I have been struggling with getting my… well, what is it I’m struggling with? Something, right? My schedule, for sure, but I think it’s slightly bigger than that. It’s like a combination of schedule, plans, balancing needs… like my routine, I suppose? I think routine. Yeah, I think my routine is broken.
My routine is in need of some fixing.
I know I’ve lamented some issues with my routine before, though I don’t recall exactly when or to what degree. I think at some point I had this notion that I’d just figure it out, fix it, and it’d be super cool so I’d share it. It is not super cool. It’s not fucked, I mean I don’t have a day job to get to. I don’t have any job to get to. So that means there isn’t like, something every day that I’m rolling in late to or that’s dorking up all of my other plans and wants or anything. But I do have studying, which I have been increasingly treating like a job. And I also have occasional appointments and other obligations, but those are relatively rare. It’s really the learning needs and the social obligations… obligations? I guess I am obliged to participate in some of them, but there are many more social situations that I’m not obliged but also not having and would like to have. Wow, that was a real sentence there. You know what? This post is going to be short and barely edited, and that’s just how it’s gunna be. I’ll post something on the subject that’s more substantial when I think it through some more.
Actually, the tone of this post is a decent illustration of the point. I’m a little overwhelmed, occasionally flustered, and I’m like, 99% sure it’s because my routine has completely fallen apart. Supporting this claim is how I’m starting to feel better about things with even the little work I’ve done so far towards fixing it. I think that’s what I was starting to say in the last paragraph. Well, that and how I’d like for the fixes to my routine to include more openings for my social wants.
I definitely have the time and I’m pretty sure I have just about everything else that I need to fix this shit. I guess I’m currently in the trial and error phase, and I’ve made some errors. I am dialing in my needs regarding health, fitness, and sleep pretty well. I’ve started a good effort on fixing my studying situation, which really needs to take up the lion’s share of my time. But I need to open up as much time as I can, and I need to reserve a good chunk of that, every week, for some social gettings of together. Preferably more than one. I’ve been averaging something like two outings a month, and that just ain’t cuttin’ it. But it’s tough to make get togethers happen when you’re an adult and even harder when you have weird health needs and that further compounds with anxiety.
I did myself up a little starter schedule, which was some nice spreadsheet practice. I’ll post whenever I get around to the real one. I think I’ve figured out that in order for this to work, I need to get back to starting my days earlier. Not as early as when I was in the military, but way earlier than I have most of this past year or so.
Alright, I’m not totally together right now, but wanted to jot down this thought while it is fresh in my head. I also wanted to to get something small posted before too much of the week burned by. Talk about routine problems, it’s already Wednesday. I’ve got some work I want to put into that schedule and routine before today is over, so I’m off to do that. See you on Fitness Check Friday.
The fitness check this week is… good? I’m not really sure what to put here as a check-in when it isn’t a number, and the goal is “better health”, so, you now, what is the progress indicator other than I feel good? I don’t know, I’ll work on that. But I do have numbers, in a moment.
I definitely feel like I’m continuing to make progress, and that’s the whole deal here. I know I said I wouldn’t bring up my weight measurements until something happened just one week ago, but hey, something kinda happened. Nothing huge, but I think I might be under 260.
My weight fluctuates very frustratingly throughout the week. It fluctuates to the point where I can’t trust the measurement even when I try my best to control for standard factors. It’s a pain in the ass. I also think my scale might not be great, but I’m not in the market to replace it anytime soon, so we’ll just have to deal. Anyway, on Wednesday I had a check in with my cardiologist, and the nurse that brought me in clocked my weight at 258. I think that scale may have been adjusted to deal with clothes, and I was uncharacteristically dressed quite lightly, so maybe I was a little under. However, in previous visits to the same office, the scales had me a good bit heavier, and also matched fairly closely with my home scale. Also, while the recent home weigh-ins didn’t match that number, things do add up to indicate the away scale is at least plausible. Nothing for certain, though.
What I am certain is that what I’m doing is working. It might not be taking the weight off me at a rate I would like, but as I keep stating here and reminding myself, that’s just an indicator not the real deal. I feel, frankly, pretty damn good. I mean, there’s the underlying pain and discomfort that are always there, exacerbated by the health problems of the past few years, but man. I’m out there, able to get regular exercise again, and that’s rad. And my fit check continues to improve. I recently bought some shorts off the internet and had to guess at my size. When they came in a few weeks ago, they were very tight. Unpleasantly so, to the point that I would not wear them out. I figured it would take months of dedicated weight loss to squeeze my fat ass into them. But I was able to slip into them this week and was surprised to find them loose enough to require a belt. I’d call that a win.
But wait, there’s more. I don’t much like looking at myself in the mirror. Not sure if you can relate, but the guy I see in the mirror is not the guy I want to see. I wouldn’t mind the aging aspect of it all, in fact I rather enjoy the grey creeping into my hair and beard. But my face and body have been so very big and out of shape that it’s been tough to just see the state of myself. I’m a stranger to myself, and I don’t like it. Given the effort I’ve been putting in over the past year, it’s not just demoralizing, it’s downright soul crushing. I’ve had to keep watching my stupid shitty body get bigger and less defined every day, even as I cut calories and add exercise. And then I also have to see my stupid face, distorted, distressed, and depressed. Nothing like the man I see in my minds’ eye. But not this week. This week, at least a little here and there, I saw my actual face. The feeling was uncanny. It was exactly the boost I needed.
I’ve been working on getting back up to speed on math for the last few months. Okay, in truth, I started this more like a few years ago, but if we’re talking serious concentration, it wasn’t until the last few weeks. You know what? None of that matters. What matters is that I’ve been giving it another honest go, and this time things have been working. Though not perfectly.
Wanting to get a college-level understanding of a few subjects has lead me to believe I need to do the same with some math. This is definitely true if I decide to go for that paper, but it would be pretty useful even if not. I’ve been staring down the barrel of a Stats class I’ve been meaning to master for a while, and that would absolutely be helpful in any direction I take my career. But in looking at that class and thinking about taking others, I have been feeling pretty behind. So I tried some problems that I found online to figure out where I am. Sort of like giving myself a “placement test”, I suppose. It seemed reasonable to start pretty low, so I did, going through a bunch of simple arithmetic stuff. That stuff was, thankfully, pretty easy, and I was honestly worried it wouldn’t be. I kept working up the scale of difficulty and continuing to be surprised by my success in each level. It was starting to make me cocky, frankly. I got particularly cocky when I found I could still do quite well in Algebra. I managed most of the problems pretty well with little to no refreshers on the subject. But as I continued through the work, it started to highlight some holes in my knowledge. Those holes grow as I continued and it reminded me that there are some lower level things I’ve never really been good at. I thought about stepping it back again to refocus on those lower level topics, but decided to keep on moving forward. This has, so far, turned out to be the right choice. it turned out that the Algebra classes and practice problems already included a mix of those arithmetic problems I needed to work on. Better yet, the more abstract ways that Algebra presents problems work better for my way of understanding things.
