Mekong

Life is okay, it turns out another coworker is in a similar situation as me and has also been granted temporary remote status, so (correlation but causation not substantiated) any bad feels from friend coworker have dissipated. Had better conversations with the husband and he's being less like Hamlet and more like Prince Hal so bad feels from me have also dissipated. Activity has been decent due to social stuff and the unending drive to catch them all (and the fact that there's a Pokestop in my office building helps, especially as it requires me walking to the other side of the building down four flights of stairs to be close enough to it). Food has been decent. The neighbors brought over a massive piece of wedding cake for my parents in law and I dutifully put it in the freezer for them to enjoy when they're back down, because I'm only kind of devoid of willpower. Since I may be leaving soon, back to cleaning out the fridge meals. Lots of bratwurst because they were on a good sale and I bought way too many. Exhausted, despite not having too weird a sleep schedule this weekend. Still not getting enough sleep. I've been in a total fog all day, just slowly eating the elephant. I'm at a crossroads right now- I should stay later to finish up some more stuff but I'm too tired to be really effective but if I go home I'll fall asleep too early and continue to be in this dumb cycle. I'm really excited for my boss to be back next week so we can talk about when I'll go to CO, but I really need all the time I can get to finish stuff before she's here so I can say, "See? I'm super good at finishing projects, you should have no concerns about me being remote." Okay, a little bit more and then I leave the rest for future Mekong. She's so great. She does everything, hypothetically. She just doesn't always show up.

Old drama settled, I got special permission from my director to pick an end date far in advance and will be able to work remotely from CO until then. So my end date will be January 2017 and I'll move up probably by the end of August. My laptop is ordered so I'm waiting for that to get here, and my direct boss is out of the country for another week so I'd wait to talk to her and hash out some details, and then I want to time the move up there so I'm not up against a project deadline trying to set up my space and dealing with any IT issues. Besides that, my manager asked me how much time I'd need to get ready to leave and I told him I could get my stuff in the car and be on the road that evening. I think he was surprised because I haven't talked a lot about the incremental packing and moving stuff up there I've already done, but hey. So, the two big things I'm working on right now are finished up on August 8th and 24th. Ideally I'd head up next week or so and be settled in CO by the weekend of the 20th. Otherwise, I probably won't leave until after the 24th. Either way, I'm thinking a month countdown for AZ is in order. I'm really, really pleased. It's really unprecedented that I'm getting to work remotely at all because of the type of data I deal with, and given that my top 2 options were 1) Let me work remotely pretty please and 2) I guess I can give you guys a long notice and stay a few months, I feel like they definitely met me more than halfway. And frankly, even if they somehow let me work remotely indefinitely, the job is going to have an expiration date. I'd presumably have the same salary in an area with a high cost of living and I don't see any options for advancement with the arrangement. So this is boring for everyone but me. Sorry, I'm excited. Which all brings me to... New drama #1- a coworker who I like very much found out about the remote thing and is really pissed off. Rationally she's pissed off at management. Emotionally, she still seems pissed off at me. It's making me sad. New drama #2- Warning, this is a rant that no one cares about but me, feel free to skip. I told the husband about this and all he had to say was to express disappointment that they weren't letting me work indefinitely. Which I told him pretty much wasn't an option at all given the agreements between some of my bigger clients and my company, and I talked to him for a long time about what I intended to give as my various options to my company to make sure he was on board with them and he said he was, but now it feels like he wasn't listening at all and making me feel like I'm the one that didn't do a good job negotiating this or something. He's just sucking the joy out of this and every other thing. He's constantly complaining about the new job and everything else and can't stand listening to it anymore. Every time he asks how my day is I don't want to tell him because it just feels like he's not actually listening and he's just waiting so I'll reciprocate and ask about his day and then he can whine incessantly about very normal complaints for anyone with a job that I just can't garner sympathy for right now. I want to- I want to be in a position to think, "Wow, man, you seem miserable and since I know that you're a reasonable person with normal expectations for what a job is like, I trust that this is not a good situation for you and support you in attempts to get out of the situation and find something better." But he didn't like his last position. And if he gets the promotion that his boss says he's in a position for in a year or two, making as much as our entire mortgage was, he's not going to like that either. I don't want to say he doesn't have a work ethic- he's worked consistently at the same job pretty much since we met- but I don't understand what seems like a completely unwillingness to accept that you're going to be working for the next 30-40 years and to make the best of it. On top of all this, I know he's been pretty much living on ramen and mac and cheese since he went up there, which irritates me 1) on a selfish level that it'll be harder to eat healthy around him or I'll end up being responsible for all the cooking, which, just no, 2) because I thought we had similar goals and apparently we don't, or if we do he just doesn't try at all to do the adult thing even if it's harder and I can't understand that at all right now. And finally, I already dread the terrible sleep I'm going to get next to a snorer. I have learned in the last couple months that I get terrible sleep either way so a lot of this is my deal and not his. Still, I don't look forward to the extra hurdle. But all that be damned, I'm looking forward to CO and seeing the husband, who really is an enjoyable human being despite the last thousand words, and my dog who is also an enjoyable human being as far as I'm concerned. My sleep has been bad. I need to start making opposite goals or goals I don't care about for these challenges because it seems like whatever my focus is, is immediately thrown into chaos and failure while everything else is pretty manageable. Activity has been pretty on point as I try to incubate eggs. Eating well has been on point. I actually feel quite relieved to feel like eating well is on auto-pilot at the moment. I don't have any cravings for things I shouldn't eat, tracking has been decent without it being difficult to stay within macros or calorie ranges. The scale has moved down. I don't feel hungry. I don't feel like this is particularly unsustainable. I just feel good. Sorry if you read this boring dreck.

