EricMN

Zero week of this challenge starts with Star Wars Day: "Always" is an emotional trap word for me. Nobody "always" does something. Nobody is "always" on. And if the Force is with you... Always, tell me how and why Luke Skywalker "disconnected" himself from the Force. And shouted "Get off my lawn!" I spent the last few years as a pretty fit middle-aged guy. In 2017 I even qualified for the OCR World Championships and I was in pretty damn good shape. Turn out I could have been in better shape for hill climbs that year, and I wasn't, but otherwise I was in pretty good shape. 2017 was also when my arthritis started to become an issue, and things have tailed off since. Now I'm 53, three years removed from the height of my powers, and watching me do an Obstacle Course race must be like watching Old Half-Robot Darth Vader in battle. Less like this... ... than this. Over the course of the last three years I've let injury, illness, stress, anxiety, and depression disconnect me from the me that I was . I feel broken. But, like all good Star Wars characters, nobody has to stay broken. Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul, Finn, Kylo Ren - all physically broken in some way. All became physically unbroken. Luke Skywalker disconnected himself from the Force. But he reconnected, and he became one with the Force. I think I'm ready to reconnect me with me. Challenge Stuff: I know what works for me when I'm my best self. This is what I'm going to do: Nutrition - tracking macros daily Strength Training multiple times per week on a set schedule Running multiple times per week on a set schedule I may or may not set macro targets right now, but I'll track my nutrition. I certainly won't be on the same kind of workout schedule I was back when I was at my best, but I'm going to set a schedule and keep it. And by "running" I will mean "moving over distance, purposefully", because my body is a mess and chasing the old me instead of accepting where I am now and moving forward is just going to get me hurt. It's going to look like Old Half-Robot Darth Vader vs. Child-Killing Anakin Skywalker at first. But if I succeed in reconnecting, it's going to get better. Maybe Rogue One Darth Vader better.

A guy in his midlife that's in better shape than me, that's what. Maybe it's because I lived in those neighborhoods, but it's kind of eerie how empty everything is in this video. They were shooting in the middle of what I think is Eighth Street just outside downtown (coincidentally to the theme of the song, right across from the County medical center) in the middle of the day and there are NO cars. I'm glad city folk are taking this more seriously than out here in the burbs.

Nope, but I discovered Spider Isako instead. Here's an exact quote from her bio: " 'Spider' Isako Yoshimatsu is a young joshi worker who is considered a very highly rated prospect. She was trained at the Hatoyama Dojo and impressed her trainer Kit Hatoyama so much that she has remained in close contact post-graduation and is considered one of her proteges. A strike-based worker, Isako likes to light up her opponents with brutal kicks and knee strikes. Also to her benefit is that she has a great look, especially apparent when she comes to the ring in a billowing custom made leather coat, and she comes across as so cool that she seems to be a star in the making." It's like someone's been reading and made Etsuko into a canon young character I'm not sold yet, but... I can get behind this, especially if any of them are likely to piledrive a fascist.

Check In I hate check-ins with nothing to report. This is why I always post about working out the next day. I should have saved that trail run. I had a productive conversation about school with each of the kids last evening. I think The Boy has realized that he just isn't interested enough in his Japanese class to want to put in the effort this trimester. I'd rather have him put in actual effort on core classes and pass them anyway. The Pink Princess has realized that trying to work without getting out of bed isn't working for her. I'm pushing her to come down and work from the area I set up for her. We'll see what happens. Yesterday was rainy and cold and dreary. I didn't feel like doing anything and I haven't started the ply boxes yet. Today is nicer but not nearly as nice as Monday. I am going to try to go for a run in a couple hours before I lose my motivation. I had wanted to get a drum instead, but nobody nearby sells them. I don't know about being more productive. I've felt like a slug since lunchtime on Monday. This is fair. You can only go running, worried, so many times before you tune it out. Ratchet, redneck, white trash... whatever they wanted to call it. If I hadn't needed to be up the next morning, functional, I would have been drinking beer with my feet up. I like the kitchen rack too. Although that meant that my SO bought a new set of pans so that we didn't have cheap ones hanging where people can see them.

