Weeks 1491 and 1492

It’s been an eventful few weeks here in the Coombes residence. 

Last week was Christmas, which was much more eventful than I planned. 

As I have mentioned, I was transitioning the dogs to raw dog food and I was documenting my experience. We hit the morning of 12/23/25 and Truman woke up by throwing up all over the place in the bedroom. Raw chicken, everywhere. 

If you think real food smells any better than processed food as vomit, it does not. It’s all terrible. 

This kicked off a week of the dogs throwing up and shitting themselves through Sunday. I have never washed towels that much in my life. Don’t worry, those are dog only towels. 

Truman also didn’t eat anything from Tuesday to Saturday so I had to take them to the vet. We didn’t get much clarity on what was going on outside of GI upset but I did get insight into the fact that I was underfeeding my dogs, Truman by 1000 calories and he had lost 30 POUNDS over 6 months. 

Lesson learned: don’t trust the feeding instructions from fresh pet food companies. 

For some reason I ignorantly thought that somehow the calories were more dense because they were healthier, which doesn’t make any logical sense in hindsight. 

Truman was like 110 and Ellie was around 103. 

Long story short, the dogs are dirty bulking (having a lot of extra food in the form of kibble) so I can get them back to very appropriate weights. 

I’m pissed at myself and so embarrassed that I couldn’t visually tell how much weight they had lost. 

I will also be getting a pet scale so I can keep a better eye on their weight. 

The good news is, with some anti-nausea medicine and metronidazol, Truman started eating again and both of the dogs stopped peeing instead of pooping…

Syd got back from her parents Sunday night and we went up to Loveland to celebrate Christmas with my mom’s family. It was quiet and nice - minus them having a Christmas tree that could induce seizures in the least epileptic of our populace. 

This week has been much less eventful from a dog perspective… Kinda…

TMI but Truman had black stool. This is a no-no and a sign of internal bleeding… Guess who got to go back to the vet on Tuesday?

Fortunately, with him behaving like his normal self, it was believed that it is a side effect of the GI distress and that he is going to be fine but we have another appointment to have him checked again in two weeks. Everything is already starting to be normal colored again, fortunately.

Ellie has an iron stomach and has made a full recovery AND threw up an old packet of cat food that she ate a while ago that fortunately was not causing any blockage. 

Again, I am re-integrating kibble (even though it isn’t my favorite thing in the world) to ensure that we get weight back on them quickly. Truman was already up 5 pounds from Saturday to Tuesday.

I have been reading books to educate myself more on pet nutrition and found Forever Dog really interesting due to my interests in longevity in humans and dogs reaching a crossover point there. I also like all of the suggestions and how they don’t take an all or nothing approach. 

My main takeaways were that any additional healthy, whole foods make a positive impact and exercise is just as if not more important for our canine companions. That’s one of their built-in benefits (even if it doesn’t always feel like it when it’s cold or has been a long day of work), they communicate that they want to do more than lay around that house and mirror our sedentary lifestyle. 

We also started looking at homes this week. We are very fortunate to be in the position that we are in and don’t take that lightly. 

That being said, we are very interested in new-builds as we don’t want to have to redo much when we get the home and we wanted to get something that would suit our needs without any changes for the next 5-10 years. 

The first builds we looked at were in an interesting community by the Chatfield Reservoir with a lot of interesting stories surrounding their intentions with the land but the layouts had a ton of useless space that turned us off pretty quickly.

We happened to find a duplex about 15 minutes south of us that checked all of our boxes (yard, AC, 2 car garage, basement since it doesn’t have a 3 car garage, convenient location, quiet neighborhood, new/new-build, etc.). 

I half-jokingly told one of my employees that if my wife liked it, we would get it as she chose her wedding dress after going to a whopping one store (evidence of her decisiveness).

Sure enough, we looked at it on New Year’s Eve and made an offer on New Year’s day. The initial offer was declined but the second offer was accepted. 

This offer was accepted shortly after Sydney and I finished staging a house that the realtor believes will sell for $3 million. It’s so interesting being in a house worth 5 times the amount of what you are looking at and experiencing all of the flaws that are present there too. 

It ultimately made me realize that no matter how deep your pockets, we all suffer similar pains. Some of us just dry our tears with dollar bills as the rest of us mere mortals dry them with Kleenex. Although, it’s the same thing if you think too much about it. 

It’s a quick turnaround time so as of writing this (Saturday, 01/03/26), we did a home inspection today (caught a leak in the furnace that could have cost us severely), we need to get money in the escrow account on Monday, and have to finish getting the loan finalized. 

If everything goes well and the seller takes care of a few of the issues that popped up, we will have the keys on 01/15/26. 

Not quite how I was expecting to start the new year but we are excited at the prospect of having a place that suits our needs better and has a positive impact on our daily life. 

The only downside is the increase in our baseline cost of living. I have been intentional about not increasing this cost over the last 5 years but alas, it’s time to raise our baseline standard of living. Yay!

Sarcasm aside, I am looking forward to it. Just not the first few months of adjusting our lifestyle a little bit. 

I look at a house as more of a psychological win for us. Without even having it, I can tell ya that all I want to do is clear out the mortgage. 

Though, I drove around the area again today after the inspection and felt at home and very grateful to have found the home we did. There is a massive park just a couple minute drive away and I can’t wait to take the dogs there for training and to play frisbee. 

This week was the first week of a new mesocycle in the RP Hypertrophy app as well and I have been having fun. Although, I do not enjoy isometric leg exercises (they kick my ass). 

I especially liked today’s workout, which was super arm heavy. 

I am curious how everything is going to adjust but it was super nice only being at the gym for 45 minutes or so instead of going for 2-3 hours like I have been. I am also increasing my intentionality around walking the dogs instead of walking on the treadmill at the gym because why should I take an hour away from my time with them when we could be doing something beneficial for all of us? 

As for all of this (the documentation), I have been thinking a lot about how I want to approach this. I can create some evergreen content (searchable content that can be used as a resource forever) and formats like this where I drone on and talk about nothing, hoping that someone can glean value from my insights and way of thinking. I am wondering what is useful to people but also wondering if I care about what is useful or if I care more about providing content to myself. 

Sometimes I think about just uploading content and turning off the comments so I don’t have to worry about people criticizing me but I also wonder why I care. At some point, I won’t. So why care now? 

Ultimately, I spend more time thinking than doing and that is part of my problem. That’s just me spinning my wheels. If I ever want any of this to gain traction, I’m going to have to post. 

Afterall, if it only helps one person, isn’t it worth it?