Mike Wazowski

Thank you!!!! Twas a very good day indeed!! Ooh I love that fun mask - even though I’m one of those boring people who wears a plain black one a lot (I bought a 5 pack, and they’re my most comfortable masks and fit well so they’re the first ones I grab - except now that I own some KN-95’s I rotate through those whenever I have to go in a building. I learned it as consulting jargon - specifically from a book called “The McKinsey Mind” that aims to teach the bulk of what new strategy consultants at one of the top firms for that are taught (my first manager at my first job had me read it my first week). I think the metaphor is intended to conjure something that’s impossibly labor-intensive and therefore not a productive use of time for consultants who bill for hundreds of dollars per hour (also, not a good use of my time, because I’d rather be dancing). Week 0, Day 6: Most of the day was dance practice. And it was unintentionally our most physically taxing one since I started wearing an activity tracker. Also went out for a walk around sundown, ate leftovers, and crashed fairly early. The day as a whole, like the dance practice, set an active calories record at an estimated 1,750 burned (it beat my previous high by 200). I suspect this is a mix of my sinuses no longer being the limiting factor in how hard I can push as an athlete and me being somewhat detrained from the past 3 months having lots of training interruptions.

Solid first day plan! Hope the school restart doesn’t feel too, too sudden.

Yay for climbing wins!!! And 3 times in a week, that rocks!

Oh hey, I’m not the only one reusing last challenge’s goals!! Excited to hang around and cheer you on!

❤️ Happy to have been a part of the community and help you this past year (without even realizing how I was helping). Glad you’re back this challenge, and glad you’re planning to roll with the punches as you go back to working in the office (hopefully *not* with crazy long days like a few months ago?).

Here and following! Can’t wait to be inspired by awesome handstands. Are the math classes part of your hobbies? If so, rock on, as a fellow math nerd! Are you able to take in the lecture while handstanding? If so, impressive!

That plow driver story really warmed my heart - thanks for sharing!!

Haha - this unfortunately jives with my lived experiences with geese. Well, not really evil per se, but certainly have some aggression tendencies. ❤️🤗 sending lots of love and hugs your way, and hoping the depression you’re feeling eases soon.

Following (with no promise on posting frequency). Glad the first counseling session felt good out of the gate - and really hoping future sessions continue to feel insightful and helpful!

+1 for what others have said re: recognizing you needed a day to just do what you wanted and not work. Almost certainly no worse for you or your employer than the alternative of forcing yourself to work, and highly likely better for both - good job creating a win-win situation! Also, sounds like a great audible to be social and have an adventure once looking at indoor doing stuff along made it clear the original plan was unappealing. Also also, if it helps, the planner I purchased recently is designed for you to cross out your daily plan up to 4 times if you have to change it. So I’d definitely encourage you not to necessarily equate changing a plan with being bad at planning (am I also still working to internalize this for myself? Hell yes! But I’ve found it a helpful mindset so far).

Week 0, Day 5 (Fri): Other than the previously mentioned awesomeness of having my sinus surgery post-op, yesterday was a solid day all around. Had an allergy shot early in the morning, pre-post-op, always fun to get stabbed with stuff you're allergic to. Between medical appointments, snuck in a brisk walk and grabbing coffee at my local shop (my espresso bean stockpile ran completely dry after making coffee on Thursday - but more is being delivered later today!). Didn't get a ton done at work, and that's ok - I made some valuable contributions in a meeting to frame up an analysis I might get handed off to me (I HATE "boil the ocean" type analyses that my department lightly tends towards - basically just doing a ton of univariate cuts on two populations to look for differences without zeroing in on the difference that really matters the most - and I was able to steer the focus on one part at least to what I consider the crux of the issue). And then it was time for dance! Had a nice long warm-up, then my partner and I did some brief partnering drills before our lesson. Lesson was really solid and teed up lots of cool ideas (and had a push to be even more autonomous in our practice approach, which is gonna be interesting). Ordered a pizza feast on the way home, made someone's day with my Baby Yoda mask as I picked it up, and enjoyed the heck out of it while watching the latest WandaVision (really like where it's going, and loved a couple sassy one-liners). Total activity was WAY higher than I was expecting / aiming for - just shy of 1,100 active calories, which is about the highest I've had since the holidays (and typical to slightly higher than a typical Friday pre-holidays). I felt exhausted when I got home from dance, so I won't be trying to hit that level of activity on repeat this weekend, but if it happens, it happens (and sleep will also need to happen afterwards, natch).

