After Dinner Plans

Twice today I have tried to get some exercise in. Just a few minutes here and there. When I start walking I’m fine, but after a few minutes my back just starts screaming at me. Come on, back. Leave me alone. Let me get my friggin’ exercise in!

I’m not sure yet, but I may be going to my parents’ place after dinner tonight. They need to have something picked up at the house and dropped off at the new place. I couldn’t do it yesterday and I don’t know if anyone else was able to take care of it. If not, then I’ll get ‘er done tonight.

Now if my effin’ back would quit it’s bitchin’. Tylenol is trying to help, but so far it’s not doing enough. I still have 11 minutes of exercise to go before I hit my daily 30 minute goal.

Wish me luck.

Not Much Going On

Watch, I publish a post saying that there isn’t much going on and five minutes later I am going to get run over by a mac truck sized issue at work. Just you watch.

Anyway, nothing much going on today.

Work has been quiet, which is nice on a Monday. I got a little exercise in this morning, but I am having a hard time getting as much done in one sitting as I could even a few days ago. My goal is 30 minutes and I usually try to do it in two 15 minute chunks. Over the last three days or so I haven’t really been able to do more than 10 minutes at a time. Either my back will start screaming, or my calves, or my knees, or something. Isn’t exercise supposed to get easier the more you do it? Apparently not.

Intermittent fasting has not been all that great lately. One or two days each week I have been failing. Not completely, but I’ll be shutting it down after 13 hours or 14 hours or whatever. The goal is 16. Having said that though, today’s fast just ended at 18 hours. So that’s a good day, right?

I have Veteran’s Day off on Thursday. It’s bitter sweet. Starting in January my company has changed the way we handle time off and it includes some of the non-national holidays we’ve enjoyed for decades being changed to floating holidays… which means next year I don’t get 11/11 off. This is my final Veteran’s Day. Unless of course I put in for a floating holiday on that day next year, but that’s neither here nor there. I plan to honor the holiday by playing the guitar, and ending World War I.

Okay. Lunch is over. Back to work, Robert.

Almost Midnight

It’s almost midnight. I haven’t been able to sleep at all. Here’s hoping that changes soon. There’s a lot going on this weekend but most of it is on Sunday. I am hoping I can spend some quality time on music tomorrow and I don’t want to be exhausted all day.

I got my 30 minutes of exercise in, and my 16 hour fast. Now I just need some sleep! Come on, body. Let’s get this done!

Ouch, babie… Ouch

I was sitting at my desk at 8:30am, 30 minutes before I start work, and I thought: Robert, you are going to do 15 minutes of exercise by walking very briskly in place. Hells yeah, you are.

Five minutes later I stopped because my back was hurting like crazy. Hells yeah, it was.

The same thing happened yesterday while I Was trying to do a second round of 15 minutes to close the 30 minute exercise ring on my Apple Watch. I powered through that time, but I couldn’t today.

In the immortal words of Austin Danger Powers, ouch babie… ouch.

I need to keep an eye on this today. I don’t want to hurt myself, but there’s a bag of Hershey’s Kisses off to my left and karmically speaking I need to do the 30 minutes so I can eat those suckers. I do understand that this arrangement makes no actual physiological sense, but shut up and leave me alone.

Here’s to a back pain free day… as if.

What Was I Going to Say?

I was planning on writing something here this morning and I completely forget what it was. Getting old sucks, kids. Stay young as long as you can, said the 50 year old asshole who still plays in a cover band.

What was it that I was going to mention? I honestly can’t remember.

I did something this morning that I haven’t been doing but should probably do more. I did part of my daily exercise first thing in the morning. I have 15 minutes of my 30 minute goal done. I’ll probably do the final 15 minutes at lunch. I also did something else related that I don’t want to do if I can avoid it. I took some Advil. My back is killing me. I don’t want to get into the habit of doing that, but I also want my back to not be a problem during the work day.

This morning when I put my t-shirt on my left ring finger caught on something. Weird. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I stopped to investigate. Yup. It was a little piece of what is left of the callus on that finger, the finger responsible for most of my guitar string bending. It’s been so long since I’ve practiced that I have lost the calluses on my finger tips. When I do work up the energy to play again I’m going to have to start from scratch, and it’s going to hurt. Sigh.

Okay, time for the work day. Maybe I’ll remember whatever it was I was planning to write about.