Fractions are a good example. I’ve never been great at them, which is tough because they are absolutely foundational. You can do higher math without them. I remember doing OK with fractions in grade school, but when we moved past them and they showed back up a just part of bigger problems, I struggled. Something about how those classes on fractions were taught and tested didn’t really get me up to speed and basically allowed me to bullshit through the answers. I would later find that other classmates experienced something similar, though for different reasons. They had all memorized things, important and useful things. But I’m not a memorizer. This is a big drawback for early math learning, and many of my classmates sailed through early math because they could memorize to the point they sounded like old pros. But memorization has never been my strong suite. I do better when I understand something on a more fundamental level, really getting all up in its conceptual guts. What I now know better as “intuition” – a term it seems I’ve long misunderstood. Anyway, I really started to lag when I not only didn’t have the memorization skills to just fudge my way through nor to build intuition off of. It’s really hard to build your math skills when you lack the memorized foundation of basics like times tables, formulas, and identity rules.
I’ve been working on writing this post for weeks and keep getting lost in it. A big part of that was trying to list out my various Math pitfalls. I have many, and the more I think about it, the more I think I should take each of those on in their own posts. I think maybe the next time I talk about Math, I’ll talk more about my problems with fractions. Today is more of a statement of where I’m at.
I am in Trig, I think. Let’s back up.
So when I settled in on Algebra, I picked a couple of online learning platforms to try and catch up. The main ones are saylor.org and mondernstates.com. I had looked at the lectures and coursework from big colleges, much of which is free (like MIT’s Open Coursework [https://ocw.mit.edu] – Algebra I [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-701-algebra-i-fall-2010/]), but I was looking for something a little more interactive and structured. Given that, the logical next step would be to go to a learning system like Brilliant.org. I’ve used Brilliant before and liked it, so that seems fair. A few years ago, I got a deep discount from my job for an annual subscription, but I was busy with work and didn’t have much time for it. Then it lapsed and they didn’t offer the discount the next year. The little I did do I liked, but it was never an immediate “click” for me. Still, I could see myself going back in the future if I have another pitfall. But what I’m using now is really working for me, so we’ll continue with that until further notice.
I made it through all of the Modern States – College Algebra course and most of the Saylor stuff. I also picked up some books on the subject:
They are all helpful, though the first two have mostly been as additional practice problems. Anyone who has gone through a few books of the “for Dummies” variety will likely agree they are pretty hit or miss. This edition is from 2005 and some of the phrasing really shows it, but I’ve found it helpful. As it is, it’s a great backup to reference in case the structure and wording from my other sources just aren’t doing it.
That last one, though, is an actual textbook, and it is fantastic. I know this is something teachers and dedicated academics already know, but textbooks are sort of amazing when it comes to documenting and transferring knowledge. There was a subject near the end of the Modern States course that I was just confounded by. I can’t remember what it was exactly, something in the logarithms and factorials zone. I just couldn’t get there, and I was starting to think that this whole experiment was coming to an end. Just too stupid to move forward. I watched the Modern States lecture, read some of the materials from there and Saylor, and even watched some of my favorite youtube teachers. I just wasn’t getting it. But I wasn’t about to give up just yet and figured it was time to fall back onto what has worked best for me thus far – trying and failing.
So I cracked open that textbook and flipped to the section that went over the offending subject. I decided to go for a practice problem right away. I tried two. I bombed both. That feeling of failure was creeping back in, but I was still determined. I went to the front of the chapter and read through it. I still didn’t get it. But I came across a couple of problems with the work shown and explanations of the work with it. That completely cracked it for me. Bam! Just like Emril and a fistful of cayenne, it suddenly made sense.
I had a few more stumbling blocks, but between all of those materials and some youtube teachers, I got through the rest of the course. There is just the final exam, which I haven’t taken yet. I think I’ve still got a little polishing left on a few subjects, and I also found that I better understand each level work if I can start putting it together with the next level up. For that, I figured it was time to make the jump to Calculus. I decided to go with the course from Modern States again, which started out pretty well. And then I failed the shit out of the first two tests. Between the two, there were something like 8-10 questions. I got one right. Yikes.
But this isn’t a give up point either. Instead, I recognized that many of the questions included information that I am just not familiar enough with. Stuff I vaguely remember from years ago, but not enough to actually use. Reflecting on my past, I can’t exactly remember what classes I took in high school. I remember doing calculus and doing pretty poorly in it. What I don’t have any memory of is a full pre-calc or trigonometry class. In fact, I’m now pretty sure that I skipped those, which if true is fucking batshit. That leap to Calculus is massive, and it is crazy that some people can just make that leap. Absolutely nannercakes.
The thought brings me back around to that missing set, the memorization and intuition that I had to rebuild for Algebra. What this informs me now is just how dependent each new piece of math is dependent on the previous sets. What I do remember of Calculus, it seems like everything up to this point is basically just learning the language and syntax, and it isn’t until Calc that you really apply it. And I’m definitely missing something between the end of Algebra I and Calc I.
So I decided to fall back again, but this time on a different familiar platform – Udemy. I have, in truth, some mixed feelings about this platform. I’m not going to get into them now, but maybe we add that topic to the ever growing list “for another day”. What I will say is that they regularly have sales and discounts (which sure seem shady) that bring expensive courses down to reasonable prices. Most of these courses are basically overblown youtube playlists, but some of the presenters really go above and beyond. A great example of that kind of presenter is Krista King [https://www.udemy.com/course/calculus-2/?couponCode=ST21MT30625G1#instructor-1]. I really like the way she presents things. Her courses are set up to follow the standard academic categories, which is pretty common. What’s different is her style, which I’m afraid I don’t have a good description for. It’s like a teacher that doesn’t feel condescending.
Within the courses, she breaks topics down with a video, some reading, and a quiz. She also provides a great handout with some of the stuff you should get familiar with. The combination really helps to build up both confidence and intuition, so I’m pretty into that.
Okay, this post is going longer than I’d meant it to and I’ve got some CS50 coursework I need to finish. But before I go, here are a few of the free youtube teachers that I’ve also really liked:
These are each great. Their styles are all a little different from each other, but they all share a sort of “here’s the thing, just give it a go and you’ll get it”, which is an attitude I can really appreciate.
I’m a little cautious with that, skeptical that I’ll be able to maintain, but we’ll clock it. Also, I don’t think I’m going to check that in every week going forward. I do think I’ll keep up the general check in, which will likely stay fitness focused and on Friday, for free. Fun? I just won’t be logging my weight here until something of note happens.
