Friday Update   Another day, another early wake up for a booty sesh on the elliptical. Food was pretty good, ended up eating around 1690 cals for 10 points. I ate a lot of fruit and did 2 1/2 hours of overtime because I have been way too lax with this recently. All language tasks were completed and I did my usual sweep of the house before heading to bed super early to read in bed.      Nicely back on track with everything. 

Summoning future me to help with my struggles. I want to be:   a happy warrior, treating fights as routine facts of life, a life that I enjoy; a kind person, not afraid to be harsh but caring; a king at deflection: know what matters, know what does not, give the latter not even the slightiest bit of my energy or attention.   I strive to shape my immediate environment as organized chaos: welcome the unplanned and unforeseen, give people and situations leeway to evolve when they choose and craft areas of stability where they matter.   My fighting style is that of a tough, agile spellsword:   I can go through any hardship with the Turtle form, where, shield in hand, life's blows slide on me and nothing stops me from doing tiny step after tiny step in an unstoppable march toward my purpose.   I can dodge, redeploy, flank or ignore any situation by swiflty disappearing or teleporting away so that I can always direct my energy toward the things that matter and make a difference where it counts.   I am independent and efficient, my persona is The Mercenary.

Reinforcements are awesome! Glad you have the firm and steady presence of a happy warrior by your side and I hope you will indeed call for help when you need it.

Absolutely love the T-shirt! Fingers crossed that the weather will be safe today .

Alright, you know what? Let's open a new chapter and name this part of my life: Good things happen to attractive people.     That's a big break with my previous focus that was on achieving long term results at the cost of the short term appearance of efficiency, which followed sort of a "good things happen to good people" logic. I can't do that anymore. Instead, what I'm going to do are the 4 bullet points listed in the post above, which are:   walk 1h/day under the sun: this helps me focus a lot and gets me some tan while I almost don't spend any time outside at all otherwise ; work out regularly: I have a regular plan and an emergency workout that I can do anytime, anywhere, with no excuses. This should help ; sleep at least 6h/night ; eat enough. This one is lax, what it actually means is that if I fail to prep meals for the week and I'm hungry as a result of it, I must not try to spare money by not eating enough but instead buy whatever necessary to have a complete, healthy meal anyway.

Thanks! I have a few focus points in order to achieve my goals of taking care of myself and being a good/attractive human being: * walk 1h/day under the sun: this helps me focus a lot and gets me some tan while I almost don't spend any time outside at all otherwise ; * work out regularly: I have a regular plan and an emergency workout that I can do anytime, anywhere, with no excuses. This should help ; * sleep at least 6h/night ; * eat enough. This one is lax, what it actually means is that if I fail to prep meals for the week and I'm hungry as a result of it, I must not try to spare money by not eating enough but instead buy whatever necessary to have a complete, healthy meal anyway.

Walk I'm blasting ahead on my walking! Other than light days where I just do a loop or two around the neighborhood, these are being walked from a trail entry point to a distance where I feel confident I can return to the trail entry point without becoming too fatigued. The Flagstaff Urban Trail System (FUTS pronounced "foots") is new to me, so I also try to adjust accordingly to discoveries on the trail - add mileage it I'm on flat, easy portions, or adjust downward a bit if I experience an increase in expected difficulty due to hills or other conditions. The actual distance I walk on FUTS will be roughly double the straight through trail mileage. I am progressing quite a bit more quickly than I expected. This week's goal was to walk three days for an average of 2 miles each. I'll adapt future weeks, based on how this week goes.    √+  Tuesday - 3 miles on Sinclair Wash Trail, east end. With hiking buddy.  +      Wednesday - 2.75 miles on same section of Sinclair Wash Trail, but I took a shortcut on part of it and did a steeper, more difficult route out of the wash. Solo. √+  Thursday - Light day, short walk around the neighborhood about half a mile. With hiking buddy.  +      Friday - 2.75 miles of next section of Sinclair Wash Trail, to the west of Tuesday and Wednesday's walks. Part of the trail had some small hills, which I felt, but were not unduly difficult. My hiking buddy said that I was walking faster today than on Monday.    Trail mileage: 5.75 miles of 50 mile goal Target mileage for this week: 6 miles Total miles walked this week: 9 miles Total mileage for the challenge to date: 9 miles   Strength Training X  I walked on Wednesday instead of doing my kettlebell exercises. Should have just moved them to Thursday instead, but got overloaded by work stuff.   Cut the Clutter and Disorganization √ √ √ √  Right on target. Front Room, decluttering.  Back Room, paperwork station - sorting, filing.    Legend √  Did as planned +   Additional day, session, or mileage X  Missed

