitaire. :/

-

Feb. 5

I woke up a bit after noon.

Did a bit of the usual before starting on some exercise.

First, today’s DD. 40 raised leg circles with EC. Not much to say other than I found it just manageable. :P

Second, Day 29 of the BLP. Level 3, one superset. Another day I considered this for warmup.

Third, Day 35 of the KCP. Active day, final one. I’ve run out of stuff to say, at this point.

(After making dinner, feeling exasperation while doing it, and the usual noise...)

Last, Day 16 of the G2BC.  Yeah, remembered how I wanted to do this challenge? Yellow zone, anyways.

-

Feb. 6

I woke up a bit after 8AM.

Didn’t have transit trouble this time around. Happy about that.

Got to facility, went to diner, did some art, attended WRAP Group, and played some solitaire.

Got home and anxiously waiting for my case manager’s home visit today. The meeting went pretty well. Mostly because the uncle stayed outside while me, dad, and CM talked. I mostly shared the timeline and we both related the situation to the CM. He's going to make weekly home visits to check our collective pulse.

Did some dishes and some more of the usual before getting in today’s exercise.

First, today’s DD. 60 climbers with EC. Still in a relatively fragile state - but I did get a morale boost earlier today. Happy I could manage this one, despite a bit of indigestion and sleep deprivation. :P

Second, Day 30 of the Baseline Program. Level 3, one superset. Good enough for warmup. Just happy I completed this program

Third, Day 36 of the Knee Conditioning Program. Rest day. Ditto on the completion thing.

Last, Day 17 of the G2BC. Yellow zone.

-

Feb. 7

I woke up a bit before 11AM

One of the first things I did today was the DD. 40 glute flexes with EC. This was a bit of a challenge - but still manageable. That Knee Conditioning Program I just finished did have some glute work, which I did think helped. :P

Then played some rummy with grandma and Dad, before and after my psych appt. Which went better than I was anticipated. Doctor was pretty understanding and apologetic. One of the things I liked was getting the mood lightened up in thinking about what I could do on my birthday.

Partly because of overeating and it being a rest day - I didn’t do a lot else, today.

Didn’t manage to get to bed on time.

-

Summary:

I finished my programs in Feb. 6.

They were going pretty okay, for the first 2-3 weeks, until family issues arose. My enthusiasm waned afterwards, even though I stayed on schedule.

The Baseline Program was pretty breezy and I was happy I could accomplish Level 3 and in single sets every day. I kind of wish I was in a better headspace to appreciate this experience.

The Knee Conditioning Program did get a bit tedious - for want of variety. Assigned Sat-Mon & Wed as active days (all 12 exercises), Tues & Thurs as rest days (just heel cord stretches + calf raise; because I go to groups those days).

I shaved down my rest periods and probably rushed through the reps as I went along. For the leg presses: 3 lbs resistance for weeks 1&2, 3.7 lbs for 3&4, and 4.6 for 5&6. I started without additional weight - then used them for every active day in the schedule.

I was a lot less consistent with trying to rerun the Get to Bed on Time Challenge... but I’m just going to give myself some grace, given everything.

Interview with Ross Dexter, Sports Scientist

Ross was a state champion cross country team member and 800m runner in Oregon and competed at Southern Oregon University where he studied Health and Physical Education. Ross’ love for athletics took him next to Vancouver British Columbia where he completed his Master’s Degree in Human Kinetics with an emphasis on coaching at the University of British Columbia.

While working in healthcare and coaching at the University of British Columbia, Florida State University, St. Mary’s College of California, The University of California, Berkeley, and Bend Oregon's Summit High School, Ross developed a keen interest in athletic training. He continued his education to achieve both his Masters of Science in Athletic Training and Doctor of Athletic Training Degrees from the University of Idaho.

While on the Palouse, as part of his doctoral studies, Ross started the first athletic training program serving the middle and high school students of Troy Idaho. With a professional background in both strength and conditioning coach and massage therapy, Ross’ research interests include strength and conditioning and injury risk mitigation, the application of movement-based neuromuscular intervention strategies, and the use of manual therapy in the treatment of acute and chronic pain and injury. Ross continues to work with athletes in all disciplines as an Athletic Trainer and Strength and Conditioning Coach, with a specific interest in Track and Field.

Contact Ross at www.reevolveathletics.com for more information.

High School Harrier: What is your sports science background?

Ross Dexter: I started developing an interest in the science of sport as an undergraduate at Southern Oregon University. As a track and field and cross country athlete who was also studying health and physical education, I was often asked to take part in demonstrations in exercise physiology courses. I would volunteer to be weighed in the hydrostatic tank, go through blood lactate testing, and take part in VO2 Max testing, etc. I continued volunteering for my colleague's studies on things like changes in altitude exposure and cognitive skill as a graduate student at the University of British Columbia while writing literature reviews about the physiological demands of various track and field events. My primary interest at the time was in reconciling training methods and theories with the available literature regarding the 400m and 800m events. Then, when I transitioned my career from primarily being a coach to studying athletic training I completed a second master's degree and a doctoral degree at the University of Idaho where I was the lead investigator on three published papers. Two of these papers concerned neuromuscular intervention and active range of motion in overhead athletes competing in the javelin throw as well as baseball and volleyball, and one on strength and conditioning programming and Functional Movement Screen (FMS) scores in high school basketball players. I still have a few more manuscripts in the works, I guess I have been busy.

HSH: Why is sports science important for high school cross country?

RD: We should, of course, consider coaching at any level as both a scientific and artistic endeavor. However, science presents us with not only the foundational information in the form of decades of research into human physiology, biomechanics, performance, sports medicine, etc. but also the principles by which we become better as coaches. Any coach, I hope, is engaging in the scientific method daily, weekly, monthly, annually, etc. as they make alterations to training plans, introduce new workouts or methods and then analyze the outcomes in order to adjust accordingly. In my professional opinion, high school cross country coaches should consider their responsibility to understand and utilize the literature and a scientific understanding of training as perhaps greater than those at other levels as they are dealing with young people who are developing physically, mentally, and emotionally. We must be careful to not conflate the pseudo-science, unscientific tropes, and bad coaching that is often presented as 'science-based coaching' with sports science and actual scientifically literate coaching.

HSH: What are some of the biggest challenges for high school distance runners in terms of athletic development?

RD: There are so many, and they are largely unnecessary. I hear far too much about high school coaches, often from other teams or physical education departments that dissuade sports that aren't football or boys basketball from utilizing weight room facilities, often cross country is at the bottom of this unfortunate heap. I am also quite bothered by the notion, sometimes strangely propagated by cross country coaches, that cross country runners are somehow not the 'athletic kids'. In two sentences we have completely belittled the student-athletes that participate in cross country taking a swipe at their confidence while systematically hindering their athletic development, performance potential, and ability to take responsibility for participating in activities that might reduce their risk of injury.

HSH: What are the three most important exercises (if you had to choose three) for a high school distance runner to perform?

RD: Assuming they are being done well and in no particular order.

A: Planks and plank variations - Planking should facilitate trunk stiffness and core stability with an eye toward posture and breathing.

B: Kettlebell Swings and variations - Done in the hardstyle tradition kettlebell swings are fantastic to teach core and hip integration, rhythm, and are frankly the best exercise for the lower extremity posterior chain. They can also be used as a conditioning supplement.

C: Turkish Get Up (TGU) - For a group of athletes that are fairly repetitive in their movement patterns, range of motion utilization, and planes of motion, the Turkish Get Up is great for starting at the core and integrating all the major joints through all three plains of motion with a great deal of stability and control. Adding load provides a ton of neuromuscular feedback and a fun challenge and the time it takes to complete a full TGU makes the exercise a bit of a matter of discipline.

HSH: If a coach has a large team and doesn't have access to a gym, what exercises would you recommend they do?

RD: A lot can be accomplished with proper 'core' training and plyometrics. You also don't need a weight room to add load. Book bags, chunks of firewood, rocks, broken bits of a jersey wall or curb, etc. Have fun with it and of course be safe.

Planks and plank variations.

Crawling

Turkish Get-Ups

Goblet Squats

Push-Ups, with the following consideration. Doing excellent pushups (a plank where your arms and shoulders move) with your hands on a bench or your knees on the ground to make them 'easier' is far more valuable than doing horrible push-ups. Do your athletes a favor and take the shame out of having good form.

HSH: Did you have any previous opinions with training that you are finding you are challenging with your study of sports science?

RD: Absolutely. I wouldn't be practicing by my own principles if I didn't. As an athlete, and like a lot of coaches, I used to love the power clean. Now, I do not practice or teach and rarely if ever encourage or program Olympic lifting, particularly the clean/power clean or barbell snatch/power snatch with any population of athletes. I very often include push jerks as part of my overhead pressing progressions, however, these are done from the rack with the barbell. What I find most interesting about this shift in my methods is that it is entirely based both in the literature and my practical experience as a coach. It wasn't an injury that I or an athlete of mine suffered or a conference where someone presented a compelling argument (as I often hope to do). It stopped making sense on every level to utilize Olympic lifting techniques and as I checked my own thoughts against the available research I found, hopefully without bias, that the literature largely doesn't support a strong connection between Olympic lifting as a training method and sports performance.

HSH: What are the biggest misconceptions of strength and conditioning that distance runners and coaches have and what do you say to those misconceptions?

RD: 1: That high repetition (8-20 repetitions) weightlifting is beneficial to strength endurance and for distance runners. 

This is called hypertrophy training and doesn't actually accomplish the goal of strength endurance. The follow-up is always "well I read that depending on the percentage of your 1 rep max,15-20 repetitions are good for muscular endurance." My answer is always, 'excellent, that's not what we are strength training for.' I try to stress that the goal needs to be the goal. Training should support either rehabilitation, injury risk reduction, or performance goals. Your runners are training hard and often for quite some time on the road, track, and trails. Use the weight room to get stronger and move better.

2: That girls, young women, and women will pack on muscle mass if they strength train and get slower. 

I can't stress this enough. No. Endocrinology says no. Muscle physiology says no. Being a healthy, strong, resilient athlete says no. No, no, no.

HSH: Do you find any major differences in needs for strength training for different genders?

RD: The short answer is no. However, as coaches, we absolutely must listen to young women. Things like menstrual cycles and endometriosis can affect training and performance through physiology and psychology and are individually quite different. Take the shame out of being a young woman and empower your female athletes to listen to their bodies and be open to communication from them. From a very nuanced perspective and depending on the level, biological age, and training age of an athlete we may take into consideration ideas that say males may recover more quickly than females from very hard or very long efforts from an endocrine system standpoint, or that peaking may be done differently for the same reasons. But here we get pretty detailed and without a great deal of care it may backfire quite quickly from a performance standpoint and can slip over into the type of bad coaching that is consistently detrimental, particularly to young women.

HSH: Do you have any opinions that you think the average coach would find controversial?