Work has been stressful and I feel like sleep is even more out of whack than normally, but perhaps I'm just now being mindful of how poorly I sleep. Not enough sleep Monday night, exhausted, stressed out, and way to busy at work yesterday, which lead to me going home and not doing anything but going to bed, but then I couldn't sleep so I got up at 3am and decided to just go to work and knock stuff out, came home this afternoon and immediately went to sleep, then work up at 8pm feeling like I could roll over and sleep until 2am and really ruin my schedule or get up now for a couple hours and get back to some sort of normalcy. So, here I am, and I'm actually glad I made this choice. All week I've been sacrificing doing anything else to allow myself to focus on sleep, and I think it's just hurt me. No food, no exercise, just digging myself a bigger hole. So I had some chicken for tonight, bringing my day up to something like 1100 kCal, but now at least I have something for tomorrow also. And I cleaned up in the kitchen and did some tiny tasks I've been meaning to do while the chicken cooked so all in all in a better place than I was a few hours ago. Random stuff- Scale appears to be moving again, though I may just be dehydrated. We'll see. I bought some frozen omelets "just in case" a few weeks ago and promptly forgot about them, but miraculously saw them this morning so that saved me a bit. I bought some Quest bars for an emergency stash in my office and they're already gone so boo. A little bit of carb creep this week, mostly because I haven't cooked and thus haven't had many veggies either. I'll need to work on that going forward. I think my multivitamin is messing me up at night so I'm switching to the morning. I'm boring.

Weekend was really great. I knew it was going to be a social weekend and I was afraid it was going to burn me out and I'd feel like I didn't have any downtime and I'd come crashing into Monday without laundry/groceries done, but I actually managed to be incredibly balanced somehow. Friday I didn't really plan food at work very well so I ended up going to a grocery store and got a tray of prosciutto and cheese, then some random snacks to keep in the office for the future. I met a friend for dinner and she chose a southern restaurant known for fried chicken so I wasn't sure what I was getting into, but they had some decent options. I ended up having an antipasto salad with greens, cured meats and cheeses, and olive tapenade and added smoked chicken to it. Very decent. We decided to go to a movie after dinner, and during dinner I'd mentioned a French grocery store I just found out about that was close by. Friend was very intrigued so we went over there first and enjoyed The Infiltrator with a smuggled bag of pastries for her and foie gras and crème brulee for moi. I highly recommend this for all your future film viewing experiences. Saturday breakfast was Andouille sausage, pepper jack, broccoli, and bullet proof coffee. Managed to do laundry before meeting some friends. Actually, had to do laundry to meet some friends, and ended up skipping The Secret Life of Pets because I didn't even have clothes in the dryer by the time it started. No worries though, my friend's little brother came along and gave me a play by play of the entire movie later that day. Shopped between playing Pokémon Go, dropped little bro off, had long conversation over dinner (octopus sashimi). Sunday was more bulletproof coffee and string cheese for breakfast, then went to work for a couple hours to put some stuff in order that require more uninterrupted concentration than I get during the week. Man, it feels so much better to be able to tell myself I just need to do X tasks and then leave. Stayed for about 3 hours, then did grocery shopping on the way home and went to a friend's house for dinner. Mostly caught up with them- never really finished a conversation from start to finish because they have a toddler and I'm easily distracted, but we got the basics out. Grilled Greek chicken, asparagus, zucchini, mushrooms, and onion with feta and lemon juice sprinkled over everything with some dark chocolate afterwards. Today is more sausage, broccoli, pepper jack, and cold brew coffee with cream. Hopefully the coffee kicks in while I walk into a meeting now.

