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The YMCA

Today was cooler than yesterday, but still a nice day. After work ended around 4 I got on some heavy gloves and hit my gardens! I spent about an hour cleaning out leaves and the dead plants from last year, by then Michael was home and we went inside to plan dinner. It was nice getting outside, and although even thought I didn’t get a lot done out there it is starting to look more like springtime out there.

I needed the exercise out there in the yard, I haven’t been good at getting to the gym lately. The trouble is that it’s such a hassle to get there on days when I’m working from home (almost every day). A 35 minute drive to the gym, 35 minutes home, getting home at 8AM to start my work day. It takes a ton of willpower to do that, and I so often lack that willpower at 5AM.

But I wasn’t going to let this turn me back into being unfit! Instead Michael and I checked out the YMCA near our house. Michael suggested it a few weeks back when I was wondering about getting rid of my membership to LA Fitness, but I was skeptical – the Y? But this YMCA is pretty state of the art, it was built last year and when I went to the website I was already half convinced that I should join.

Spring Valley Branch YMCA is a full service YMCA with two indoor pools, indoor water slide, hot tub and sauna, a wellness center, youth fitness area, child watch babysitting, mega outdoor pool with two slides, toddler pool, splash pad, playground, indoor track, gymnasium, and a cafe.

Spiffy. The “tour” we got was mostly self-guided, but we saw enough to be convinced. It’s only 4 miles from our house and has everything we got from the LA Fitness plus more. I’m so excited about the pools. If Michael and I sign up together it’s only a few dollars more per month than the LA Fitness membership.

I think the only downside is the number of kids I almost ran into while visiting it on Sunday, but when I’ll be at the gym early in the morning and I don’t expect a lot of kids to be there.

The other consideration is the sweet deal I had when I had to go into the office – I could ride down early and miss most of the traffic, hit the gym and be to work by 8AM. Dealing with the traffic is not an option, so now I’ll be heading down just as early but dropping into the Starbucks down the street from the office to hang out with a book and/or laptop for an hour or so before work, should work out just as well.

So it’ll work out, Michael and I are cancelling our memberships to LA Fitness in favor of the YMCA. Too bad it takes such an absurd amount of time to cancel our memberships with LA Fitness, we have to MAIL the cancellation forms to California for processing, and they have to be postmarked at least 30 days before an automatic payment for them to stop it. Plus when we signed up we paid for the first and last month, so even after we get it cancelled we’ll have another month of membership out there. Sheesh, what a racket.