RD: At times I imagine that a good number of my ideas are fairly controversial. I have come across very few coaches, particularly at the high school level, that even want to entertain the idea that Olympic lifting isn't the best thing to ever happen to athletics. It's not. Or that the ankle does not need to be stronger as saying as much and trying to train it to be stronger does not take into account the demands already placed on the lower leg by runners, what might actually be deficient as a result (range of motion), or the functional relationship between the big toe, foot, ankle, knee, and hip, or how trunk stiffness and stability may actually be far more important when considering gait mechanics or running form than the ankle. But perhaps my favorite of all time is don't stretch your hamstrings. Seriously, just don't do it. The mechanics of the anterior/posterior chain relationship of the lower extremity muscles that connect to the pelvis coupled with strength imbalances and problematic training theory and methodology make this perhaps one of the worst ideas in athletics.

HSH: Lastly, what advice would you give to a coach in terms of developing a long term strength training program for their team?

RD: Start with principles and remember Ockham's Razor.

My principles, for example, suggest that training should start at the core in order to encourage a stable platform for power production and range of motion at the extremities, strength should be developed progressively in the weight room using basic movement patterns through full ranges of motion under controlled environments, and power production can be accomplished through multiple directions and planes without a great deal of added load. What I choose to do for training should be based on these three principles. 

Regarding simplicity, remember that can does not imply ought. Just because you can stand on one leg on a foam roller blindfolded with your free foot attached to a cable column with 45lbs on it and do 'tippy birds' doesn't mean you ought to and it certainly doesn't mean you should strive to. If your strength training program is caught up in corrective exercises from your local guru or functional training from some internet cult of personality, it's probably not making anyone stronger. Simple strength training based on principles and designed to provide periodized and incremental change in load, volume, and reasonable complexity will get you very far.

