20
May
For a while I’ve been getting between three and ten obviously bogus new user accounts a day. I guess my plugins catch their spam comments before they post because I never see anything in my spam folder from these users. But it’s annoying, damned annoying, so for the moment I’ve turned off new user registration until I find a solution. Since everything cross-posts to Facebook and I have comments integrated you should still be able to comment from FB. I’m looking for a solution for the annoyance but it’s not a real high priority. If I knew who you were then your account still exists but if I didn’t then it’s gone with the spammers.
1
May
I feel like there’s a chapter missing here. Mostly because there is. I’ve been through a lot since I wrote last and won’t be sharing it with the world. Suffice it to say I am still alive and kicking. I want, as always, to get back in the habit of writing here and now that I can close the chapter which I will not chronicle maybe I can get back to it. I have a lot to say about a lot of things but always no time to say it.
There’s a lot of stuff afloat at the moment. Don’t bother staying tuned. I’ll probably just flake again.
I am not going to bother going in to all that’s transpired since the last time I posted. I am taking another break from FB for a while and I am not even sure the post to FB plugin is working so this may be the only place this shows up and that’s fine with me. I had been posting things to my wife on her wall every day because that’s where I am and so that will move here as well as anything else important enough to actually put in to 1′s and 0′s. Otherwise everyone will just have to be content with not knowing what I had for lunch or how my last bowel movement went.
19
Oct
Some days you just give up and it’s for the best. Take this week as an example. I had to have an emergency extraction done on the last remaining molar on the upper right side and you can trust me that it sucked. I boasted, I guess, that I would be back at the office the very same day. This statement had some basis in reality as I have my last dental work, a root canal on one of my canines, done over a long lunch and went back to work and finished out the day. I also have worked while on painkillers, 7.5 Vicodin and Soma to be exact, and functioned just fine. Well reality decided that I wasn’t going to get away with flaunting all of this in its face. The pain after the extraction was almost as bad as the pain I was having prior and the little bitty Vicodin 5s knocked me flat on my ass! So I didn’t go back to work nor did I go to work the next day. I did work from home, as much as I could, but that was only as long as I could stand the pain before taking a pill and being knocked flat on my back, presumably snoring. The procedure also relegated me to soft foods which are pretty boring and mostly not low in carbs so I didn’t keep up with my dietary changes. And yes, I know good and well I could have figured out some mushed up healthy options but I was beyond caring.
So how does one handle something like this is in the middle of trying to make massive changes to their life? It’s easy! You wave the white flag, you give up. Now giving up has gotten a bad rap to be sure and I don’t mean you don’t go forward. What I mean is that you give yourself permission to not feel like a failure. Just like from Thanksgiving on through Christmas I won’t even try a little bit to track my progress or change my diet, although some of the changes will have hopefully stuck, I didn’t try to worry about everything. I was in pain and on medication and those popsicles were damn good! When you give yourself permission to have those kinds of days you eliminate the failure aspect. Sometimes life just hits you in teeth with a big bag of suck and you need to step back and realize that if you keep pushing you will fail and give yourself permission to take a day off. Small failures, in the more traditional sense of the word, are one of the biggest reasons people stop making changes in their lives. They look at their failure and decide they can’t do it. I think that most times the reality is that they couldn’t do it at that exact moment. Of course changes are hard and a lot of folks look for any excuse. So instead of giving yourself an excuse, give yourself permission.
Today I will be eating low carb again, just like the couple of days before I had the tooth issue. I know that the minor amount of pain left isn’t a valid excuse and that I can darn well manage to eat right today. I am going to work as well. In fact I am typing this on the bus. I gave myself permission and today I rescind that permission because it’s what is best for me. If you are serious about making changes in your life you have to be willing to give yourself permission to take a step back every once in a while. Major changes take time and if you allow yourself to see set backs as failures you are less likely to succeed. I know that this battle will be won with small victories. I know that these major changes are really a bunch of small changes. Every time a small change sticks and becomes habit I win. So what if the holiday season sets me back a little bit? So what if I ate a bunch of frozen things full of sweet goodness when I had a tooth pulled? The only real issue is making sure I am not giving myself excuses and at this point I think I know myself well enough to make sure that’s not the case.
So if anyone needs me I’ll be looking for something interesting to eat for lunch….
15
Oct
Getting in shape, when you have let yourself go as long as I have, is a daunting task. I have enjoyed life to the fullest every chance I could and as a result I have a lot of work to do. When I was younger I did a lot of physical things which have had a continuing effect on my body so there are some lingering issues there I have to consider. I am a very long time clean drug user and have no doubt that there are still things from back then that are affecting me some twenty years later. I love food and believe me it shows. I am sedentary at work. I smoke. My commute leaves me with precious little time for working out. All of these things add up to a rather difficult set of obstacles. None of them are insurmountable but all of them together are rather daunting. That’s not to say that I am not trying, quite the opposite, but rather that I am trying to be as honest with myself as I possibly can.
Diet seems like the easiest obstacle to tackle out so it’s the one I am working on first. I have my ups and downs but I am slowly working on changing my eating habits. I have no desire to “go on a diet” as that’s simply a recipe for failure. Even if I were to lose weight on a diet I would eventually stop the diet nd go back to my habits so it’s the habits that have to change. It’s really not that hard to eat a lot healthier but I have some habits that I need to change in order to really fix the problems. The first two also address one of the spending issues I’d like to change so that’s a bonus. What I need to do is eat breakfast at home and bring my lunch to work more often than not. If I am packing my own lunch then I can easily make it a healthy affair and the family as a whole does a pretty fine job of eating a healthy breakfast most days. All I need to do is get up a little earlier to eat breakfast and develop the discipline of packing my lunch the night before.
Honestly developing healthy habits is the crux of the issues I have to overcome and the health will follow. The only exception is the one or two places where I have to break bad habits. I am not even going to address smoking except to say I am still quitting, I haven’t given up, and I am still failing. Outside of that I think that most of these things are relatively minor but the sheer volume of changes is going to be an issue and I feel like I have to be honest with myself about that. Take exercise, for example, where I have some restrictions on the sort of physical activity I can do due to my weight, my joints, and likely other things. It appears cycling will be the best option for me. I even have a good friend who is willing to bring me along on his weekly long distance ride and my wife is willing to cycle in the mornings with me. To cycle in the mornings I’ll have to get up even earlier in order to have time which is a minor sacrifice but considering I am already working on getting up early to eat breakfast this becomes a very early start to the day. For joining the crazy Irishman on his weekly ride I’ll have to give up sleeping in on Saturday which means limiting Friday night revelry. That’s not a show stopper and honestly probably much better for my health, but it is a rather major change.
None of these changes, or any I haven’t listed, are really huge changes but once you look at the big picture it’s hard to imagine what your life will look like if you mange to make all of them. All of them are worthwhile changes and none of them I can’t have, metaphorical, desert ever again but looking at the big picture is certainly feels like it. I don’t know what my life will look like when I am done and, hell, I may be truly bored out of my skull but what I do know is that if I keep going like I am today then I won’t live to see my grandkids and if I do it’ll be with someone else wiping my ass! So even if life is boring after get everything in order, which I don’t think it will be, these changes are worth making. I can always find something else, something new, to make life exciting, if I have to.
