Category: Life

It was 107 degrees today, and this evening I had the closest thing to a spiritual experience I’ve had in at least 15 years.

My weight as of late has been yo-yoing between “almost there” and “good lord, put the burrito down you absolute unit.” The triggers on both sides of the yo-yo have been really consistent. I will diet, exercise, do all of the stuff you need to do, and make awesome progress. Better than a pound a week in general. This has managed to proceed all the way to about 147 pounds (my first weight goal is 142, the second is 135, and the third is 128, each time stopping to see how I feel at that weight or if I should keep going). Somewhere along the way, I will either get sick or injured. Ankles, knees, shin splints, calf strains, flu bugs; whatever the culprit, I put things on hold. Then the yo-yo starts back up until some thing makes me realize I’ve let it get away from me again.

This time, it was those hard-fought belt loops. I’ve had the same belt for a decade, and this year for the first time I totally ran it out of holes and had it still feel loose. Now, I’ve legitimately been dealing with tendonitis in my right ankle, initially brought on by running for my life after Dad died despite not knowing how to run. That was two years ago now, maybe to the day. It still flares up every few months and then any little aggravation really weakens the stability of the ankle and also hurts like hell. One of those flare-ups put a stop to my newfound, still fledgling interest in distance running. It drove me absolutely crazy, and then it just annoyed me, and then it was the way it was, and then the comfortable complacency kicked in and the yo-yo started it’s ascent. The belt loop went from loose to okay, to tight, to having to move to the next one. That’s about an inch and a half between holes.

This Tuesday I reaffirmed everything, four weeks from the reinjuring of the ankle and a week cleared from the podiatrist. Committing to a lot of changes. New ergonomics in the office. A new commitment to bodyweight workouts in addition to just the walking and running. I told myself that day to do as many push-ups as I could physically do in one go without totally losing form. That number was only 20. That’s “poor” by most measures. So the next day, I did 21. Yesterday, 22. Today, 23 and it felt easier than ever.

Since I last wrote here, I started a podcast that is managing over a thousand plays a week and is on popular charts in a dozen countries any given week. Those are recorded Fridays from about 4:30 to 7:00. I committed tonight, about an hour ago, to eliminating one loophole I’d been leaving myself. Exercise on recording days. Do the shit you’re supposed to be doing on recording days. So, after eating, 8:20 at night, I’m still short about 6,500 steps from my step goal of 11,111.

Let’s get after it.

This was supposed to just be a walk, getting the steps in, making the habit feel natural again. Go do it outside now that it’s cooled off to about 80. So out I go, these summer nights are incredibly well-lit even that late in the evening. I don’t really have a set idea of where I’m even going. Left, right, right, left again, straight, whatever. It’s a small neighborhood, I’m not gonna get lost anywhere in it.

Spotify has other ideas regarding this “walk” and the generated playlist I’ve chosen due to the artists listed is instead more of a running playlist, hitting BPM ranges that normally work pretty well. The first song is perfect.

This has been perhaps my single favorite song Spotify’s ever discovered for me. By a minute ten, I’m running at 170 steps a minute. I feel awesome. I’m not really distance running yet, more going for a minute, 90 seconds, and getting back into a walk until I can go again in a few more minutes.

I find myself on the outside edge of the neighborhood, a long straight stretch of a little over a quarter mile.

I’ve never had this song come up in the context of running before. The long, ethereal build-up occured as I look out to the west. There are mesas, yellow-brown grass, green cholla dotting the landscape near and far. A splash of color from the 8:35 sunset. The warmth still radiating from the asphalt.

I am, for a fleeting moment, moved nearly to tears.

You see, this is a moment I’d envisioned somewhere around the age of 16.

That song, with it’s arpeggiated synthesizer, simple acoustic line and native-inspired vocals had given me a visceral, implacable compulsion to live in the desert, drive its roads, see it at speed, too hot to think. Now, there are a few differences. I know now that the exact sort of desert I’d envisioned is more of an Arizona or Nevada desert than New Mexico. And the mental image, which I can recall as viscerally as though I had actually lived it, was during the day, probably close to 1 in the afternoon.

