Whisper

10 minutes ago, fleaball said:

I need input from someone who actually understands food. I got chicken Alfredo for dinner. It was a huge portion and I didn’t eat all of it, but I did eat all the chicken and broccoli out of it so now I’m left with a stupid amount of pasta in sauce. If I open up a tuna packet and dump it in will that be completely terrible? I’m wary of tuna in cream sauce for some reason. And don’t want to go through the effort of draining a can of beans and portioning it out. 

I'm honestly not sure. I like both chicken and tuna in mac and cheese, but for some reason my brain is going "nope" at the thought of it in alfredo.

Don't suppose you have and canned chicken?

So excited for this I decided to get a jump start on it today!  Been a long time since I walked out in nature, I've really missed it. 

1 hour ago, spezzy said:

The livestreams will be uploaded to youtube and I'll  post in this thread afterwards, so if you don't like FB, you can just do everything in here in the forums 

Thank you for this. Missed it the first read through and wasn't sure I would be able to take part.

Sounds like a good kick in the pants and out the front door!

Stealing from Chesire.

Kind of a quick and dirty start, based on your 2nd photo. 

Hope you're enjoying your lake time!

Progress gif

Think I'm done with my painting. 

This has been a really, really hard week. Lots of equipment problems at work, and Maggie's kidney took another dive. Took her to ER Wednesday afternoon. Took her home this afternoon. 

On the work front, lot of pressure put on me since Tuesday when we discovered that an equipment manufacturer hadn't finished the refit on a machine that is really needed at our Mexico plant, so what can I do to get us by if they ship them one of ours instead...

Gave my best assessment, pissed off the production manager in the process. I HATE her. She is the only person I have to deal with that I loathe.  She is a lying, manipulative backstabber.

Got the things working as well as I could. Remaining machine was at a point where it could handle what it needed, but they would need to do some manual processing. No production on Friday, so we're going to pull the machine that was going, and I was going to do some more improvement on remaining machine. 

15 minutes before the end of the shift, she sends a group chat acting like this is all some big surprise to her.

I was so freaking angry. I couldn't calm myself all night. Nearly didn't go into work at all this morning. 

I went in, but very deliberately not until an hour after she assumed I would be done. I worked on the machine that is staying, got the insertion working well.

She walked past me a few times but didn't acknowledge my presence. 

We didn't pull the other machine out today. We will put a forklift smack dab in the middle of her production on Tuesday and see how she enjoys it.

When I was about to leave, the plant manager asked me to step into his office. Wasn't sure if she had complained about me or what, but he thanked me for stepping up this week and "really saving our bacon" and gave me a thank you card with a $200 gift card.

So, I suppose I'm not getting fired this week. One of the high level engineers also told me that he made a point of bringing up how much help I've been when on a call with some of the senior people where my promotion seems to be in limbo. 

On 8/29/2022 at 7:09 AM, Chesire said:

Almost forgot the other thing.  I should be finishing up Darebee's Hero's Journey this week!  A sixty day program that I started in .. March?  Too many things tried to pull me away, but I've stuck to it, balancing it around running days and stupid life stuff.   Maybe I won't finish until next week, but I'm so close! 

I love this! You couldn't stick with the timeline, but you still stuck with the program and completed it. Totally metal!

Finally painted. Hoping just one more round to call it done.

No painting again this Saturday 😢 canceled next two weeks for funerals.

Happy to report that I've kept the living room up, and got some more tidying up done yesterday. 

Doing fine with dumping the sweet tea and going with regular iced. Trending the right direction on lowering soda, but did have some a couple days.

Brain rebelled against the dinner plan last week. Had a bunch of extra afernoon stuff and just couldn't on the raw veggies.  Have fresh stuff for this week, and found some frozen meat stuff that I can quickly make a single portion of, as the lunch meat approach lost its luster fast.

Haven't been doing the protein shake for breakfast, but going to try again this week.

Got to play violin at church this morning, which was really nice.

I'm so proud of myself. 

One of the Bell Chior members decided to host a dinner party for the the Chior and their spouses, and not only did I go, I actually talked with people.

Hate trying to post on mobile sometimes, but don't know an easier way to add pictures. Phone ate the post I had written, don't feel like writing it again, but will say I'm happy with the progress I made today. 

Sharing my shame as a motivation to finally fix it.

Oh look, I vanished for a week again! I didn't mean to. I thought about writing. I even started to. This post was started over 24 hours ago. Just can't seem to keep writing.

Missed church on Sunday. It was a rare week where I wasn't scheduled to do anything (normally I'm a tech or a musician) so wasn't a huge deal. M and I had plans to have breakfast after church with some friends we haven't seen in a long while, but was having trouble getting her up. Decided to miss church so that I could still get her if she woke up. It worked out in the end. Catching up was good, but stuff like that is exhausting to me.

I took Monday and Tuesday off work. Scheduled in advance and I have plenty of PTO saved up. Just needed some room to breath. Got a little bit of cleaning done, but mostly just relaxed.

Wednesday and Thursday were crazy at work, trying to catch up on stuff missed by being off two days. Friday was calmer, fewer shops running, so more able to chip away at the backlog without being called away every few minutes.

Normally I would go to painting today, but it is cooler today than it has been in a while. I've got a cross breeze bringing fresh air into my apartment, and I'm feeling motivated to make some big progress in cleaning / sorting. I want to eliminate the living room choke point today.

1 hour ago, Chesire said:

I like it alot.

I love this so much and think of it every time I type "a lot"!

1 hour ago, Chesire said:

Besides making the labs look good, was there a reason for the testosterone? 