Check In Straight to the chase: Friday I was busy on yet another garage project and fell off a bench onto the concrete floor. A bunch of stuff fell off the bench and onto me. I wound up with a bunch of scrapes and bruises, but nothing is broken. I probably should have quit for the day, but I'm stubborn. Also, when I came in asking the kids for help because I needed to wash off some of the bloody mess and put on some bandages, The Pink Princess said something like "We heard a crash out there but he said you make noises like that all the time and not to worry." The Boy said "Yeah, you spend a lot of time banging around out there." I hope if I ever fall and am seriously injured, I can reach my phone because they're not coming to save me. Saturday I was sore, so I wanted to kind of lay low, but we got a delivery of something I had been waiting for so that got done. Saturday evening I had my own private bonfire in the backyard, burning most of the pile of scrap lumber from my shop. It was all stuff too odd-shaped or small to re-use for anything, but there was a LOT of it. It would have been a nice evening with some company. The Pink Princess and The Boy both said they wouldn't come hang out with me because it was too ratchet for them. Sunday was a lay-low day, between the online church broadcast and the issues I had accessing the recording to edit and re-post. I had nothing else on my agenda so I spent more time editing that normal. We also had more issues than normal. We decided we're going to have most people pre-record things instead of trying to do the whole interactive Zoom experience. It should make our lives easier. Today was the nicest day of the year so far. I managed to take advantage of it at lunchtime and went for a trail run. I still need to get the Plyo box built. That's an easy project. Maybe I'll knock that off tonight so I can put it in a garage workout tomorrow.

Oh my. Ohhhhh, my. This is just the tease. That question mark will disappear eventually.

Check In I have needed the positivity that checking in here brings the past few days. Thank you all for your kindness. I needed to re-read this after yesterday's school interaction. Thank you all for being the words of encouragement I need to hear. I will probably take you up on that sandbag, today's build will be a 20x24x30 plyo box and those would work well together. Also, how big is the tire? I have a harness but my tire is too large for me to pull at more than a slow walking pace. It's actually two drop cloth tarps. I have a bigger one that's covering my rubber flooring mats and a narrower one that's covering the rack. I will report back on how well it works. This site is still called Nerd Fitness I broke the seal, fitnessing happened. I christened the garage gym with a 20-minute Tabata set that I wrote on the fly.

I know you were. As for kids, I got started early-ish. I'm about to be 53. I just bitch a lot talk older. Although @DarK_RaideR's SRLF thought I looked like I could be his dad. This is a real thing. I hope you get to catch up soon.

I'm glad your dad appears to be feeling better. This infuriates me. It's people with this mindset that will stretch out the curve and get my friends and family in retail and front-line healthcare sick. It was mentioned above but Craigslist or FB Marketplace is where I would look. My oldest just bought a new MacBook with some of her unemployment money and she found a good one on Craigslist. Before she found that one she was looking on Mac of All Trades. ETA: If you have a few days to see if the prices hold in your range, this looks interesting. I might be. I certainly sound like I am when I talk. When I start to feel like an adult, I'll let you all know. I still feel like I'm faking it and I have kids in their thirties.

Check In My biggest stressor continues to be distance learning. I get daily "Your kid is behind" emails from a random subset of their teachers and while I know they're not intended to be shaming, the sheer volume of the communication makes me feel like I'm failing my kids. The Boy had his first tutoring session yesterday. For starters she just wants him to be able to identify and list all his outstanding assignments. I'd be happy if he is able to produce that this week. I had finally convinced him that if he can't tell me what should be on the list that this is a problem and that he should be participating in his daily morning Zoom calls so he knows what is going on. So he is. So. I've eliminated most of my fitnessing excuses. I need to add a bar rest for squats but otherwise it's mostly complete. It's not flimsy and it easily holds my weight for pull-ups, but it's not a massive heavy-duty squat-rack. I also considered what I really needed here, and the answer was not "a permanent home gym" but more "Something I can use for the next month or more until my gym opens", which means that I could dismantle this thing in less than 30 minutes and put the 2x4 lumber to other use. Also, I can cover the whole thing up so that when I'm working in the shop, everything doesn't get covered in sawdust: I've got about 150lb in standard plates, one good speed rope and another that needs time for the cable to permanently unwind, two 20lb kettlebells (cute!) that I can use for high-rep moves and a homemade "kettlebell" I can load up for swings. The stem is about 6 inches too long. I'm going back to the home center to get a shorter one. I've also got a sledgehammer and a tire and beating on that kind of sounds good. I probably need a slightly smaller one if I want to harness it and drag it around. This is where I've been, but I am ready. My gym trainers broadcast workouts multiple times daily on FB Live to the private FB group. I have zero excuses. I won't self-shame, but I need to take some steps forward.

Welp. There go my excuses.