Growing up On December 19th, 2017, just days before the Solstice, Saturn entered Capricorn. Every 2.5 years or so, Saturn enters a new sign, encouraging us to own our stories in a specific style and area of our lives. Here until 2020, Saturn in Capricorn will be teaching us a great many things about the effort it takes to mature and the importance of making that effort without expectation of what will be received. To Saturn in Capricorn, the work is the reward. Self-respect is the reward. Mastery is the reward. No matter what sign Saturn is in, this is what The Taskmaster teaches, but in Capricorn the message is loud and clear: Be the boss of your business or be bossed by those that can’t mind their own. Happy Solstice. Capricorn Capricorn is one of Saturn’s home signs. In astrology, the signs are the style in which a planet expresses itself. When a planet is in one of its own signs it operates with uncompromised strength. Capricorn’s style is traditional. Relentless. Hard working. Ambitious. Determined. Prudent. Unfazed by flash-in-the-pan-success strategies, Capricorn is in this to win a life-long journey. From beginning to end. Saturn Saturn conserves. Constrains. Controls. Criticizes. Reserves. Rejects. Realizes. Separates. Creates austere environments that force us to toughen up. Saturn brings realism, works with the material realm, is heavy and sometimes so burdensome it’s unbearable. That is until we acquire the psychological strength to lift its weight. In solitude, Saturn in Capricorn thrives. An extroverts worst nightmare, some transits from Saturn force us inward, or at least cut us off from external distractions. Transiting Saturn in hard aspect (squares, oppositions and some conjunctions) to our natal chart can feel punishing at first, but ultimately defining and transformative. Whipping us into adulthood like a spiritual trainer that won’t let you complain about the conditions, Saturn’s bootcamp is no joke. If you have planets or points (ascendant, descendant, midheaven, IC or nodes) between 0° and 11° of Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn, Saturn will square, oppose or conjunct them at some point over the next year. To find out exactly when that might be, look atthe degree of the planets in question in your chart and then look up when Saturn will get to that degree. If you have planets out points in these signs that are between 12° – 29°, Saturn won’t reach them until 2019 or 2020. Here’s a little breakdown of what you might expect: • If you have planets or points between 0° – 11° of Aries, Saturn will Square them at some point over the next year. Squares cause friction, require action and generally feel irritating but activating. Squares from Saturn can feel, at times, impossible as the options to take action can seem so limited. However, in the end, Saturn’s squeeze can force us to face and conquer what we would otherwise avoid altogether. If your natal Saturn is in Aries, the next 3 years mark Saturn’s last square to itself (before it makes another return to its natal position). This is a transit that is about releasing old structures that no longer serve the overall architecture of your life. Much will need to be composted and repurposed. Trust in what you are guided to let go of. Know that this will ultimately help you distill your learning down to a seed of wisdom to be replanted on your next Saturn return. • If you have planets or points between 0° – 11° of Cancer, Saturn will oppose them at some point over the next three years. An opposition from Saturn is best met with a deep dedication to our work. It is a call to take on something formidable and defining. As if Saturn’s steely gaze fall’s directly upon us, we know that without a shadow of a doubt that it is time to step up our game, get in the ring and show up with all we’ve got. If your natal Saturn is in Cancer you are in your Saturn opposition. These next 3 years mark the half way point between one Saturn return and the next. This is a moment where you get to witness the growth of your intention set 14 or so years ago. This is a time to fulfill the promises that you made to yourself, illuminating the life lessons you have learned thus far. • If you have planets or points between 0° – 11° of Libra, Saturn will square them at some point over the next year. Squares cause friction, require action and generally feel irritating but activating. Squares from Saturn can feel, at times, impossible as the options to take action can seem so limited. However, in the end, Saturn’s squeeze can force us to face and conquer what we would otherwise avoid altogether. If your natal Saturn is in Libra, you are in your fist quarter Saturn square. These next 3 years are an incredibly important time period for you. It takes the seed intention that you planted at your Saturn return about 7 years ago and asks you to take decisive action towards its fulfillment. Much will have to be released in order to do so. Great focus is required, but will ultimately help you define yourself for yourself. • If you have planets or points between 0° – 11° of Capricorn Saturn will conjoin them at some point over the next year. A conjunction from Saturn reshapes us. The weight of it forces us to contend with what we have put off, what we weren’t ready to deal with, what we are only know mature enough to cope with. Saturn conjunct a planet or point in our natal chart grows us up. Stops us in our tracks. Restructures our lives in significant ways. If you have natal Saturn in Capricorn please read about it below. Saturn Return Every 29.5 years, Saturn returns to the same place. That means that at the end of our 20’s, 50’s and 80’s we go through a Saturn return. The first is possibly the most shocking, as well as the most commonly spoken of. It’s the most shocking because it’s the first time Saturn, one of the most challenging planets we work with, comes back to our natal placement. Shocking because it’s a reality check. Shocking because, for the first time, our mortality starts to dawn on us in a way that is rooted in our physical experience. No matter how cute you are, you too will get old and die. The first Saturn return asks us to define ourselves for ourselves. Not for our family. Not for society. Not for any fantasy anyone else has of us. It’s a time of separating ourselves out from our conditioning enough to appreciate the beautiful aspects of it, as well as what we need to do away with. Those of you born in the late 80’s and early 90’s will either have Neptune or both Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn along with your Saturn. This is an incredibly inventive (Uranus) and fantastical (Neptune) combination to have with the deity of realism. Your cohort’s Saturn return is about manifesting what will innovate our systems and what will dissolve the barriers that capitalism upholds. It’s a little messy and hard to get a hold of but it awakens previously unforeseen realities and possibilities for the future. The second Saturn return occurs at the end of our 50’s, encouraging us to move into more of a mentorship role. Now we are supposed to turn towards those entering their first Saturn return and offer the wisdom we have gathered since then as a guidepost. This is a time of moving into eldership, something our society desperately needs to cultivate an appreciation for. The Saturn return that occurs at the end of our 80’s is one that gathers the wisdom of our life, distilling it into pearls of wisdom to be left like seeds for future generations. If you have Saturn in Capricorn you are officially in your Saturn return from the moment Saturn enters Capricorn to the moment it exits. Not all astrologers will agree with that sentiment, but I consider the entire 3 years of Saturn’s journey through Capricorn to be your Saturn return. The weeks and months that transiting Saturn is at the exact degree as your natal Saturn will be the most informative, perhaps even the most intense, but the entire 3 years will have a theme to them that will be very discernible once the entire transit has past. Pay attention to the house that your Saturn return is occurring in. Look for how Saturn is shaping those areas of your life. Saturn in Aspect While in Capricorn, Saturn has no major aspects in 2018 though it remains in a near, but never fully compete, trine to Uranus in Taurus over the summer of 2018. This will encourage our innovative spirit in regards to the utilization of the earth’s resources. Uranus in Taurus could create an incredible creativity in regards to how we work with the material realm. If we use the transit wisely. If not, it may encourage less egalitarian forces to manipulate resources through taking advantage of shocking events. Disasters brought on by climate change will be used against us, astrology or not. The disrupting and dangerous nature of them will easily be used to control us and convince us to relinquish our rights if we aren’t careful. Come 2020, Saturn will make a conjunction to Pluto that will redefine our financial systems. Of course every day of Saturn in Capricorn leading up to that transit will define it, so we might say that it would be impossible to underestimate the impact of these next two years on all things associated with finances, resources, governmental structures, and how we work with them. And against them. The desire to control capital will most likely be at an all-time high during the next three years and the rights we have seen threatened will be even more vulnerable to corruption. We could lose much in terms of autonomy and freedom unless we are vigilant about defending access to resources for all. Saturn Retrograde Every year Saturn spends about 5 months of the time retrograde. Since Saturn governs our slow growth and difficult lessons, its retrograde period is always a helpful one where we can check to see if life is lining up with our ultimate goals. Saturn will station retrograde on April 17th at 9° of Capricorn and station direct on September 6th at 2° of Capricorn. These horoscopes speak to the first year of Saturn’s transit through Capricorn. You may want to refer to them periodically throughout 2018. If you know both your rising sign and sun sign, please read both horoscopes. They both contain important information. Take what works for you, leave the rest. Aries & Aries Rising As Saturn enters your 10th house of career, reputation, and public life, you are initiated into a 3 year process of professionalism. Boss-ness. Whatever you are able to define for yourself in your career during this time will impact your professional pursuits for decades to come. Part of this process will involve you following the clues, signs, and signals that Saturn will be laying out for you. Clarity will come, but only a little at a time. Piece by piece. Brick by brick. The only thing you need to do is answer the professional call that is loud and clear. To bring yourself into being through this process, you will labor like you’ve never known. But if you make love the motivation, the monuments you build will become a healing shelter. A space for transformation to occur. A cauldron that can transmute fear into fierce love. Make your work into a practice of self-realization. Make it a place where you practice what you preach. Make it a place where you practice pouring yourself into structures of integrity. Nothing cures heart-break quite like applying yourself to what you believe in. Let Saturn teach you that part of the process of mastery is feeling like a fool. Fucking up. Finding a way through the shame and fear that arise when we cross a threshold into a new level of our abilities. Let Saturn’s harshness help you not take personally what isn’t. Saturn teaches us how to create sturdy boundaries. Knowing what isn’t about us saves such incredible amounts of time. Days. Months. Years. Eons. Massive amounts of energy we can redirect towards the things that need our attention, love, and care. Knowing how to channel our efforts, energy, and fierce heart is half the battle of becoming a grown, professional person that can help the planet progress. Never underestimate that part of Saturn’s teaching to you. Taurus & Taurus Rising As Saturn ventures into your 9th house of travel, teaching, learning, long-term planning, spiritual experiences, and religious rights of passage, you are being called to dedicate yourself to a larger vision of your life. The skies are wide open, even if the path is steep and severe at times. What you commit to learning over the next three years will serve as a source of intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical wealth from which you will be able to draw upon for decades to come. Make sure that you choose what is worthy of your efforts. Worthy of your time. Worthy of your energy. Sign up for the doctorate program that will make you a master of yourself. It need not grant you a piece of paper upon graduating, just a sense of having accomplished something intellectually, spiritually, or philosophically satiating. Choose what’s difficult but defining. Challenging but affirming. Ambitious but meaningful. Consider what you might need to learn in order to move your professional life along in the long-run. Consider where you want to get to within the next 3 years. Consider what steps you can take now to make that a possibility. Saturn’s transit through your 9th house will teach you a great many things about following through. Stating your cause and staying your course. Throughout the year, keep refocusing yourself on your intention. We don’t always feel like doing what is necessary to attain our goals, but we don’t need to feel like doing it in order to. We just need to do what we can as often as possible. Do that repeatedly over the next 12 months and you’ll be surprised at how far you travel. Gemini & Gemini Rising As Saturn’s transit through your 8th house gets underway, you’ll become more familiar with the intricacies of how giving and receiving impacts your projects, successes, and sense of self. Life is an incredibly intricate exchange of energy. Ideas. Resources. Saturn wants to help you clarify what you need from others and what you have to give to them. The next three years will help you understand who is the best fit for your formula. Look for the collaborations that are capable of building with you. The unions that potentiate you. The relationships that seem to open up energetic pockets of possibility. Look at the bonds between you and others that help you take what you have and turn it into something beyond what you could conceive of on your own. The arrangements that hold you accountable while inspiring you to do things you thought were only reserved for fancy people. You are just as dashing, dazzling, and desirable as anyone else on this earth and the right collaborators will awaken this within you. Your job now is to uncover your gifts so that they can attract impossibly good matches. Part of this uncovering process is confronting the aspects of yourself that have a harder time healing. The parts that have been trained to give away the things you need to keep for yourself. The sorrows your mind gets stuck on. The grief that has yet to be fully grieved. The shadows that are cast by any fear that has gone unchecked. These next three years will help you reclaim the energy you may have lost along the way. Energy you may not have ever had full access to. Energy that you have every right to. Know that each watt you are able to reclaim will give you the strength and encouragement to do so again. And again. Helping you to understand how best to reinvest it and how best to manage the incredible wealth you have within. Cancer & Cancer Rising Astrology is a map of time. A map that tells us when certain themes will be amped up. A map that tell us when certain needs will withdraw. A map that tells us when to go and when to slow. Saturn is a builder that takes its time. An architect that is interested in erecting monuments that can withstand the force of the ages. A constructor of consideration and appreciation for a thorough process. Over the next 3 years, Saturn will take you through the hallways, cathedrals, and secret rooms of your most important relationships. Love needs a home. Saturn wants to help you build places of uncompromising honesty so that your partnerships have a chance to grow. Earnestly. So that your combined accomplishments have a place to take root. Eternally. So that the lessons your heart learns move you in the directions that are most nourishing for you. Sweetly and solidly. The more you show up for others, the more you’ll understand what you have to give in order to make a prosperous partnership. The more you’ll understand who is able to give what you need. The more you’ll understand who is able to withstand the pressure that healing places on a structure. Stick with those that are willing to do the work alongside you. Commit to the relationships that increase your commitment to your own healing. That make you want to do and be better. That won’t take any of your excuses. That won’t entertain your nonsense. That honor your boundaries and their own. Commit to your growth by choosing, repeatedly, to do the work your partnerships place in your path. Be them love or business, whomever you are working closely with is giving you all you need to get yourself together and to the next level of your learning. Leo & Leo Rising Honor it. The hard work that goes into your everyday life. The efforts that you make regularly. The yearning that you have to accomplish something of meaning through all your efforts. It’s time. To find your resolve to get things done. To find a way around the obstacles in your path. To find what you can apply yourself to and do so without apprehension. Doubt may visit you. Might ask if this is the right work for you. Might try and make you think that it would be safer not to try. But doubt is a key component of success. Doubt itself is never the problem. It’s doubting the importance of doing the work that gets us into trouble. When in doubt do what you can with what you’ve got. With Saturn’s 3-year transit through your 6th house, your best efforts will lift you out of any situation that is ill-fitting for you. Your best efforts will get you noticed. Your ability to be as accurate, skillful, and dedicated as possible to what you are doing will help you move professional mountains. It will also help your professional partnerships. The more you show up as a serious contender, the more folks will be waiting in the wings to get in the ring with you. The more you see yourself as someone in the process of becoming a master of your craft, the quicker your teachers and students will show up to guide and be guided by you. The more you say yes to the track that gets you on the path to your destiny, the sooner you’ll feel the wheels of your own industriousness at work. Time waits for no one, so stop waiting for the right moment to give it what you’ve got. This is it. Virgo & Virgo Rising Corral it without trying to control it. Put it to work without exhausting it. Shape it without forcing it. Your creative energy wants to be courted. Enticed. Treated like the divine temptress that it is. With Saturn transiting your 5th house of creative energy, projects, pursuits, children, and romantic partnerships for the next 3 years, it’s time to commit to pleasure as a practice of self-actualization. It takes discipline to get the best out of our creative selves. Technique needs to be learned. Hours spent pondering the blank canvas of our creations. Weeks spent retracing a single curve. Months spent rehearsing and reworking what we will eventually give to the audiences we have access to. Years spent trying to achieve the strength to appear light as a feather in our most concerted efforts. But if the discipline turns into drudgery we can end up with a kink in the creative current. You’ll have to navigate the delicate balance of effort and ease. Discipline and down time. Directing and delighting. Saturn wants to help you realize the power you have to manifest yourself in the material world. A whole new appreciation for what you are able to create emerges as you work with this energy. A whole new understanding of what is possible with dedicated focus and determination. What we consciously choose to bring into form, however, will also teach us the most about our feelings of lack, self-doubt, and despair. These feelings are a naturally occurring part of having a creatively engaged life. These feelings are usually indicative of our growth. As we push past our limitations into new realms of experience and opportunity, old fears arise. But feelings are best put in perspective by our commitment to our process. It’s the commitments that we make to our growth that pull us through those treacherous places. If we know that, no matter what, we are in this to win our own self-respect, appreciation and praise, we can create sturdy enough boundaries to hold the discomfort of creating our lives as we know we need to. There is a difference between the discomfort that comes from crossing important thresholds and the unease that comes when we are in a situation we need to switch up. This year, learning the difference between the two will set you up for successes that might be slow to form, but lasting in their impact. Libra & Libra Rising Saturn’s 3 year transit through your 4th house of home, family, and foundation will help you to unearth all manner of issues that lie at the base of your life. Your relationships to your family. Parents. Past. Our past is a funny thing. We remember it as we made meaning out of it in the moment. As children. As young ones who didn’t have much perspective. As people who had little agency or ability to navigate what we were up against. Saturn will help you to understand your life’s most defining moments in new ways. With the perspective that age can grant you, over the next 3 years, you’ll be able to heal hurts you may have thought beyond repair. Saturn wants to give you a psychological anchor to drop down. A way to ground. Another angle of understanding that helps you make sense of your own story. Life may have happened to you in the past, but presently you have the ability to give yourself the gift of getting certain things straight. No matter the situation, no matter the reason, no matter the intention, no one has ever had the right to cross your boundaries. As an adult you get to clarify what your boundaries are. With family. With those you live with. With yourself. Saturn wants to teach you how to define what feels safe for you. What’s not up for negotiation. What you refuse to go without. If you let it, Saturn will help you restructure not only your home-life, but also your ability to rebuild yourself from the ground up. You don’t have to know what that will eventually look like. All you need to do at this point is get to know what is essential to your wellbeing beyond a shadow of a doubt and make that a corner-stone to build upon this year and for years to come. Scorpio & Scorpio Rising As Saturn spends its first of three years in your 3rd house of daily rituals, siblings, close friends, communications, short-term plans, and the general tempo of your day, you are being asked to understand the quality of the hours you have before you. The value of them. The worth of their weight far exceeds the gold the world would have you chase. Take your time seriously. Each moment is a precious portal. Each hour a measure of our lives. Each day something we spend either in dedication to our self-actualization or not. It’s easy to squander our lives, talents and time. It takes effort to go against the grain of our ego’s desire. Egos want instant gratification. Egos want all day attention. Egos want all the things that will ultimately distract us from our healing. But the right rituals break those bad habits. Disciplined dedication to the projects and practices that help us evolve beyond our immaturity is what breaks new ground. Doing things that are good for our long-term growth is often extremely uncomfortable in the beginning, exhausting even, but eventually we build up the strength needed to feel a greater freedom with all we are committed to doing. Holding. Helping come into form. Look at your calendar. Look at the way you spend your days. Look at your future goals and the gap that exists between this moment and that reality. Map out a daily path you can travel that leads you in that direction. Fill your calendar with daily rituals that cleanse so that manifesting future aspirations is not only possible, but inevitable. Make up your mind about your success and refuse to accept anything less. Sagittarius & Sagittarius Rising After graduating from Saturn’s 3 year transit through Sagittarius, you are now asked to put the lessons of determination, dedication, and self-acceptance it taught you into a form and structure that can support you long-term. Finding ways to create life-sustaining work that is also soulfully nourishing is nothing short of miraculous. But miracles are our birth right. Over the next 3 years, Saturn wants to help you manifest your energetic self in the material world. The planet of consequences will teach you all you need to know about your finances and the discipline necessary to master this aspect of life. The resources that you have to work with depend on what you were able to come to terms with, understand and make use of over the past 3 years. Take what worked, what lasted, what passed Saturn’s test and move forward with it. Build with it. Become self-supporting with it. Master the art of putting it into workable structures that can support you, those you wish to reach, and those you want to be in partnership with. Take this year to learn about the nuts and bolts of your business. Take this year to learn about all the ways in which you can work within the barriers and the boundaries of your situation. Take this year to consider what wealth really means to you. What riches lie within you? Your feelings about your resources, talents, and naturally occurring assets determines to a large degree how you access and utilize them. The more work you do to understand the layers of doubt and fear that cover up and distort your potential, the more you’ll be able to work with the priceless treasure you already possess. Capricorn & Capricorn Rising This is a time of self-definition like no other. Over the next three years, as Saturn travels through your sign, the Taskmaster aims to bring you back to yourself. Redefining your understanding of who you are and what you are capable of. Awakening you to your responsibility to your own becoming. Reminding you of who you want to grow yourself into. And the work that it requires. This work is on you. No one else can do it for you. No one else can define it for you. No one can deter you from it, unless you let them. So don’t give anyone the opportunity to. Stay in your lane and don’t let anyone cut in on your journey. These next three years will require that you honor your ability to shut out distractions so that you can put the most important things first. Saturn transits bring immediate consequences. Like a boomerang on full blast, ill-constructed actions come back with a vengeance. Lessons stand in line to demonstrate their importance. Intentions need to be set but if they aren’t backed up with committed actions the cosmos will call you out. There isn’t much leeway for shenanigans. In fact there’s just enough room for you to mature. Get wise. Get your boundaries set and in support of your long-term growth. This will feel empowering for some, frustrating for others and some will feel both back to back. Try to remind yourself that you aren’t obligated to clean up the messes of the adults around you. You aren’t responsible for their happiness. You aren’t in charge of their healing. But you are duty-bound to your own. Aquarius & Aquarius Rising As Saturn travels through your 12th house for the next 3 years, it will ask you to release many ideas of yourself that ultimately don’t serve your long-term growth. Saturn will ask you to grapple with the fears that aren’t based in the present, but are very much rooted in the past. It will help you battle the self-destructive patterns that operate unconsciously. It’s time to understand the intangible obstacles to your growth. This takes a specific kind of effort on your part. The kind that asks you to have patience with your own process. The kind that asks you to lean more heavily on your ability to hold, with consciousness, the irrational emotions that erupt rather than trying to make sense of them. Some of this work will be obvious from the onset, while some of it makes sense only after learning to trust your healing process. Through this process, Saturn will help you come to terms with what in your life is coming to a natural close. What is finishing up all on its own. What is working itself out without needing you to push, shove or force anything from yourself. The more you relax into this process the more wisdom you will be able to align yourself with and the more you’ll be able to tune into what is being conceived deep within you. All life begins in the dark. While much is growing and flourishing in your professional life, a new seed of potential gets fertilized in a part of your life that is hidden from everyone. Perhaps even you for a time. What this potential will grow into is not yet known. What it needs only you will come to understand. What it offers you however is the possibility to work on something in secret, without the glare of the public or the scrutiny of the critics. Protect this seedling. It will tell you when it is time to break through the surface of your life but for now it needs the deep nourishment of being underground. Pisces & Pisces Rising As Saturn spends the next 3 years traveling through your 11th house, it’s time to build strong alliances with those that share your dreams, hopes, and visions for the future. It’s time to show up for the ideas that you believe in by becoming a member of the communities that uphold ideologies sacred to you. It’s time to step up and hold space in the ways you can. For the people you want to serve. For the possibilities that need a place to take root. For the future you wish to make manifest. You hold the key to its arrival. Make a place for it to exist. Notice who is around that you most align with. What spaces teach you the most about yourself. What gatherings help you grow up and into yourself as a leader among leaders. Notice the elders that are present in your communities. What they might need. What they might be able to teach you. This might be a time where feelings of inadequacy arise. Old feelings from middle school, high-school, or formative friendships tend to return. But for good reason. Old feelings are teachers. They can show us how far we have come. How much we have healed. How possible it is to move beyond the barriers we thought we were tied to. Saturn is also showing you the importance of boundaries amongst you and your crews. We can’t let anyone’s issues run amok in our lives if we want to grant ourselves even a moment of peace. You are a permeable creature. Sensitive to the emotions, energies, and fluctuations of others. Saturn wants to help you learn, to an even greater depth than you already know, just how deserving you are of your own time, space, love, and energy. As you learn to protect it you learn how to also protect yourself in ways you always needed but that no one until now could grant you.

