Month: December 2019

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Weekly Post 11/25/2019

Highlights:

  • Went to the gym
  • Bears win!
  • Thanksgiving leftovers

Lowlights:

  • So much traveling

Goals for next week   Go to the gym again

I made it up to the gym for the first time in a long time. I found my old condo gym routine that hits the whole body with all of the weight machines at my home gym. It’s a basic 3×10 protocol with roughly 15 exercises that I can finish in almost 35 minutes with little rest. I need to make a concerted effort to make it the gym though. I don’t find the lifting and exercising to be that difficult. It seems that my brain doesn’t like getting healthier or put it at the top of the priorities list as I think it should be. There is time in the later evenings with my work and family schedule, but in the past working out late and taking a shower has made it difficult to fall asleep. To be fair back then I was getting an ample amount of sleep compared to now maybe this time will be different?

The Bears beat the New York Giants, but it wasn’t pretty we are still struggling and it this was a game we should have decidedly won but, we were so very close to losing I was on the edge of my seat for the entire game. This season is running of games and the Bears still is playing like trash. There are glimpses of hope but they are sporadic and we never seem to capitalize off them or put 2 good drives together. I’m hoping the Bears offense will start clicking so I can enjoy watching the games rather than biting my nails for 4 hours straight.

I had a great Thanksgiving with my family in downtown Chicago. Easily my favorite food of the Thanksgiving meal can only happen the day after Thanksgiving. The stuffing sandwich has been my go-to post-turkey day lunch for about the last 18 years. My Grandma whipped it up for me one year when she stayed over for the holiday weekend. It is a real game-changer combined with most of the food groups. Two toasted slices of white bread both have cranberry sauce spread like jam. Stuffing that was reheated in a frying pan giving it some crunchiness. Ham slices that are also hot, I mainly eat ham in Thanksgiving rather than turkey. That is the gist of the sandwich the hard part of the sandwich is cooking the stuffing into a patty and not burning them since you are working with leftover and you won’t have any more stuffing until next year. If you get that stuffing just right with the right ratio of ham this is my favorite sandwich of all time.

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Weekly Post 11/11/2019

Highlights:

  • Beard is coming in nicely
  • Bears beat the Detriot Lions!

Lowlights:

  • Only ate fast food for lunch

Golas for next week: Find a place to eat my bring from home lunch at

After a week and a half, this is the best shape my beard has been in since I started participating in No Shave November. The major tip I have learned is to stated conditioning the beard as soon as you can. I started after day 5 of no shaving and my beard hasn’t itched once. In the past years, it would develop this horrible itch underneath my beard. It would always sneak up on me before I knew it and the only remedy would be a couple of days of conditioning in the shower.

This year has been the most comfortable by far also due to the constant brushing whenever I walk past the bathroom. I read somewhere once that the brushing also stimulates growth which would be difficult for me to judge since this is the only time of the year that I will rock the beard. I will keep you guys posted on the beards progress in the coming weeks.

Finally, the Chicago Bears won a game, I was really about to lose all hope on this season and pretty much lost general interest in most of the NFL games while were all enduring some really bad football played by the Bears in the past weeks. It is nice to start the week with a little pep in my step on a victory Monday.

The new work location is still making my lunch decisions pretty limited to fast food only options. I still haven’t found any better/healthier options yet and starting to worry that I will have to mine the menus of a restaurant to eat more responsible. This is a task I have never attempted and don’t have much confidence that I will be able to do without just ordering fries all the time. The quest will continue until I find some good lunch options.

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Weekly Post 11/18/19

Highlights:

  • Quick Family trip to Disney World

Lowlights:

  • Cold and overcast in Florida
  • Bears Lost to the Rams
  • Horrible Mochas

Goals for this week:

    • Breakfast smoothies all week and find a place for lunch salads

The family and I headed down to Orlando to spend some time at Disney World and get some good extended family time in before the holiday gauntlet comes barreling down. Having two families within driving distance means that every Holiday equals 2 holidays. 2 Thanksgiving in one weekend is fun but a lot of time spent in the car when all you want to do is sit on the couch and digest lol

It’s nice we can get together before all that starts and enjoy our time together without being time-crunched in a natural spot where everybody can chillax and have a relaxing time without the usual hosting pressures.

The highlight of the trip was Brunch with Mickey and Friends. Tons of great photo ops with the OG Disney crew, they all came by one by one once the table had finished their 2nd plate of the buffet. The actors did a great job handling all the little children and the varying age of the groups. They mad sure every guest that wanted a picture got one and we’re very aware that I had the Sony A7II camera and not iPhone and the charterers made sure to give me the majority of the poses so my camera could do all the hard work and send off the pictures to everyone after the brunch.

I was pretty happy with how most of the pictures came out. I can tell that I am getting better at composing my pictures. I am starting to see how a picture should be framed before I raise the eyepiece to my eyes. In turn, I’m becoming a lot more efficient at taking pictures. I use to take 1000 pictures and the only handful would be worth editing or post right out of the camera. Where now am constantly moving to be in the best shooting position resulting in a better sample of pictures without having to wade through 95% to find the better-looking pictures. Now it’s about 20% decent looking pictures with about 1/2 the number of total pictures taken.

