Modern Manners: An open letter to Loud Man at the gym

 

Dear Loud Man at the gym,

I don't know your name, surprisingly, so I will refer to you as LM, if you don't mind.

Let me begin by congratulating you on how regularly you exercise. You are always at the gym when I am, and I suspect that you are there on the days when I am not. I know you are a creature of habit, because of the way you park your car, and the bag you always carry, but then, most of us gym goers are probably like that.

However, I am fast approaching information overload due to your loud conversations with

1.    people you know at the gym
2.    people you don't know at the gym

Too Much Information

Grass stains, cockatoos, silky oaks and flying foxes

Regular readers might remember my post about spring arriving in Brisbane. The golden pendas have now finished flowering, and the silky oaks are in bloom. They are a type of Grevillea and as you can see in the photo above, they grow very tall.

More about that in a later post...

From my view on the treadmill yesterday, I saw that the change of season has brought another regular arrival at this time of year: cricket matches. The boys in their white polo shirts, long white pants and broad brimmed hats are back on the oval opposite the gym.

The actual view from the treadmill

The view from my treadmill

Spring in Brisbane: Rainbow Lorikeets and Sulphur Crested Cockatoos

A Rainbow Lorikeet in a Golden Penda tree

I've discovered that I have some readers in the Northern Hemisphere, so while the weather in your part of the world is getting colder, here in Australia it's spring, and the birds are going nuts!

A little back story: the gym that I belong to was badly flooded in the January  2011 floods. Fortunately, they were fully insured, but they decided to build another storey for all of the cardio-equipment- treadmills, rowing machines and step machines- because they are so hard to move in an emergency. The down side for me is the steps up to the cardio-room- this is the hardest part of the workout for me, due to my dodgy heart. However, the upside is that the treadmills all face out onto the gardens of the gym, and the playing fields of a school. There is also a creek running past the gym (and which was responsible for the flooding.) So, there is usually something to see on both weekdays and weekends from my elevated position, hence the tag for this post: The View from a Treadmill.