Tag: routine

About to Go Home

It is silly. I love to travel. I enjoy staying in hotels. I love the city of Boston. Why then did spending three nights in a hotel in Boston start to bum me out? It was nice. It was fun. It was a goofy little excursion away from the norm.

Why then, with all the things that I enjoyed about the entire situation, does the idea of being able to go home after work tonight fill me up with happiness? My wife and I will be home together. We’ll eat dinner together at home. We’ll sack out on the couch after dinner and watch TV in our living room at home. We’ll sleep in our own bed tonight. We’ll wake up at home tomorrow and be back on our regular, normal daily routine.

I love to travel. I love staying in hotels. I love being in the city of Boston. I guess I just love being at home with Jen more. When you look at it that way, it’s not even a little bit surprising.

Also, there are cats at home when there were no cats in the hotel. That’s gotta count for something too, right?

Stressed Out

Yesterday I was a bundle of stressed out, frayed nerves because the morning commute was such a disaster it spoiled my brain for the whole day. Today I am a bundle of stressed out, frayed nerves because of all the meetings I have to go to today. I am flat out all day long. I’m kinda scared for my stomach. It took me a full week to recover from our trip to Florida* and further along than that, yesterday was the first day since that I almost went the whole day without any problems (almost) and now today I am in meetings all day and may not be able to stop for lunch. I am at risk of a bad stomach day.**

*Florida will henceforth be known as MoonPieTown due to this post.

**I am referring to post-gastric bypass side effects and various related issues. Food/diet/digestion-wise I need to be a creature of habit and routine to succeed without weird problems and I am going to get bounced out of my routine today. I’m not happy about it, but what can you do?

Radio Cat

160/365

Just look at that furry little diva being all bad ass.

Today has been better than yesterday on the healthy front, but I’m not up to 100% yet. Let’s call it 80-85% and assume I’ll be through whatever is bothering me by tomorrow.

Today I managed to completely screw up my daily routine but I’m okay with it. We got snow yesterday, so this morning at 5:30am or so instead of going down to the cellar and getting my exercise in for the day I went outside and shoveled. We didn’t get a lot of snow, but we got enough. Within an hour it was all gone. Not long after finishing up outside I went out and ran some errands. Today is a very important day, after all*.

I didn’t get to breakfast until I was starting work at 9:00am. The hunger pains that I wrote about yesterday were definitely a thing and the eating struggles I also mentioned yesterday were also a thing, but not as bad as last night. Since breakfast was so late I didn’t have time to eat a snack mid-way between breakfast and lunch. I ended up going four hours without eating and wouldn’t you know it, when lunch time started approaching those mean old hunger pains were back again. I’m eating lunch now and feeling a little better, though that weird queasiness that has been slowing me down the last couple of days is still there. It is definitely better than it was, but it’s still there. It hasn’t been enough to stop me the way it was yesterday, so that’s a big plus. Maybe I can eat enough lunch so that I won’t be hurting in the lead up to dinner. That would be nice.

*Why is today a very important day. you ask? Because today is my beloved wife Jen’s birthday! It’s not just any old birthday either. It’s a big enough milestone birthday that her present this year was a week at Disney World. Yeah, it’s a big deal. She’s the love of my life and the woman of my dreams and my beautiful bride and it’s her birthday! Wish her a happy birthday!

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Jen,
Happy birthday to you!!!!

Hectic Morning

I messed myself up this morning. I overslept a little and then made it worse by not getting into my morning routine for about half an hour after I got out of bed. Ooops. I’ve been all out of whack ever since.

It actually started last night around 11:00pm. I went to bed really late and didn’t fall asleep for about an hour. I made a plan to do some guitar work after finishing my morning exercise. I picked two songs from the list of things I want to re-record and listened through them to remind myself what needs to be done. Then I had a snack and went down a small youtube rabbit hole (videos about Lord of the Rings back stories). (Oooops)

Then I got a really late start and didn’t have time for any guitar. I did open a box that FedEx delivered yesterday. It had some dishes in it that came from IKEA. Almost 50% of the items in the box arrived broken. Damn it. Then I punched into work and it’s been seriously hectic so far. It’s almost 12:30 now and the morning was colored by lots of urgent issues. I actually had a pretty long to-do list for today and I haven’t gotten to any of it yet. Here’s hoping the afternoon calms down.