But the other side of that vision, that compulsion, was that I’d live alone. Not so much as an acquaintance for a thousand miles in any direction. And the reality of the situation, of this little town in the middle of New Mexico, and this scene with its heat and cholla and mesas and storm clouds in the distance, and the unmistakable parallax of it going on for a hundred miles with nothing but a raven or coyote to break it up, and that I’d feel so absolutely loved and cared for that the timid teenager that originally envisioned it would call me a spiteful liar…

It was very nearly more than I could bear, the sheer exuberant joy. And off I ran, 186 steps a minute, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Breathe in 2 3, out 2 3, in 2 3, out 2 3. Do you have any idea how good you’ve got it, how many people have killed for a chance at a situation that still wouldn’t even compare?

Even thinking about it now, over an hour later, with the same song playing, has me almost hyperventilating with the sheer feeling of it.

I only hope that if there’s any justice, that my memory which admittedly isn’t as good as I’d like it to be will hold this small, visceral moment as tightly as any formative memory I’ve ever held. My father’s laugh, the smell of incense and cake in the basement of Diana’s house, the regretful mistakes and accidents and triumphs that shaped my being, this brief moment was as important as any of them. It felt like an affirmation in return. That this moment was a reward for making the right decisions when they were most pivotal.

That song now has a meaning, an emotion attached to it that few have. I’ve dumped a lot of emotions into one other song.

Good times and bad have both had that song as the soundtrack. Losing my job and the death of my father. My 5-year wedding anniversary, 10-year anniversary of the relationship, new cars, new house, new job.

I am utterly drained. Heh. I was so compelled to sit down and write this, here, the first thing in almost 18 months. It’s just me, and that’s okay.

I’m so used to balancing good news with bad, that I’ve spent a couple minutes trying to think of bad news.

• The good news is I’ve made it to 30 in reasonably good health.
• The good news is I had the best birthday of my life.
• The good news is we both have stable, well-paying employment.
• The good news is the bills get paid every month, uneventfully.
• The good news is I’m working through many issues in my life and I feel like I’m making good progress everywhere.

Now, here’s a thing.

• The good news is I don’t have a plan at this point.

I really had no plan for what I should be doing at 30. Everything kind of led up to age 29 and stopped. This is a good thing. I’m left with the ability to write my own script, and it’s a feeling I’ve never really had before. I can set my own priorities, set my own goals, and it’s more than that. I can explore the things I’m passionate about, or things I think I would be passionate about if I gave them a try.

Astute readers may point out that I could do that whenever I wanted. I’d argue that’s not true though; there are expectations placed on you from every direction. Right now I think I am meeting or exceeding those remaining expectations from work and home.

There’s a psychological theory called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I don’t recall where I first heard about it, but the idea is that certain needs are more important than others, and as those needs are met, like a pyramid, loftier goals at the top become feasible to work on. The base is physiological needs: Food, Water, Shelter, Clothing. Then you have safety: Personal Security, Financial Security, Health, and what I’d round up as Insurance. At the middle of the pyramid is social belonging: Friendships, Intimacy and Family. Above that is esteem or respect, with self-respect considered more important than respect from others.

Once all of those things are met, you’re left with two related needs at the top. Self-actualization, the idea that what a man can be, he must be. This gets into self-improvement, bettering yourself in whatever ways seem best to you. It also manifests as a creative spirit, to make your best self through effort and creating.

For thirty years of the hierarchy’s existence, that was the top. But Maslow revised his work in the ’70s and decided there was something more accurate to place at the top of the pyramid, and that was the idea of self-transcendence. Now you’re getting into turning yourself into a force for good, through volunteering or other altruistic efforts. It represents, to him, the pinnacle of human nature, and it is only sustainable once all those things below are met and satisfied.

Right now, I’d put myself, pretty solidly, in the self-actualization camp. My resolutions this year all revolve around that category. To be more athletic by losing weight, to write more, to cook new foods, to read more. It’s all a part of a concept of expanding myself, to become the best version of myself, through incremental progress. I think that last bit, incremental progress, is something I didn’t always have sight of. Particularly in my late teens and early 20s, I was altogether too likely to abandon something when I didn’t master it immediately. Age has brought a little wisdom, and a lot more patience.