You missed an opportunity to put Doritos on your salad and I'm disappointed in you. Get it!

New Challenge:

Bullet Points: -I am officially 30 (and a couple days) but someone said something about a "bone doctor" today and I snickered, so I fully admit age can be a very relative construct in some cases. -I officially told my job about moving to Colorado. They were surprisingly supportive and happy for me and appreciative of my work here. No timeline is set, I told them that I'm flexible and willing to extend my notice quite a bit and that I don't have anything lined up yet in CO, that I still intend on leaving the position in good shape despite being horrendously in the weeds on a lot of projects right now and they were really warm about it all. I mentioned that I'd love to be remote too and they said there wasn't a precedent for that in my position but they'd look into it, which is more than the flat NO I expected. All told everything is as much up in the air as it ever was, but I'm feeling a lot better about having it out in the open and I think that aspect makes all possibilities more workable, so I'm happy. -My birthday was good. I actually told my job about stuff on my birthday, so that was an interesting day. Then I went and treated myself to some shopping. I bought prenatal vitamins and a neurobiology text book, so if your birthday is any summation of where your life is, I don't know what to tell you. Some people surprised me for dinner, so that was nice of them, since I hadn't bothered making plans with anyone, and then I spent the evening calling/texting/social media-ing people back that'd wished me a happy birthday. All told I'm quite pleased with myself in this regard as usually having to return a bunch of phone calls and Facebook messages makes me really overwhelmed and anxious and I end up avoiding doing it for like a week and then I get more anxious and finally respond and feel like an asshole for taking so long. So yeah, I feel like a functioning adult, sort of. -I'm newly in ketosis (I think? I haven't gotten any ketostix to check yet) and it's going pretty well. My reasoning was mostly that I wanted a stricter eating parameter because I've had a lot of trouble with consistency and even when I manage to track and keep calories on the level, some days I still end up with a lot of sugar, some days not, and I think it's all just contributing to a lot of headaches, not feeling well, and overall difficulty staying on routine. I've felt a little better so hopefully this helps. If nothing else, I hope it keeps me more consistent because I don't want to have to get back into ketosis. It hasn't been easy during a birthday week but not nearly as hard as I expected. It's restrictive enough to keep me overthinking about it. -Challenge stuff to be updated. (5/18 edit) Challenge Stuff Update! I dedicate this challenge to Sleep, that elusive seductress. My methods remain pretty consistent, but I am going to try to approach them with intent towards sleeping better, sleeping more, and being more restful. -Keto- continue to track food and keep carbs low. The aim is 20-25 net carbs a day. I actually feel much better on VLC, I think keeping tight reins works better for me. And I definitely feel very awake and lucid with bulletproof coffee so onwards on this front. -Drink all the water- Aim is 100 oz a day. Partly because keto demands it, but it definitely feels better and if I chug water right before bed it's good insurance that I'll be out of bed first thing in the morning. -Work hard, play hard, sleep hard- Aim is some activity daily. Still an inconsistent one for me, and it being 100+ F at night doesn't help, but I envy my dog that sprints her heart out and then conks out for a nap and is off running in her dreams, all within a span of 20 minutes. Exercise helps me sleep. I need help sleeping. -The little extras- multivitamin and omega 3s nightly, figure out a better study schedule for German, continue to chip away at projects at work and get to Colorado.