Missed a Chance

I feel like I missed a chance tonight. I didn’t play guitar even though I had plenty of time to. I just popped an episode of The Walking Dead on Netflix and flaked. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have been productive. I still haven’t even finished my exercise for the day. I am at 17 minutes. 13 minutes to go. Why am I sitting here talking to all of you when I should be walking?

It’s gonna be a late night, but at least I get to watch the scene where Dale argues to save Randal’s life*.


*The Walking Dead, season two episode 11 Judge Jury and Executioner. Season two isn’t the best season**, but Jeffrey DeMunn kicked this episode’s ass.

**Get back in the damn house, Carl!

Example

I wrote about struggling to leave the facebook this morning. Here’s an example of why leaving is annoying.

That Pedal Show, the guitar gear centered weekly show on youtube that I really enjoy watching, does a live show on Mondays at 5:00pm UK time, which translates to noon for me. I try to tune in during work but sometimes I miss out. Today being a holiday, I was looking forward to watching without any distractions. I was going to put my feet up, listen to the discussion, and maybe noodle on my guitar a little to kinda get into the spirit of the thing, you know.

Noon comes along and there is no notification on youtube. There’s nothing on their youtube landing page. There’s nothing on their web page. That last one isn’t unusual, they generally don’t put news there. They put it on facebook. There is a really active facebook group and that’s where I go when I want to find out if they had to cancel a live show. At least… it used to be. All I wanted to do was look at posts around noon time and see if they mentioned anything. I couldn’t though… because I made myself boycott the whole bookfaycey experience.

Shit.

Okay, so I’ll try again next Monday.


Unrelated note: The Apple Watch Activity app dangles these monthly challenge out to users. This month’s challenge, for me, is to burn a specific number of calories. The goal they set is higher than what I would have if I just hit my normal goal every day. In fact, I would miss the challenge by quite a bit.

Usually I don’t pay much attention to things like this. I just keep my head down and do my thing and yippee, right? For some reason though, I really want to hit this one. It told me how much I would have to average each day in order to hit it and I changed my calorie goal to match that number.

I’ve already closed my exercise ring (I’m actually two whole minutes over the 30 minute goal). I’m still only at 80% of the move goal (they call the calorie burning ring the Move ring). I’m going to have to exercise more today, aren’t I. Crud.


Unrelated note again: Kyle Schwarber played first base for the Red Sox last night. Early in the game he made a pretty terrible error. He fielded a ground ball and tried to throw it to the pitcher, who was covering first base, and he underhand tossed it to somewhere near the orbit of Neptune. I didn’t see it because I was listening on the radio, but it sounded really bad.

Later in the game he was faced with an almost identical play and this is what he did (roll the video, please):

Early Start

I was up early this morning and had some chores to do. Between taking the trash barrels to the street and going up and down the stairs to do laundry (the avalanche of Bellana clothes are finally folded and put away) I somehow managed to register 10 minutes of exercise without even having done any actual exercise. The activity app is off to a good start today.

I’m not sure what was going on, but the FaceID on my iPhone stopped working last night. It was working before I started cooking dinner but I noticed it wasn’t working just after we finished eating. Weird. It didn’t work once for the rest of the day. Right now? Working fine. I’m not sure what happened.

Today is my sister’s birthday. Being facebook free, I sent her a text instead of a post on facebook. I hope that is acceptable. I’m not sure what the protocol is anymore.

Speaking of facebook (giggles), that was kinda fun yesterday. Sure, it pulled the nazis over to Twitter for a while, but I managed to avoid all of that and just have fun reading the faux panic. Sounds like Zuckerberg lost about six billion dollars in stock value. I assume most of that was due to the 60 Minutes story Sunday night, but whatever. It’s all connected to his wallet one way or another. Granted it was just stock value, right? He’ll probably make it back today. It’s not like it’s real money or anything. It’s not like he’s going to need to take a second mortgage to pay his bills.

Okay, time to go to work. We need to get through the day so that we can focus all of our attention on the Red Sox beating the Yankees tonight. It’s a moral imperative. 8:00pm tonight, or thereabouts, we finally get payback for that friggin one game playoff back in ’78. Sure we beat them in 2004 and handed them the most humiliating playoff loss in major league baseball history (giggles), but still… I want one game playoff revenge. Suck it, Bucky Dent.