So, not having a plan in the strictest sense of the word isn’t really a bad thing. Living seems to be a bit too free-form of a thing to try to impose an over-regimented structure to it. I need a little more than I’ve got right now, and finding that balance will be useful, but if I can manage that concept of “get a little better every day,” I think I’ll end up doing much better than I had in the past.

I’ve been out sick for the last two days, and I’m pretty sure whatever I got was contagious because there’s been a ton of people out. It’s been a lot of sitting with the dog, half-watching nature documentaries and half-hoping my head would stop pounding. Not sure what it is, but I feel mostly over it today and I’m mostly just irritated I had to burn two days of sick leave.

Went ahead and grabbed a 13” MacBook Air last night. I was hoping Diana would make use of the Surface Pro 3, but it doesn’t sound like she’s terribly interested, so I’m gonna put it up for sale I guess. I think I’m going to try to get her to use it at least a little bit, see how she likes the stylus and such before committing to that. If she doesn’t want it, it’ll offset almost all of the cost of this machine. Initial impressions are really good, I’m really happy that it’s got an SDXC slot, that simplest route to expandable storage.

I have no regrets about buying the SP3, it was the nicest laptop I’d ever owned, except for its inability to actually sit on a lap. Now that using it in that manner is more and more likely, and given the change in workload, it’s just not the right tool for the job. Not getting hung up on buying new gear to help me either be productive or relax on my own time is important. Diana pointed out that this could be seen as an extension of keeping work at work. I have a very good test lab setup on my computer at the office. There’s no reason anymore to extend that to what I’m doing on what little off-time I am afforded.

I also spent a little time playing the FIFA 17 demo and my theory that the odd-numbered years are the ones to pay attention to has held true for the seventh consecutive year. It feels really incredible. I played a match with all the assists off and won 4-1. I’m gonna play the hell out of it when it drops, Tuesday after next.

I’m getting a bit disgusted with not only the lack of progress on the house, but the sheer lack of communication. I get that to them it’s just work, but for me it’s the biggest purchase I’ve ever made in my life, by far. It deserves more than three phone calls over as many months. So far I haven’t had a single person on this home-buying process that committed to weekly communication with me even come close to doing so. What has happened to the value of a person’s word? These are all people older than I. They are, by some measure or another, professionals. If you aren’t going to come even close to honoring a commitment, maybe you shouldn’t have made it in the first place. I think I’m going to call today and raise a little Hell.

There’s a book by Brian Tracy called Eat That Frog! that is some 130 pages on the concept that procrastination is bad, and you should get the least desirable task out of the way first. Right now, my frog is my email inbox, which badly needs processing. Not doing it is interfering with my weekly review. Not to mention, one of the applications which is now available to me with the switch to OS X, Omnifocus 2, is very much reliant on keeping up with that weekly review schedule. I don’t have high hopes for today, but if I can get that out of the way, I’ll call the day a success.

It seems like our ISP’s network finally stabilized yesterday. We had a solid week of sporadic packet loss, sometimes dropping out entirely, the worst of which lasted an hour in the middle of the work day. At least it wasn’t just us, pretty much all the agencies were affected. The post-mortem on this will be a lot of fun.

Going to be an interesting day today, but I very much need to get a lot of stuff accomplished and close out the week strong. Let’s get after it.

Today has Diana and I both taking the train instead of driving to work, a statement that indicates how much has transpired over the intervening months.

Diana’s job search concluded successfully in late June. She’s working with me again, in Santa Fe. Her desk is about a 30-second walk from mine. It’s a significant pay raise, plus a full 40 hours a week. Combine the effects of both and her pay has doubled. But so far, from my position, it’s well more than double the work for double the pay. It’s been a bit difficult to watch. Even if the last job was overall a crappy gig, she was at least able to largely leave work at work. That hasn’t happened with any consistency since. She tells me not to worry about it. That’s, uh, difficult.

With the increase in pay, as well as the fact that we’re now both commuting, I insisted that we get an apartment in Santa Fe to reduce commute time, while we try to find a house. We put a deposit down on a really nice 2-bed deal north of the city, and the house search began again in earnest as we waited for a spot at the apartments to open up. Then I made a mistake, or so I called it at the time.