Check In Not much to report for the past couple days other than installing the house numbers. It looks so much better than the Prison Stencil numbers that it replaced. I spent a good part of the previous week or so not getting enough sleep and not really taking care of myself well. I fixed that so far this week. I've eaten better meals and I've had at least 7.5 hours of sleep each night. Kids are still doing what they've been doing. I should be more worried about the bad grades but I am not. I'm more worried about making sure my kids' mental health is a priority, especially The Pink Princess, who doesn't get out of bed often. That's partly because of the crappy spring weather. She wants to get out of the house and take walks but doesn't want to be miserable to do it and I can't blame her. I know I'm sick and tired of cold, windy and 40-50 degrees F (that's 5-10degC for y'all not on the Freedomheight temperature scale). Tomorrow things get better (near 70degF/20degC) and in theory the wind might not blow at gale force at the same time. If things are as nice as it sounds I'll even make The Boy go outside for a bit. He can help me rake the yard. Speaking of The Boy, he had started with a tutor before the Covid Shelter At Home order started. I contacted her and they are now going to do a twice-weekly session (Tuesday and Thursday) to try to get him organized enough to get caught up. I'll have them add a third day if it works for her and if he needs it. Yes it is. I am so proud of him. He said it's heavy. It's more like me going to be 10 minutes behind you - I'm that out of shape - but I will take you up on that. Lebanon Hills. We'll plan a day and try to pick a time in the morning when it's not crowded. I gave him a pass because it was Holy Week and he really wanted it to be meaningful even though we are all completely disconnected. Last week was 100% different - I think I spent an hour outside of Sunday morning working on stuff. Thank you. I'm going to let The Boy know my Nerd friends like his gaming outfit. Thank you. I had nothing to do with the costume, though, his older sister bought it off Amazon. He had it on his wish list. The rest of it is stuff I am enjoying and while I sometimes feel a little guilty with the time off on my own in the shop (when I could, for example, be sitting over my kids' shoulders making helping them do homework), it's helping keep my sanity at least somewhat intact. I'll chase you, slowly, too. I'm having my Internet service upgraded this week. That will help. I'm also going to try to Internet Geek my way out of this problem... warning: tech nerd things Darker than my boy, but accurate. When I saw coming up the steps I asked "Do you have a flesh wound?" and he didn't understand what I meant and his poor deceased mother rolled over in her grave. Today my grandboy was running around the house screaming. He never came in the office, but it's not that big a house. I'm lucky in that I spend most of my teleconference time on mute. Thank you. This was amazing. I've decided that today's project is going to be an attempt at trying to complete a working home gym area in the garage. I'll report back tomorrow.

Check In It has been a couple of weeks, and in more ways than one. The Boy turned 17 under a stay-at-home order. Along with a bunch of video games he wanted, he also got some more interesting gifts. I spent WAY more time than I would like doing video editing and production for our church services. My pastor is a great guy and I love my congregation but it took a lot of time away from my family and it's just... a lot. We had my grandboy here for almost a full week and my son started working 12-hour shifts last week so we were on patrol. The night he came over, I asked if he wanted noodles and he told me "That's not noodles, that's pasta" and that set the tone for three days of awesomeness that included a massive snowstorm. Work is challenging. I hate coding over remote desktop. The lag is killing me and sometimes it buffers and the letters come out looking like I don't just have arthritis and need to be careful when I type, but more like I have advanced CTE symptoms. I finally finished the cabinet yesterday, except for the bench top. We ordered a custom cushion for this so I'm not going to attach the bench top until it comes. The cushion has tie-downs and I want to hide the hooks below the bench seat, which means cutouts, which means I need to plan it first based on the actual cushions. But this project is done until then, which means I need a new one. I wanted a quick project win so I spent a couple hours and slapped this one together: Time to keep working on self-care. I let the past couple weeks chip away and it's time to get back to positive outcomes.

Tell her I said I'm old so if she makes me wait too long she could lose a viewer to natural causes.

You're a master. You get responses. I'm lucky if my Pink Princess wakes up before 10:30 am. She's missed at least three check-in questions since this started. I have so much respect for what you and every other teacher is doing to try to keep kids engaged and learning. You'll never be paid enough to reflect the respect I think you deserve.

I'm all in for this.