That's amazing, I love this. That's what my mom says, and she can be a little blunt and over objective when it comes to her kids sometimes, so I try to believe her and take the compliment. Also because she's still in my hometown and probably knows more about the goings on of my former classmates than I do, so if she says I'm doing okay, I guess that's good.

Youngster! ;-)

Thanks, good advice. I do think I'm feeling bad about 30 because I'm not necessarily where I want to be in life (though obviously in transition, quite literally, and getting closer) and where I should be at 30, but I sort of get the impression that that's just part of turning 30 also.

Is your local team Hamburg? Or a smaller team? Americans are the same with baseball. I don't know anyone that enjoys it, but tickets are cheap and it's fun to go and hang out with people. Football, however, I like. Go Sankt Pauli! No respect needed, you're fun to read.

Long weekend, and thank our founding fathers for that. I don't plan on do much except sleep and try to prepare myself for another overwhelmingly busy week. I feel very stuck in that everything is incredibly stressful at work right now, which makes me all the more ready to just give notice and head to Colorado, which reminds me at how much extra stuff I want to do to at least really leave the role in great shape for my predecessor, which stresses me out. I'm also intent on doing some job searching this weekend, no excuses. I can't find anything that really seems like a good fit. My resume isn't ready. I hate writing cover letters. I don't have time to take off and interview anyway. I don't know where to start. I don't even know what I want to do as a career. NO EXCUSES. I also have plenty of food because I keep feeling hungry for something in particular, going to the store and gathering ingredients for that meal and three others I have in my head I want to make, then being too tired when I get home and not eating. Planned meals for this weekend: Grilled lamb and roasted baby potatoes Caprese salad- fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomatoes, basil This thing I have in my head that I'm calling Buffalo Chicken salad- grilled chicken tenders, dipped in wing sauce (Frank's Red Hot and butter), over romaine hearts, julienned carrots and celery, bleu cheese dressing. This other thing I'm calling Greek Mixed Grill- marinated chicken, bell pepper, zucchini, onion, baby artichokes, all grilled then put over spinach, sprinkled with cucumber, tomatoes, olives, feta, lemon juice, and olive oil. Breakfast sausage crumbled and cooked with crumbled ground brown turkey and whatever vegetables look good. Then throw this ridiculously pungent garlic raw sauerkraut over the top. Breakfast. Leftover roasted peppers and onions I have from this week with pulled pork I've been sprinkling with sea salt, lime juice, cilantro, and rolling in lettuce leaves. The meat is really tender and fatty and unctuous and the lime juice cuts it and it's just OMNOMNOMNOMsogood. A buttload of fruits and vegetables. Just so much. Imagine a butt. Load it up. That much. Some cod because I read an article last night about how cod's protein is really bio-available and then I saw it at the store and NEEDED it. I promise myself if I cook and job search this weekend the rest of the time I can spend it how I prefer. My habit tracker has taken a hit so time to right that. Final happy thought: I found a Grunge station on Pandora tonight and it's giving me life. Final darker thought: Not having a dog or husband or house or bills or other responsibilities to anchor me is really fucking with me in ways I never expected. I'm also feeling really isolated and it's overwhelming. I also turn 30 very soon so make of that what you will. I don't think I mind and I intended on celebrating it, but the timing is just bad and the people I'd want to celebrate with aren't around. So. Sad for me.

Thanks, man. I think I realized today that I just always am going to have a lot on my plate and can't really continue to use it as an excuse. And if I don't want to change my goals or how I go about them, I don't really have an excuse anyway. But that's a whole other story, I'm sure. :-)

Thanks! I will dearly miss this book club. I've joined a new book club in FoCo but I'm wondering if I'll like it because it has a very different vibe. I see they have really specific agendas scheduled for their meetings with lists of topics to discuss and the books are much more of an intellectual variety. My Phoenix book club just voted every month on something that looked interesting, usually a book being made into a movie or scifi/fantasy, and sometimes we talked about the books during the meetings, sometimes we didn't. One lady never managed to read a single book we chose. But yeah, it was definitely more of a meetup for people that like books to come together and talk about books than an actual book club, but I loved it all the same.

