Week 1517

While we didn’t do much to celebrate the holiday week, I was grateful to have a long weekend. 

This week was very interesting to me as it has highlighted how easy it is to fall out of your routine. I had been waking up at 4:30 AM with minimal issues for months and now am struggling to get out of bed prior to 5:30 AM. 

I’m wondering if the sun being up later is throwing off how easy it was to go to bed as early as I did in the winter months but either way, I’ll get myself back on track. 

I missed one day of the gym this week due to my restful slumbers. 

My gym is currently getting renovated so I have been going to a different 24 Hour Fitness in my area that recently was renovated. I have noticed that when there is a shift in my routine, it is pretty easy to add in new behaviors or lapse in previous ones. 

This will need to be an ongoing watch point in multiple areas of my life. 

Last week was more productive than the previous two as it came to Japanese and, despite my work life being busier, I feel like I am getting back into my rhythm a bit. 

Below is my week:

Frankly, I don’t know why it broke out Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood the way it did but this is a good spot to emphasize that the viewing hours are a rough estimate.

As I waited for Claude to put that image together, I was thinking about AI and how I leverage it. Currently, it is constant trial and error to find the limitations of my use case as a non-technical person. 

For instance, Claude seems to routinely struggle with pulling information from the internet but I have leveraged it for automation to pull data from APIs that it seems to routinely do successfully, enabling me to do tracking that I otherwise wouldn’t do because of the tedium. 

That said, I tried to have it do the same thing with a spreadsheet we co-created and it ran into issues, deciding that our working Chrome integration doesn’t work nor that it can pull data from Drive. 

That generally doesn’t matter but for my workout information I don’t use local files for convenience. 

I have found ChatGPT is generally more reliable for any ideating that requires active searching and have found it and Gemini function similarly for that purpose but ChatGPT has significantly more context to my life situation that I don’t have to provide. 

I haven’t taken the time to fix how Claude looks at my workouts but I would like to begin publicly documenting my workouts and the efforts that I am making there. This is partly for accountability, and partly to share more of one of the largest constants in my life. 

I have previously talked about my goals of getting to 250lbs at 10% bodyfat (this will likely take another 5+ years), getting conversationally fluent in Japanese, and being more intentional with how I engage with my pets - in the back of my mind this develops to me having a deep level of dog training knowledge - a skill that will serve me as I plan to have dogs most of my life. 

The future state of this would be me sharing my progress along these goals and sharing my shifting goals as time goes on. 

These have all been goals in the back of my mind (more or less) my whole life and I’m aiming to knock more of those life goals out. 

An aside that this made me think about is I have this desire resurfacing in the back of my mind to monetize monetize monetize but I am reminding myself that all of this is ultimately for me and the sharing is to hopefully give others a peak behind the curtain to what it took to get to my future state. 

That desired future state often is blurry and at times it feels like I am blindly trusting myself but that is ultimately what we are all doing. 

While I think about where I am going with relative frequency, Sydney and I don’t always talk about these goals so we spent a few hours this weekend getting more clear on where we are going and why. 

That conversation was very fruitful and provided us clear insights into where our priorities lie and where we need to focus our attention over the coming years.

We decided it is likely that we will have one child and that we will spend the next few years preparing to ensure we are in a position where I can support Sydney in taking care of the child. 

That means that I have to be incredibly intentional at work in the coming years to ensure that we can do this while sustaining our current lifestyle. 

I have also become very comfortable with the idea of becoming a provider to my family - something that I’m not sure I ever would have envisioned for myself. 

Generally, this desire as a whole is more recent and that’s part of why we want to take the time to prepare. It’s an irreversible decision and we want to ensure it’s the right decision for where we are at in our lives. 

We also have solidified that it’s important for us to take at least one more international trip prior to this as neither of us wants to travel internationally with an infant. It’s cruel and unusual  punishment to have to deal with other people’s babies on planes - we don’t want to suffer the social anxiety of that being our child so will likely focus on road trips and bringing our pets along with us. 

This also means that we will need a large vehicle… I really don’t want a full size SUV but it seems to be looking more and more practical in the coming years. 

This has also encouraged us to evaluate our lifestyle and what is important when it comes to consumption.