Oh god no - if anything, most dancers are even more awkward in the club because we have juuuust enough awareness to know that we probably look ridiculous in that moment. You and me both!! The initial energy spike was followed by a crash, unsurprisingly. My body is very excited to sleep tonight now that I'm able to properly breathe through my nose (and either lie on my back or my side, not in pain).

Chuckled way too hard at this. If you ever need to know who's the easy laugh to get from your audience, it's probably me.

Apparently, it's easier to remember to wash your brushes when you only use them for dance competitions! I'm pretty in the habit of washing mine.

Week 0, Day 4 (Thu): It was a meeting packed day at work! I still managed to get in one hour of focused work on a technical problem, and one hour of thinking on Diversity Council stuff while taking a brisk afternoon walk (it's not what I envisioned when I said I wanted to get more deep work in, but it's also a Cal Newport endorsed strategy, so 🤷‍♂️). I was able to advocate for some good Diversity ideas immediately after that with my committee working group - and the camaraderie is growing, I'm learning more about folks who are quiet in a 30-person meeting room and it's sweet - this is really a great group of people (unsurprisingly - we all volunteered our time to make our company better at Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Can't remember much other than that - though I did also teach my beginner latin class for college kids and it was nice to get back into the groove for that (very tiny turnout for my class, but it's cool - I missed these kids, they're all pretty great). Total activity level was up from previous days - watch said I burned ~700 active calories yesterday (typically the lowest I'd get before the holidays / getting covid / sinus surgery). I'm cautiously optimistic that I might be able to ramp up to a baseline, non-surgery recovery activity level sooner than expected (I figured I'd need at least all of the next week to ramp back up). Then THIS MORNING WAS THE BEST MORNING EVER! I had my post-op appointment about two hours ago to get the splint tubes that were keeping my sinuses set where the surgeon put them: Breathing through my nose now feels amazing. I literally keep thinking "Is this how most people's breathing feels ALL THE TIME??!?" I was ALARMED to find out how long the tube things that have been up my nose this past week were (like, I think 5-6" in total). Suddenly, constant headaches from the past week make a LOT of sense. I've been feeling so much better since getting home that, I kid you not, most of the past two hours have been bits of working interrupted by longer bursts of a one-man dance party (a mix of some ballroom stuff and some "Mike's a raging dork" stuff). Also, since zero week is fast approaching its end, time to design how I'm gonna track my stuff - I'll put numbers in starting Monday of week one: Mobility (10+ minutes a day): Mindfulness / Prayer (5+ minutes a day): Walk (at least 0.5 miles outside per day): Daily Plans Made (at a minimum, every work day): Weekly Plans Made (no later than Monday, or Tuesday if Monday's a holiday): Running Weekly Average Hours Asleep (no set goal per se, but will course correct as needed): Running Weekly Average Active Calories (no set goal, just collecting data): Ankle prehab (3x / week): Pilates (3x / week): Bonus! Mini Strength Workout (ideally 2x / week): Bonus! Solo Dance Practices (ideally 1-2x / week): Typing all that out - are y'all sure this isn't a typical "Mike got hella ambitious" challenge? Lol.

I chortled at this description. After googling the exercise, I see your concern. ❤️

Here for the happy news, for sure!

Oooh I love everything I’m reading re: climbing excitement!

Oh even better!! Rock on organizing, nerds!

Sold. When the next summer Olympics happen, I’m blocking time to watch the oly events. I didn’t know there were MIND GAMES and DRAMA!!

For anyone who loves reading long introspection and planning things, my yearly goals plus slotting them into challenges has been added to the first post. For anyone who doesn't enjoy those things, you're under no obligation to read them (it's mostly copy-and-pasted from previous stuff I posted last challenge, I just added some color coding - so you're not missing much).

Woo! Way to check off all the things yesterday.

