Doing a longer (time coverage) update again because I got distracted. With work, but also with exercising! And issues at home with the person who will be leaving in 33 days … not that I’m counting (not the bf, but a friend of his who has been staying since May due to … reasons; it’s gotten to the point where dealing with her is occupying more of my time and negative thought processes than dealing with Trump for the last few years). Anyway …
We start with Daylight Savings day, where my calendar would not let me schedule anything between 2 and 3am. That issue aside, I spent all of my free time doing work, I meant to go to bed early because I had a 5:30am telecon Monday (celestial mechanics waits for no one), but that didn’t happen.
For the rest of the week, I had all day conferences Monday-Friday. However, I didn’t really do anything for it. This is a conference that (until last year) I had gone to Texas for every year since 2007. It is really just not the same doing things remotely, and as much as I complained the last few years about how “this meeting could have been an email” and “this conference could have been a short meeting,” there really are some things that you really do have to do in-person, despite everyones’ best attempts and best intents.
So, I did a lot of other work, and extremely little with respect to the conference. In face, I even went grocery shopping Friday and didn’t even call into the conference at all. Do I feel somewhat guilty of wasting that registration fee? Yeah, maybe. But, if everything is pre-recorded anyway, and the talks were 3 minutes instead of the normal 15, it’s more informative just to read the submitted conference abstracts. Sigh.
Anyway, food-wise I stuck to my plan, and I tried a new cake recipe that I saw on this past season’s Worst Cooks in America. They were small cakes that you could make in a mason jar, so it was fairly painless to fit into my meal plan.
I did not do much exercise, however. Unfortunately. One issue with the weights is that I felt very sore in my lower back. I’m not really sure what is going on there, so I’m trying to focus on form and only doing it when my lower back doesn’t hurt so much.
On Friday, I had the first issue with my knee in a few months. It just kicked in when I was walking down the stairs from work, to my car, after grocery shopping. Just, suddenly, a searing pain in the back of my left knee. So, Saturday, I did the rowing machine, thinking that the forced – but controlled – knee motion would help. And it did. To the point that the bf and I went for a walk due to the reasonable weather, hence the steps >10k.
Also tried yet another new recipe, yet again from Worst Cooks in America: Crispy Beef with Carrots and Snow Peas. It did involve some deep frying, and I estimated about 1/4 of the oil actually made it into the beef for purposes of counting calories and macros. The beef was actually really good. But, both the bf and I did not like it once it made it into the sauce, which turned it kinda gummy, and for leftovers (on Sunday) after being reheated in the microwave, it was just kinda gross. So, next time we’ll do the beef separately and just toss it maybe with some seared green beans or something like that.
Sunday, food was again okay, but exercise was nil. I think another one of my issues is that I see a new week and think, “Gosh! I have all this time to do the exercises I don’t need to do every day!” And then I don’t do them. So, I think Sunday needs to be a day of exercise. Like, mandatory. Start the week off well.
This week was almost all spent programming and debugging. Lots of it. I still managed to lift twice, and get out for a brief walk on Thursday (I was sick of being inside so I said to myself, “I’m not going to waste this fleeting motivation to get outside” and so I did a brief, 17-minute walk). I managed to stick reasonably within my goals, at least on the aggregate for the week, for food.
That said, Wednesday, The Lodger (bf’s friend) and I had yet another, shall we say, “tiff.” It resulted in me saying that the stuff I cooked would no longer be available to her. I’m not going to cook for someone who treats me like $h¡‡ and thinks that it’s me or her who’s staying here so actively tries to break me and the bf up. That very, very constrained, tiny rant aside, it meant that I needed to then spend a half hour re-working the next two weeks’ meal plan. So, that was fun.
Saturday, the bf and I made it outside again for a walk because it’s starting to get consistently nice outside. Of course, as I write this on Monday night, it’s supposed to snow a bit tomorrow. Anyway, food was good, I made spring rolls on Friday so we ate several of those, and I was still working through some leftovers because of the change in who was eating what.
As an aside, I wanted to take this opportunity to quickly address weight. I haven’t been reporting it for awhile because it’s been fairly flat at about 215 lbs. What happened to 210 lbs, you might ask? (Okay, I don’t think anyone would ask.) Well, see, my scale sucked. Apparently, it was off. I had repeatedly been getting weird measurements, like I’d weigh myself, let it turn off, turn it on and weigh myself again, and it would be 3 lbs different. So, I got a new scale and it read consistent values, but they were all several pounds heavier. So, I’ve been kinda unhappy about that. I’m still measuring and recording, but, yeah, not reporting.
My Fitness Blog 