I think it undermines my overall fitness goals and explorations to just focus on that number. I stated that when I first started the fitness check and then, you know, did the opposite. So let’s get that part of my blogging back on track, and only log the weight when something happens. Instead, let’s get to what the check-in is supposed to be about – overall progress and what I’m doing to get there.
Let’s start with what I’m doing to get there. I mentioned in the last post that I finally followed through on my threats of HIIT, in both the sprinting and calisthenics flavors.
Side note – what is up with the spelling of that word? Calisthenics, I mean. How does anyone know how to spell that without a spell check? Truly, every time I go to type it in for the first time in any session, I inevitably get it wrong. I’m not even consistent in my misspelling. Sometimes I remember there’s a “th” in there, other times I don’t. That “i”? Yeah, sometimes that’s an “e” in my head. About half of the time I think it’s like “calisthedics”. That’s not right, we all know that’s not right, but for some reason my head thinks there should be a “d” sound in there, and I do not know why. Words are bad and I don’t like ’em.
Right, two flavors. Three, I guess, counting the spinning session. Unless we can just call a stationary bike HIIT session another sprint, which seems fair to me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it because the research on HIIT suggests that it is far more effective at fat burning than most other forms of exercise. Fat burning is pretty high on my list of sub goals under the overall fitness umbrella-ella. It’s one of those compounding things, where the various changes that accompany the core results give an additional boost to other areas. Yes I’ll lose weight, get thinner, and fit better in my clothes, and those are all important to me. I’d love for a woman to look at me with wanting ever again in my life. It’s a feeling I didn’t realize that I’ve wanted until it recently became painfully clear how deeply I’ve been longing for it. But I also have to think about stuff like, my mobility, blood sugar, pressure on my heart. Mortality shit. Arguably more important than lookin’ spiced, but then the soul doesn’t burn for the touch of, like, target heart rate.
Now this isn’t going to be a deep exploration into any of that, though perhaps there are some subjects for other days in there. So back to the subject at hand. The short version is that I think I’m going to try incorporating HIIT sprints and cales… body weight exercises sooner than I had originally planned. I figured I’d pull in the HIIT stuff around the end of summertime, but I’m feelin’ like now would be better. However, I would have to be carefull with balancing the workouts. When it’s just a few jogs and lifting sessions, I can kinda do them whenever. But when each workout effects the next, I gotta Jenga these things better so I don’t just topple over.
I mentioned that the HIIT session canceled my scheduled Leg Day. I had plans to just treat it like a rain out postponement, and pick the leg stuff up the next day. But when I got up yesterday, my legs told me “no thanks”. It is now two days later, and my thighs are still on fire. I think we gotta admit that leg day ain’t gonna happen this week. I guess I count the HIIT session as both, but given that the different workouts focus on different fitness aspects, I don’t want to completely replace my actual leg strength training with something that isn’t focused on that going forward. So my loose plan to put together a schedule eventually has to tighten up. Evidentially, “eventually” is now.
Okay, now for the overall progress part, for which we shall do a “fit check”. This is the space between the numbers on a page and how you might feel about yourself in a more ethereal manner. For me, that is squarely in how my clothes fit. And I have a great check in for that today.
Late last week and early this week, there has been some rain and chilliness. That coincided with my leg day turned HIIT, of course, but that wasn’t the only chilly day. A few of those days brought me out of doors, which precipitated me throwing on a jacket. This is a jacket I’ve been wearing a lot the last few years, and one whose changing feel of fit I’ve become quite familiar with. The last few years have been marked by insane weight gains, near instant losses, rapid regains, and now (hopefully) slower and more healthy losses. That jacket has been along for the ride, and I’ve felt its distinct fit at each level. A couple of years ago, I got too big to even put it on.
After leaving the hospital, having shrunk down considerably, it basically hung off me. Before the spring of 2024, when I’d gotten down to about 220lbs, I was practically swimming in it. It of course got tighter as I rebounded to a bigger me. A few months ago, it was starting to feel real tight again. Tight enough to raise concern, like I worried how much longer I’d be able to zip it up. That was a real motivator, one of many, to step the exercise up a notch. This week, however, I am happy to report that every time I donned my dark blue jacket, it felt comfortably loose. Fancy free. And that’s a very dope feeling.
Anyway, that’s it for today. I’ll try and write about something that isn’t my stupid gut next week. In the mean time, have a great weekend. I will.
Today was supposed to be Leg Day, but instead I got HIIT.
HIIT isn’t a typo, though there is still a grammatical error we’re just going to chalk up to style. It’s a workout, or I suppose style of workout that is geared for improving your fitness, whether a specific area or overall, by pushing your limits. By style of workout, I mean it’s kind of like a workout philosophy. Like how cardio can be running, biking, or swimming. Or how strength training could be weights, resistance, or fighting the urge to open another tab from that… site. HIIT, too, can be a variety of workouts, but they all share the same basic idea.
High Intensity Interval Training, aka HIIT, gained popularity years and years ago, and I’m pretty sure it’s become standard exercise cannon these days. Most people that I know that have at all explored exercise past their high school gym class know it, and I’d bet there are schools that teach it now, too. I think I talked about doing HIIT years ago, back when this blog was very different. In my late 20s and early 30s (I’m in my 40 now), I had great success when I employed HIIT workouts. I might guess they were the most successful parts of all my cross training efforts, and I would suspect I could make progress again if I just focused on the HIIT style. I base this in part on a friend that states he just does HIIT (burpees I think), and he has looked amazing ever since.
I’ll give a brief explanation for what HIIT is, though if you’re really interested, you should probably find a legit fitness source. I seem to remember the Mayo Clinic having a great write-up in the mid 2010s, but I can’t be bothered to google that for a link right now.
The first aspect of all HIIT style workouts is right in the title, that they are high intensity – meaning you do the workouts with a ferocity, a level of exertion greater than your normal workout. So if you go for a jog and want to increase your fitness level, then sometimes your jog should be a run. But it’s not high intensity until you bump it all the way up to a sprint. Imagine you can mentally gauge your workout intensity and know what your effort level is at each workout. Let’s call a light walk something like a 10-15%, a jog or light run between 20-50%, and at 100% you’re in a dead-ass-leave-nothing-behind sprint.
The “interval” half is just as important, because if you just go from zero to 100%, ignoring the obvious invitation to injury, then you probably aren’t going to sustain the workout for very long. And that’s kind of important, so you break the workout into sections of “on” and “off”, where each section of “on” is where you go hard and “off” is where you don’t. The lack of quantifiable specificity in that last statement is key, as different styles and techniques place the intensity and interval spacing in each section at different levels, often within the same workout.