I saw what houses go for in Albuquerque.

Diana and I will occasionally go to a good-sized park a couple miles away. It’s got a tennis court, basketball hoops, and a nice big area for the dog. It’s a good combination of open and shady. It’s a really nice park.

I could get a 4-bedroom monster of a home, with a front door that faces that park, for less than a dilapidated 1-bedroom in Santa Fe. Seriously. There’d be enough money left over to buy a new car.

At that point, it became a question of balance, cost versus commute with a vague idea of “quality of life” being at its highest at some point in that balancing act. Unfortunately, if you’re not familiar with the area, there isn’t much immediately around Santa Fe in three directions. We looked around, but choices were slim and still overpriced for what they were.

Rio Rancho became an option, it knocks about 15 minutes off the commute each way, and several friends, current and former coworkers had all recently bought there because of what you could get for the money. I found some listings and we headed over there on a Saturday to look around.

Way up on the northern border of the city is the established community of Enchanted Hills, with a lot of good offerings for the money, and just northwest of that is a community so new that if you drop in with Google Street View, it’s all dirt with some roads roughed in and a construction office trailer. What it is now, is one of the few places in this part of the state offering affordable build-to-suit homes.

We drove in because one of the homes was for sale, but we ended up stopping in with the home builders office and they gave us a little walkthrough of what they could provide. This was a game-changer. I hadn’t given building our first home any serious consideration because I thought it would be about $300,000, not half that.

Long story short, we had the design appointment a couple weekends ago, picking out paint and carpet and all those things for our new home. It’s happening, and in the intervening time with Diana’s pay increase, we’re able to save up quite a bit of money. The mortgage payment will work out to an increase in living expenses equal to about one of Diana’s new checks, but now she gets paid weekly instead of bi-weekly. The other new check can go to savings, or paying credit cards, or all the other stuff we’ve been able to do at an accelerated rate. We’re hoping to be in the new place before Christmas, but it’s going to be close.

The builders, incidentally, told us that we could get the same plan that we really liked built in Santa Fe…for an extra hundred thousand dollars. That was really the last straw. The only place still building in Santa Fe is about 20 minutes from work. So shaving 25 minutes off the commute for $100,000? I can’t make that trade-off in good conscience. The extra cost would be a significant burden, and have us back to treading water.

I feel like we’ve made a good decision there.

I’d thought work was going well until about two weeks ago. Apparently my boss had a different opinion for months, and I wish I’d known. Now I have to struggle to make things right between now and early November, or we’re in real danger of every happy thing I wrote above being taken away.

I’m toying with the idea of us taking the train every Thursday. We’ve both been working 7:30-4:30, but Diana is expected to be able to stay late on Thursday for a meeting. Right now, the time to sit and write would be put to good use. I’ve been driving two hours a day every workday for over a month straight. It’s a better commute than some people have, but it still stresses me out. It would cost $20 a day, though. So $80-100 a month, which is a tough sell for something in which I have to leave ten minutes earlier, but get home a full hour later.

On the other hand, it’s a rather therapeutic time. It’s hard to quantify the value of it. Would it be “money well spent?” Debatable, but then again I have a hard time determining such things.

What if I need it to work through the problems that will make the difference in keeping the job? Then the train becomes worth quite a lot of money. I know we’ll be taking it tomorrow, as well; there’s some construction going on that reduces I-25 to one northbound lane, and we saw the traffic jam span over a mile yesterday on the way back home. I really don’t need the stress.

I’m starting to question if I need the stress of driving at all. It was one thing when it was occasional, once a week or so. Doing it for a month straight has rather taken the charm out of it. But is the stress worth it to be home relaxing an hour earlier? Probably. Even if I’m not doing much of anything with the extra hour, the feeling I was experiencing of only having about an hour to myself was pretty rough.

There’s no reason it needs to be an all-or-nothing, right-now decision. I’m going to have to think about it for a bit. The fact that I’m already approaching 1200 words means it’s probably worth doing more frequently than what’s been happening lately.

I haven’t talked to a mental health professional. Haven’t even tried. I said I would, and lately, not doing it feels like I’ve been unfair to myself. I should make the call, at least to get a referral. It’s not going to be immediately available anyway. With how I’ve been feeling lately, I’m even reconsidering my aversion to medicating the problems, which is a major personal paradigm shift. I’m not sure if it’s just a desire for escape from the way I’m feeling.