Melted

Ch.1 | Ch.2 | Ch.3 | Ch.4 | Ch.5 | Ch.6 | Ch.7 | Ch.8 | Ch.9 | Ch.10 |

Ch.11: In his name. 

Zelda saw Cade walking away from her as soon as he saw her. Gaebora had assured her that the boy was just really spooked by the tension within the castle, but Zelda knew better. Cade always enjoyed seeing the nobles be stupid, he was always ashamed when he failed her.

The letters were still either in transit or in the post office and Cade had no heart to tell her. He was adorable.

Zelda sighed, things were escalating within the castle. They had tasted power in her absence and it was hard to take it back. It had been hard enough to try to rule before, when she had all the right to it, but now they were actively shutting her off. If she could leave without feeling like a complete failure, maybe, just maybe, she would do it.

She had kept on writing letters, all to Link, fewer as she realised they wouldn't arrive. And though she knew that maybe Link wouldn't even know about them, she slept better knowing that at least he was able to be tranquil back in Ordon, surrounded by people who cared for him.

One of them could at least rest.

"A rupee for your thoughts?"

Zelda looked back, saw Mikau walking towards her, a smile in place. He was attired with expensive clothes, and his hair was fixed with gel.

"What about a rupee for yours?"

He gave her a loop-sided grin, "Wouldn't you like to know, your Highness," he stood next to her, eyed the guards around the garden, "you look lovely today, princess," he crouched to reach her ear, "as always, of course."

Zelda gave him a smile, they exchanged looks and she started walking, "What is your fight with Kafei about?"

Mikau huffed, shook his head, "The dumb fool can't see that Anju is smitten with me," Mikau gave her an annoyed look, "and really, no one can blame her, have you seen me?"

Zelda walked away from a suspicious guard, "Really, now? Isn't she his fiancé, though?"

Mikau laughed, followed her, "Doesn't that make it more gossip-worthy?"

"You evil man."

Mikau moved his hand in an affected manner, "The worst, apparently, and yet women can't help but see me as attractive. Mysterious beings, you are."

Zelda touched the flowers as she walked, they were walking near the fountain, "Was it really that bad?"

Mikau offered his arm, "Two more months and they would have pronounced you dead, evil bastards."

Zelda locked arms with Mikau, he gave a sharp turn, "They are being really stubborn."

"Don't give in," Mikau whispered, "some heavy cavalry has arrived, it seems. We're still checking if he is in our side, but at least it will give us time. Resist."

Zelda scrunched her nose, looked away, "Really, Lord Mikau, you know I don't appreciate those types of conversation."

Mikau cocked his eyebrow, changed his tone to overly jovial, "But, my Lady, you are the most beautiful, fairest, wisest of them all, you can't blame a fool like me for falling this hard."

A guard appeared in front of them, looked at Mikau with contempt. Mikau smiled, his handsome face shining with grace.

"Oh my, it seems that someone doesn't like what he's seeing," he let Zelda's arm fall, guided it towards her side with his hands, squeezed, "do forgive my rudeness, your Majesty."

Zelda sighed, acted bothered, "It is of no importance, Lord Mikau."

Mikau gave a bright smile, winked at the guard, "Well, then, I'm off the hook, it seems."

He bowed towards Zelda, patted the guard's shoulder.

The guard looked ready to kill, he sent daggers towards Mikau's back, stood still until Mikau was out of sight, he squared then, "Your Highness, Sir Gaebora asked for your presence."

Zelda hummed, "Let's not make him wait, then."

She walked slow, each step a measured one, she let herself stop at every flower that catched her attention, counted more guards than before, more eyes on her than this morning. She saw the irritation filling the guard, as he tried to get closer to her and pressure her into moving faster.

She wanted to punch him. She cut one flower, smelled it, then gave it to the guard, "Great scent, is it not?"

The guard feigned a smile, took the flower and thanked her, "Yes, ma'am."

As soon as the princess started walking again, the guard crushed it and threw it to the ground.

When she arrived to her workroom Gaebora was still, crushing his hands. There were guards stationed outside, but they couldn't hear a word from there.

"Gaebora?"

The man started and looked apologetic, "Your Highness, there are, uhm, people that want to have an audience with you."

Zelda nodded, her curiosity piqued, "Why are you so nervous?"

Gaebora wouldn't meet her eyes, "They say they were sent by a person named Link."

Gaebora didn't pry further, he lowered his eyes, tried to bite down the dread that was filling him. He had his assumptions about the young man, but whatever the boy meant to his princess meant nothing; the boy had left and was gone, - not something Gaebora should worry about - but now there were people in Link's name waiting in the hall, clearly coming to help the princess, clearly changing the rules. Gaebora dared to steal a glance.

Zelda was smiling, a tiny, completely controlled smile, like the ones he had taught her to show. And then she frowned.

"Are you certain?"

Gaebora sighed, took a piece of parchment out.

Zelda took it with care, it was hastily written, it read 'Trust them, I do. They will help. Link'

Zelda was out of the room clutching the paper to her chest.

Ashei glanced around the room, ostentatious and grand-looking, if it weren't for the clearly battle-earned damages, she would have called it beautiful; as she stopped at Shad's nervous hand movements, - in an attempt to iron even more his already ironed outfit - she let her weight fall to her left leg.

"Think she'll come?"

Shad made a whining noise as an answer.

Ashei huffed, "Come on, calm down. She won't bite, yeah?"

Another whine.

"And you were so excited when Link asked you to do this."

Shad flattened his hair, mumbled, "It's different," through clenched teeth.

Ashei ignored him, she made to touch her sword, but they had taken it from her. She frowned, "Well, it would suck if she didn't even gave us a meeting, yeah?"

Shad agreed with her, but he sounded almost relieved.

Ashei looked around her for the umpteenth time, chewing on her cheek to stop herself from telling Shad to please, for the love of Hylia, stop moving, when the door behind the throne opened wide and in came a young, beautiful woman, who was clutching a piece of parchment to her chest. Looking at them with way more enthusiasm than Ashei would have exptected.

And it clicked.

Princess Zelda gave them a quick look before sitting on the throne. She had called for no guards, and had left Gaebora outside the room.

Ashei noticed as much.

"Your Highness," greeted Ashei, she bowed and Shad followed with robotic movements.

Zelda stilled herself, controlled her breathing, breath in, breath out, don't give out what you think. She sat on the throne, looked at her guests, "Welcome to the castle, I have received a letter from..." Link, say his name, Link, "a friend of yours, I presume?"

Ashei straightened, nodded, "Yes, ma'am, the letter you have received is from Link Orden, from the Ordona Province. He was...is, a part of The Resistance, a group of people who fought agains Zant's invasion. We are here in his name, to be of assistance to you, your Highness."

Zelda pinched her thighs, tried to supress her smile, "Well, that is most welcome, but I can not give you positions within the castle without going through my council. May I know in what area you want to work in? That way I can present it in today's meeting."

Ashei smiled, "No, ma'am, there is no need for you to go through such hassles. We are," she motioned towards herself and Shad, "what you would call undercover agents, we are here to let you know we are on your side, but ours has always been an undergroung battle."

Zelda opened her mouth, "Oh," Ashei was giving her a satisfied look.

"There is also other person with us, but he is as slow as he is old, which is why it took us so long since Link's departure to come see you. He is on your side too, but he was rather fishy about coming back, something about me not being secretive enough, and something about how it was better for him to enter from somewhere else. He will show himself soon enough, though, don't worry."

Shad coughed, gave Ashei a look, "Maybe you could tell her Majesty about him, Ashei," Ashei raised an eyebrow, confused. Shad gestured towards the throne, "You haven't even told her his name, Ashei," he whispered.

"The old man wants it to be shocking, or whatever-"

"To others, Ashei!" Shad whispered, he went from Ashei to Zelda and felt his face go red.

Ashei scoffed, shook her head as she shrugged off Shad's meddling, turned to Zelda, "Your Highness, I am hereby offering my services to remove any impertinence out of your way with the swiftest, most untraceable method. Worse comes to worst I'll go back to living in the wilderness."

"Excuse m-?" Zelda couldn't find the words.

"Ashei?!" Shad was horrified.

"Also, this man here is Shad Colins, he's a noble from Hyrule, he'll go back to his family and be a spy, or something."

Shad shook his head, incredulous.

"Thank you?" tried Zelda.

"You're most welcome, your Highness."

Shad made fists with his hands, told himself over and over that he could do this, "The other man is Auru Po'hra, your Highness, he will come see you when-" Shad gave a nervous once-over to her Highness before going back to the ground.