For a single-exercise routine like HIIT Burpees, you might do something like 45 seconds “on”, where you just do as many Burpees at as hard an intensity as you can muster followed by 15 seconds “off”, where you just rest. That rest might not be entirely literal, but maybe you grab a swig of water, shake the legs out, swing your arms a little… you know, whatever you do to reset as best as you can before the next round. Because the next round is coming, immediately.
If you’re doing my favorite version of HIIT interval sprinting, or “Wind Sprints” as I called them back in my military days, you might do a hard-as-possible sprint for 20 seconds or 100 yards, and then fall into a light jog for 20 seconds. In Wind Sprints, you never stop, you just slow down to a sustainable pace. In either case, after the “off” section, that next round I warned you about comes for you. You’ll repeat cycles of “on” and “off” sections until its over. You know, intervals, just like the label on the tin reads.
This past Saturday I did a version of HIIT sprints to help work on my running goal, though not nearly as intense as the Wind Sprints of my younger years. Instead, I just used the open basketball court at the school across the street to run sprints, then actually stopping to rest in between charges. Not long rests, which would negate the benefits of the “interval” part of the training, though admittedly not as short as would give the best boost. I think for this type of sprint training, the recommended rest period is mercilessly short, like 10 seconds or something. Woof. No, this was more like 30 second rests. And not actual Wind Sprints, which is something I’d love to do again, but to do them right, I’d need a group of at least five people. Five might be too few, come to think of it. But whatever, I’m not doing them anytime soon. Should I explain how to do those? Another time, perhaps.
Today, which is Wednesday, I had plans to do just a normal walk and some weightlifting. Today is supposed to be leg day. However, it’s raining outside, which doesn’t usually stop me from my walk. But yeah, I just wasn’t feelin’ it. And I’ve been telling myself that I would cross train with my indoor bike and some HIIT stuff, and that would leave me plenty of time to do my legs, right? So cue today’s workout, in which I followed two routines. This time I can easily share them, because they were from some youtube folks:
I can’t vouch for either of these instructors’ other works or as people in general, and I’m not going to bother finding out if I can. I’m just interested in these specific workouts, and I’m happy to recommend them for folks like me whom are just getting back into the swing of things. For my use, I did the two back-to-back, starting with the spinning (which is how cycle-douches refer to stationary bike sessions).
For the cycling session, I don’t think I can honestly say I went at full intensity. I was a little worried about injuring myself, so I definitely held a bit back. On the last leg, however, I did try to cash in as much as I could, and that left me pretty close to spent. The second workout was a calisthenics routine, which I was likewise planning to hold back on. It’s my reintroduction, so I should ease into things, right. Yeah, well, ain’t nothin’ in this workout an “ease” when you’re old and busted. I found some of the exercises in this routine so hard that there wasn’t any slack to hold back on. To the point, I had previously thought that when I got back to HIIT, I’d keep it simple like my friend did, and just do all-burpee sessions. How foolish. The penultimate exercise in this video, what the presenter Emi called a “Walking Burpee”, is supposed to be an easier version of the standard. And I bet she’s correct in that assertion. But they were definitely not easy for me!
I was already beat from the exercises that preceded it, and just in the act of trying to hand-walk into the down position of my very first rep, I was ready to give up.
Doing burpees is one of those exercises that is infamous amongst workout…ers, I guess I’ll call them, whatever, I’ve clearly lost my mind. People find them hard to do. Even people that work out regularly, including those that are considered quite fit, find burpees hard to do. Perhaps because they are hard to do. Everyone I know who’s ever played intense sports or been in the military knows them well, and they all agree that doing burpees sucks.
I’m going to share a link to someone explaining burpees in a second. This is for those of you who have yet to have the pleasure, so you can get an idea of just what they are. It is also for the rest of us that may know them by other names or with slightly different techniques. In case you don’t know, there are a lot of different types of burpess, which may omit a step, add something extra, or mix it up some other way. Sometimes the differences seem regional, like everyone from this area does the jump and everyone from that area doesn’t. I sometimes omit the jump because I live on the second floor, but when that isn’t a problem I tend to include it. It’s how we did it in TACP. Also fitness couches will sometimes modify the technique for specific needs and targets, like there’s a version with an extra “frog hop” that I’ve heard gets used for people on the defensive line in football, so they get an edge on that explosive first burst off the line.
This is the one I’m most familiar with – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZQA08SlJnM. If you’ve never done them before, I encourage you to give them a try. But anything you have planned for the day done first.
Fucking ridiculous. How could I have even entertained the idea of doing a full HIIT Burpee-only routine? What was I going to do, one of them? The instant I got into the down position on the first one I knew I was wrong. Remind you, this isn’t even a fullass real burpee, it’s a modified easier style. In the 45 second window she gave to perform them, I got in like five. If good form counts, then zero, actually. I did zero, and it still beat my ass like a drum. I was dripping with sweat and shaking before the 10 second mark. I had to drag myself into the last exercise, and I definitely did not finish strong.
If you are already fit, I bet neither of the routines I linked would be much of a challenge. But for where I’m at right now, they were both pretty damned intense, especially back to back. They were exactly the beatdown I’ve been looking for. Highly recommend.
If the rain lets up a little, I’ll probably still try and get a walk in. A nice walk always feel good and sets me right. But Leg Day is fucking canceled.
Today’s weigh-in is about the same and I’m going to log another 262.
I have walked every day so far this week. I also finished all three of my planned strength training sessions, and I’ll likely go for a bonus or two. I am thinking about how to spend those bonus sessions, leaning toward swapping out a normal cardio session for sprints. I’m also thinking of giving a first go at the burpee HIIT session I mentioned a little while back. The results my friend had with his were quite dramatic, and my own results from a lesser version in a distant past were pretty good, too.
OH! I mentioned in the last post that my preferred walking/running path is a little busted right now, and that it seems it will remain that way for a few months. I also mentioned that I want to gear up to try an actual full mile run by my birthday, which is about the middle of the year. I also-also mentioned that the busted path kinda dorks up my plans for the run, but that I’m looking for workarounds. It’s the end of May when I’m writing this, so that mid-June check in is comin’ up mighty quick. Though I’m expecting to fail this goal, that’s not the point. I suppose from a certain perspective that pre-invalidates the goal, but that would also miss the point. Pretty bad point aim, my guy.
It’s really the effort towards to overall fitness goals that matters, with the honest attempt being a checkpoint. I guess it’s more like preconditioning for a starting point evaluation. I want to get a better idea of where I’m actually at, and for my needs, I don’t think starting with an entirely cold reading is meaningful. Like, I already know I came out of the hospital totally busted, that data point does nothing for me.
