Kegel and Book Update

Kegel Exercise Update

I’m up to ten repeats per exercise three times a day but realized I’ve been so concentrated on the exercises themselves I haven’t paid attention to whether they’re working. Debated if I should work up to four times a day at ten first or to twenty repeats at three times a day first and decided on the latter. Interestingly, I find it hardest to isolate the correct muscles when standing, which not surprisingly is also when I have the most trouble with leaking. I do better sitting and best when lying on my side with my knees drawn up to maybe forty-five degrees. Anyone trying this who has found a technique that works better for them?

Books I’ve Read

I finished Margaret Atwood’s Madd Addam trilogy—Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Madd Addam. I’m glad I bought the first two books together, which made me keep reading. I didn’t really care for the first book but found the second and third very engaging. They concentrated more on the characters than building the post-apocalyptic world of the first book, some of which I found implausible.

Cathy Maxwell’s The Highlander’s Bed is a typical historical romance and has a silly plot that was unlikely for the time period, but it was still a quick, fun read.

The second book in David Anthony Durham’s Acacia trilogy, The Other Lands, continues the story of another world’s royal siblings separated when young to keep them safe from a conquering nation and reunited to rule again. The characters and the world are interesting. To my surprise, the more sci-fi/fantasy I read written by men, the worse they seem to be at creating the non-humanoid creatures that inhabit their worlds. Maybe their imaginations are overly saturated with video game monsters. I love the flying lizard, though.

I’ve seen the movies based on John Irving’s books, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, which I liked. Someone gave me his book, In One Person, about a small Vermont town from the fifties to the present and a boy trying to figure out how to grow up as a bisexual. It meandered in places and had repetitious parts that lost my attention. Most of the story, written much like a journal, came across as real and immediate.