Category: General

It’s Friday, thank god. This week has been ok, but Younger has been home from school sick the last two days, and she had enough of a cough that Missus decided she didn’t need to go in today. Day one was ok, and fun, day two I just let her watch PBS all day, and today, well today I’m out of patience. All she wants is to eat, but of course she doesn’t want anything healthy that I cook. Nope. I managed to get her out for a bike ride on Wednesday to see Momo, and she’s been playing with her friends in the afternoon, but mostly she’s been building pillow forts in the den and getting mad at me when I tell her to clean up. We’ve already had a fight this morning, and I sent her to her room. Missus is telling me that she’s going to take over after 1PM so that I can get ‘deep work’ done, but there are meetings and town halls going on today.

I’ve been good this week. Wednesday night was a bit of bender, but the rest of the week I’ve been good. Missus wants to abstain from drinking this month, until we get to Hawaii, so it should be easier for me to refrain also. Still, tonight is Girls Scouts and game night, and my current habits and triggers might make me trouble. I do know that I’m pretty well rested and ready for some physical activity, but if I stay up tonight I’m not likely to be up for whatever challenges we have tomorrow. I had planned to go to the climbing gym, but there’s some sort of outdoor enthusiast event across town in the morning.

I’ve been running and biking this week, no weight training. I actually rode my bike to the store Wednesday with my three-day tactical bag and rode back with two sixers, some wings, and a loaf of bread. I’ve been trying to figure out if I can get some molle-compatible bags to connect to it, maybe something for a IFAK or other storage. I bought a 3L water reservoir this morning for it, but I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to take a laptop along with me. The idea of travelling with only a single backpack appeals to me, but then the challenge quickly becomes to figure out how much stuff I can pack or lash to it. I have to remind myself that I’m not going on any expeditions.

Life is good. Last week’s anxiety has resolved itself and things are pretty chill right now. Lots of important work to be done, but nothing is terribly urgent that it’s putting me out of sorts.

This week is going pretty well. We’ve managed to avoid any real quarrels at home, and have been finding a renewed focus at work. I’ve been getting a good amount of sleep, and I even went for a long run today. So far so good.

Tax day came and went without a word from my CPA. I’m not sure that they want my business; I think I might actually be better off doing them myself. I’m sure it’s my fault, somehow. An initial pass on the automatically calculated tax program shows an inaccurate cost basis for most of my stack, probably by about two to five times what it actually is. Enough about that.

We started watching The Batman. I’m not sure how I feel about it, other than it is three hours long. I was watching with Elder yesterday, thinking about how many Batmans there have been since I was a kid: Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney, Bale. This certainly isn’t The Dark Knight. It’s not as bad as the other DC movies though, that’s for sure. I’m just wondering if there’s going to be a Joker tie-in with this series. That would be interesting, but probably not.

Yea, things are going well. Sticking to good habits, living my best life.

I did my best to recharge this weekend. Friday ended on a bit of a sour note, so all I wanted to do was put it behind me as much as possible.

I took Younger to the rock gym Saturday. I took Elder last week, and wanted to give little sister the same attention the first time. I still can’t wait to go back next weekend. I didn’t exhaust myself, but did a lot better on the runs I did. I also watched Free Solo, about the guy that climbed El Capitan without a rope. So I’m going through a bit of rock climbing excitement.

Today I went mountain biking. Alone. There’s a reservoir about twenty minutes away, and they’ve got a lot of open land out there. It’s multipurpose, so people bring their horses out there, and they have a trio of bike paths as well. I hit them all, and rode over the rest of the area, about eight miles total.

I don’t assume that these trails were too hard, I do live in coastal flat, but there was enough elevation change around the river that I had a few oh shit moments. The last time I was out at the place was in my twenties, when I was in college. I’m pretty proud of myself that I made it through.

According to my fitness tracker, today’s ride was actually more strenuous than any other activity that I’ve been doing, whether running, climbing, or whatever. It was very fun, but my bike is so old that I thought it was going to fall apart. I was living on the edge also in that I didn’t have any spare parts for my bike. The brakes held up though, even though I thought the tires were going to fall off half the trip.

There were a couple of places that stood out. A lot of the trail was exposed roots, and was very rough, and at one point I came up to a heavily forested area that had a mass of pine needles, making the ground very smooth and soft. It was flat too, and I remember it as a bit of a respite after coming up through a particularly harrowing section. There was another area that had these waist high plants poking up through the ground. I don’t know what they were, but the greenery was striking against the rest of the undergrowth.