I'm always really tired. I never really felt like the testosterone was helping, but didn't realize the way it was hurting until I was off it for a while and went back on.

16 minutes ago, Danoria said:

I just realized

When you highlight a section and hit the "quote section" button, it drops down to the draft field. Write what you want, maybe give a line break or two, then scroll back up,

16 minutes ago, Danoria said:

I don't know how to do many quotes in one thread.

highlight the next bit and repeat. 😉

I think it works roughly the same on mobile, just a bit more clunky.

Worked on waterfall painting. 

I've been fairly solid in my head about what I want to do with this challenge for a couple weeks now, and have even been composing the outline post in my head, but for some reason it gets really hard when fingers are on keyboard. 

Testosterone and Estrogen

I need to talk to my doctor about this and see what she says, but I currently feel disinclined to resuming testosterone. I've been on the stuff for years and never really felt like it was doing anything other than normalising the lab numbers. I didn't feel any better taking it than not. Insurance decided not to cover it, so I didn't have it and while not on it, I noticed the my sleep seemed to be getting better.  Once insurance approved it again, I tried taking it for a few days, and  just couldn't still myself to sleep. It used to happen a lot, it was happening a lot less when I wasn't on the testosterone. Took it for 3 days, each night was bad, stopped again and it has been better.

A1C and HDL

I wasn't on any blood sugar medications when the test was ran. I had been previously, but was having a reaction and had stopped taking it for over a month.  I've since started taking a new med with no ill effects thus far. 

I really feel like my body is telling me that I need to make serious and sustained changes, or things are just going to keep getting worse. I'm trying to look at things realistically; there aren't that many spoons, more spoons are not forthcoming, CHANGING ALL THE THINGS!!!!!!!!  isn't going to work, it's just going to rebound. 

So, making a mental graph, what are the things I need to do, and what are the least effort ways to do them?

1. I need to lower my sugar intake for my A1C.

2. I need  to up my fiber intake for my A1C and HDL.

3. I need to up my healthy fat intake for my HDL.

The lowest of low hanging fruit, and where I got the name for this challenge: sweet tea. I drink more sweet tea at home than all other drinks combined. Cutting it out will cut out a lot of sugar. So, I'm switching to iced tea with a little bit of sweet n low. Maybe not the healthiest thing, but a whole lot better and something I think I can maintain. 

Next change, I know I'm not going to cook, not on any real consistent basis, so instead, dinners will be mostly raw veggies with hummus, some cheese, lunch meat and triscuits. 

Breakfast, trying to switch from having Belvita "breakfast biscuits" to a protein shake with a tablespoon of olive oil and two of chia seeds. Playing around with it, but trying to find something that is fairly good tasting, but has protein, good fat and fiber.

I've been working on this for a couple weeks now. I think it is going ok. Getting more consistent, finding what works and adjusting as needed while staying engaged here is the challenge. Not sure how to make any of that measurable and not word salad right now, but there it is.

Welcome Danoria! How goes the treadmill? 

15 hours ago, fleaball said:

my brain is too dead to words rn, so here's a lizard

16 hours ago, Whisper said:

I've got a friend, M, that I am something of a caregiver for. I've cut back on how much I'm doing for her because I just couldn't maintain it, but we're still in a situation where I feel like I have to worry about her or she's not going to be able to care for herself. 

Yesterday turned into the M emergency show. Got a text from her at 11 that everything was falling apart. UTI still raging (after weeks and several rounds of antibiotics),thinking a toe she dropped a can on was infected, 3 day evection notice because she apparently lost her rent money order... "ugly crying and stuck".

Forwarded message to her brothers.  Tried getting her to contact some people that could take her to ER, realized that wasn't going to happen, so contacted them myself. Found her a ride, had them there at 3, took them another hour to get her out the door. She was at ER till 11, IV antibiotics and other fun stuff.

I just... This isn't my responsibility, but she won't reach out to anyone else. We talked on Sunday about her needing to get seen Monday and who to talk to, and she just doesn't. 

Lots of stress eating and soda drinking yesterday. 

...but now you are bitter, bitter as gall 

My goal last challenge was to stay engaged through the challenge, and I did an ok job at it.  Struggled to keep up, but didn't totally vanish.  This time, I'm I need to try and push a bit more.

Work remains a huge stressor for me. 50 hours / week is the base level, often going even higher, and I'm stuck in a bit of limbo doing a bunch of work as a Lead / Supervisor without the formal position, while also trying to get the company to address the fact that they really aren't paying people enough in the current market. We've been losing people at work. I don't want to leave but at the same time, I don't know that I can justify staying to myself. 

I've got a friend, M, that I am something of a caregiver for. I've cut back on how much I'm doing for her because I just couldn't maintain it, but we're still in a situation where I feel like I have to worry about her or she's not going to be able to care for herself. 

A couple weeks ago I got blood work done and I've been looking at the results as they come in. 

As always, my bad cholesterol is on the high end of  fine, but my good cholesterol is too low. 

My testosterone levels are extremely low, my estrogen levels are high. I should just grow out my hair and start wearing earrings. Oh, wait.

My A1C is now 6.4; diabetes starts at 6.5 I would really like to not be diabetic, but at well over 350 lbs, what do I expect?

Been trying to get this up for two days. Hitting post so I can work on it other places. I have a point, I just can't seem to get to it.

23 hours ago, Rookie said:

Ahhh you might be disappointed haha. Percy is a black cat but I can for sure share a WIP pic.  This is it in 2 different lightings

Percy is beautiful. Black cat's are so hard to capture.

17 hours ago, Rookie said:

I have an idea of what I want to try out for next challenge Now I just need to wait patiently for the new challenge to start.

Having similar thoughts right now.