What I really want to note is that I did get some running in. It wasn’t as much as I’d like, but it wasn’t nothing, and I tested the two most ready versions. The first time, I did the full walk-loop on the detoured path, then went back to the section of path that starts behind my condo. I walked to where the closed off section starts, and interval trained the way back home. The second time, I did the detoured walk-loop, but instead of adding the partial section, I just finished with interval training on the street portion of the way back. Both were a little compromised, as expected, but both were still good. Good enough for my current needs, certainly. But I do have to keep ramping things up to make progress, so think I’ll take a few days next week to try and push myself harder. I’m thinking a combination of longer overall sessions and sessions with longer run-sections in the intervals. I’m also keen to restart my sprint training strategy from years past, though that has some logistic troubles. Solvable ones.
All of that is to say that I’m pretty happy with today’s check in, so you know… stay the course.
I’m using a very small disruption to my daily routine to better explore how I deal with roadblocks and setbacks.
I go for a walk every day. Almost every day, some days I don’t do the walk because I’m busy or sick or lazy. On a good week, I hit seven out of seven days with a 1 hour dedicated walk, outside, along the same path.
Lately, I haven’t been able to do my preferred path, but only just slightly. The annoyance is that the slight deviation means I have to work around a part of my path that has significance in my attempt to permanently modify my routine. That was a long sentence, so let me try and illustrate this. Actually, that gives me an idea…
Okay, so here’s a little sketch – neither to scale nor exact, but just for the idea. My walk takes place on one of the town’s many great foot and bike paths. The path I use swings right behind my condo, and naturally that’s where I start, indicated on the shitty sketch as the uppercase “A”. I walk this path as it winds around the lovely, calming woods and creek until I hit an underpass somewhere around “B”, then turn around and head home along the same path. According to the GPS tracking on the fitness app I use, the round trip is something like 3.8 miles.
The path has some really nice features, including some good hills for running. Another is a nice amount of privacy. Both of those are key here, because starting around the end of last month, April, I decided I was overdue to start ramping up the challenge of my daily walks. I used to run, like a lot, and it was good for my health. Both physically and mentally. I know it’s not for everyone, but I’m among a lot of folks that really benefit from regular runs.
Okay, so about three quarters of the way into my total walk, like half-wayish of the return side of things, I’ve started Interval Running. For the uninitiated, that means I’d do timed stretches of running and walking, then repeat until whatever. This is a well worn and, I think, well researched strategy for improving your cardio or just getting up to speed on running in general. I did this before, years ago, and it was great. And it feels good to be doing it again.
The path and its various features helps to boost this strategy with the hills and privacy. There’s a great hill right at the beginning of the section of the path where I like to start my first running interval, which on the sketch is somewhere between the lowercase “b” and the “2”. I start a little before this hill to warm up, than I absolutely charge that hill like my life depends on it. The hill crests onto the turnabout of a quiet end-street, which is a great place to slow down to a jog or walk and shake it out. Cross the street and back onto the path is pretty level, then the hill rolls back down, and I ride a comfortable speed jog-ish with the downhill until I hit the next interval. Run, walk, run, walk, and so on, prioritizing uphill sections for hard sprints and downhill sections for slower jogs or shuffles. You know, interval training. And I keep on like this until I reach the backyard of my condo, at which point I can comfortably dissemble and drag myself (figuratively, don’t freak out) back home.
The problem is that there has been a sewage emergency. I don’t know the specifics and they aren’t really relevant to the situation anyway, but the specifics that I do know and that do matter is how they are dealing with this problem. From what I understand, there was a pipe burst and some overflow or something, following a recent freak storm surge. The town’s water works department is fixing it, and to accomplish this, they have run a temporary pipe and a series of pumps and other equipment to redirect the flow of the creek (the blue line on the sketch) around the area that needs repair. For the repair and redirect, it means they have to block off access to that part of the creek and the bath that runs along it, which is marked on the sketch as “1” and “2”. That whole section of path between those two numbers is inaccessible to me, and will likely remain so until at least mid July. And that makes me salty.
I mean, I’m not salty at the town or the folks doing the repairs. Stuff happens and frankly I’m happy it’s getting fixed. Also, I don’t want to get in the way of the workers, so even if they don’t need to, them blocking the section off is a good call. But things like this are disruptive of people’s daily goings on. Some people use this path to get to and from work every day, and this must be a major pain in the ass for them. It’s only a minor pain in the ass for me, but I think we’d all prefer our asses to remain pain free. The part that’s top of mind for me is that I can’t skip the exercise, and I haven’t, but I have felt compelled to postpone the ramp-up. The running part, that is.
A similar disruption happened around the same time last year and in about the same area, though the specifics on that, which also don’t matter, were slightly different. At the time, I was really not in the mood for a redirect, and couldn’t find anywhere to get up to date information on when the path would open back up, and really didn’t trust my health to scout equivalent alternatives. So I just skipped it entirely for like, the entire summer. And that wasn’t great for me.
For this year’s disruption, I know I can’t just skip it. And my health has improved enough that I can explore alternatives more readily. So on one of my walks, I decided to just let it take as long as it takes while I poke around the edges of the construction zone. I was looking for where the path is blocked and where I can get on and off of the path to keep it as close to the original plan as possible. There aren’t a lot of good options in the direction that I like to go, there’s really just the street. I followed that and hopped back onto the outlets of the path, trying to find the earliest unblocked section just past the zone. What I found is what I now use, indicated by the greenish “a”, “b”, and dashed line between them on the sketch.
The result is a walk that is slightly shorter and slightly less pleasant, but more or less the same. The street detour is not fun, but being able to just keep on is a huge improvement over my response to last year’s disruption, so let’s call that a win. But it does bum me out a bit, because I had just set myself a goal and this throws that off.
The goal is to try and run a full, unbroken mile by the middle of June. I was not actually expecting to make this goal, but I was expecting to make some serious progress on it. Around that time, I’d go for my challenge run attempt, see how I did, then use that mid-June check-in to get an idea where and when to put an updated goal. However, there is no way I can make any progress on this goal if I can’t practice toward it, and with the disruption, I find myself not even a little motivated to maintain my interval training. How can I run if I’m not running?
Look, I know this is a “me” problem, okay, you don’t need to explain this or offer me any solutions. I have plenty of options, not the least of which is to just do the same interval run but on the section that is temporarily the street. If I hate the street that much, I can see take the path in the other direction (which I avoid because it’s mostly street and it sucks), drive to a different path, do the walk at a different section of the same path, go to a gym and use the treadmill, and hey, I got more options than those. I have an embarrassment of options, it’s really not a huge issue. And I”m most likely to do the simplest, either do the run in the middle section or just deal with the street. Small as it is, that is the central conflict.
I’m not exactly jazzed for either idea. The middle-run option doesn’t mesh with how I like to train. I like to do that running session like there’s nothing left and I give everything I have to it. If I shift this to the middle, I can’t do that. And then there’s the street option. And I fuckin’ hate the street option.