I think I caught the area during a very beautiful part of spring. It was Easter, after all.

All I have to say is that it is a very beautiful day outside. This morning’s routine with the kids was very smooth, I came back and meditated then joined Missus outside on our back deck and enjoyed some coffee. It’s the perfect temperature outside (for now) and we were able to listen to the birds, watch the wind blow through the trees, and talk and joke. Beautiful.

Today I’ve got our weekly PM and dao feedback meetings, tomorrow is end of sprint at Star Atlas which means engineering demos and happy hour. I spent all day yesterday working on a project proposal pitch deck which I’ll be presenting over the next day or two.

I’m hoping to take the kids to the community center today so that they can do some swimming. It’s really an excuse for me to do some weightlifting.

Other than that this week has been going really well. I got word that my raise is finally in effect, so that’s going to be nice.

So I’ve been wearing a Whoop fitness tracker for the last three months or so. It’s geared toward high-performing athletes, and it’s very useful for tracking heart rate during athletic activities, as well as sleep and recovery. Although I’ve been running and exercising regularly, I’ve been unable to push myself far enough to meet the level of strain that the app says is necessary for significant cardio load.

For example, a run I did on Friday, 2.3mi at a t 9:11/mi, 21m total, comes in at a 10.9 strain measurement. That equates to 18m spent at 80-90% of my maximum heart rate. Strain between 10 and 13.9 is considered moderate, that is, the cardiovascular load is significant but not strenuous.

The best I’ve been able to do was a 16.8 on a run, the GPS was messed up so I don’t know exactly how far, but I believe it was about 5.5m. 58m running, 50m at 80-90% of my max HR. That was a pretty good run for me, although I don’t have the pace. Yesterday though, I did the same run and hit a 17.4, which is enough for the device to tell me that I need to take it easy today.

It almost killed me.

The weather was really warm yesterday, so much so that I was able to go running shirtless, up to this point in the season I’d been dealing with cooler temps, but I actually felt like I was getting some sun yesterday. That was sort of the point, to work on my tan. Now I don’t know if it was the fact that I run 2.7m the day before, a light one for me, or the heat, or something else, but about halfway through the run I knew something was wrong.

The mantra I’ve been telling myself on these runs is that all I have to do is put one foot in front of the other. As long as I don’t hurt myself I can finish. Maybe I bit off more than I could chew, but I’ve done this very same run on at least four or five occasions and have had no problems. Not in warmer weather during 2PM in the afternoon.

I kept going as long as I could, at one point I was jogging at no more that a walking pace, bursting across intersections and driveways where cars were pulling in and out. About a mile from my house I had to start walking. I tried to give myself some time to cool down and gave it one more push when I got onto my street, but I couldn’t do it and had to finish under a walk.

I got home, grabbed some water and sat on the porch to drink and started feeling lightheaded. I tried different positions, putting my feet up, or my head between my knees, to alleviate what I suppose was something like heat stroke. It lasted no more than ten minutes.

I was fine the rest of the day, but was probably the worst I’ve felt following an exercise. So today my recovery score is super low, and the Whoop is telling me to keep my strain below 13.8, which would probably take a three mile run to hit.

This thing is going to kill me. But if you’re a professional athlete or just someone who wants to get in shape, this thing will Whiip you into shape.

So I realized yesterday after I hit published that I had failed to mention the most important news of my day, that my mom and her husband of twenty-three years are separating. She texted me yesterday asking for ten minutes of my time, so I called her and she broke the news. Now I’ve never been close to my step-father, so much so that I didn’t even call him my step-father until a year or two ago. I was eighteen when they got together, living with my mom in an apartment when she told me she was moving in with him, and that I needed to find my own place.

I didn’t really see them all that much after that. They had a house about twenty minutes away and then moved three hours away a few years after that, where they’ve been living for some time. My brother lived with them for a few years after he graduated high school, before taking a job in Germany.

My stepdad is a nice guy, but like I said, we were never close. We shared some interest in investing and finance, I tried to get him into crypto, but I don’t think he ever did. Anyways, now my mom is telling me that he’s moving out but still wants to continue to see the girls. I don’t know how that’s going to work. Awkwardly, most likely.

This is all against the backdrop of my brother coming home from Germany for the first time in seven years. We were trying to arrange our weekend with them, and were hoping to crash at my mom’s. My dad was hoping to fly out my eighty-year old grandmother as well, but I don’t even know how that’s going to work now. We’ll figure it out.