Tiny update. Everything is moved, house is sold. Last weekend was a very long weekend- worked Friday, packed until past midnight, up and out at 6am Saturday, got in to Fort Collins around midnight, unpacked most of Sunday, on a flight back to Arizona at 5am Monday, straight from the airport to work, and now I've just been breathing work all week. Twice I've left work and realized I have less than 8 hours until my alarm goes off to come back to work. I'm coming in tomorrow too, but only for a few hours, and then I'll just sleep the weekend away and try to recover. On the plus side, I have wifi again, so I'm all caught up on Game of Thrones. So the important things aren't falling through the cracks, at least.

My update success is currently a perfect inverse relation to my real world accomplishment success, so bright side and all that. The house closes today. I didn't hear anything about the final walk-through last night so I guess it went okay. Everyone's signed everything and by the weekend the equity approximate to a year's salary for us will be dropped into our account. So that'll be cool. Husband comes into town tonight, we'll come "home," pack, and be on the road to CO tomorrow. 14 hour drive, not counting gas, sleep, and/or dog walk stops, unpack the truck, put me on a plane Monday morning and I'll be coming straight from the airport back to work to start another week. I'm tired just thinking about it, so I'll stop. This has thus far been my most successful attempt at daily fitness. Unfortunately, it's mostly come in the form of packing (lugging around boxes for an hour or so totally counts in my book) or walking laps at the dog park, neither of which will make sense as fitness activities next week when the dog is in CO and I don't have stuff to pack anymore. Upshot is that I'll have a pool, so fingers crossed that Future Mekong is way less lazy than Present Mekong. I'm sure that's the case. Eating has been really good but now my fridge is empty and I'll be relying on take away until at least Monday. I still intend on tracking, though. Ummm that's it. I hope everyone is doing well in their challenges.

Really good weekend but now I'm grumpy at work, irrationally irritated at being here when there's so much other stuff I need to be doing. And rationally irritated at work stuff. I finally finished the last of my carrots yesterday, after more than a week straight of carrot fries, carrot sticks, and roasted carrots. As the Age of Carrots comes to a close, the Epoch of Chicken Tenders rises. Today is day 3 in a row of chicken tenders- so far I've had them wrapped in bacon, jerk, and with wing sauce. Today is book club (get-drunk at-a-bar-and-get-too-loud-talking-about-books-club) and before that I need to go sign all the house selling docs, so probably will eat at the bar tonight. We'll see how that goes. Down to half a pork roast wrapped in bacon and roasted, a pot of goulash from the other pork roast, 2 salmon filets, 8 chicken tenders, and some frozen vegetables. The end is nigh.

Good enough, I'll try it. How annoying, you cook like I do. Whenever my husband really likes something I make, I feel a little bad because I probably didn't follow a recipe and it'll never be recreated exactly the same.

Just a little oil or do you add anything to help them crisp? What temperature do you do? I've seen them battered and fried before, but definitely that sounds like a fun thing to do at home.