Not only does the street lack the same interesting and challenging set of hills, it also lacks the crucial privacy where I can struggle with the reasonable expectation that the only folks who will see me struggle are others in similar struggles. There is a sort of comfort in the shared use of the shared space, even with slightly different intentions and expectation. I’m not bothered by the cyclists on the path, nor are they bothered by me. Likewise, dog walkers, parents with strollers, and folks commuting on foot are all fair to be there, and we all regard each other with the same levels of neighborly “leave-each-other-aloneness”, and it’s good. It’s great.
The street (or rather sidewalks) that line it are not fun to walk and fully suck ass to run on. I don’t want to run up there, it blows. There isn’t enough tree cover, there is too much car traffic, there isn’t the same level or type of privacy, and the sidewalks are uneven and a danger to my shitty ankles. I don’t wanna run up there, it stinks.
I’m making myself chuckle with this post a little. Frankly, I didn’t need to recount as much of the situation as I did. You didn’t need to know all that, and likely don’t care. I could put it a bit differently – I go for a daily walk with an occasional run, and the section I like to run on is currently blocked off by the city and it sucks. Done and dusted. But I don’t know, I think the story and picture are more fun.
Anyway, all of that is to say that I’m taking this as a challenge. It can be an exercise in dealing with disruptions. I have other options, and this is a good excuse to explore a few of them. None of them are ideal, but I know that ideal is the enemy of good. I’ll give the street run a try this week, but I’ve got a feeling that I’ll shift to a different location. I think it sucks to drive to a place to run, but whatever. It’s just for a while, and better to be slightly uncomfortable to keep up what I need than to suffer the effects of just not doing it.
One of the things I am up to these days is studying. I’m thinking about going back to school full time. I’m also considering a more current-era alternative to traditional college, which would be to pick a couple of projects and use those as springboards to get up to speed on the skills most relevant to my desired job. The thing is, I’m not sure my desired job is a job. At least not one that already exists out there and if it does, that job would likely require that I have a college degree to prove that I can do it. Seems more like I’m leaning pretty hard in that college direction, and though I feel a little uneasy writing it, I suppose that does seem about right. Though maybe not exactly the traditional route. And if that sounds like I’m hedging my bets, well… yeah, I am.
Most of the best results I have had in my own personal growth have come out of a combination of traditional education (or similar) and pursuing something like autodidact projects of need. I was really shooting for a succinct description and I don’t think I got there.
Autodidact is a term that entered my lexicon a few years back. It came to me the same way I first learned the term “luthier”. Luthier came to me when I was a few guitars into learning how to make electric guitars. These little projects of mine came up in a group conversation and a friend of a friend remarked, “Oh, so you’re a luthier…” and I didn’t hear the rest of what he’d said, because I was so lost in that notion. I think I disagreed a little confusingly and someone else mercifully took the conversation over before I could look any stupider than I undoubtedly already did, which was quite kind of them. It’s been a while since I’ve built a guitar from scratch and really don’t think of myself as a luthier. However, I might have bulked at the title back then even if I had heard it before, given that it’s hard to think of the guitar work I’ve done as amounting to the level of craftsmanship that “luthier” implies to me, though I’m pretty sure he was correct, at least in a strict, literal sense.
(little side note, the spellcheck on the CMS backend of WordPress is absolutely certain that “Luthier” is not a real word, but then it also just flagged “WordPress” as a spelling mistake. So that’s fun.”)
Autodidact, which basically means self-taught, also came to me when in a conversation where I was talking about a side project and someone much smarter than I was all, “Oh, so you’re an Autodidact”, and I was all, “the fuck you just…”. The term felt off to me, for a number of reasons, not the least being some nebulous feeling of undue pride. I’m sure this comes from the extremely bad experiences and interactions I and so many others have had with people who claim to be self educated. This compounds when you begin to understand those making this claim and break them down into groups. Some of the most adamant of “self learners” absolutely did not teach themselves anythings, and instead were just watching youtube and reading bad reddit posts from bad reddit posters. Another annoying subset of those people actually did go to college and seem to think they learned nothing from that experience, even when the thing they brag about teaching themselves was literally a class they took. What are you bragging about, that you didn’t pay attention and wasted money? I have a feeling that if I did any research on the subject, I’d find that it’s one of those classic American myth maker backgrounds that a certain type of douche just loves to claim, like being a self-made millionaire while failing to mention how their rich parents paid their way through everything. I’m sorry, “invested in them”. This is yet another subject I feel like I could go on forever about, and maybe I will, but not today.
Anyway, of the education euphemisms I’ve come across lately, the best fit for my current situation is something along the line of “self-paced education”. This leaves a lot of room for a variety of learning paths and styles, including any mix of traditional college, vocational classes, in person, online, old books, worksheets, non-traditional yackings, you name it. Anything you can hodge-podged together into learning counts. And that kinda works for me.
To wrap up the greater point of the educational… I don’t know, let’s call it a scheme. The Educational Scheme I’m driving towards right now is to more or less follow a college curriculum and use free-or-cheap college resources to get up to a college graduate understanding of my chosen fields of study. Bit of a mouthful, and I have more to say on it, but I think that will be another post. What I will say today is that the landscape of resources available to us all now, much of which is free, is incredible. When you get a good look at it all, it’s hard not to feel like there is an educational revolution just begging to happen. Fingers crossed the current administration and otherwise political climate don’t ruin that along with everything else.
So that’s sorted, let’s get a little specific before closing for the day. Just a smidge.
I’ve set down some very basic criteria for my first round of chosen subjects:
I will need them for a degree and will still find them useful if I don’t pursue college
I am directly interested in them or it would benefit the pursuit of my interests if I studied them
I can find a healthy variety of resources to learn them from
I can, if I choose to (and I think I will), get college credit for them (or useful equivalent, like a professional certification)
Not everything I’m studying meets all four. For a related side note, I’m like a chapter or two from finishing a book on the subject of learning. The book piqued my interest because it’s basically talking about what I was planning on doing, and I was hoping it would give me either direction or clarity. Now that I’m so far into it, I find it absolutely is talking about what I’m trying to do, and it’s been a good read. It’s also been helpful, giving me some good ideas, a combination of starting points and well worn strategies . I’m hoping for a bit more, and the book’s forward, table of contents, and first chapter implied it would give me that in the form of overarching actionable advice. I haven’t gotten to that just yet, though it should be coming up next. I’ll name the book and give my opinion on it when I finish. But it’s not going to directly lead to a degree, is the point, and that truth isn’t a problem given that it could help me get through the journey a little bit better, more quickly, and less haphazardly. No red squiggly on “haphazardly”, huh? Alright, cool.
Likewise, I’m also picking back up some interests that I just like, regardless of whether they satisfy even one item on the list. I’ve been digging back into playing music, woodworking, and gadget tinkering hobbies. I don’t know if anything from that trio can lead to whatever my main focus will be, or work, or side hustle, or anything really. Heck, I’m a terrible musician. But I love to play music, and that helps me, if indirectly, to just get by in this shit world of ours. And that’s a good enough reason for me.