Appropriately enough, I wound up listening to a bit of this lecture by Alan Watts, on the divine madness known as falling in love. He gets into it about romantic marriage being a recent historical anomaly, and how basing this type of long-term contract on something resembling temporary insanity is well… a bit insane itself. I’ve always been conflicted about the idea of staying married for ever. There’s enough social science on the subject out there, mainly my doubts are around what Watts terms the monotony of monogamy, but I’ll leave that for now.

I used to make jokes (Why is divorce so expensive? Because it’s worth it. What’s the number one cause of divorce? Marriage.) to my boys when we were hanging out, but someone in SAIA announced they were getting one after a decade or two and they were obviously hung up about it and it wasn’t the right tone to set. No such jokes with my mom either. I think the fact that Missus and I are going on our twelfth year married might have something to do with it as well. I’m not sure whether each additional year together increases or decreases our chances of staying together, but we’ve passed the seven year itch. The average marriage in the States is eight and a half years, so we might be doing ok.

I had to take not one but two naps today; that should tell you enough about how my day has been. I did manage to run almost three miles and read a hundred pages of The Dawn of Everything, a new History book. The girls are winding down and I’m trying to make sure I get to bed at a decent hour tonight.

TDoE is actually a really good tome of potential source material for POLISdao. I had been looking to the Iroquois Confederation for some inspiration to set the tone for the dao’s constitution, and TDoE’s early chapters are spent describing the (native) American reaction to European society. Apparently they did not like it, and some of the more egalitarian ideas that came out of the Enlightenment may have been cross-pollinated from these peoples. It’s an interesting book in so many ways, but it’s rather thick and I’m reading quickly. This is the type of book that I should re-read and footnote. My own copy, not the library’s.

It’s Sunday morning, I’m up a bit earlier than normal because I was so tired yesterday. I took Elder to the rock gym, then we came back and watched Iron Man 2 and Thor. I didn’t drink or smoke, but turned in around 10 last night. I was beat. I had some interesting dreams.

I’ve been avoiding doing things I know I need to do. I continue to avoid thinking or doing anything about taxes, I haven’t heard from the CPA in two weeks. Plus I haven’t done my house accounts or budgeting for March yet, and have managed to overspend out of the house account. I am going to do that this morning, no putting that off.

Younger and I have been fighting a lot recently. Usually I’ll ask her something simple, and she’ll tell me no like she has a choice, and then it’s straight to WWIII. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it interesting because Elder is mostly trained to do what she’s told and mostly helps out without too much fuss. She still gets distracted very easily, but at least she’s good natured about it. And I don’t think I’ve had to punish her for anything at all recently.

My brother is coming home from Germany next month on a vacation. I don’t think I’ve seen him in five years or more. I’m pretty sure it’s not been since he had his daughter, so it’ll be the first time seeing her outside of a FaceTime call. He’s coming down for almost a whole month, but it coincides with our Hawaii trip, so I’ll only get a weekend with them. We were talking about doing a trip to an amusement park or water park, TBD.

I don’t have a lot of updates to put out, work is pretty much top-secret, so I feel less inclined to say anything in this space. I have been doing a lot of writing though, so I suppose that’s why I haven’t been journaling quite as much. I guess I don’t have much energy left at the end of the day.

Missus is trying to figure out what to do about work and Union. They’re rescinding telework, although there’s no real reason for them to do that other than to be assholes and exercise control over the staff. There’s no reason for her to be in the office five days a week, eight hours a day. On top of that she just found out that her program director is going out for twelve weeks paternity leave, and she knows they’re going to try and make her do his job, even though he’s two pay grades above her. So she’s thinking about going full-time with the union. Doing so might make her lose her certification, as she needs a certain number of patient hours to maintain it. Walking away is still an option as well, and it seems her boss has figured that out as she’s trying to offer Missus some pittance — a modified works schedule — as some sort of incentive to stay. It’s asinine.

So I’m going to go get started with the accounts, the kids are going to church then I’ll have some game time with my brother for a bit. No idea what we’re doing with the rest of our day, maybe a bike ride or something to keep me and the kids active. Anything to get out of the house and avoid the harsh reality of the responsibilities I’m ignoring.

Tuesday morning is off to a good start, the girls got out of the house this morning without too much fuss. I’m rested and ready to get to work.