I need to do whatever it takes to keep this job, to prove I can do what’s desired. The future of more than just myself is depending on that.

I know that if I can hang in and prove to be the right choice, Thanksgiving is going to be pretty spectacular. But I need to improve every day between now and then.

I’m going to be writing again on the way home, but since it’s going to be largely about work and topics I can’t discuss freely, I won’t be posting it. But it’s going to be useful to me, just the same.

You know, on those power toggles where it’s represented by an I and an O? I remember which is which by saying “O for Off.” Try not to think about it too much.

So I got my Fitbit surge about six months ago, and the goal it sets for you is 10,000 steps per day. I hit that one time, in April on Nutanix day.

I’ve hit it three times in the last three days.

In fact, I’ve only hit the “5 miles walked” goal for the first time this week, which I’ve also done three times in the last three days. Critically, the goal for calories burned was getting met less than once a week, probably 0.3 or 0.4 times a week by eyeballing it, and only over 3,000 calories burned twice in six months. Except, you know, for the last three times in the last three days.

I woke up yesterday feeling half-dead. I preemptively let myself off the hook if I didn’t increase my cardio numbers or even hit 10,000 steps. My legs were worn all the way out. My right calf felt like there was a rock in it. But what surprised me is what a good mood I was in. I think there’s some serious biochemical changes happening, more testosterone if I had to guess. I feel, and this may be out of character for me, significantly more alive. More mentally sharp. More friendly. It’s wild. And despite half-dead, rock-in-calf feeling, I ended up walking over 13,000 steps for 5.5 miles.

I did end up buying some new shoes. It’s not an area where I spare expense but I actually found the low-end of the Asics product line to be more comfortable than anything else. Low-end here meaning about $70 on sale. Prior to that I’ve been wearing some Olukai slip-ons that were little more than dressy skate shoes. I didn’t plan much of this out very well, it’s been rather spontaneous.

Yesterday was also the first day in recent memory where I went all day without any stomach issues. I think we’re onto something. Outside of being lactose intolerant, I was still having a lot of problems. It’s looking like the Clif Builder’s bars I’ve been eating are out. They’re lactose-free, but soy protein isolate is notoriously hard for the body to digest, and it’s the first ingredient in said bars. I picked up some Kind bars and had one yesterday instead. It still did a good job as an afternoon snack and while it has soy protein isolate, it’s towards the middle-to-bottom of the ingredient list. That amount seems doable for my body.

I gotta say, that makes the protein bar section of the grocery even more of a word search. Probably 75% of the bars are out right off the top due to the use of whey protein isolate. Now the ones with soy protein isolate high up the list are out too. You don’t see a lot of casein whey bars. Maybe I’ll give up and go to jerky or something.

So in other news, I’m turning over all the info I got on the SNSLocker ransomware to the FBI. It was a particularly inept job of ransomware, and the final result is I have the guy’s full name, age, email address, IP address, the source code to the payment & decryption website, a dump of the database of victims including their IP address, and a number of them are in the US, meaning the FBI can at least start the ball rolling. I’m supposed to meet a couple agents for lunch in a week or two, whenever they can squeeze in the hour trip up from Albuquerque. It’ll be a nice attaboy to put on my list of accomplishments. The Trend Micro blog covered the story and at least linked the tweet that I wrote at the time of the initial research.

There will be a full post-mortem of SNSLocker on bluesoul.me after I finish the disclosure process.

One of my self-serving complaints that kept me from getting anywhere fitness-wise was that “I don’t have that much time when I’m home, so I want to spend it how I want.” Which is partly true, I don’t have a lot of time when you subtract dinner and a shower. But I was not using the time in a productive manner, and I’m using productive very loosely. Anything that would make me happy could be considered productive. It was mostly time spent dicking around on Reddit. The last 3 nights, I’ve been on the computer for maybe a total of 15 minutes. I do not feel deprived. Right now the plan is for the weekend to be the time for rest, recuperation, and fucking around. We’ll see what happens, the weekend isn’t too far away at this point.