With those and the more formalized subjects I am pursuing, one thing I want to do on this site is to talk about that experience. Talk about what I’m learning, talk about how I’m going about learning it, how things are going, and so on. I keep getting about halfway into writing about how I’m doing in this subject or how learning that this is going, and then realizing that it’s not what I want to go up as the first post on it. That should be no surprise, I mean this post had a few unnecessary stops along the way. And that’s the point of this point, to give a point to start the conversation. A sort of “starting point”, if you will. Woof. I need an editor.
That’s why one of the subjects is English Composition, sometimes called College Composition or Introduction to Writing. If I do the college thing, I’ll need credit for that class. Moreover, I’ll need what I should learn from the class to actually succeed in other classes further down the line. The big positive upshot is that even if I don’t do the college thing, it’s still something that would be useful. I love to write, and I haven’t been doing it much outside of just the most awful corporate office procedure documents for years, and man, writing those things sticks. The style guild on a corporate doc is basically “stuffy turd potato, double-spaced”, and they only ever get read by other workers that are skipping every other sentence or managers that are desperate to have a thing to correct so they can justify their bullshit jobs. I think it would do wonders for me to just write something fun again.
I’m planning to come in later this week and write some more about my English Comp experience. The experience has already proven itself worth discussing, and I’m likely to dedicate an entire post to just one of my shortcomings in the class. Here’s a preview to that – Citation and References: Aaron Stinks At Them. The rest of the subjects I’ve hit so far are easy peasy, stuff we should all already know, really. Though I could really use some practice on writing essays… not really sure how to go about that. Guess I could harass my friends for help, but that doesn’t exactly sound like a fun time.
The second subject is College Algebra, which also deserves its own post. I was really happy when I got far enough into it to relieve my fear that I had lost all of my previous math prowess. Before starting, I was really worried that I would have to go back to remedial math or that I just couldn’t do it at all, effectively shutting this entire experiment down before it even starts. It was a real boost to my mood and motivation when I found that I could still factor. Better still when I came to feel I better understand now how logarithms work then I ever did in high school. This is not a good paragraph, and I’m somehow both getting really ahead of myself and somewhat behind the point. That’s some more proof that I could use those Composition classes right? Also, I need a lot more work on logs before I can declare I actually get them. So a post on that is forthcoming.
The other classes I’m taking are Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, and Computer Science. There are other subjects that I’m tracking, but that is the list that I am most actively pursuing at the moment. The Econ stuff is mostly out of interest, though that interest is strong, and I have, so far, found it easy. CS, on the other hand, I’m not that interested in on its face. It’s more like the results of having had learned it will be useful, you dig? I’ve had some pretty meaningful successes in my professional life with some really low-level coding, and I’ve found a shitload of fun and fulfillment in personal coding projects. I think my side interest in CS may turn to something else and having had that class will be extremely useful. At present, the most likely suspect is some discipline of engineering. But let’s hold up a minute on the whole getting ahead of myself stuff.
Alright, this is at least a whole page-scroll longer than I’d meant it to be. I have more to say, big surprise, but it’s late and this isn’t going to help me get to bed on time, so let’s start wrapping things up. Maybe that essay practice will help with my shitty brevity. We’ll plan to follow up on all of this as we go. Fuckin’ “we”, like it’s a group over here or some jazz. It’s just me, the notable Aaron. You know, this guy? With the thumbs? Yeah, that’s right.
I believe I stated in the last post that I was planning on making some regular fitness check-ins, and this will stand as the first.
When I first started typing this, I was calling it a “weigh-in”. I doubled-back and edited that to “fitness”. I’m going to just blow past that today, but I’ve remembered that it gets brought up by serious health professionals to not rely on your weight as the single indicator of health, rather a part of a system. From my own past, I remember being healthier when I was heavier than the dreaded BMI math wanted me to be, so I get it. I’ll have more to say on the subject, but that will have to wait for another day.
262. That’s today’s weight. In pounds, if you were wondering. I feel pretty good about that. Due to some serious health conditions, my weight has been all over the place for the past few years, well over 300 just a few years ago. That will all go in the future post I alluded to earlier. I’d planned to post that by now, but it seems I have a lot to say, so it’s taking me some time. But this is now, so let’s establish a baseline.
The heaviest I’ve been since the start of 2025 was 270. That was a few weeks ago, and that’s what we’re going to call my base. I’m fairly sure that at least five of those pounds were water weight, but I’m counting them. Water weight has become a real concern of mine, given my condition. Add to that I’m pretty sure I got above that weight while away from my scale. Not knowing what the actual top weight was, let’s stick with 270. Better to have something.
I’m planning to eventually present the rest of what I’m tracking, but not today. Today will be just the weight and a handful of fitness goals I know I’m going with. Before I do, however, I also want to log my Friday, yesterday, weigh-in of 261 pounds. Since we’re keeping track, let’s also note that Friday is my stated weigh-in day going forward. That’s the day that I log my weight on the spreadsheet where I actually keep track of all of this stuff. A pound or two drift here and there is expected, especially at my weight and age. Lot of reasons I picked that day, but the biggest is that Friday morning is my most reliable reading.
I plan to share that spreadsheet as well, eventually, but also not today. I’ve been using an old one I made years ago, which does just fine, but it needs both cleaning up and expanding. It currently tracks some stuff I don’t care about anymore and is missing stuff I now do. You get the idea. Plus, I’m out of my corporate job, which leaves me few outlets to stretch my well developed spreadsheet skills. Making a little “personal dashboard” seems like a nice side project. But I’m stalling, let’s go ahead and run down the current list.
Current
Short Term Goal
Long Term Goal*
Weight – 262
255 pounds (lose about 15)
200 pounds
Cardio – 60min+ Walk (some running)
Run (at all), 1x Week
Run 1 Unbroken Mile
Fit Check – Size 40 jeans, loose
Size 38 jeans, comfortable
Size 36 jeans, comfortable
Mobility – Okayish, I guess?
Undefined
Undefined
*You may notice I did not specify any time frames on my goals. I don’t know what they are yet. I’m planning my first major check in around my birthday, which is the middle of June. That’s about a month away. We’ll try and nail some specifics down by then.
Fit-check is my current shorthand for how I feel, which I’m struggling to define outside of how my clothing fits. Right now, I’m wearing an XL t-shirt and a size 38 jeans. The jeans are snug but they were uncomfortably tight not much more than a week ago. The shirt feels great, though could look a bit better. These are brands that run a little big, and for clarity, I have a pair of size 40 chinos that no amount of baby powder and shoe horns would squeeze me into. Sorry for the visual.