I’ve got at least one team meeting on the calendar late this afternoon, but I should have a few hours this AM to focus and get some work done. I think I’ll do some Solana programming. I spent yesterday going over a couple new features for the POLISdao with our lead web3 dev, but I’m going to save that for later in the week.

I haven’t really been thinking too much about my taxes, I’m just hoping that the CPA I hired can get me close enough that I don’t mind paying out to Uncle Sam. Well, I take that back. I have been thinking about it quite a bit, but I’ve been procrastinating on it, finding ways to avoid doing it. I don’t think I can get away with that past this week though. I just have a bit more to do, and it’s really not all that bad, time wise. I just don’t want to think about it.

Missus is slowly coming around on the offer I made to her, to let her quit her job and take some time off from work to evaluate everything and figure out what she really wants to do with no pressure. The VA is a mess, and her union is reflection of that. She’s doing a great job at both, but there’s not really a culture of excellence within it, and it’s mostly a bunch of passive-aggressive, petty bullshit. It’s bad for her mental health. Anyways I’ve been riling her about it, and we were talking about health insurance the other day and she said let’s wait till August, which is the month that she hits her fifteen years. She’s eligible for a partial retirement, so that’s the earliest we agreed that she could step away. To hear her say it is a good sign though. I just need to hold the fort down for the next couple years while Star Atlas launches. As long as we avoid lifestyle inflation we should be good.

I’m setting aside 37% of my paycheck into crypto right now, which still leaves me with more take home that I had at my last job. I haven’t even looked at the budget for last month, but I know for a fact that I haven’t done anything crazy the last four months. Just a little bit of fun. The one thing I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold off on for much longer is a car. I’ve been driving Missus’s 2012 CRV since I got rid of my Fusion during the COVID lockdown, but I’m really itching for a new mode of transportation. I’ve been dreaming about souped up BMW M8s; older, antique sport cars (manual only, of course), to motorcycles and even electric scooters. Just something to give us options when one of us has the car.

I don’t think I’m going to do anything crazy, of course. Buying a new car with cash is out of reach right now, and I’m not taking a loan out. Insurance is another factor, not to mention the time or money I’d be obligated to spend on maintenance or detailing if I bought a $22k Subaru BRZ. I could save for that car in as little as three months, but it might just be better for me to get a bike or a beater, and go spend a day with Skip Barber to get it out of my system.

Plus even thinking about this before my taxes are done is kind of irresponsible.

To work.

So yesterday my boy Todd and I went to a climbing gym across the water and boy am I hooked. The place we went to had hundred-foot top rope climbs and a bouldering area, and after a good three hours of climbing we were beat. I can’t wait to go back.

I really couldn’t do much, I think I managed to run through all of the V0 and 5.6-5.7 setups that they had, but I couldn’t do much more than that. Still, I think I did better than Todd, who has been working out a lot and has much better muscle foundation than I do. My scrawny ass had better hand and forearm strength, apparently.

I made a point to be super friendly with the staff. I showed up there were just two young women manning the counter. I’m a complete noob, I told them, and I want to do some climbing. And they did a really good job walking us through the rules and how to use the equipment. It was really nice.

The hardest part of the climb was letting go at the top. The first time you let go to let the auto-belay device bring you down is super scary, but I got over it pretty quick and was later hanging off the ground, thirty feet in the air to rest while Todd held me.

I wasn’t quite as worn out as I thought I would be. I had some slight stiffness when I woke up this morning, but other than some slight soreness in my arms and back, I’m feeling pretty good. I even went for a short run today.

My feet are a bit of a mess. I’ve been plagued with a hammer-toe on my right foot for years, and it usually causes issues with the knuckle when I wear rental shoes, whether for skiing or ice skating or what have you. And the first pair of shoes they gave me were a bit too pinchy and gave me a pretty bad bunion after an hour or so. They gave me a slightly bigger brand, but the damage was done. Climbing shoes are designed to be used barefoot, but I had to put a sock on to cover the sore.

So today I decided to take some corrective action, and looked up ways to correct the situation. I found a couple videos that showed how to I could tape the toe down, and managed to get some relief by doing it.

Today was also day one of spring break for the girls, and we had a successful morning. We set up most of our stuff the night before, and I even dropped Missus off at work, then the girls at the community center. They went swimming today, and we even found a game room that had skee ball, air hockey and ping pong. When we got home the girls literally spent the entire time outside, playing with their friends before we finally called them in for dinner and evening chores at seven. Now they’re out.