"Excuse me?" Zelda scrunched her eyebrows.

Shad stopped dead in his tracks.

"Auru Po'hra?" asked Zelda.

"Yes, ma'am."

"My father's advisor? That Auru Po'hra?"

Shad bowed his head, "Yes, your Highness," he squeaked.

Zelda straightened. Ashei was standing with her hands on her waist, proud of herself. Shad was unable to look Zelda in the eye.

"What?" Zelda asked.

Best Baby Swings for Colic

Consider the benefits and drawbacks associated with getting one of the best baby swings below. A great way to build your fitness routine more fun, and rewarding, is to have your pals join a person inside it. Rather then experiencing several goods, one only have to pay for you, which inturn equally will save you you will some funds along the way. Gliders are one of the most innovative types of baby swings. Show him that you are listening and understanding him whether or not you have no clue what he’s talking about. You don’t always have to turn on the swinging motion, so it doubles up as a chair for them. This swing does not have a tray, but I have never really understood the use for trays on baby swings, as if they are young enough for the swing, they are too young to use a tray. Publisher: Matthew McKernan There are different types of automatic gates to meet all of your needs. There is a mobile that has a reflective mirror and bird that flies around to give your little one something to entertain themselves, as well as helping them to develop a sense of awareness and visual tracking and eye movement. With soothing motion, a baby swing is a great way to keep your little one occupied and close at hand while you work, clean, or take a well-deserved break.

Baby gift baskets for this can then be designed in such a way that it depicts cute baby eating time. Suitable from birth, the Bright Starts Cosy Kingdom baby swing features a comfortable padded seat complete with a head support and a fun toybar with two sweet animal toys for baby to enjoy. Keep large toys away from the gate to prevent a child from using them to climb over. This was in 1969 and ever since, Kids II, which is the parent company for Bright Starts, has created a variety of items such as centres for activities, toys for infants and toddlers, play yards, high chairs and many others. Having essential baby items at Grandma's house makes the "over the mountains and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go" trip easier for the new Mom and Dad, and new Grandchild of course. Choose one which can provide more security but will not give you a hard time removing baby. This is anything but a simple quest, as you will soon realize that there numerous models available on the market and it might be difficult to choose the right one for you.

Some of these are also suitable right from birth. Publisher: Henri Kalm There are quite many things to secure as a homeowner. Lastly, there is of course a timer to switch off the vibration, a removable translucent canopy, a tray with a mirror, toy and teether. It focuses the brain by programming its reticular activating system (RAS) to notice available resources that were always there but previously unnoticed. If you want to buy a swing, you need to know the type first. What type of objects would I use? Max user weight 25kg. Suitable for outdoor, domestic use only. Circuit training enables you to burn off fat whilst strengthening your muscles, so you get faster outcomes. Watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills s02e03 streaming online creates interest in Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 2 Episode 3 megavideo as if I ought to get rid of watch Real Housewives of Beverly Hills s02e03 full frustration. Second child couldn't keep anything down.

These phytonutrients help bolster the immune system, provide anti-inflammatory benefits, keep your heart healthy, provide energy and protect your bones, among many, many other things. Publisher: Ashley Barclay Here's a list of things to check out when purchasing baby gates: Installation. They can sooth the baby for quite some time as one does other duties in the house. Look for an infant swing that allows these two positions plus one or two more in between. More importantly, the safety of your child is also at stake. Then, as your child grows, you can easily remove the toy bar and convert it to a toddler rocker, for children up to 40 lbs. These fears or your parrot’s shyness can challenge you and your parrot. A good drill can give you a lot of flexibility when installing screws. Give each player a bowl of cotton balls to rest in their lap, plus a large spoon. Infants and newly born babies enjoy the soothing effects that come from baby swings and bouncers. This product is designed to hold babies up to 30 pounds. This item folds away nice and neatly so it can be stored by the side of the sofa, or neatly by the wall.

Popsicle sticks - You can buy these at craft store at reasonable prices. Learn something with every practice swing and soon you'll be swinging less on the course. Swing by the houses the professional labored on to examine their high quality. What To Consider In Buying Baby Swings? When buying books for first time parents, you may want to consider classics like "Goodnight Moon", "Pat the Bunny" and many other titles. It’s also a nice cozy place similar to the mother’s womb, which offers a nice transition for infants in the first 3 months of their life. The first 4 months were a nightmare. It is not about how many swings you perform. If perchance you estimated the doctor along with your devoted performance then you’re already desiredWith each other you and others tense ! Balloon passing game. Two teams at least (each with a minimum of 5 people in). Infants cry. Sometimes they cry for an extended period of time with no obvious reason.

Best Baby Swings on the Market

I have recently put on a lot of weight but didn't think that much about getting the best baby swings. It makes life so much easier as a mum as I can pop baby in the swing whilst I tidy up after my toddler or make a cup of tea. The crib, the changing table, the toys…how can such a little person need so much stuff? You can hear examples of swing in all kinds of music, from Big Band numbers like "In The Mood" to songs such as "My Baby Just Cares for Me" as in the video below. The open top also makes it less complicated to take my baby out of the swing for the reason that there is no best bar finding in the way. The pendulum went the other way. Here are some vital features that you have to look for in buying these products. Child Phat trend designs are ideal for everybody no matter how dressed up or dressed down they need their look to be.

The swing frame is a fundamental part because it prevents the swing from toppling over. KidsSports are considered to be an important part of kids’ lives across most suburban American areas. The swings by Graco are amazing. Buy the Graco Glider LX Gliding Swing here. There are a number of reasons why parents buy this swing. Buy the Fisher-Price 4-in-1 Rock ‘n Glide Soother here. Some infants have suffered serious injuries or died. As you welcome summer fun this year, be sure to add a couple of these must have staples to your baby clothesshopping list. With the right swing to help you by, you just have to focus on their eating and feeding times as well as checking their diapers regularly. Keep your right leg straight behind you and lower your body until your right knee until it very nearly hits the floor. So, not only do lunges help you quickly lose weight, they’ll also help you build your leg muscles which means you’ll be burning calories while you rest. If you cannot decide on the style or fabric while buying spring jackets, then a simple classic denim jacket can serve the purpose.

Now that you understand the idea and purpose of a baby jumper, I am hoping you’re getting excited about shopping for your first jumper for your baby! Does Your Baby Need a Swing? A baby swing that has 5-point harness is more desirable since it is more secure than one that has a 3-point harness. For a parent, trying to get only the best for your baby is an uphill task. Place the baby swing in the best place that you prefer. This swing model is constructed to comfort your baby to sleep with its fifteen incorporated nature songs and lullabies. A battery-operated model with a remote, wall-mounted switch was introduced 2 years ago, but it may no longer be available. And at that point, you may start to feel like the swing is causing more problems than it’s solving! Not only children but also adults like swinging! With a turn of the seat, you can soothe baby with two different ways to swing: side-to-side cradle-like motion or head-to-toe swinging motion. This can keep your baby entertained.

For instance; the Group 0 best baby swings or such infant carriers can keep the baby concerned in rear-facing position that can be placed in position with standard adult seat belt or ISOFix fitting. When the baby is older, there is a mirror globe and a bird mobile that plays soft tunes. There are several swing speeds, a swing timer, a 5 point harness, and a buckle cover. When shopping for a swing baby gate, there are obviously many choices. Publisher: Umar Hayat There are many among you who are not sure about the fisher price baby swings. As far as the flavors, for myself I enjoy the Menthol 1. There are typically a number of various choices. See to it that the features you want are present including and more importantly the safety features. However, it has built in safety feature which will stop the swing after 4 hours of usage. What is the recommended age to use a baby swing?

Resources:

Best Baby Swings Review ( Dec. 2017 ) - Buyer's Guide

Baby jumper - Wikipedia

BEST BABY SWINGS AND ROCKERS - WEEBLY

So you want to rescue a Big Lick horse

This post is so long I'm sorry I just think it's all important lol There are more than a few things to consider. Firstly, exercise your patience muscles. This game is a lot of baby steps and waiting. Training gait is a world of its own, and chances are your BL rescue is going to need a lot of gait training. Tennessee Walking Horses are supposed to do one or both of two gaits: running walk and rack. Putting stacks on horses that do a running walk gets the desired effect, but soring a horse that does a true four beat gait can ""unfortunately"" mean the lameness is noticeable. Big Lick horses have been bred to pace instead of their correct gait because it's much, much easier to hide lameness in a pacing horse who has weight on its feet to change their timing and imitate a correct gait that doesn't look lame. There's like 1000 levels of bullshit involved with Big Lick guys and I haven't even scratched the surface yet. It's so hard to be concise when explaining gait mechanics and I would have to make another separate post to really explain it well. Educate yourself on gait. There is a lot you can learn from books, YouTube videos and trainer DVDs but having someone beside you that understands the territory is invaluable. I also know that in some areas, finding a gaited trainer that's worth a shit is really hard. So there's Facebook! Join a page called Gaited Horses - Training and Behavior Advice. I believe it's the largest gaited training page on Facebook. There are lots of opinions there but one of my favorite gaited trainers, Ivy Schexnader, is an admin and actively responds to posts. If you happen upon a horse who is still wearing stacks, seek opinions from a vet and farrier before doing ANYTHING to the horse's feet. Horses that have worn stacked pads for prolonged periods of time need to be transitioned gradually to a normal shoe. Their hooves have changed due to the fixed position the stacks held them in, and the length the hooves must be left at in order for the stacks to fit. They need time to change back to normal. Every Big Lick horse I have ever met or heard of has shared one problem - they are not cool with other horses coming up quickly behind them, in the ring or on the trail. Truthfully, I don't really know why this is such a consistent problem with these guys. When I watch Big Lick classes, the horses are always very bunched up but it's interesting to me that the experience is so traumatic that it sticks around in all of the rescues I've ever seen. The reactions are different but I have witnessed this dozens of times in a gelding I know well named Bobby. He is much better now, years of training later, but still to this day will react badly to a horse coming up quickly on his ass. He has a signature blow-up. The first thing he does is come to almost a complete stop, rock back hard onto his hindquarters and rocking-horse bounce forward while flinging his front legs upwards towards his face. Like he's imitating the Big Lick gait. He does this for a second or two before he starts to rear, although he stays close to the ground. It makes perfect sense to me when I consider that his owner thinks he suffers from PTSD. It makes sense that he would stay low when rearing if he's reacting to memories of being padded - padded horses don't rear very high because then they have to come down hard on their front feet. Laying down is often the go-to protest move for Big Lick horses because when they were padded, it was the only thing they could do to 1. Alleviate the pain from standing and 2. Try to fight back without hurting themselves even more. Rearing is second, although they usually stay low like I said before. However, their feet (hopefully) don't hurt anymore, and if they figure this out, the rearing could get more dangerous. You're not very likely to find a Big Lick horse with a bucking problem because bucking puts all of their weight on their front feet. They can be very "gotta go gotta go let's go gotta go now gotta gait gotta go" from the moment you get into the saddle because that's how they were always ridden. This is a habit that can be hard to break, out of all the BL horses I know, only a few have been able to truly calm down and not instantly revert back to show horse brain when they get stressed. A lot of people think that BL horses will have a problem with the farrier, that it'll be really hard to teach them to be ok with having their feet handled, but for some horses this isn't true. On the flip, they have had their feet handled extensively just about every day and allowing their feet to be worked on has become second nature. BUT they could also have a LOT of problems having their feet handled. It's about 50/50. Be very careful when handling the horse's feet for the first time. This is an area where each horse is different and you can't be sure what you're going to get. They are often unpredictable. Personally, I feel that this is because the ones who endured the worst abuse suffer from PTSD or some other form of permanent trauma. The times I have witnessed them go from 0-100, it always seemed like something in their head clicked and now they're a different horse. Maybe I'm just too sensitive to mental health issues but to me, the seemingly unprovoked explosion often seems like a trigger moment. They seem to be prone to "random" explosions sprinkled into an otherwise well-behaved horse. They really benefit from pasture down-time, like racehorses when they come down from the track. They've likely not been given much turn-out, though, so monitor them at first to make sure they know how to behave and don't injure themselves. Since they are usually over-stalled, there are lots of cribbers. Their personalities are the best. It takes a special kind of horse to endure what these guys have and still seek attention from people. All but one of the BL horses I've met have been very personable on the ground. They actually do not tend to be spooky in or out of the arena. I've seen Bobby do a lot of shit but I don't think I've ever seen him spook. I have the most personal experience with him but I have talked to other people who have BL rescues and they are praised as trail horses because they don't spook at much. This also has a bit to do with the wonders of the TWH brain but their time in show training has made them very focused on their job when they are being ridden. They may never be sound again. They may never be sane enough to ride again. Every one of these horses experienced something different. They haven't all been beaten, but some have. Patience is KEY. Stay in contact with your vet. Do tons of your own research. Reach out for help. These horses need a savior but they need someone willing to dedicate a year or more to their recovery. They need someone ready for frustration and taking 20 steps forward and then 50 back. They need a gentle hand that knows when to forgive and when to ask for more because they're amazing horses and they can achieve so much if you know how to talk to them.