Considering it wasn’t long ago that I was busting out of a XXXL pair of gym shorts on the way to the hospital, I feel pretty alright with the current size. But I’d love to get back into my size 36 jeans and feel comfortable in them. Really, I just want to get rid of my gut, and stuff like jean size and weight are my best vitals to track along the way. Plus, around size 36 is where my best cache of good clothes lives. I have some amazing clothes in that class. Really show off the goods, and it would feel great to have anyone find me even a little sexy again, ya’ dig?
Mobility is another one. I was worried about this when I started pulling up to my 40s, but man, following my hospital stay, this now feels crucial. A few months after being discharged, I developed some serious shoulder issues, and I had a really hard time just walking. Stair were really tough for a few months. I’ve mostly recovered, but not entirely. I have had to face the very real possibility that I might not ever fully recover my mobility, so I’d like to get back as much as I can and hold onto it for as long as I can. I greatly value my ability to get around on my own, and when I lost that it was devastating. It crushed my sense of self. Any fix to that is worth pursuing.
My current routine isn’t too crazy. It’s pretty light compared to what I did trying to get in shape in my mid-30s and a far cry from anything I did in my early 20s. But hey, I’m not in the military any more. I’m old and injured. And so far it’s working, so I’m callin’ that a win. Here’s the basics:
Walk minimum 30 minutes 3 times per week
Interval Training (working toward run) 1 time per week
Strength Training – Modified GVT with focus on regaining lost muscle in major zones (will share in future post)
Calisthenics – not started / undecided.
Calisthenics isn’t required for everyone’s fitness routine, but the best results I’ve ever had always included them, so they’ll be going on the menu when I’m ready for them. I had especially good results the time I did them as HIIT sessions. I’ll probably do that again, borrowing from my friend Jackie and his success. I’m pretty sure he described his entire routine as exclusively and intensively doing Burpee HIIT. Burpees suck shit to do, which might be part of the appeal. You don’t just breeze through them, and the feedback is very rapid. So we’ll probably go with that, though mine will be more supplemental and likely much less intensive.
I’d also love to bring back my “Church”. That’s the snarky and lightly insensitive way I used to label a short list of routines I’d dial up for my Sunday workout. It’s workouts that suck, like a sprint drill that goes directly into burpees and then flutter kicks, rinse and repeat. It’s awful. But many of the results are nearly immediate, and they are glorious. If you can manage this sort of thing once per week, I fully recommend you do so, and you don’t have to use my dickish moniker for it. For my own plans, if I can drag my ass out of bed early enough tomorrow, I hope to scout a nearby location for future sessions.
Alright I have more but this post has already gone longer than I’d intended. Let’s call it for today. I’ll check back in with a thing or two next week.
Today, I welcome myself back to my own blog. Hi, I’m Aaron, the titular note taker. I’ve had this website for many years, and used to update it with some regularity. The content and consistency of the website changed from time to time, but more or less functioned as a personal blog. Some years into that and some years back from now, I don’t recall how many, I became extremely burnt out and overwhelmed in my job and various aspects of my personal life. My mid-to-late 30s were pretty rough. During that burn-out period, my posts here become less and less frequent. Due to some extremely lackluster attention and follow through, I also had a bunch of half-written blogs that I hadn’t meant to go up end up publishing anyway. At some point, I realized just how little I was doing with this and then scrapped it all. Well, scrapped most of it, anyway. I not only stopped posting, I also cleared out the back posts, leaving up a placeholder for a while. I’ve now scrapped that.
I’m in my early 40s now, and once again have the urge to share what is going on in my life. I also have regained that old urge to write. Reviving my old blog seems like the natural course of action to satisfy both. I should give fair warning to anyone who somehow found their way here that I don’t have any real expectations for what this will be, how frequently I’ll update it, or even if I will keep it up at all. That’s the gist of it – I’m planning to start writing again, including here, and this is the first post towards that.
I’m in a bit of a transition period in my life, you see. I’ve had some changes, some by choice and some not, and I’m feeling introspective. More so than usual. I’ve also been sitting on some additional changes that I want to make but haven’t, some I’ve been sitting on for quite some time. Odd they haven’t hatched on their own… annoying that bit. I do journal personally, fairly regularly, but there is a part of me that wants to commit to the structure, rigor, and practice that writing to an audience (even just a perceived if not actually present one) has on one’s related skills. Before I move on, I should address the weight of the words at the first part of this paragraph – it’s nothing massive, world changing, person changing. Well, I don’t think so. It’s more stuff I’ve been doing or planning to do, like getting in shape, engaging my existing and underused skills, and picking up new ones. Plus just working on the whole me of it all. Like to be a (slightly) less shitty person. Not that I’m all that terribly shitty, in fact I think most people would say I’m quite nice. I think.
Also I was hospitalized at the start of 2024 and slightly died and haven’t fully recovered. And probably won’t. But I’m up and moving around again, so you know, that’s good.
The plan, at least for the time being, is to pop in here as appropriate with the things that are on my mind. You know, a blog. Remember those?
Lately, the things on my mind have been a bit too much to keep up with. So I’m hoping that, in part, this can act as a somewhat therapeutic exercise. Maybe a way to jot down something that’s bothering or exciting me, get it out of my head and let it live somewhere else for a while. I also want to use the blog as a bit of an academic booster, as I’ve been trying to play catch-up on my education and skill acquisition. I’m not sure exactly what form that will take, though right now I’m thinking I might occasionally use this as a sort of review of whatever I’m trying to learn at the moment. I’m also looking for something to be a quasi formal record of my current and previous efforts during this time, my struggles, strategies, and successes on various issues, such as my health and fitness. Lastly, one of the original focuses I had planned but rarely actually indulged in, was to talk about some of my hobbies, interests, passions… look, I’m into a lot of shit. Dumb shit, mostly, but that don’t bother me none. I like to tinker and screw around with stuff. I’m fascinated by the world and how it works. I like to try new experiences and I love to make things. And I need a place to talk about them, sometimes very briefly and other times at nauseating length. So you know, blog.
Some of these areas of interest are ongoing threats, which gives me the notion to set up a sort of schedule or likely something less formal, but some expectation to have semi-regular check-ins. Maybe more, but for now, let’s just say that’s what is likely to appear here, assuming anything else appears here ever again. Well, wouldn’t you know, it’s the first post in a very long time and it’s already longer than I’d intended. Sounds like I’m right back to my same old shit, yee-haw. Oh well, at least it’s relatively coherent this time.
Anyway, here’s a picture I drew of a thing I found that, now that I’m looking at it again, does look a lot more like a dick than I’d first thought. For reference, it was slightly larger than key size. I’m pretty sure it was a bottle opener. You can see it, right? Right?
I suppose it could have been a weird key. But, I mean, look at it.