I had to have a snack at about 11:30 and I over did it. Now I need to wait until my stomach empties out a little (no bad issues, I am just a little too full) before I can have any lunch.

We don’t have any plans in place for the weekend yet. I am still on the fence as to whether or not a leaf peeping drive to the mountains would be worth it or not. Maybe I’ll just take Dad’s camera and a roll of black and white film out and be faux artsy around town. Maybe.

Five hours to go until the weekend. Duck and cover and get through it, folks. Good luck.

Now What?

I spent the last three months writing a post about the previous day’s music progress the first thing each morning. Now that the music project is over… now what do I do? I got so used to that little piece of the routine that I feel confused and disorientated this morning. I felt about the same way when the year of answering daily writing prompts came to an end.

Now what?

Also… don’t you hate it when your candle burns out? It’s sad, somehow.

DSC_2957

I am such a nerd. Wow.

Screwed Up Routine

I overslept a little. I had a bit of an issue first thing. Nothing major, but it threw off my morning routine enough that I dumped the whole deal down the crapper. Instead of doing my 50 minutes or so of morning exercise I did 30 minutes of guitar playing. Bad for the physical health, but good for the mental health… or something like that.

I still managed to mess up the timing a little so that I had to rush through some of the morning routine things that I didn’t skip. I’m in the office today so there’s a bunch of office-day-prep things that need to happen.

I got in on time though, and I wasn’t planning on having time for much on the musical front today and I ended up with a song’s worth of guitar parts recorded. I’ll take that as a win.

I’m off tomorrow for my dad’s wake, but I have the morning to myself. I might get a hair cut. I will definitely iron a couple of dress shirts. I might play a shit load of guitar. I will definitely do about 50 minutes worth of exercise.

Routine: Interrupted

I overslept a little this morning. Instead of being down cellar doing my daily exercise at about 5:20am, I kicked things off at about 6:30. Not the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination, but still… not what I wanted. I have become a creature of routine in a kind of negative way since my weight loss surgery. When I get off of the normal workflow I get bitchy. Sorry about that.

I started my silly running in place thing (pronounced “yogging” with a soft “j”, thank you Ron Burgundy) which should last about 48 minutes. I had to pause the proceedings three times. Two of them were not a big deal and I could easily get over them, but one was just dumb. At the risk of too much information, I had to use the bathroom. Oh come on, Robert. You couldn’t have taken care of that before you started? You couldn’t have held it until after? Ugh. Dumb ass. Instant bitchy.

I was able to get everything I needed to do before work done. I also snuck in some guitar playing. I put rhythm guitars onto the two song ideas I started yesterday. I wanted to add a lead track to a song or two as well, but that was where the time cut needed to happen. Next time. I hope.

Why do I let little scheduling hiccups like having to use the bathroom at a random time get under my skin this way. Grrrrr. I don’t know.

Here’s a couple of guitar pictures, just because. I snapped them while listening to playbacks of the new tracks. Multitasking, as it were.

320/365
320/365

Another Weird Morning

I wrote about some stomach weirdness yesterday. I am pretty sure I know what it was, and it was not gastric bypass related. I am not going to say specifically because it goes big time into TMI territory. Suffice to say it happened again today and it has thrown off my whole daily routine.

I got up, felt a little off, but started my day as normal. I was trying to drink a water bottle while doing my daily exercise but after about 10 minutes and 12 ounces of water I was hit with a mild case of The Foamies. Something was trying to get into my stomach but was having trouble along the route and must have gotten stuck. I didn’t feel like anything was stuck, but I got into saliva over-production mode and had to stop exercising and take care of it. It was involved enough that I had to go upstairs and ride it out for a while.

