Maigs

On 10/8/2023 at 3:43 AM, Rhovaniel said:

Hey Maigs, how are you doing?

 

Whoops, fell off there didn't I? I've been good just not feeling the forums lately.

I've been decent at getting in exercise, not so great about steps, decent on food, and mostly failing at mobility. My weight has moved a bit in the right direction, so there's that. 

Pup tax:

Easier said than done, but this is the philosophy I try to take in life when I'm overwhelmed 

2 hours ago, Jarric said:

In the evening we went for dinner and then to see Fascinating Aïda, who were excellent. If you haven't heard of them, they're a group of 3 older women who play light piano music with hilariously offensive lyrics. The following clip is 100% NSFW:

*Off to share this with everyone I know 😂😂

On 9/18/2023 at 3:47 PM, Jarric said:

We went to a restaurant where you eat in absolute, pitch-black darkness.

That sounds really interesting. I've done the cave tours where they turn off the lights like @Kalitraz mentioned, but I would never have thought about it for a restaurant. Are they accommodating to dietary restrictions?

58 minutes ago, RES said:

Did you ever sit down?  

Two jobs ago that was a normal day for me because I had to park three blocks from the building, then took a half hour+ walk over lunch. 

Today it's 7:30pm and I'm under 3k steps 

Week 1(ish) Monday

First day back at the office after working while traveling (I tagged along with Hub's work trip) and I had zero motivation actually work. I don't think I accomplished anything. Extra thankful I don't have to track my time anymore 😁. After work we picked up a crap load of free cardboard that were going to use as a weed barrier around our baby trees that morning glories are trying to suffocate. Then we grabbed the boys and played 9 holes of disc golf. I think this was my first time out this year and I'm not very good to begin with, but I managed to be not completely terrible.

Move -disc golf

Steps - 8056 That's with disc golf. I would have been around 3k without it. Definitely for improvement

Eat Well - we didn't get home until after 7 but I still cooked dinner and stuck to plan. That's a late dinner for us so I'm proud that I stuck to not getting garbage fast food

Mobility -none

Week 1(ish) - Sunday

Welp, that motivation didn't last long. I pushed through though. My eating schedule was thrown off which probably threw off my energy levels so I took a late afternoon nap and then had issues getting going again. But I made it down to the basement gym for a lifting session and then did some bare minimum stretching

Move - Push day

Bench press - 50 x 10 x 3

Front Raise - 10 x 10 x 3

Cable tricep pushdown - 35 x 10 x 3

Lateral raise - 10 x 10 x 3

Skullcrusher - 17.5 x 10 x 3

OHP - 20 x 10 x 3

Steps  - 10,717

Eat Well - my schedule was way off, but I still did well on quality and quantity

Mobility - I said bare minimum earlier and I meant it. I did butterfly and forward folds

Day Zero

First day motivation definitely showed. 

Move - 30 minutes of cardio doing Beat Saber. My shoulders and legs are unreasonably sore from that

Steps - 11,684. Weekends are much easier for me to get my steps in. Tomorrow will be the real test to see if I can increase these

Eat Well - Did very well on this despite having just come back from over a week out of state the day before. Meal planning and grocery shopping is now done so hopefully this stays on track

Mobility - I did a short Youtube stretching video and supplemented with some stretches targeting my hips

5 minutes ago, Vidd said:

Oh hey fellow accountant Thank you! So fortunately in my state, I don't need to be in a public accounting firm, I just need accounting experience that is under the supervision of a CPA. For the past few years I've been working as a general ledger accountant and this should be enough to get my license. Once I do, I'll need to do some thinking on if I want to stay where I am, or see if I can find something else. I have wonderful bosses who have shown interest in my development, but my department has been hit hard with outsourcing, with about 200 people losing their jobs across all accounting functions except for SOX auditing for some reason, so it has me nervous about the future.

