I've mentioned before how much I enjoy my FitBit. One of the things it measures is BPM (beats per minute) for my heart. Like most things, I obsess over it a bit.
It's helpful in knowing my resting heart rate and my maximum heart rate when running. As for the resting heart rate, it's interesting to watch it rise or fall week to week or day to day, and I try to figure out the reasons for the movement - stress, not feeling well, too little sleep, etc.
The most recent change seemed to coincide with buying furniture.
Wifey and I have been married 30-plus years and have always had a hodge-podge of furniture, some hand-me-downs, some used stuff, an occasional new recliner. All different colors and brands. Heck, for the first 7-8 years living in Rapid City, we had a glass patio table as our dinner table, though we never set up the umbrella. We aren't that big of rednecks. Mostly, we just aren't very pretentious and lean toward the functional. If somebody doesn't want to have dinner with us because we have patio furniture in our house, so be it.
But that changed a month ago, with my heart rate, because we bought our first new, matching set of living room furniture. Couch, sofa, recliner. The whole ten yards. Which, actually, turned out to only be five yards, because then I learned we needed to paint our living room, dining room and kitchen to match the furniture. And we needed new window treatments to match the paint. And new hanging decor to match the window treatments. Fortunately, the dogs are the right color.
It wasn't so much the buying the stuff that caused my heart to jump, it was the process of doing all the extraneous stuff: Picking a color, taping, painting, hanging things. And, while it's generally a good thing to be taller than average, it's not good to be the tall person when you're doing all that stuff. "Hey, tall guy, I can't reach up there!"
This past weekend we finished it all (with the help of daughter and son-in-law), but guess what? Our new furniture hasn't arrived yet!
Back to the heart rate. Apparently, when you're at your fittest, your heart rate is generally at it's lowest. For me, that's generally mid-summer. Between more running, more hikes with the dogs, and more back and forth to the garden, I'm at my peak by end of July.
My resting heart rate has been at 54 beats per minute. This past couple weeks it's started rising, 55, 56, 57, now 58.
That's not something to get concerned about. 58 is still good. But something caused it to go up and I think it happened somewhere between balancing one foot on the ladder on the stairs and the other foot on a ledge as I tried to hanging a huge 20-pound picture above the stairway to the basement and doing the same with wife holding the folded ladder at an angle while I hung another.
Or it could have been: "This white paint was supposed to have a gray tint, but it looks blue to me?" So we took it back.
Or it could have been: "I think we need to paint the ceiling too."
That was actually the one argument I won, or then we were looking at high 70s for the ol' ticker if I'd been stuck (tall guy) doing that..
Now, it'd just be nice if the new furniture showed up. Hope to hell it matches.
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