There happened to be a coffee shop that masqueraded itself as a full-service Starbucks when I did my trip due diligence to figure out my food, drink and golf options for the trip. I was very stoked to see there was a full-fledged Starbucks on a property within walking distance to get my Mocha fix all week. As soon as we walked up the first time I knew something was up as there were no building architecture ques of the usual Starbucks look. Then I saw it, the sign that put me in a 5 min depression “Starbucks Coffee Proudly Served Here” I didn’t have any hope for the Mochas after that, but since I’m a glutton for punishment I went ahead and got a Mocha each morning I was there. The mochas scored 5 to 6 out of ten on my scale with major points being deducted due to the overuse of nasty chocolate syrup. The other major factor was the expresso tased like it was over roasted burnt and gave some off-flavors that I didn’t enjoy. I was happy to get back to the airport to have a decent Mocha at a real Starbucks.

The weather did not want to cooperate while I was in Orlando. It just happened to be record-breaking cold weather while we were in Florida, seriously it was low 50s and high 40s on one of the evenings. There was one night when it wasn’t freezing, but still pretty chilly I was able to sneak away and hit the hot tub and smoke a cigar.

It was a fun night to smoke one on vacation but it was most certainly against the rules to be having one in the hot tub. I was on edge the whole time, all nervous that I was going to get busted and ruin the family vacation. Looking back what were they going to do? Lock me up and kick my family out of the Villa?? 99% sure they would have just told me to put it out and leave the hot tub.

Overall this was a great trip and something I look forward to all year. Yea the weather could have been better but if you need nice weather to have a good time- change your fun parameters and start having even more fun.

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Weekly Post 11/4/2019

Highlights:

  • New Low Weight

Lowlights:

  • Got Sick
  • Ate Mcdonalds
  • Bears Suck Agian

Goals for next week:  Breakfast smoothies all week with 3 days of salads for lunch.

It was a roller-coaster week health-wise for me as I hit a 2 year low on the scale and immediately got a bug from my son’s daycare that knocked me out for almost 48 hours. I still had to go to work due to me starting a new project at another location other than my home base and since this is on a short timeline I felt like I had to risk it to kick off the work and get the team making progress in the right direction before I would feel safe taking a day off.

I am usually a large proponent for staying home while sick no matter how important you feel it is to be at work. If it hadn’t been for this project I would have happily stayed home and destroyed some Netflix on the couch. With staring this new project at a new facility with a whole new leadership team I didn’t want me missing work be the first impression the new force had of me.

With that new work, location means I have lost my roster of restaurants that have enabled me to start eating healthy and shedding the much-needed weight I have been carrying for the past few years.

Losing those restaurants and food choices are scary, the new location has all the fast food choices you could want and the nearest grocery store or market is 2 or three times further making my lunch break that much smaller. I know I could be making my lunches at home and eating them at work but I value that time away from the office. Typically I watch some DVR shows or some Netflix and eat my lunch but, it does help me recharge/set my afternoon up to be nice and productive. Where in the past working on a closed campus I would get a stir crazy and my work rate would plummet toward quitting time.

This is how I ended up eating at Mcdonalds for the first time in a couple of months as I still view it as safe food and I was looking for some comfort after being sick.

Taking a step back maybe this is an opportunity to take another step forward in eating healthier and saving major cash. I have the skills to be making salads and soups at home. Buying the ingredients would reduce my lunch cost from 9 dollars a meal to closer to $4 a meal. That is significant savings at 20 meals a week. (20 x5)4 weeks that 400 bucks saved a month! close to $5,000 for the whole year. Wow, that is a lot of cash that’s in my pocket and the end of the day. I wonder if I could find a place to eat my meal outside of work to get those benefits and bring my lunch to save all that money. I will need to look into this further and see my options. Making food at home and bringing it in isn’t the hard part, Eating lunch outside the office will be the tough one. Time to start exploring!

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Weekly Post 10/28/2019

Highlights:

  • No work this weekend
  • Fun brunch on a rainy Saturday

Lowlights:

  • Bears lost 3 in a row now

Goals for next week: Keep trying to get rid of these work day Mochas

It was a nice low key week. I could have done without the cold rain during the weekend. Still managed to make it to Brunch despite the weather. This weekend we went to Tavern on Rush for a boozy brunch. Not gonna lie this place had some weak ass Mochas, so I guzzled mine down in 3 gulps and went straight to the beer before my food even came. In case you are wondering Heineken and french toast paired beautifully together. We followed up Brunch with some beers at my Brothers’ new spot downtown to hide from the cold rain. College football was on and the rain never stopped and we never left the couch.

I should try and purposefully plan some low effort weekends to use the off days to recharge my battery. Busy weeks seem to compound that tiredness that creeps in during the week. Recovery needs to start being a bigger priority now that my age gets up in value.