I think somewhere in between passing the exam and starting work with a CPA firm my state changed their rules, but I still didn't qualify because I didn't work under a CPA. For half of it I actually worked under someone else who had passed the exam but never got the required experience 😂

Yikes on the outsourcing! Wonderful bosses can make a huge difference, but can't always redeem a job that isn't working for other reasons. My thought is that it never hurts to keep an eye on what is out there

7 hours ago, spezzy said:

 

They've been SO MUCH FUN - I leased a goat for 4-H for a summer once as a kid, but I was only able to have rabbits and chickens on the property we had, so I've really been enjoying finally being able to have them  

My dad barely tolerated cats and dogs and was absolutely against farm animals so I've never had any experience with any of them. And now Hubs and I are out of state too often (mostly family stuff since we're 10 hours from where we both grew up) to make farm animals reasonable for us. But I can live vicariously through your posts

8 hours ago, RES said:

Hello fellow accountant!  My hat is off to you, I couldn't do public accounting and would much rather work for private businesses making sure the bills are paid and payments received   Congrats on making the change!

I enjoyed the work, and they would have basically let me set the schedule I wanted. But I hated the fact that I basically had 100's of bosses (each client) with very irregular demands on my time. Plus I really despise having to track my time and worry about billable vs nonbillable and feeling bad if I went down a rabbit hole. 

My new job is super flexible and doesn't seem like they care how many hours I work as long as I get the work done and do it well

Fellow CPA here, congrats! Do you have the experience needed for the license yet? I passed the exam in 2012, but as I was in the process of taking the tests, got a job that was great,but didn't count towards the experience. I stayed there until 2018, when it stopped being great, then got a job at a CPA firm and finally got my license in 2020

Hi RES! Fingers crossed your job is actually getting better, but don't be afraid to keep an eye out there. I have zero regrets about my job change

I'm pretty jealous of your goats. Hubs and I agreed to no farm animals, but if we were to ever get any it would definitely be goats  

I'm back (hopefully) and glad to see you still around. I'm excited for you having Wednesdays off and love your goal to have it planned out so it doesn't become a lost day

I almost forgot to add: a year and a half after losing our dear Floor we finally decided we were ready for a dog again and adopted a puppy from the local humane society. 

Then two days later went back and got his brother.

Meet Bernard and Reginald, who will usually be referred to as "the boys" and make me smile on a daily basis, even when they're driving me nuts with their antics.

Well it's been a hot minute since I've been around here. Look like my last challenge was over a year ago. I fell into a deep burnout despite my job being awesome and letting me work ~25 hour weeks most of the year (with 60-70 hours for the three months of tax season). So this spring I quit and got a new job. I'm out of public accounting, with normal work hours and so much less stress. This was about 4 months ago and a couple of weeks ago I finally felt like my old self with some actual energy to do shit. 

A quick (re)introduction I guess:

I'm 37, an accountant, animal lover, farmhouse owner (just the house, no farm ), D&D & boardgame player, and about 60lbs overweight. I had gotten very close to my ideal weight in 2016 and kept it for about 3 years but then that all went to hell in 2020. Ironically, not for the reasons you'd expect. That just happened to be when my newish job really started dragging me down (I loved my boss and coworkers, it was the nature of the job that slowly burnt me to a crisp) and the year my beloved Floof really started to go downhill (and we lost him in early 2021). Then last year was a Series of Unfortunate Events that really just tipped me over the edge into "barely functioning as a human". 

I am a Ranger at heart that wants to do all the things, but ends up doing none of the things. I got really into OCRs a while back, but they're dead here now. I was going to a kickboxing gym that I loved, but they closed last year. I have a nice lifting setup in my basement now but haven't gotten in the regular habit of using it yet. I got into biking, but there's nowhere good to bike near the house we bought 3 years ago so I have to drive somewhere to ride (which, spoiler, doesn't happen). 

BUT! I'm finally feeling very optimistic about my ability to get back at it. I have energy and drive again. I enjoy my job and don't foresee it becoming a massive drain on me (as long as whoever gets hired as the new CFO isn't awful). So I'm jumping into this challenge a little late, but starting today.

Goals

Move - some sort of movement more days than not. It does not have to be much, just something

Steps - going to try to get back to hitting 10k steps regularly. I'm nowhere near there now, but going to consciously get more steps in regularly

Eat well - aiming for a 500cal/day deficit, though I won't beat myself up if I'm over as long as I ate good, nutritious foods

Mobility - my hip has been out of whack for a while. I went to PT last year, but promptly stopped doing my exercises as soon as I "graduated" so it's mad again

On 8/18/2022 at 8:02 AM, Jarric said:

Hey @Maigs, how have you been? How's the renovation project going?