Update I took the day off from work on Friday and spent six hours doing schoolwork with The Pink Princess. She cares about the outcomes of her grades but I don't think she understands that the effort she puts in affects the end result. It's like she's at a disconnect, much like her brother. It's exhausting much of the time. I spent a good bit of time on Saturday setting up and producing our Sunday church service, plus several hours on Sunday producing the live feed, editing the recording, and publishing it for those who can't or won't use Zoom and who couldn't watch live because Zoom is overloaded and is failing to broadcast to Facebook Live. There was a lot of video editing so that it didn't look like our pastor was running the whole thing solo off his phone in his kitchen. I know some churches are having their pastor broadcast using his phone from his kitchen, but we have a bit more expertise and invested infrastructure and we're using it. One of the guys at church who also does IT has been doing a lot of planning, but he can't do the Sunday broadcast production right now because he just started chemo last week and he said he isn't comfortable being counted on at specific times right now. I'm just glad he's still willing to brainstorm stuff with me. Weather was gorgeous on Sunday and I went outside and raked our front yard, because it looked like we were the first family to be bitten during the Zombpocalypse. Yes sir, yes sir, six bags full. All this meant I didn't get as much done on the bench as I would have liked. I did get the drawer fronts made. I ran into a problem once I mounted the first one. If you have a 2.5-inch drawer near the bottom of the 12-inch drawer opening, and you attach the drawer to the approximately 12-inch face frame below the center mark, the drawer face will not stay square to the drawer and there will be a gap at the bottom when you close the drawer. I should have anticipated this; physics is a thing. I fixed this problem by extending the sides of the drawers to near the top. This keeps everything square. I managed to get one drawer mounted. Sanded, filled to hide dings. It will look better when it's painted. I'm repeating the same thing with the remaining drawers, so this will take a bit longer than I wanted, but part of doing a build without plans is problem solving when you run into the things that you (by definition) did not plan for.

Y'all are awesome. I feel a little more like myself every day. Even introverts need their social oxygen. The kids are coming around. The Boy and I had a conversation and I finally got him to see the point to maintaining a schedule and separating school from everything else. It will be a work in progress. The Pink Princess is coming around. She spent the day doing schoolwork and even let me know she had upcoming quizzes that she needed to be present for at specific times. I'm glad to see the reality of the situation is sinking in. She said that by next week she will probably even start using the workstation I made for her because she's starting to see why I thought having it would make a difference to begin with. Small steps will add up. I spent the evening working on the bench. The face trim was attached, the cabinet was leveled and the bench top was cut to fit. I probably could have used more clamps. ... but these ones were busy. It's starting to look like a bench. I think I need to shorten the kicker base by about an inch, down to the top of the baseboards. By the time I put a cushion on this thing it's going to be pretty high, which isn't so much a problem if I build a table to go with it, but that would mean we would need chairs that are one to two inches taller. That sounds like more of a next year project I think. We'll see how long all this goes on, I guess. Today's project will be to attach the bench top, round over the front edge, shorten the kicker, and finally start on the drawer faces. I suspect I'll be ready to start applying paint while my grandson is over for the weekend, which means I won't be applying paint while my grandson is over for the weekend.

Thanks, everyone, for listening. I think this week is just New Normal Therapy week for me. Having y'all around to be supportive is making a difference. Thank you all. Wednesday was a ton better with nutrition; I could have tracked and still not felt bad about it. The kids did a lot better with checking in with school. I still want The Pink Princess to emerge from her nest and have a routine, but I think I'll take what I can get in increments. The Boy was productive and he knows his IEP support team from school is checking in with me so at least he feels like there's a reason to get the work done. I'll work on why it's important to have a schedule going forward with him. Work was long and dull. We had three separate teleconference meetings. I am doing what feels like busy work. I'm not in any hurry to finish my current project; it's really just busy work and I hate that. I've been asked to make a lot of design decisions on others' projects and maybe I just need to wrap my head around being a team mentor as opposed to a major producer. As long as I still have a job, I guess. After work, I only had about an hour before I was needed to do a church broadcast and help the team work through issues with distributed remote contributors that will be asked to fill roles on Sunday. That took far too much time, and part of it was broadcast (an intentional testing broadcast) for the world to see. I'll manage for Sunday when I'm pulling it off live. I was going to start face frames for the drawers on Wednesday, but decided to see how the piece fit in place. It didn't - it was half an inch too long, even though when I measured - all three times - I had given myself about half an inch of play with the final dimensions I built. That's how out of plumb my walls are. The kicker base is EXACTLY the size it needs to be and it needed to be wedged in to fit. The bench cabinet didn't fit at all. Fortunately, when I built the cabinet bases, I had covered the ends in quarter-inch plywood - not because they were needed, they're not visible, but for stability and to prevent racking over time as people sit and scooch around. I had glued the ends on and had to remove them by hand. Once the ends were removed, I had to flush cut the back panel so everything fit. Once everything was sanded down smooth again, I brought the cabinets back inside to check again for fit and hoped I wouldn't have to sand any more material off to make it fit. That's tight. At the bottom, anyway. You can see the gap at the top. The floor is also not level and I'm resisting the urge to cut out the flooring and see if it's un-level all the way down to the sub-floor. I'm just going to shim it. It's off by over 1/4 inch over just a 15 inch run. That's obnoxious. I'm surprised our chairs didn't all slide downhill toward the table when we sat here. My plan had been to build and install the drawer face frames on next, but I think I'm going to shim this thing level, cut the benchtop to length and install it, and start installing the face trim first so that I can measure each individual drawer face to fit its opening exactly, and then this weekend I'll paint it in place. The cats will probably enjoy managing the project. They don't even like each other.