My week was meh. I survived. Good thing it's Week Zero, or else I'd be feeling quite demoralized. Sunday- With the hubs in CO all loving son duties fall on me, so I took his parents out for a birthday dinner (their birthdays are one day apart). They exceeded all senior citizen expectations by wanting to go to a seafood buffet for an early afternoon dinner, so that's what we did. Because I'm healthy, and totally not just because I'm cheap and wanted my money's worth, I loaded up on the protein. I filled my plate(s) with crab legs, grilled calamari, sashimi, seaweed salad, and then shrimp dishes with the least amount of gloppy sauces. Still, the temptation to just taste other stuff got the better of me and by my best food tracking efforts I still blasted way past my calorie and carb targets. I did get very close to my lofty protein goal though, so I'll take the win where I can. Also, later in the evening I wanted a little something but my stomach was still grumpy, so I had a big bowl of lettuce with a sprinkling of vinegar and oil. Chewed slowly over an hour or so while talking on the phone, it settled my stomach quite well. Monday through today- work continues to be way too busy and stressful primarily because there's just too much to do in the time I have. And our company is really big into work-life balance, so working more than a normal week is really discouraged, which is nice, but also stressful because I feel like I have to make every second as productive as possible and if I can't do it in a normal timeframe I'm messing up, but there's just way too much. And the fact that I have a touch of short-timer's syndrome, but that's a secret still, and I am also thus trying to get ahead on stuff I know I won't be here for later, and also since I'm the only one taking care of the dog right now and 90% of her day is sleeping while I'm at work or sleeping while I'm sleeping, I'm loath to leave her alone anymore than I have to... it's all just compounding into a stressful ball of crap. I think I've decided to come in a bit on the weekend to see what I can get done without subjecting the pup to an 18 hour day by herself like if I tried to stay late during the week. I'll miss her in a week when she goes up to CO, but it'll be a relief to not have to worry about her feeling neglected. On a food front, I've been tracking but not planning ahead of time, to poor results. I tell myself I'm doing it because I'm just trying to eat everything left in the house, but I could be doing better. I baked some cod last night (and more carrot fries), but did I really need to cover it in a mixture of breadcrumbs, walnuts, and butter? Probably not, and it's probably not so necessary to finish shelf-stable stuff like breadcrumbs, anyway. The main freezer/fridge stuff I need to get rid of by next Friday are: 2 pork roasts, ~6 homemade formed burgers, raclette cheese (which is disgusting and which I'll be needing to give away or just toss), 4 salmon filets, several pounds of chicken tenders, some steamer bags of vegetables, a tub of ricotta cheese, 2 lbs of bacon, some delicious but very pungent dill-garlic raw sauerkraut, milk, kielbasa, and random fruits like kiwi, apple, peaches, and cherries . So we'll see what I can manage. I've also decided to cut milk back out of my diet. The calorie and carb hit just isn't worth the amount of protein, and I think it's causing me some acne issues. My skin isn't great, but I don't have a lot of pimples, but right now I have two prominent angry ones on my face and my whole back is bumpy. Ugh. I wonder how much just cutting out milk versus cutting out all dairy (noooooo!) would be. Sleep has been good. The switch to reading versus being on my phone seems to help. Activity is good only because I've been going to the dog park a lot more often and walking laps with dog park friends. The German hasn't been happening at all. Next week- no milk, more German, more food planning. Okay, ready, break!

Thanks! Carrot fries were good, and thank goodness because I bought a ridiculously huge bag at Costo and now need to power through it as best I can this week. They only get about as crispy as sweet potato fries, but I like the flavor a bit more. My normal recipe is to cut them into 1/4 to 1/8 inch juliennes, coat with little oil, then add a teaspoon or two of cornstarch ( I used 2 tsp for 3 giant carrots) and shake to coat, spread out on a parchment-lined sheet and bake at 400 F for about 15 minutes or so. I do the same thing with sweet potatoes with the added step of soaking the juliennes in cold water for 30 minutes because Pinterest says so. This time, since I'm in Spartan mode, I cooked my chicken thighs on a cast iron grill pan, pulled them out, drained off some of the chicken fat, and threw the fries into the hot pan, leaving the oven temp at 425 F. They turned out at least as well as my normal recipe, with the added goodness of garlicky chicken flavor, and they didn't stick like I was concerned they might. I think I may start doing the hotter temperature from now on. If you don't want to use cornstarch or cutting the carrots so thinly is too fiddly, roasted carrots are just as nice without the bit of crispness.

That was really interesting, thanks for sharing. And for what it's worth, I've been slightly jealous of you because you're really pretty and always have interesting things to say on NF and do cool challenges you actually finish and have lots of cool NF friends and you get to travel for work and you generally seem to have your shit together in a way that would be intimidating at a high school reunion. I know I only see a tiny piece of your life through forums, but don't sell yourself short. I hope you institute some really nice habits and thought patterns with your self love challenge. Also, not hating anyone as long as you've hated your body really hit home for me. On a more serious note, how has your self love challenge not already turned your thread into one giant running masturbation innuendo? I'm not sure if I'm impressed or disappointed. Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

Yes, and I know I'm not doing nearly as much as I should- I should really organize as I pack, I just can't devote the time to it. And once this leg is done, I need to spend all my time working and looking for a job up there, and then there won't be the excuse of being too busy with the house. But I have visions of a white Christmas, all settled finally in FoCo, and that'll have to be my motivation for now. Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

Chicken and carrot fries. Longer update forthcoming. Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk