Week 1511

Ahh yes, the week of my birth. 

Not just that but a very busy week with the timing of Syd being out of town and a mix of things happening in my work life. 

As we know, I am not going to dive into my work life here but I felt it was a good, and eye-opening week. This has not only shown me how far I have come in my career but how far I have to go. 

With Syd gone and some late nights this week, I was super proud of Ellie for not having any accidents. That may seem like a small feat but she is more inconsistent with this than I would care to admit. It has me mentally evaluating if I should hire a dog walker to take them out during the day as I prefer not to let them build bad habits outside unsupervised when we are gone. 

Ellie has already developed the bad habit of jumping on our window sills and slamming into our windows when we are gone, resulting in me reintroducing the crate to minimize the chances of us coming home to a shattered window and a very large mess…

Ellie was very receptive to this and is always such a calm girl in her crate, even choosing to sleep in it at night. 

Knowing that I was going to have time constraints on my personal life this week, I was especially intentional about walking them before and after work and they seemed to be very appreciative of that. 

Ironically, this is what I used to do when I first got a dog but I had fallen into very bad habits when we had our Neo, Hank and our Dane, Norman. Hank didn’t want to go on walks - preferring playing fetch. Norman was afraid of everything so taking him on hikes was stressful to say the least. 

This has been beneficial to both me and the dogs and I much prefer to hit 10k steps with them than on a treadmill at a gym. 

Beyond that, I stumbled upon Stonnie Dennis on YouTube and have found his methods of dog training to environmental stimulus/exposure incredibly interesting. 

My wife would roll my eyes at this but I used to say (quite often) that homeless people have the best dogs because of the amount of life exposure they get. 

Stonnie seems to iterate upon this theory (significantly more intentionally and - I’m assuming - moderately less offensively) by having mentor dogs work with him to expose the dogs he is training to various situations. 

This has helped me evaluate how I engage with my dogs and provided them with a bit more freedom when we go on walks in the morning. This has translated into Truman getting to smell much more (one of his favorite activities) and Ellie getting to chase prairie dogs into their burrows (apparently, one of her favorite activities). 

This also translated into us going to the Cherry Creek Off Leash Dog Area on Memorial Day, exploring the river and getting to be dogs. 

I think it’s safe to say that all of us have enjoyed doing this and would like to do more of it. 

This paired with my birthday has also prompted some reflection for me and the life that I want to live and help facilitate for them. 

For my birthday, people kept asking what we were doing. The more I was asked this, the more I realized that I wasn’t doing anything differently to capitalize on the long weekend nor to celebrate. Celebration isn’t something I am particularly good at anyway but I forecasted my life and if I spend every weekend this way, I’ll have ultimately lived a bit of a boring one. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I love my wife. We love our pets. We have lived an objectively good life. 

But I like to have experiences. I’d like to do more than spend my birthday cooped up in my house and walking the dogs. Again, that’s not a bad way to spend life but I always feel lethargic when I am doing that. When I walk the dogs or go to the gym or do… pretty much anything away from my desk… I find myself significantly more present in the moment. 

If I can manage to be more intentional, I’ll be able to do more and squeeze more juice out of life. 

When I was a kid, I accidentally forced this intention on myself. I went to school, worked 10-12 hours most Saturdays and Sundays and played sports. I did this for two years without issue and still spent time with my friends, with my family, and got everything done I needed to. 

But it was an expectation that I did all of that. 

As an adult, I have had to learn how to structure things for myself. Choosing how to organize my workday, prioritize personal goals, relationships, etc. 

I think I have overindexed on comfort. 

I have quite a bit of downtime on the weekend, which is great for recharging but if I don’t need it and end up feeling lethargic if I do too little, why would I make it a priority? 

Even if that prioritization is unintentional - my actions show that it’s important to me. 

I still take action to move in the direction that I want to be moving, sure, but I always feel like I could be doing more. 

I think on the flip side of that, I fear burning myself out. I have only truly burnt out once and it was terrible. I didn’t want to do anything and it all stemmed from having a job that was out of line with my values that drained me to my core. 

It had nothing to do with “doing too much” and everything to do with doing too much that was out of line with who I am. 

So I am left to wonder if I have been leaning too much into balance and not enough into pushing myself. 

I don’t know that there is a way to definitively find that out without pushing myself to do and take on more so I guess that’s what I am left to do. 

To continue to live increasingly intentionally. 

Speaking of - below is my week wrapped for Japanese. I was a bit tired this week so admittedly made less progress than I wanted to but still, I made progress. I have been really enjoying Bunpro even though it kicks my ass. 

Because I am getting more exposure to the vocabulary I “know” and grammatical structures, I am understanding more of the anime shows that I am watching. That being said, learning grammar is exhausting to me and I can only handle so much exposure to particles before I need a break. 

Especially when I am learning grammar rules that combine conjugations, verbs, and particles. It gets a bit confusing in a hurry. That said, I’ve found that I can generally focus on exposure more than rote memorization to keep myself engaged. 

Watching anime after practice has been nice as I can get absorbed into the show and listen (either with or without subtitles) to see if I can parse through what is being said. 

I have finished through season 5 of MHA, just learned how inconvenient it is to identify what episode you are on in Demon Slayer if you have your Netflix in 日本語, and have watched to episode 55 of HunterxHunter. 

You will notice that I don’t track Demon Slayer nor Hunter Hunter because I have been watching them in the background as passive immersion. 

As for the gym, I have been getting increasingly frustrated at how busy it is constantly. I don’t like fighting people to get on the equipment nor do I enjoy lingering over someone while they do their set. It makes me feel rushed when it’s done to me and I’d prefer not to do that to others. 

We are likely going to build out a gym in our basement and this is significantly increasing my desire to pursue this. While I will miss working out around people - it’s currently more of an inconvenience and a block for me than it is motivating. My lack of willingness to wait on people is also cutting my workouts short. 

This is benefiting the dogs as it’s leading me to want to do longer walks in the morning but it’s really annoying as a whole.