Who cares what your current mileage is? Just do it and build up to whatever distance you're interested in tackling. I got into trail running because I love Obstacle Course racing and it's all trail running. I haven't done any serious distance. @jonfirestar has and he makes me look like a slug. In my experience the difference between road running and trail running is the unevenness of the ground. I spend all my time scanning the ground 0-3 meters in front of me for rocks, roots, small potholes, etc. There's not a whole lot of sightseeing on unmaintained trails. I'm not worried about falls, it's more about injury prevention, like Sloth said. I've fallen once or twice, once on a bushwhacked "trail" on a mountain in Montana, but I've sprained my ankle three times in the last six years because I wasn't paying attention to where my foot was landing. Building up the stabilizer muscles in your ankles is important. Lots of single-leg strength and balance exercises helps.

Not a lot to report. I'm frustrated with distance learning for the kids. Teachers are scrambling and I know our district is trying to ease kids into the idea that we're working from home now, but I don't think that's putting my kids in the right frame of mind. Physically going to school puts most kids in a school headspace. I tried to duplicate that by creating school workspaces for my kids. My daughter isn't buying it and right now she's barely getting out of bed. I'm worried for her mental and physical health. Trying to program over my remote connection is an exercise in pain. The lag makes me want to throw things. About every two to three minutes the whole system buffers and everything I type shows up a jumbled mess. It looks like it was transcribed by my dyslexic brother. I don't know how people do this for years. Maybe they just set the appropriate (low) expectations. Oh. Also. My partner/fiancee/whatever went to Florida in mid-February for her annual "save me from seasonal affective disorder" and I was supposed to fly down a week ago to bring her home. We postponed that indefinitely because we just didn't feel it was safe after at least one TSA agent at the Orlando airport - where I was headed - was hospitalized with COVID-19. As of today Florida is under a 30-day Stay Home order. Who knows when she'll be back. We had a good run... Snacking was a lot better yesterday. I had a Kind bar and some M&Ms late in the afternoon when I made a lumber run. No fitnessing. I haven't wrapped my head around that yet. I will get there. To ease my frustration at the whole "Shit is not going the way it needs to for us to make it through this" thing, I spent another evening doing garage therapy. I got all the drawers assembled and installed. Woodworking might be the only thing keeping me sane right now. I have a plan for how I'm going to lay out the face trim and the drawer faces. I'll share that tomorrow after that portion of the design build is complete.

Let's Check In, Shall We? Monday was the first day back to school for the kids. I had spent the entire day Sunday making sure the kids had appropriate Distance Learning environments: usable computer, usable bandwidth, good monitor, keyboard and mouse so that it didn't feel like school was taking place on FunTimeComputer that they use for personal stuff. The Boy was pretty excited about the whole thing because he got an upgraded workstation and he got to participate in the Zoom meeting for his classroom. The Pink Princess was less excited. She barely wanted to get out of bed, didn't use the workstation I set up for her, claimed her classes all got cancelled online for the day (I have no way of confirming this, although the online School software the district uses was only up sporadically during the day due to failure under load) and basically spent the time the same way she has for the past few weeks, doing nearly nothing and barely getting out of bed. I was frustrated, so I went out in the garage and did some self-care. My garage is a mess. I started working on built-in bench seating with storage drawers for our kitchen/dining area over the weekend, and made some more progress Monday evening. The carcass is mostly complete. I've still got a lot of work to do - drawers, drawer faces, connecting it all together and painting it white to match the kitchen. You'll probably get progress photos along the way. It was a failure to launch regarding any fitnessing, although I ate mostly healthy throughout the day. Snacking is going to be a challenge, there's too much crap in this house due to all the people who are here all the time. At least I got outside for a bit to enjoy the nicest day of the year so far.

I've worried about my own daughter. I wish she had friends like that, hers are all just crappy teenagers like her. My boy and your boy appear to be peas in a pod. Kuiil is amazing and you're not wrong.

This just means the community finally recognized the quality of the content you've always been producing. Outstanding. When he was much younger, The Boy loved this movie.

I love this attitude. Got any examples? I'd love to see what you have in mind.