Once I felt better I ate breakfast, which I never do before I finish my exercise for the day. At that point, the whole morning workflow is down the toilet. I still had 35 minutes of exercise left to do so I restarted. I ended up doing the whole daily goal instead of just finishing the first attempt. Due to that I managed to hit all of my Apple Watch activity goals for the day. Well, not the 12 stand-hours goal, but the exercise and move (calorie) goals. That’s nice.

Now that I’m punched into work for the day I think I am back on schedule. I just hate it when the routine goes south like this, even a little bit. I feel pretty normal now. Whatever it was seems to have passed. I felt that way yesterday too and then it came back before lunch. Let’s see how things progress today.

Good luck, Robbie.

Daily Habits

Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
View all responses

Daily habits. I don’t know if I really had any daily habits prior to the whole weight loss surgery thing. Now I have a bunch of them, mostly due to having all of these post-op goals to hit every day.

  • Have some water and my morning vitamins before breakfast
  • Exercise every morning before breakfast
  • Eat a lot of protein for breakfast
  • Make sure the cats are fed
  • Make the bed (I fail on this one a lot, but I hate it when I do)
  • Exercise again during lunch, just a bit
  • Hit my daily water/liquid intake goal of at least 64 ounces
  • Hit my daily protein goal of at least 80 grams
  • Hit my daily Apple Watch Activity app exercise goal of at least 30 minutes, preferably more like 60
  • Hit my daily Apple Watch Activity app move goal by burning at least 1000 calories
  • Hit my daily Apple Watch Activity app stand goal by standing for at least one minute each hour for 12 hours
  • Write at least one blog post
  • Take at least one photograph, preferably with my Nikon Z5
  • Most important of all, be kind and loving to my wife
  • Track my sleep stats with my Apple Watch
  • Wake up and do it all again

I am sure I am missing a few things. I find the whole exercise and post-op thing a ton easier if I stick to a routine. Like, I overslept by almost two hours this morning and I am worried about staying on target for all of the exercise and food/water goals already. It’s only 7:30am, but I should have a bunch of that stuff done already. It bugs me a bit.

Anyway, those are some daily habits. I may be insane. Just a smidgen.

Don’t Do it Again

The last time I was in the office I sat at the same desk I’m sitting at right now. When I left for the day I forgot my laptop charger and had to drive back in the next day to get it.

Robert… moron… whatever you do… don’t forget the damn charger again, m’kay? Forgetting your laptop charger is bad.

On a mostly unrelated note, all of this extra working from the office stuff has thrown my personal, internal calendar into complete chaos. I have been 100% convinced all day today that today is Friday. Guess what. It’s not Friday. Not even close. Tomorrow is Friday. It’s just plain old Thursday.

I was hoping this weekend could be a total downtime weekend. I don’t think that’s possible. I want to finish hanging the blinds and curtains and make the last couple of changes to the bed room setup. I also want to put together the tent/shed thing we bought for the back yard. Unfortunately it’s going to rain all weekend so that’s out. I have four songs that need to be finished by the end of the weekend, so there will be music in the car and at home. I still have to finish writing two of those four songs. Way to wait for the last minute, Robert. Dope. Next month’s music plan is a full 10 song album in a month deal using my new King of Tone overdrive pedal which I haven’t even plugged in yet. Dope.

It’s looking more and more like I will be able to work from home for the second half of the day. Fingers are still very much crossed. My stomach started acting up about half an hour ago but it was just one of those, hey dope you are hungry stomach aches. I ate a snack and now I am fine. I won’t get home until well after 2:00pm so I am not sure what to do about eating lunch. I’m hoping for some chicken and maybe some french fries, but I don’t want to ruin dinner. It’s crazy how reliant I have become on being able to cook lunch and dinner at decent, routine times, and how shuffling those times even a little bit messes me up.

I am hoping I’ll be leaving the office at about 1:45. Fingers intensely crossed. I wanna go home. Just don’t forget your charger, you dope.