In case you missed it, during the previous challenge we discovered (on Mother's Day) that MFG (my beloved wife of over 20 years) had a massive kidney tumor.  Three weeks of ever-increasing pain and immobility later the surgeons were able to remove most of the mass, and we are now at home in the recovering-from-major-surgery phase of her cancer battle.  There is a long and difficult road ahead, but right now I'm just grateful for every additional day I get to spend with her that isn't overshadowed by bodily agony.  As you can imagine my life changed abruptly and drastically last month, but with most of the dramatic craziness behind us now I'm going to move forward with my reshuffled priorities.  First and foremost everything I do is in service to MFG's recovery and continued fight against this thing that's trying to kill her.  The next step in the fight is several weeks away, so for now the sole objective is to recover from surgery.  That requires plenty of food, rest, targeted exercises, and pain management to heal her surgical wounds, rebuild strength, and allow her body to develop new circulatory routes to compensate for what she lost.  My main role in that is to coordinate visits from medical professionals, manage her vast array of medications, stay on top of all the billing and insurance issues, and keep the household running as smoothly as possible.  Honestly it's been pretty daunting so far, and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to perform it all once I have to go back to work full time, but I'm getting close to a groove that should be a little simpler to maintain once it has some good momentum.   Responsibility for family meals has fallen largely on my shoulders, and I'm definitely up to that task.  It has been demanding, but it should actually make my fitness goals a little easier since I'm going to be able to more-accurately plan, count, and log my meals.  And since I intend to basically create a repeatable and streamlined biweekly menu it should get to the point where it almost runs itself.  That'll be helpful despite being tiring.   In terms of my own fitness for this challenge, my usual three goals are loaded up as follows: DRINK - one 12-oz Dr Pepper each morning, no more no less.  Diet drinks are out; I did not do well after reintroducing them.  I specifically want the calories and the caffeine from just one can to start every day.  1 is green, 2 is yellow, 3 or more is red. EAT - 2000 (+/- 10%) calories per day, no additional restrictions beyond what my system already imposes.  I will generally emphasize good nutrition since that helps me be able to stay on target.  Backup parachute for this goal is to eat under 2350 daily calories which is maintenance TDEE at my goal weight of 185 lbs--that'll earn me a yellow square on the grid if I overshoot the green target.  Anything above that is red. MOVE - 3 days per week (MWF) do 20 consecutive minutes of strength training.  Cardio will still happen--lately it's been predominantly yard work--but it won't be a component of my Move goal.  I'm still working with bodyweight exercise at home since it's doing the job and doesn't require a whole lot of investment in terms of time, money, or gear.  Bonus is that it's portable:  I was even able to complete a couple of thorough sessions while at the hospital with MFG.  Simple Y/N rating for green or red, respectively. As usual I'll track everything in my spreadsheet and post daily updates.  I've noticed how easy it is for me to go off the rails when I'm not keeping myself accountable here, so I appreciate you following along again. Onward, one blessed day at a time.

Same, and I am not about to move from where my daughter is. But wait, there’s more, Y’all.   You know that Urban Ashram I’ve been wanting to set up forever? I think it might be time. https://www.npr.org/2024/06/17/nx-s1-5009271/electronic-shelf-labels-prices-walmart-grocery-store From the article: “If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there's something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.   Raising prices on water during hot weather isn’t ‘surge pricing.’ It’s price gouging. Something something something French Revolution.   Now, you guys all know that I haven’t been in a grocery store since before the pandemic, and that even before then, I’ve only been in a Wal-Mart five times in my whole life (I’ve been in Target three times). But the point remains that we are in now in the first full-on chapters of what feels like a dystopian novel that I would have eaten up with a spoon in my high school years (2020 was the prologue).    I said to James this afternoon, “The only question any of us should be concerned with answering right now is When they were setting the world on fire, what did you do?”