Things have been okay. Food hasn't been good and I've missed a workout each of the last two weeks (assuming I make it down there some time time weekend). But I'm feeling decent overall. We finally bought a bike rack for the car so we can get back on the bikes (no place to bike around our house so we have to drive to the trails) and got out for a ride this week. I really missed being on two wheels apparently.

And today I finally got back to working upstairs and made amazing progress in ~2-2.5 hours. I could possibly have all of the trim stripped this weekend. It's actually looking like it will be possible to get moved upstairs by the end of the year! Still a lot to do (strip the doors, re-shellac all the trim & doors, pain the walls, and refinish the floors) but progress is happening. 

I'm not lashing out at you at all personally, EG, I've seen you around the forums for years and I know you're a good and kind person, but I really dislike the automatic response so many people have that "it's different when it's your own". I'm a high functioning, well adjusted person, who about had a breakdown when my 6 & 7 year old nieces visited last month and acted like generally well behaved 6 & 7 year old kids (and their custodial grandparents were there so I wasn't even responsible for them). Sure, it could easily be different if they were mine, but I cannot imagine it being different enough for me to enjoy it. I'm much happier as half a DINK, and haven't changed my mind about kids at 36 years old, happily married for half of that

Spoilered details on my old home renovation project

Sunday

Less lazy day . I got out early and tried out a new method to a home improvement project that has been stymying me for months and it worked beautifully. I'll make another post in bit being excited about old home improvement projects with pictures

After that I went outside and played in the dirt some more. I found a fully intact and completely clean rodent skull, so that was fun. 

I'd had it in my head all weekend that Hub's Sunday D&D game was this weekend so I was going to do a core workout when they were here. But when no one showed up around start time I remembered that is is actually their off week. So instead I hung out with Hubs when he got off work. 

Food was good and right in goal

21 hours ago, Heidi said:

I love those rocks!

Sadly, i don’t live nearby and have no land of my own to do a DruidThing with them (think cave with shallow pool area at the front, possibly a waterfall, definitely plants).

They're very pretty rocks....there's just.so.many.of.them. And a ton of antique bricks (you can see some of them in the first picture). We'll definitely reuse as much as we reasonably can, but I don't think there's any way we can reuse them all. 

21 hours ago, Heidi said:

I’m thinking of adding in something like this: It seems simple enough that I can start where I am, and as though it will really continue to be core conditioning even if I got to a point where I could do it without thinking about it. (Yes, I know you’re not over 50, but work with me here.)

Haha, I did have a moment of "Crap, how old do people on here think I am?" 😂

What I'm thinking of doing is picking 2-3 laying core exercises and 2-3 plank ones and supersetting them for time.

So something like dead bugs & plank 3 rounds of 20secs each. Then toe touches & plank shoulder taps 3 rounds for 20 secs each. Then maybe reverse crunches & slow mountain climbers 3 rounds for 20 secs each. Then slowly increase the time as I'm able to complete these until I get up to a minute

Welcome back! I'm sorry to hear about the asthma and fingers crossed your decision tree helps you track in the right direction without over-exerting 

Saturday

Very lazy day. I don't think I actually got moving until around noon and even then it wasn't much other than my workout. It was 100F, feels like 110F outside so I did not go out there other than to water some plants. I straightened up the house a little. That's really about it. In the evening I finally went downstairs and did my workout

Squat: 65/70/75 x 10

DB Lateral Raise: 20 x 10 x 3

Deadlift: 155/165/170 x 5

Front Raise: 20 x 10 x 3

RDL: 100/105/110 x 5

OHP with EZ Bar: 37.5/42.5/42.5 x 10 

I figured out that my EZ bar is 17.5lbs. And that I hate 10 rep sets of squats 😅 

20 hours ago, Kestrel Grey said:

I feel like I've missed a lot. What's with all the rock hauling?

Lol. Somewhere way back in previous ownership of my house someone REALLY liked decorative rocks. Over the years of neglect they've sunk into the ground or been moved to random places. We're slowly digging them out and adding them to a pile to figure out what to do with later. 

If anyone in the Midwest wants rocks I got plenty 😅

Pics spoilered for size