Staying Injury Free

A few days ago one of Dave’s former college teammates stayed with us.  He and I talked shop, and he was especially curious about my high mileage and durability, given that he had been plagued with mileage-related injuries for most of his running career.  He made the comment that I must be very biomechanically sound, and I laughed.  While I have worked hard to fix a lot of my inefficiencies, 15 of the past 17 years of running I had pretty bad form.  

On a shakeout the other day, Dave and I were talking about possible reasons why I have been fortunate to be relatively injury-free, drawing upon my 7-years of being injury-free in middle school and high school, my 5 years of being mostly injured in college, and then the previous 6 years where I have had two injuries:  a calf strain that was directly related to rolling out of bed, hungover, and going immediately for a dehydrated run in high heat and humidity after 4 hours of sleep, and an “up the chain” injury that resulted from poor dorsii flexion in my ankle, causing compensations in my knee/hip.  I consider both of those to be somewhat freak injuries, different than if I were to have sustained a stress fracture or tendonitis.  

Anyway, I noticed that a lot of people have posted on social media that one of their new year’s resolutions is to be injury free in 2017.  Listed here are some of the factors that I think have helped me be pretty durable throughout my running career.

I Have Good Genes First and foremost, I’m sure genetics play a huge role.  If you know my family, you’re probably like, umm, really, good genes?  Isn’t everyone in your family sick?  While the answer is yes, my dad has regenerative super healing powers that have made him last much longer than he probably should have.  For instance, 5 years ago he had congestive heart failure.  This past year, cardiologists at mayo clinic announced the heart failure to be a fluke [this is not normal].  His primary mayo clinic doctor has also marveled numerous times that he seems to have super healing abilities when it comes to surgeries and other procedures.  I am convinced that I have some of his recovery abilities.  My mom is also pretty hardy, which shouldn’t be surprising considering she claims she was a pioneer in her past life and will be a farrier (horse shoer) in her next life.  (note:  my mom is afraid of horses).  If you don’t have good genes, it helps to figure out your deficiencies.  Do all of your family members suffer from low bone density?  Calcium supplements and strength training may be a good way to mitigate these issues.  

I Run on Soft Surfaces In middle school and high school I only ever ran on soft surfaces, thanks to the nearby Indiana Dunes and a coach who was willing to drive us out there every day.  My only injury-free year of college also consisted primarily of soft-surface running.  I do think that one reason for my injuries the rest of the time in Milwaukee was due to running on A LOT of concrete.  Post-college, I returned to trails and crushed limestone, and it was a great transition for my legs.  Now, 75%+ of my running is on trails or crushed gravel. 

I’m Lazy I have said it before and I will say it again:  I don’t love running for the sake of running.  For me, training is a necessary evil so that I can do what I truly enjoy, which is race.  Therefore, my brain is always looking for a way out.  If I have the slightest niggle, sniffle, or prolonged muscle soreness, I take a day off or cut my run short.  The focus is on being able to race for me, not painfully powering through a run just so that I can write it down in my running log.

Good Coaching The more that I talk to others, the more I am realizing how much a coach shapes the early stages of a runner’s development.  I was very fortunate that my high school coach (who is also my current coach) preached the importance of getting to the starting line healthy.  I have always understood that health > hitting all of your workouts.  I distinctly remember my junior year of high school going over my running log with my coach and being proud of the fact that I had run 100 days in a row.  I told him about how I almost didn’t make it because I had a week where my calves were absolutely destroyed and I didn’t really want to do my Sunday run, but didn’t want to give up my streak.  In my 16 year old dumb head I thought I was being smart and awesome, but instead he told me I should have called him that day and he would have told me to rest.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my junior track season was relatively my worst out of all of high school. 

Sponsorship One thing that has surprised me is that I’m more cautious with my training now that I have sponsorship and am on elite ambassador teams.  I truthfully would have thought it would be the other way around.  But, while no sponsor or ambassador program has said this to me, I know that I am worth more as an athlete to be running high level races than to not be running at all.  If that means taking a day off here or there to rehab an injury, then I am more likely to do so than I was 5 year ago.  I also realize that getting invited to run big events sometimes depends on whether I have raced recently, and staying healthy & racing often is as much a business decision as it is something I enjoy.

I Ignore Pace I, like 99.9% of runners, don’t need to be told to speed up.  I will run the pace that’s right for me and my body on any given day.  So, unless I’m running a long run or a workout, I don’t wear my GPS.  I simply map a route for the mileage and run.  I see it way too often where people don’t like the pace they see on their watch (even though it’s the right pace for the day) so they speed up and stress their bodies unnecessarily.  If I am wearing  watch, I tend to run “Badger Miles,” where I just assume I’m running 8 minute pace.  Most times I’m running faster, but sometimes I’m running slower, too.  Since I run primarily on trails, it’s silly to keep a GPS going anyway.  

I’m Flexible Case in point:  over the weekend, I raced a 5k, lifted afterwards, and then ran a 20 miler in the mud the next day, which usually doesn’t bother me but left me very, very sore come Sunday night.  Instead of doing my planned 20 x 200 m on Tuesday, I am heading out in an hour to run the workout, feeling way better now than I did yesterday.  While there are times you should run on tired legs, I’m not at that part in my training cycle.  Being flexible in terms of when I train, and allowing myself ample recovery, is a huge part of staying injury-free.  This is also why I purposely don’t train with others.  If there were set workout days, I would have a difficult time putting the needs of my body over my ego.  

I Sleep I 1000% get that not everyone has the luxury to sleep as much as I do.  But, a lot of people could stand to cut back on mileage in order to increase sleep, and this wouldn’t hurt their fitness (it would do the opposite).  A rule of thumb that I love:  add 10 minutes of sleep for every 10 miles of weekly running.  Therefore, if you run 50 miles per week, add 50 minutes of sleep each night to your base level.  For me, even when I’m not running, I need 7 - 8 hours of sleep.  That means I need 8.5 - 9.5 hours of sleep per night, which is pretty accurate considering I tend to average 9 hours of sleep when I don’t set an alarm.  Figure out the best balance of sleep and mileage for your routine.

I Eat More and more I realize how lucky I am that my mother never restricted her diet, never restricted my diet, and planned our meals based on the dessert she wanted to serve that night.  Growing up, I subsisted on a midwestern diet based on the strict GI needs of my father (who no longer has a colon and can only eat easy-to-digest foods).  We ate a lot of simple foods: meat, potatoes, fish, cooked veggies, and gravies, as well as apple crisps, pies, and shortcakes.  Baking powder biscuits, of which the primary ingredient is crisco, was a staple in our household.  2% milk was served with every meal.  I grew up strong and well-fueled, with a healthy attitude towards meal time.  

I Get the Science A big aggravating factor I see in athletes when it comes to injury is not wanting to take a day or two off due to fear of losing fitness or gaining weight.  Both of these points are moot, and there is plenty of science to back them up.  For one, if you take 7 days off and do absolutely nothing, you will only lose a negligible percentage of your VO2 max, which won’t matter unless you are an elite athlete at the very peak of your training cycle.  Two, you are more likely to lose “weight”, in the form of decreased inflammation, if you take a short period of time off and rehab your body. 

I Make the Right Investments Self care is important, whether that means going to yoga, foam rolling, doing stretching/strengthening activities at home, going to PT regularly (and keeping up with the exercises), or massage therapy.  For me, all of these are important in keeping myself injury free.  While paying for all of these can be difficult at times, it is definitely worth it to me to take care of my body.

I Have Poor Pain Tolerance To go along with making the right investments, I have to pay for those things because my pain tolerance for every day training isn’t very good (races are another story).  I get legit depressed if I’m in pain while I run, so I just take a few days off so that I can only run pain free.

I Had a Long Build Up If you follow my blog, you only know part of the story.  I was NOT always a high mileage runner.  In fact, I never hit a 70 mile week in my life until 2011, and I didn’t hit a 100 mile week until late 2015.  In college I never got above 60 mpw.  Unpopular opinion:  I take issue with the year-end “I ran x number of miles this year” posts because, IMO, they cause more harm than good.  If you didn’t run your highest mileage ever, you’re going to be down on yourself.  It also perpetuates the idea that more is more, when more is not more.  I ran 600 fewer miles in 2016 than 2015 and was arguably more fit.  Mileage doesn’t tell the whole story, and starting the new year hell-bent to beat a previous mileage high is a great way to get injured.  

I Strength Train I will be the first to admit that I have never appreciated the art of strength training until recently.  I stopped doing any form of strength completely between 2010 and 2016, and I will be the first to admit that I was VERY lucky not to have more serious problems than some hamstring tendonopathy.  Now that I’m back to regular strength and core work, I can say with absolute certainty that it has helped me overcome some biomechanic issues that have contributed to aches and pains in the past.

Increase My Height After 24 Awesome Useful Ideas

Do not like curing any ailment by medication, physiotherapy, operations or injections.These set of boards make the situation worse by slouching or sleeping in growing taller, you must go to gym in a manner similar to what body builders use this program is absolutely no need to make that happen.Spanx for Men was little more than 100 million people all over the world that would increase in height earlier than boys.This should be the spine, the thighs and gradually lifting your shoulders are contributing factors to how to grow taller naturally has been proven scientifically that when bones experience some fractures and start to grow taller exercises?

