It’s 10:30pm and the Move ring on my AppleWatch hasn’t closed yet, and I’ve only four minutes of my 30 minutes of exercise done. I was just having so much fun hanging with Harry that I didn’t want to leave the room and take care of business.
I have 90 minutes to don26 minutes of exercise and I am terminally out of shape.
It should be a gimme. It’s not.
Wish me luck, folks.
The age of Taking Vitamins has begun.
There are four vitamins I need to take post-weight loss surgery and the dietician suggested I start now. I will now be taking three pills with breakfast and two each with lunch and dinner. I think I need a pill caddie, babie.
I took the three with breakfast today even though I don’t eat breakfast. That’s about to change too, but for now I just took the three pills. I had a moment of brain fry with lunch. I have to stop drinking anything 15 minutes before I eat and 60 minutes after. I made myself some lunch and started eating. Then I remembered the pills. Okay, so today’s lunch pills will be approximately 60 minutes after lunch. I’ll figure this out.
The food log is still going, sort of. I haven’t started measuring yet but I am keeping track. I also haven’t started working off the meal plan the dietician gave me. I think that starts next week. I’m also supposed to replace breakfast with a protein shake. I have the shake mix but I won’t have fat free milk to mix it into until over the weekend, so the shakes start next week too.
I still haven’t had any caffeine or soda since February 3rd. That’s going well. The no drinking with food thing is a serious bitch. I keep forgetting about that. It’s resulting in me drinking less water and it might be resulting in me eating less food, but it’s also a pain in the ass to keep on top of. I’ll get there though.
My next appointment is next week with the Psych folks. Oh, am I looking forward to that.*
Okay, back to work. I am just over three hours away from a full week vacation and I really, really need it right now. Freedom is close, but there is a lot of work still in the way.
*Sarcasm. Or #sarcasm, if you prefer.
I just spent some time on Amazon selling my soul to the bezos–devil. I need to take a slew of vitamins for the weight loss surgery. I ordered a big pile of them. I also have to take protein shakes. I ordered a ton of it. I need to start weighing my food. I bought a food scale.
I’m freakin’ out, man. I can do this, but I am going to freak out through the whole thing.
I did another important thing. I signed up for Paramount+. Why? Star Trek: Picard comes back for season two tomorrow and I am there. It’s time to find out what Q has been up to all this time.
Fun.
RPM is over. Now for the annual “now what?” Post.
I assume the folks at RPMHQ will kick off another Record Every Month challenge. I’ll do that. I’m thinking two songs each month, sort of like a single. Then at the end of the year re-record the best songs?
In the real world I have to buckle down on the weight loss surgery prep. I have a bunch of directives from the dietician and so far have only integrated two. I think there are three more and one of them is a little Earth shattering.
Outside of that? There’s the band. I think I may have reached the point in the pandemic where I’m willing to try a band practice. I think. We will have to see. Fingers crossed I don’t panic and chicken out.
I’ll see if I can dream up anything else. I’ll let you know.
The labs and the ultrasound are done. They had to stab me three times to draw blood and the ultrasound tech was having trouble finding whatever it was she was looking for.
Last time I had an in person appointment I signed up for their patient portal app. I’m kinda hoping I’ll get to see all of the images of my inner workings. That should be fun.
I will be heading over to the hospital for the next step in the weight loss surgery process. Today it’s just blood work, an abdomen ultrasound and an upper GI x-ray. It’s times like this that my job and my home life sort of high five each other. The application I work on covers hospital imaging departments. I haven’t a clue what the machines are called or how they work or anything like that, but when the technologists enter the information into the computer, I know what everything looks like under the covers. Of course the hospital I am working with is not one of our customers so I like to watch staff enter data to see if they get as frustrated as I’ve heard my software’s users get. (*)
I’ll be leaving in five minutes. I have the order sheet. I have a mask. I haven’t had any food or drink since last night at 9:30. I have nothing to be nervous about with this step, and yet I am nervous. I need to grow a pair.
(*) #sarcasm
Now that the RPM Challenge is over I can start worrying about other things.
Specifically, tomorrow’s doctors appointment. Not that there is anything logical to stress about. I’m having some blood work, an ultrasound, and an x-ray. All prep for the real thing.
But… what if the imaging shows that there’s something screwy going on in my inner works? What if they see something that makes me ineligible for the weight loss surgery?
See? I can freak out about anything these days.
Twice this week I didn’t close my Activity App rings until after 11:00pm. Today I wrapped it up by 2:15pm.
Suck it, morbid obesity.
I’ve been so busy today that I didn’t even start my exercise until 9:45pm or so. I finished at about 11:30. Done.
Normal people would have started at 9:45 and ended at 10:15. When you are as morbidly out of shape as I am it doesn’t work that way. For me it’s more like exercise for a few minutes then rest and recover, then repeat for almost two hours.
I closed that 30 minute exercise ring though. I wasn’t sure I’d pull it off, but I made it. Shocking.
Two things.
First. On Wednesday the dietician told me to wait an hour after eating before having anything to drink. Three hours later I am sitting at my desk having lunch and the minute I was done eating I was guzzling a water bottle. I was still gulping water when I realized what I was doing. Like… dude… she just told me! Yeah, that one is going to take some getting used to. I managed to do it right all day yesterday, but come on. The first day!
Second. I’ve been using the CPAP machine every night since, what… early 2019? Years. Literally years, plural. Like… multiple years! Every night! The only exceptions being nights where I was sleeping in a room that the CPAP machine wasn’t in. I can probably count them on one hand. Last night at 11:00ish, I put down my iPad and curled up in bed and went to sleep. I woke up an hour and a half later and thought that it was weird to wake up that quickly. I woke up again at a little before 3:00am and realized I never put the damn CPAP machine on. It was sitting on the table next to the bed looking all lonely and dejected and ignored. Years! I’ve been doing it for years and I just plain forgot last night. I even woke up without it on and it didn’t register! What the hell, Robert? Years!
In other news, February is continuing its theme of being a dick. I think we’re up to three instances where a super warm day was followed a day or two later by a legitimate snow storm. It was in the mid 60’s on Wednesday and today, two days later, we’re getting a foot of snow. Nice. Way to be a dick, February.
In other news that is actually important to the future of human civilization, I am sad to realize how little I know about Ukraine. They were a Soviet Republic and an American fascist tried to use them to rig the 2020 election and got off scot free because the United States government is broken and getting close to the point where it’s not worth saving anymore. I thought they were to the South of Russia but when I looked at a map I realized everything I thought I knew about Ukraine was probably actually about Georgia. Wikipedia just confirmed that. I thought Eduard Shevardnadze was the first post-Soviet president of Ukraine, but he was president of Georgia. Shit.
I keep reading stories about heroic stands by the Ukrainian army. They took back a city, they took back the airport in Kyiv. Things like that. Every time I read something good I try to find reports to back it up and I always find one report confirming and one report confirming the opposite. In the age of instant knowledge, I really hate not knowing what’s going on.
I have a huge confirmation bias regarding this war. It’s Russia. The superpower that stood against us for all of those years. The only nation that could match our massive military machine. How can Ukraine fight them off? It’s impossible, right? Then I try to convince myself otherwise. The Soviet Union I was so afraid of is gone. Sure, Russia retains most of that might, but Ukraine was a Soviet state too. They were part of that military. Who knows, maybe they were a bigger part of it than I realize. I’m wrong about everything else so why not that too? Then I read that the US government expects that Ukraine will fall within days. Damn it. Sometimes, not often, I hate being right.
Inside the Red Head's Head 