THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

So last week, my company started this new health initiative called Virgin HealthMiles. It’s apparently run at least somewhat in conjunction with our health insurer. Anyone else ever heard of this?

The basic idea is that you wear this special pedometer that tracks the number of steps that you do in a given day. You get points (they call them “miles”) for doing various things, chief of which is different activities, like getting at least 7000 steps in a day. Once you reach certain levels of miles, they give you money. The more you do, the more you make. The pedometers come with a USB cable and some software that automatically uploads your steps to Virgin’s website.

My company was giving out these pedometers to the first 400 people that signed up (normally they are $24.99 each) so naturally I scored one. You can get up to $150 a year by doing this. There are 5 levels and you get different amounts of cash for reaching each level. Level 1 is where you start out and is worth $0, then $25, $25, $50 and $50 I believe. It looks like the 5th level might be a bit hard to get, though we shall see.

They also have an “upgraded” membership which you can sign up for $6.99/mo. With that membership, you can earn up to $500/year. I think the levels are $0, $25, $125, $175, and $175. So if you can make it to level 3 (which is 12,000 “miles”), the upgraded membership pays for itself. After like a week, I’m at 3910 miles, though they give you lots of bonus miles when you first start out so I don’t think I’ll be able to keep up that pace. Still, Level 3 seems pretty reachable. I’m already almost to Level 2 (6,000 “miles”). You have up to 60 days to convert your membership so I’ll be seeing where I’m at around Day 58 but I expect that I’ll be upgrading at that point.

The other thing is that a few of us here at work that got the pedometers are having a little step-competition. We were trying to figure out what kind of ground rules that we could make to discourage cheating. It turns out that the website lets you set up challenges. These challenges allow you to set up teams as well as handicaps (to allow people at different step levels to compete on even ground). We have set one up but the system doesn’t seem to be working correctly.

I’m not sure if this is open to the general public or not – you’d certainly have to pay the $6.99/mo and the $25 for the pedometer, but even still, if you’re moderately active, it could be worth it. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

So this past Sunday night / Monday morning (a week or so), I’m laying in bed when I hear one of the kids screaming / crying. I’m kind of half asleep, and it wakes me up. In my half-asleep stupor I wonder where Carolyn is. Not that it’s her job to get the kids when they wake up in the middle of night, but typically she does that. So I roll over and I notice that a) it’s like 4 a.m. and b) Carolyn is not bed. Again, remember I am half asleep so I think “hmm well that’s weird”

The 2 possibilities I entertain are that perhaps she is in the bathroom, or maybe she is tending to one kid and a different kid is crying. So I think okay I will go investigate. So I start to make my way out of our bedroom and into the main living area. As I do this I start waking up and I realize that it’s not one of the kids – It’s CAROLYN who is crying / screaming. I hustle to the sound and she is laying down at the foot of the stairs in obvious pain.

The combination of dark, tired, pregnant (so not as agile as she once was) and a new house (so not as familiar with number of steps and such) caused her to miss the last step or two. I guess she thought she was on the last step and so took a normal sized step so she fell down the last step or two. Ended up breaking her foot and spraining her ankle. You can read her take here.

I was joking around and told her the other day that this was not a very convenient time for her to decide to break her foot! But then she told me that it would have been way worse say 6 months from now. Touche, touche!! My mom has come down from Cleveland to stay with us for awhile and we’ve had lots of friends come over to help unpack some and bring us over some meals and such. We are very grateful to all our helpers.

In further annoying news, everyone else besides me was driving home from the library on Saturday during a crazy thunderstorm when all of a sudden the van stopped really working. Power steering went out, the engine started overheating and in general craziness ensued. They managed to limp home but it turns out that the van’s drive belt slipped off its track. It looks like the belt itself is still in good condition but we were not able to get it back into place. And of course when I say we I mean I stood around and watched while one of my more car-savvy friends tried to do it. In an interesting coincidence, I had just called Midas the day before to bring in the van to have them put on our new tires that I bought off the Internet. I had already been planning to take the van there so this just made it that much more fun!!

Complicating the matter was the fact that the side door had accidentally been left open all night, meaning that the battery was dead when we went to try and start it on Sunday morning. We managed to push the van out of the driveway with my mom’s car, and then I pushed it over to the side of the street. And of course by “I”, I mean I flailed around barely moving it until thankfully some random guy came by out for a walk and he helped me. It was much easier with 2 people, surprisingly enough . One funny thing was that we kept trying to push it over to where I had parked the little car (preparing for a jumpstart), and it was getting harder as the road was starting to go uphill, till I realized that maybe it might be easier to put the van in park and actually move the car that could actually work!?!?!? .

We jumped it and the van started up. I let it rev for awhile and put the window down so I could hear things. But as soon as I removed the jumper cables, the van died. I tried that twice with the same result and then decided to give up for awhile. I got ready for church and went there, and in the meantime, eagle-eye Carolyn noticed that there was something hanging below the van. That turned out to be the aforementioned belt. Perhaps by losing the ability to walk her other senses have been honed? I charged the battery and in the evening, our friend came over and we tried for awhile to get the belt back on. In the end, we just took it up to Midas. I guess you can drive without a belt but you don’t have power steering and you only have a limited amount of juice before the battery dies. So my friend offered to drive and I tried to follow him. But he was driving like a maniac because he wasn’t sure how much time he’d have. He passed a few cars on the double yellow and he told me he ran every red light . Good times….

We’ll see how much the damage is….