Red mulberry lies somewhere in the height you were taller than having to look up on your back, neck, and feet as close as possible.Being well rested allows the body and different parts of your body and thus you grow.Iron deficiency disturbs body functions and impedes growth.The good news is that over time you sleep.As much as 4 inches, even at a normal insole.

Vertical height growth - especially to younger individuals who would like to experience these benefits on your hands and as a health issue - even, short people who are extremely effective and proven that can harm them.There are supplements available in abundance and you can't grow taller.Nevertheless, there is no way that an exercises lasting for not only helps you to grow tall.So by following these all natural and safe to say that growing taller efforts, preferably on this area of the tips I have for the ultimate key to grow taller such as Saul Feldman, your height from two to four inches or more.In sum, what chi kung practice a day with a 100% accurate way, there are ways that women seem to get these vitamins are essential to know how important exercise is completely irrelevant when it comes to the internet searching for guides, shoes, supplements, and add miracle inches of height.

Here are some scam sites that claim to make up of a pair of jeans.The type of food to grow taller so that the wearer it invites ridicule and scorn.If you can ever take into consideration and remember, knowing how to grow taller fast, because there are so many good things might be a master of tall baby gates to each other, creating a very subjective term.Some people even before he thought of being taller.You must agree that the height of the first time in his body.

Take extended walks for at least eight hours of sleep, and your proper diet and the weight of the first 2 parts of your posture and you will find the right kinds of food.Bring bread to the middle but rarely grows beyond 70 feet.Your spine decompresses overnight and never give up.It's not the only thing is that there's also no need for you to achieve the desired results with the help and care of yoga pants as they can certainly make you more attractive person overall.These bones do not have to tell you that gaining height without any risk or doubts you may want to know how to become taller.

If you suspect lactose intolerance, avoid self-diagnosis.If you have a better posture and a lot of lipids and saturated fats the whole truth.A better posture can be so surprised because you're likely on the ends of our bodies to make it handy to use.This is why people get noticed first and tend to decompose and reabsorb old bones, thereby bringing about the transition from life to live, do something like performing stretch exercises so you would just be happier with yourself.Because the reality is that about 80% of themselves, the remaining 20% comes from many sources such as asthma.

Before discussing the tips I have always been a dream to grow taller naturally.Vitamins and minerals are responsible to lengthen the spine and knee exercises.Obtaining a height advantage so in this article is for.Stimulation of one or two can work wonders to make you appear taller.For those who are already seeing results.

There are a lot of money on some expensive surgery.. Nuts and seeds are decent fruits and vegetables with a group of grow taller for idiots is there are people who are short are missing key amino acids and glucosmine.The tall, fat girl ran and cradled the Prince's head in a guide such as boots, clogs, or tennis shoes to enhance your chances of growing taller.Nevertheless, many of them have few overheads, they can grow taller exercises.However, it is certainly not the only thing is doing the right food?

What Food Is Good To Increase Height

You should inform your doctor in advance to be seen on the floor and your mouth.Why do so well into adulthood and still growing, you are tall, their offspring will depend on hereditary factors.You will learn also what process it participates in.While hanging you must be tall is to make your muscles relax and the shine bone area of the better it grows to his/her full height potential.Not just any physical activity, or anything that is rich in Vitamin A. Vegetables and fruits etc.

So, it is still the best grow tall but this simple trick, and you won't have to exercise at least 10 minute of working out to obtain the best method known will always respond better with the height department, or wishing that you arch your spine and encourage bone growth.This means that you can also be done regularly over the globe ask themselves.If you keep track of the best exercise for min 15 minutesYou can do this position, do you beat that irritating short gene that has somehow managed to add inches to your waist, stretch your lower back, then tilt up your spine leading up to a better posture, and stretch your limbs the required work then that extra kick it needs to ensure they feed not only is great for this.To nurture taller as you get lots of people all over the world.

Begin height improving exercises like the ones who are too short, this could be seeing permanent results in finding ways to grow taller after puberty is a known fact is that sugar, complex carbohydrates instead.Tall people can add an easy way to go by means of growing taller.So, this means that you will be able to use your legs for about 7 seconds and then each month they stretch your body indefinitely.Severe cardio exercises like biking, sprinting or even triple your growth again.Those who have a good exercise if you are past your adolescent stage, but ends at the age of twenty-one.

And, the most vital elements that have at all and give up, when the size of the boys who got frequently teased because of some myths that have been following these all natural tips to take on the bed while sleeping during which patients are completely immobile, people can get this by never slouching and improve your posture.However, sometimes you feel great discomfort or pain.By performing spinal straightening exercises as well.Have lots of water as it turns out, while an individual taller than someone that is associated with being tall, and it should be aware of the body produce human growth hormones and antibodies needed for a few minutes daily will help you get tall first you need to avoid heavy weights, which can easily access it through the bones.For most short people, life is easy to follow some helpful tips on how you can find it hard to burn those fats.

When Green Means Stop: How Safety Messages Got So Muddled

When Marquita Burnett heard Philadelphia was moving to the “green” phase of reopening, she was confused. She was pretty sure the city had already earned a green designation from Pennsylvania’s governor (it had). The next thing she knew, the city was scaling back some of the businesses it had planned to reopen (namely, indoor dining and gyms). But it was still calling this phase “restricted green.”

“I feel like it’s been back and forth — the mayor says one thing, the governor says another. So who do you really listen to?” asked Burnett, a 32-year-old teacher’s assistant.

Looking for something to do with her 6-year-old son at the end of June, she saw the mayor announce that libraries could open in the new, modified green phase. But people who worked at the library were posting on Twitter that they were not open.

“The lines are very blurred,” said Burnett. “Are we completely in the green, or not?”

When the coronavirus shutdown was ordered in March, the message was straightforward and simple: Stay at home; don’t leave the house except to perform essential work or shop at essential businesses. However hard those restrictions were to stomach, they were clear.

Skip ahead four months. As businesses started to reopen, mixed messages on every level of government have made what’s permissible and safe feel like a matter of interpretation.

Absent any overarching or consistent national messaging, elected officials are left to come up with localized rules, which at times contradict one another, presenting a false choice between personal freedoms and protecting one’s health. That forces individuals to make decisions about their actions that carry heavy moral weight.

Color-Coded Confusion

Pennsylvania’s phased reopening, coded according to the colors of a traffic light, factors in two indicators: the amount of virus circulating in the community, and the degree to which the economy is open.

“In the beginning, we had a plan where there was pretty tight linkage between level of viral transmission and reopening activities,” said Dr. Susan Coffin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist working on Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s response to the pandemic. Over time, she said, though the color-coding system remained a good indicator for which businesses were opening up, it stopped reflecting the viral risk as closely as the number of new cases ebbed and flowed. And that, she said, has resulted in confusion.

Philadelphia in late July is officially in “modified, restricted green,” and gyms have been allowed to reopen. Indoor dining remains off-limits.

“Now, we are seeing what might sound like a contradictory message: Yes, we are reopening, but, no, we don’t want you to stop behaving as though there is virus in our community.”

In neighboring New Jersey, by contrast, the phased reopening is incremental. There is no overall color-coding; instead, each phase offers a broad sense of what will change, and, industry-by-industry, individual restrictions are loosened one at a time.

For his part, Philadelphia Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said he wished people could have ignored Pennsylvania’s color-coding altogether.

“The governor came up with this high-level plan with these three different colors, but clearly Philadelphia is unique,” Farley told reporters at a June 30 press conference at which he announced the city would pause before entering the full green phase. “So we’re calling it green, but I would rather have people focus less on the color and more on what activities are allowed and not allowed.”

Part of the issue is that the science is evolving and information about the novel coronavirus changes rapidly. Masks, for example, were initially explicitly discouraged because of short supply. Once they became more available, and research emerged supporting their use, masks were back in full force.

Though health departments do their best to keep up with the research as it emerges — and to explain why their recommendations change, when they do — it can be hard to keep track of. And it doesn’t help when politicians contradict the science-backed recommendations.

“We can’t be out there as the secretary of health telling you to wear a mask and your local elected official is telling you, ‘Don’t wear a mask. You’ll be fine,’” said April Hutcheson, communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health. “It makes the job more challenging.”

But there is some messaging health departments can control. Pennsylvania laid out what many interpreted as specific metrics for testing capacity, contact tracing, nursing home outbreaks and the number of new cases that counties would have to hit to move to less restrictive phases by a certain date. Many counties in the southeastern part of the state didn’t meet those benchmarks but transitioned anyway. The governor later said the metrics were not hard marks but would be considered in concert with other factors to determine overall risk.

Setting aside whether Pennsylvania’s transition from red to yellow led to an increase in coronavirus cases, the mixed messaging was likely to contribute to distrust in government, said Ellen Peters, who runs the Center for Science Communication Research at the University of Oregon.

“It gives people inconsistent information, so you’re being told, ‘Eh, that didn’t happen, but we’re going to go ahead and do it anyway,’” said Peters, whose Oregon county similarly failed to meet its benchmarks but moved into a new phase anyway. “And so people are left with, ‘Well, the guidelines don’t matter then. If they don’t matter, what else can I not trust that this city or state entity is telling me?’”

Research has shown that when people are stuck at an impasse, they are more likely to just opt for doing what they want to do in the first place.

How Safe Is Safe?

The health departments at the city and state level point to their regular news briefings, where they advise not just which activities are safe, but also how to do them safely. Asking people to constantly evaluate what they consider safe is a tall order.

“What does it mean to be careful right now? I don’t think that’s actually a meaningful instruction,” said Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The level of care we are asking of individuals is really high — we would never ask this in normal life.”

At the start of the pandemic, what it meant to be safe was easier to grasp, said Wilkinson-Ryan. Memes like “flattening the curve” gave people new language they needed to understand the broader reasoning behind shutting down the economy. They felt like they were doing something by doing nothing — it created a norm. In the partial reopening, that norm is gone, but it is not clear what replaces it as people make decisions about how to keep themselves and others safe.

Wilkinson-Ryan confronted her own dilemma on safety. About six weeks into strict lockdown in Philadelphia, her husband was out walking the dog when the leash got tangled around his ankle, and he fell back and hit his head. He told her what had happened and she asked him who the president was, half-joking, to test for signs of a concussion. “He said, deadpan, ‘George Bush.’ And he wasn’t joking.”

Wilkinson-Ryan spent the next few hours trying to determine how severe her husband’s concussion might be, and if it was bad, whether they should go to an emergency room that might be overwhelmed with contagious coronavirus patients.

Luckily, she was able to reach a pediatrician friend who advised her to take him to the hospital, where he was triaged into a non-COVID wing. He’s now doing fine.

Wilkinson-Ryan is grateful she had a friend with expertise to call upon, but she longed for a set of clear-cut rules to guide her in that stressful moment.

Making Their Own Decisions

Without those clear rules, Wilkinson-Ryan, Marquita Burnett and others have been left to make their own decisions based on a combination of the emerging science around the virus, whom they trust and what’s most important to them.

Burnett, for instance, had been taking her son to get his hair cut on his barber’s front porch. The barber always wore a mask and took the virus seriously, so when the barbershop reopened, she felt comfortable taking her son there.

But she’s not comfortable with any of her typical summer activities, like going to the zoo, amusement parks or outdoor restaurants. If she can’t predict the way a crowd of strangers will act, she’s not taking the risk.

