The best of all possible news for those who are still kicking the can around to avoid starting a workout program.

Your workout can become a playout. That’s the whole point.

I asked Medium peep Penny Nelson to give me updates on her progress. At 73, five weeks ago she started a brand-new program at her local gym. The way I see it she did it right. She hired a pro, the pro does a proper assessment of what you and I can do and what we can’t, then works hard to make it work for us. …

How letting others have center stage changes lives, including mine.

My hands hurt. It’s not just the CMC arthritis in my thumbs, this dining room is damned cold at four am. I woke up an hour ago in the Mambo View Point Eco Lodge here in the Usambara Mountains. The deep valley below my huge, expansive-but-cold room is full of clouds.The bright full moon lights them and my way to the restaurant where I have access to the Internet.

It’s cold at six thousand feet plus. However, having spent fifty years in and around Denver, I love the high thin air, and it puts a bounce in my step as…

Stay with me here. I’m going somewhere with this.

It’s just past five am here in rural Africa. The hot water button has been on for hours, and the water has been on in the shower since about twenty minutes ago. Still not warm. Meanwhile the precious water flows out and away, water that is such an important resource in this world, wasted because of bad pipes and bad plumbing.

Every so often I pad into the bathroom and check again for an improvement. Not yet.

Yesterday, in a series of extremely funny but very frustrating events, this motel, which was once the best place in town, well…..the incredibly…

You can’t make this up. Another story from Tanzania.

My latest motel in rural Tanzania was likely once a great property. It’s got a good location, close to a largely undiscovered game park which has lots of wonderful offerings, but let’s just say that like so many places it struggles to join the 20th Century.

That’s the last one, not this one. By this I mean, largely, Internet access, which is the lifeblood of any and all tourists and business travelers. …

A treatise, again, on life quality.

It’s about four-fifteen local time. I’m in a small African town nestled next to the Pare mountains, really just a long line of tallish scrubby hills two hours outside Moshi, Tanzania. Yesterday my guide Aladdin, a civil engineer turned guide who works for ETrip Africa, drove me here to investigate a little-known animal park to see what was what.

I am often Ben’s guinea pig. Ben Jennings runs Etrip, and it’s a delight to suss out new areas with him.

At one point during the day, Aladdin and I were discussing elephant poop.

Okay okay, what on earth does this…

On returning to the site of the deed, and how it feels to face an uncertain future again. But that’s good news. Stay with me here.

A reminder to Dear Reader: I do not have a financial agreement with any outfit mentioned in this story. I am a pleased client and I like to make referrals to those I like and trust. And again, my Chromebook is not allowing me to download and use my own photos. Kindly bear with Unsplash until I can remedy this. Thanks.

The big bus, full of exhausted but happy climbers, its top laced with used gear, tents and equipment, pulled into the parking lot at the lovely Stella Maris Hotel (Kilimanjaro Central, if you will) here in Moshi. Ben Jennings…

A reminder that what you don’t use, you lose.

Fellow Medium writer Micah Ward penned a very useful piece for those who are, have been and plan to spend too much time being sedentary, for whatever reasons, most of them not particularly justified. Mobility as we age depends very much on whether or not the pegs are working. The thigh muscle is the largest one in the body, but it will wither away if you keep sitting. And boy are you in for a surprise when you want to get up and get ‘er did, and your pegs are done for. Not a good look or feeling.

To that:

…

How imposing your religion on others without their permission or interest is a lot like smoking a stinking cigar in a small room.

As I pack my things to head back to Moshi, Tanzania this morning long before the birds wake up, the neighborhood church, which has installed huge speakers on the roof, booms its intense, unwelcome, and invasive screaming, shouting, drumbeats and music into every nearby household.

What they are doing is illegal, they aren’t registered as a church, they are breaking noise ordinances, and worse, the pastor takes every single penny these incredibly poor people have. It’s a big business, but it’s not faith, it’s spectacle.

Spectacle sells. Just ask the ancient Romans.

This practice is common, and for the folks…