Week 1495

After almost five years together, my wife and I finally got a dining table. 

First a garage fridge, then a house, now a dining table? Apparently we just can’t help but dive deeper into the American Dream. 

This week, I again had to prioritize work and wrapping up at the townhouse over some of my personal goals. 

I worked late/early a few days last week to ensure I took care of all of my responsibilities and I spent a handful of hours making sure that I got the right paint so they could paint the walls of the old townhouse and scrubbing the drool off the walls because that is life with giant breed dogs. 

After a few hours I got fed up that I was spending so much time cleaning when we are paying for cleaners and decided that they are welcome to charge me so I didn’t have to keep doing it. Hopefully I saved us some money but I doubt it since I couldn’t put the correct ceiling light back in Syd’s old office. 

I also had to dispose of this massive metal thing that was delivered to us incorrectly that we had been using as a divider in our garage for the past year. It was stupidly awkward, heavy, and rusty. 

I am running a few processes at work and all of that managed to overlap at the same time so I sacrificed some of my personal time to ensure I took care of everything. This has put me further behind where I should be in my training program so I am not going to do that again. 

I am happy to work late but not routinely at the cost of my personal goals. I’d rather sacrifice more sleep to get both done (again, as long as it isn’t a regular occurrence). 

I only weighed in 3 times last week but averaged 236.47. This is great! I just have to watch my rate of gain so I don’t accidentally add mostly fat going into my two month cut. Although, I do love a good exercise in futility. 

I have been listening to a lot of Rich Roll’s content and it has me wondering what the transition from mostly vegetarian to mostly plant based would look like. I have felt really good eating less meat and have gained muscle doing it. If my big ass can do that, I think anybody can. That being said, a lot of my protein comes from my egg-dominant breakfast and I don’t know that I am willing to cut that out. 

I’d be open to having my own chickens/ducks/quail, we just don’t have much space for that and I’m not sure our new HOA allows them anyway. This would just give me insight into how they are treated. 

I have found it interesting thinking about how much people critique the decisions of others instead of focusing on themselves when it comes to diet. You criticizing or shaming others just makes them stand firmer in their decision because it forces them to be on the defensive. 

Seems like a waste of energy. 

Ultimately, if I were to shift down that route, it wouldn’t be to dogmatically become vegan or live anybody’s ideal aside from my own. While I understand our need for food on a grand scale, I don’t resonate with the idea of animals being raised and slaughtered for my consumption - especially with me being removed from that process. 

Plants for slaughter, I can live with. 

I’m pretty sure all of the plants in my office just shuddered.

I think I will work up to a lean 250 lbs before I try that, though, as I want to have a solid foundation of muscle that I can work to sustain first before trying to gain weight. 

We’ll see. That will likely change. 

I’ve been taking the dogs to play fetch on a hill in our neighborhood and they have absolutely loved it. I also took them to the park down the street from us but I enjoyed that less as there were too many people there and all I wanted to do was let them run and wrestle.

Speaking of too many people… There are too many people that go to 24 Hour Fitness. I have gone between 8 AM and 12 AM and there hasn’t been a single time where there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of people relative to my old gym. 

It’s a personal problem and I have to suck it up but it’s irritating enough to make me desire building out a home gym more so I don’t have to deal with it. I enjoy working out around people - there’s just a cap where it becomes more irritating than beneficial. 

I am still behind on Japanese. Behind on video recording. Not editing jack diddly. I am tired of saying that I am behind and am going to take small actions to prevent this from becoming more of a recurring theme than it is. 

I am also really leaning in to what I want to do next with my career. I want a direction to set my sights on to really ramp up my intentionality at work. 

I am intentional, a clear direction just helps increase my buy-in and decreases the distance between thought and action. 

With this, I am considering pursuing a designation with the ICF as I love coaching people and playing a small role in their lives. 

That’s the whole reason I write this too. 

At the moment, it’s more of a public journal but the whole intention is to help others and give a peek behind the curtain as I work to build an inspiring life. Well, inspiring to me, at least. 

I like knowing that if you were reading this in 10 years, you’d know more about what I was able to accomplish than I was able to conceive of while writing this. 

To put a bow on the week, we visited my Granny and Grandad on Sunday. 

My family has some interesting dynamics and their dynamic with the rest of the family is no different. I dominantly base my relationships off of how people have interacted with me as I find it hard to picture anything but the behaviors I have seen and experienced. 

That being said, even when people have historically treated you well, sometimes there are obvious signs that they struggle to have good relationships with others and their relationships would fall into this category. 

It was particularly interesting hearing some of the stories that we have heard from other perspectives be told in a very different way. (Long story short, I have an aunt that committed suicide - at least, that is the general consensus - yet we got to hear a story of alcoholism leading to carbon monoxide poisoning.) 

Going further than that doesn’t seem like my story to tell but the takeaway here is, if you have relationship issues with a lot of people, look at the common thread in those relationship issues. A secondary takeaway is that listening to numerous perspectives of a situation rarely results in the same story being told twice. You can be informed more by piecing together the overlapping in the stories than by taking the story at face value. 

Thus, I find it interesting to hear from both parties involved in a situation prior to formulating an opinion when I can. 

Truth be told, though, I generally don’t care. Especially if I am being informed of the situation in a way that is clearly trying to sway my opinion.

P.S. Our wifi through Quantum Fiber has been annoying to deal with (lots of issues with connectivity, which I believe stems from the router being in the basement instead of the main level or the upper level (likely will be addressing by having a company come in and add ethernet wiring to multiple rooms). Our fridge had a high temperature warning and ice melting in the freezer. And the dogs keep having diarrhea (christening the house and carpet this week) because some tall bastard keeps trying to feed them food that is better for them than kibble. That tall bastard also has this weird dissonance between him eating less meat and having to feed all of his pets a lot of meat. That same guy also failed to order the cats’ meat this week so they were experiencing another version of the same issues that the dogs were experiencing. This guy.