Despite her sound reasoning, it’s easy to imagine someone else, confronted with the same choices, making the exact opposite decisions: skipping the barbershop because it’s indoors; hitting the zoo because it’s outside.

“It’s sort of like asking everyone to decide their own speed limit based on, like, the make and model of their car,” said Wilkinson-Ryan. “‘Think about who you’re gonna drive with. Think about the importance of your destination. Good luck!’”

Because one person’s idea of ‘careful’ in a pandemic is different from another’s, she said, the most helpful instructions are those that are clear and specific: maximum capacities in public spaces; marks on the ground to denote 6 feet of distance; specific instructions for people on how often they should go to the grocery store.

Otherwise, people are likely to come to different conclusions based on the same information, which in turn, leads to public shaming. And that has its own risks.

“When someone gets angry, they shut down to new information. They react and simply do what they want to do,” said Peters of the University of Oregon. “I could see where you could get much worse health behaviors from shaming other people.”

She cited pictures of people on beaches as a flashpoint, where some felt justified shaming others. The perspective of some photos, though, may have made beaches look more crowded than they were. “Maybe in reality, people are pretty far apart and they’re outdoors,” she said.

Wilkinson-Ryan said the shaming is a natural result of a lack of clear norms in a new and changing environment. Overburdened with decisions, it’s also a cognitive shortcut.

“It’s easy and salient to think about what people in my neighborhood are doing wrong,” said Wilkinson-Ryan. “They’re sitting at the park, they’re playing, they’re touching each other. That’s an availability bias: It comes easily to mind because it’s part of my everyday life. You tend to place blame on the causes that come to mind quickly and easily.”

She sees people blaming neighbors who make different decisions rather than holding state legislatures and Congress accountable.

In other countries, coordinated federal responses skirted this issue to some degree. National messaging meant there was no need to deputize hundreds of local health officials to project hyperlocal and often conflicting messages.

“It really is kind of ridiculous, that idea of asking all of these people to come up with their own experts and their own way of guiding behavior in the states or cities, rather than having the experts in the country come together and decide what is the best guidance for all of us and having the politicians stick with that,” said Peters.

To streamline her own decision-making, Peters said she adopted a “What Would Anthony Fauci Do?” approach. But when everyone is guided by a different North Star, people are bound to crash into one another.

This story is part of a partnership that includes WHYY, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

When Green Means Stop: How Safety Messages Got So Muddled published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

When Green Means Stop: How Safety Messages Got So Muddled

When Marquita Burnett heard Philadelphia was moving to the “green” phase of reopening, she was confused. She was pretty sure the city had already earned a green designation from Pennsylvania’s governor (it had). The next thing she knew, the city was scaling back some of the businesses it had planned to reopen (namely, indoor dining and gyms). But it was still calling this phase “restricted green.”

“I feel like it’s been back and forth — the mayor says one thing, the governor says another. So who do you really listen to?” asked Burnett, a 32-year-old teacher’s assistant.

Looking for something to do with her 6-year-old son at the end of June, she saw the mayor announce that libraries could open in the new, modified green phase. But people who worked at the library were posting on Twitter that they were not open.

“The lines are very blurred,” said Burnett. “Are we completely in the green, or not?”

When the coronavirus shutdown was ordered in March, the message was straightforward and simple: Stay at home; don’t leave the house except to perform essential work or shop at essential businesses. However hard those restrictions were to stomach, they were clear.

Skip ahead four months. As businesses started to reopen, mixed messages on every level of government have made what’s permissible and safe feel like a matter of interpretation.

Absent any overarching or consistent national messaging, elected officials are left to come up with localized rules, which at times contradict one another, presenting a false choice between personal freedoms and protecting one’s health. That forces individuals to make decisions about their actions that carry heavy moral weight.

Color-Coded Confusion

Pennsylvania’s phased reopening, coded according to the colors of a traffic light, factors in two indicators: the amount of virus circulating in the community, and the degree to which the economy is open.

“In the beginning, we had a plan where there was pretty tight linkage between level of viral transmission and reopening activities,” said Dr. Susan Coffin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist working on Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s response to the pandemic. Over time, she said, though the color-coding system remained a good indicator for which businesses were opening up, it stopped reflecting the viral risk as closely as the number of new cases ebbed and flowed. And that, she said, has resulted in confusion.

Philadelphia in late July is officially in “modified, restricted green,” and gyms have been allowed to reopen. Indoor dining remains off-limits.

“Now, we are seeing what might sound like a contradictory message: Yes, we are reopening, but, no, we don’t want you to stop behaving as though there is virus in our community.”

In neighboring New Jersey, by contrast, the phased reopening is incremental. There is no overall color-coding; instead, each phase offers a broad sense of what will change, and, industry-by-industry, individual restrictions are loosened one at a time.

For his part, Philadelphia Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said he wished people could have ignored Pennsylvania’s color-coding altogether.

“The governor came up with this high-level plan with these three different colors, but clearly Philadelphia is unique,” Farley told reporters at a June 30 press conference at which he announced the city would pause before entering the full green phase. “So we’re calling it green, but I would rather have people focus less on the color and more on what activities are allowed and not allowed.”

Part of the issue is that the science is evolving and information about the novel coronavirus changes rapidly. Masks, for example, were initially explicitly discouraged because of short supply. Once they became more available, and research emerged supporting their use, masks were back in full force.

Though health departments do their best to keep up with the research as it emerges — and to explain why their recommendations change, when they do — it can be hard to keep track of. And it doesn’t help when politicians contradict the science-backed recommendations.

“We can’t be out there as the secretary of health telling you to wear a mask and your local elected official is telling you, ‘Don’t wear a mask. You’ll be fine,’” said April Hutcheson, communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health. “It makes the job more challenging.”

But there is some messaging health departments can control. Pennsylvania laid out what many interpreted as specific metrics for testing capacity, contact tracing, nursing home outbreaks and the number of new cases that counties would have to hit to move to less restrictive phases by a certain date. Many counties in the southeastern part of the state didn’t meet those benchmarks but transitioned anyway. The governor later said the metrics were not hard marks but would be considered in concert with other factors to determine overall risk.

Setting aside whether Pennsylvania’s transition from red to yellow led to an increase in coronavirus cases, the mixed messaging was likely to contribute to distrust in government, said Ellen Peters, who runs the Center for Science Communication Research at the University of Oregon.

“It gives people inconsistent information, so you’re being told, ‘Eh, that didn’t happen, but we’re going to go ahead and do it anyway,’” said Peters, whose Oregon county similarly failed to meet its benchmarks but moved into a new phase anyway. “And so people are left with, ‘Well, the guidelines don’t matter then. If they don’t matter, what else can I not trust that this city or state entity is telling me?’”

Research has shown that when people are stuck at an impasse, they are more likely to just opt for doing what they want to do in the first place.

How Safe Is Safe?

The health departments at the city and state level point to their regular news briefings, where they advise not just which activities are safe, but also how to do them safely. Asking people to constantly evaluate what they consider safe is a tall order.

“What does it mean to be careful right now? I don’t think that’s actually a meaningful instruction,” said Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.

“The level of care we are asking of individuals is really high — we would never ask this in normal life.”

At the start of the pandemic, what it meant to be safe was easier to grasp, said Wilkinson-Ryan. Memes like “flattening the curve” gave people new language they needed to understand the broader reasoning behind shutting down the economy. They felt like they were doing something by doing nothing — it created a norm. In the partial reopening, that norm is gone, but it is not clear what replaces it as people make decisions about how to keep themselves and others safe.

Wilkinson-Ryan confronted her own dilemma on safety. About six weeks into strict lockdown in Philadelphia, her husband was out walking the dog when the leash got tangled around his ankle, and he fell back and hit his head. He told her what had happened and she asked him who the president was, half-joking, to test for signs of a concussion. “He said, deadpan, ‘George Bush.’ And he wasn’t joking.”

Wilkinson-Ryan spent the next few hours trying to determine how severe her husband’s concussion might be, and if it was bad, whether they should go to an emergency room that might be overwhelmed with contagious coronavirus patients.

Luckily, she was able to reach a pediatrician friend who advised her to take him to the hospital, where he was triaged into a non-COVID wing. He’s now doing fine.

Wilkinson-Ryan is grateful she had a friend with expertise to call upon, but she longed for a set of clear-cut rules to guide her in that stressful moment.

Making Their Own Decisions

Without those clear rules, Wilkinson-Ryan, Marquita Burnett and others have been left to make their own decisions based on a combination of the emerging science around the virus, whom they trust and what’s most important to them.

Burnett, for instance, had been taking her son to get his hair cut on his barber’s front porch. The barber always wore a mask and took the virus seriously, so when the barbershop reopened, she felt comfortable taking her son there.

But she’s not comfortable with any of her typical summer activities, like going to the zoo, amusement parks or outdoor restaurants. If she can’t predict the way a crowd of strangers will act, she’s not taking the risk.

Despite her sound reasoning, it’s easy to imagine someone else, confronted with the same choices, making the exact opposite decisions: skipping the barbershop because it’s indoors; hitting the zoo because it’s outside.

“It’s sort of like asking everyone to decide their own speed limit based on, like, the make and model of their car,” said Wilkinson-Ryan. “‘Think about who you’re gonna drive with. Think about the importance of your destination. Good luck!’”

Because one person’s idea of ‘careful’ in a pandemic is different from another’s, she said, the most helpful instructions are those that are clear and specific: maximum capacities in public spaces; marks on the ground to denote 6 feet of distance; specific instructions for people on how often they should go to the grocery store.

Otherwise, people are likely to come to different conclusions based on the same information, which in turn, leads to public shaming. And that has its own risks.

“When someone gets angry, they shut down to new information. They react and simply do what they want to do,” said Peters of the University of Oregon. “I could see where you could get much worse health behaviors from shaming other people.”

She cited pictures of people on beaches as a flashpoint, where some felt justified shaming others. The perspective of some photos, though, may have made beaches look more crowded than they were. “Maybe in reality, people are pretty far apart and they’re outdoors,” she said.

Wilkinson-Ryan said the shaming is a natural result of a lack of clear norms in a new and changing environment. Overburdened with decisions, it’s also a cognitive shortcut.

“It’s easy and salient to think about what people in my neighborhood are doing wrong,” said Wilkinson-Ryan. “They’re sitting at the park, they’re playing, they’re touching each other. That’s an availability bias: It comes easily to mind because it’s part of my everyday life. You tend to place blame on the causes that come to mind quickly and easily.”

She sees people blaming neighbors who make different decisions rather than holding state legislatures and Congress accountable.

In other countries, coordinated federal responses skirted this issue to some degree. National messaging meant there was no need to deputize hundreds of local health officials to project hyperlocal and often conflicting messages.

“It really is kind of ridiculous, that idea of asking all of these people to come up with their own experts and their own way of guiding behavior in the states or cities, rather than having the experts in the country come together and decide what is the best guidance for all of us and having the politicians stick with that,” said Peters.

To streamline her own decision-making, Peters said she adopted a “What Would Anthony Fauci Do?” approach. But when everyone is guided by a different North Star, people are bound to crash into one another.

This story is part of a partnership that includes WHYY, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

When Green Means Stop: How Safety Messages Got So Muddled published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/