Ahh nice, way to be an ally! I was vaguely aware of that from USAPL (or at least, it didn't sound "new" to me, so maybe I just think I remember it). I get why organizations try to tamp down on their athletes advocating for causes (from a blah blah blah capitalism and maximizing profits sense), but especially when that advocacy is about the sport, it seems odd to try and silence athletes. Ooh, glad you're happy with the shiny new program so far! Is she also helping with the changes to squat positioning you're implementing? Feel free to pass on responding, but what are some of the most convincing reasons for you to keep powerlifting out of the Olympics? Ballroom dancing has had a similar debate for a while (it actually caused a schism between the two major world organizations around when I started), but my sport's reasons are a bit different, so I'm curious on another take on why to avoid the Olympics from a different sport. For the record, I'm anti-ballroom-in-the-Olympics because it'd push the genre away from it's current multiple-couples-on-the-floor-at-once, performance-in-the-round, nobody-knows-the-song-list-in-advance competition format that feels more connected to its social dancing roots than if it became more like ice dancing with music chosen in advance, one couple performing at a time, and pre-prepped programs to a single list of songs used for an entire comp season. There have also been attempts to turn the scoring system more quantitative in a way that, IMO, started to strip the artistry out of performances and make them a little unpleasant to watch as the movement got more focused on meeting the athleticism rubric than being about two people expressing movement to music together in the moment. Oh, and that's not talking about how likely or not ballroom is to actually make it into the olympics, even if all the changes were made to make it olympics ready. That was a ramble, lol.

So I know you were probably writing in sarcasm when you said it was "fun" to talk about organizing for good process flow in your home, but my nerd brain lit up thinking about that stuff! So glad you and the hubs are able to take the time to make your new home really work well for the two of you. And backyard dinners in February - way to live the dream!

LOL that seems highly implausible!! Guess it's just a sign that wearable tech still has *plenty* of room to improve. Yep! Under 24 hours now on my chalkboard countdown - I'm happy dancing every time I see it (I know, I won't magically feel 100% after the tubes are taken out, but it'll solidly put me into the next phase of my nose healing). Also, because I'm a dork, the chorus of "final countdown" plays in my head every time I update my little chalkboard tracker. Wednesday (yesterday): Work was pretty solid - I got a roughly two hour stretch of focused working time in, which is a minor miracle after a couple weeks of really not being able to muster the focus (and I got some work I'm proud of done in those two hours, which is also a big win in recent weeks). Over lunch, I took a self-guided tour of a unit in my building that seemed like it'd be an upgrade in spaciousness (and with a balcony and view) for the same price as my current place, but came across a couple deal-breakers for me that left me deciding to contentedly keep my current place for now, and explore other complexes closer to my lease expiring (the specific dealbreakers, for the curious: the bedroom had only a single window instead of the double in my current place, so my bedroom wouldn't be as much of a bright and sunny oasis; the doorjambs were arranged such that I *couldn't* hang my pull up bar anywhere but in my bedroom; the kitchen pantry was right between the range and the fridge, leaving the range flush to a wall of wood on one side vs. the little staging area I currently have; there were a couple other things that weren't a strict upgrade, but would've been live-with-able, but taking that tour made me realize just how *ideal* my current place is for my bachelor pad needs). Presented my work well to my boss after lunch, then promptly lost all energy and focus (I'm taking this as a "the narcotics have fully worn off, now your body's gonna let you know how exhausting surgery recovery has been" sign). Then it was D&D (or more precisely, Pathfinder) time after work! Session was entirely focused on downtime between adventures, with characters stocking up on gear, crafting stuff, and retraining options or training for new multiclasses. My monk's highlight was getting into a flaming staff dance battle with someone who'll train him to be even better with his flaming staff, and it was a pretty cool scene to role play. Also a nice low-energy session which is totally what I needed as I'm still ramping up my strength. Daily activity continues to tick upward encouragingly - kicked off today with a grocery store run (by car) in lieu of a morning walk, but I'll try and get outside over lunch as the temperatures tick above freezing (my part of Texas is going through a harsh cold spell, by our standards - there might even be multiple days where temperatures don't get above freezing this weekend!). ETA: Oh, and my wall-mountable dip bars arrived yesterday (or Tuesday, heck if I can remember). Humorously, the wall-mounting hardware has not yet shipped, nor has the rack to hang the bars when they're not in use (gotta love multiple SKU's from multiple warehouses!).