Category: Hobby

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I’m not doing any New Years Resolutions in 2021

I will be attempting to do Monthly goals that will hopefully be more manageable and achievable. The short sprints rather than the usual year-long marathon goals.

Januarys goal will be completing some fitness activity for every day this month

I found a beginner stretching YouTube video that is less than 20 min. I will try and complete as much stretching as I can this month. Stacking the stretching with my strength and cardio days should give me a good battle plan to accomplish this months goal.

Goals I’m thinking about performing:

Month being Sober

Month of Meditation

Month with out Caffeine

Month of reduced phone usage

Month Of leaning to play Chess (Yea I watched Queens Gambit)

Month of Learning to play Poker

any suggestions? please post below

I will be trying to write a monthly post as a follow up combined with a pre post to the upcoming month goal.

Happy New Years!!

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1st Run In Forever 03/17/2020

Distance 3.68 Miles AV Pace 12:34/Mi

With not having to commute to work, it seemed like a good time to start running again/exercising, reading back through my work out logs it has been just over a year since I last attempted to raise my heart rate in the name of health.

There have been many times I have had to restart a workout regime. The usual fears were there, shin splints, being way to sore the next few days, don’t have the right shoes, it’s too cold outside. After two days of being stuck inside and the cabin fever driving me crazy, going out for a run with all those “scary” excuses was an easy decision to get my butt off the couch and hit the lakefront for an easy peasy jog.

I got super lucky as the day I decided to go jogging was one of the best weather days of the year so far, the sun was out, and the temperature almost hit 52 degrees—shorts and Quarter-zip with a beanie and light gloves at the start of the run.

Run Breakdown: Distance 3.68 Miles – Avg Pace 12:34/mi

  • The first half mile was pretty easy as I was not trying to break any speed records my spirt.
  • Second half mile, I started to feel my abs working.
  • 2nd mile I began to switch between jogging and walking
  • 3rd mile had more prolonged bouts of walking – I was feeling out of breath, and my running form was to deteriorating fast  
  • Last half mile 50/50 run-walk with faster pace on the running trying to get home and get some dinner

This 1st run was lackluster performance-wise, but I was proud that I got out there and got the first one out of the wat. On to the next run!

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Weekly Post 12/16/2019

Highlights:

  • Lunch with a highschool friend
  • Started bringing leftovers for lunch
  • Finished The Wire

Lowlights:

Goals for next week: Try to reduce my lunch budget

Following last week’s post and I had another business lunch set up with a highschool friend downtown. Just to talk about the future and see if our forces could align and expedite some progress. This is still a new experiment for me so there is a lot to figure out and organize before these business lunches will start producing some juicy results. Either way, it was fun to catch up and talk about old times and the present comparing stories at how similar and yet different our lives past have been and how we still have a lot of the same experiences.

 For the majority of this week, I broke out the old’ lunch pail and brought leftovers to work to eat for lunch. To be fair these meals were planned leftovers with the full intention to have them for lunch the next day. In my quest to keep reducing my expenses on food this seemed like the next logical step. We quickly found out that usually dinner is the most expensive meal of the day and having the same meal for lunch the next day just doubles my spending. The good take ways for this habit is that I am now building a routine to bring lunch rather than going out to eat five days a week. If I can keep this habit than the next step would be to meal plan for lunch and be mindful of what the food costs are compared to a usual fast food meal. Those meals range between $12 and $8, If I can get my spend down to $7 or $6 I would be very happy. I don’t have a plan yet other than to keep bring meals from home into to work and once that habit it and nature then start to plan out my lunches.

I watched HBO’s original show The Wire. This came out right at the tail end of Highschool and finished up while I was still in college. Never really heard of it even though around that same time I was watching Entourage and Sopranos every Sunday night. Soon after though, this show kept getting recommend both by acquaintances and on my regular websites. I Started this show multiple times when over the last 6 or 7 years and never made it past the 3rd episode for some reason or other. New shows that come out that “You have to watch” it always got put on the back burner. Then I read another article about the 50 best TV shows you need to watch. I can’t remember which article but it kicked me in high gear and I made it past the first season in one weekend. That first season of The Wire was so good I just kept pressing play.

It hooks, line and sinker me in as I made it through the 2nd season in the by the end of the next week. after those first two weeks, I was on roll watching it every chance I got, during lunch breaks, in the morning before work. I was addicted by the time I finished the 4th season I was burnt out. Only 12 more episodes to in the final season… it took the entirety of that next week at that same feverous pace finish out the whole series.  

This was an awesome show. Lots of intricate storylines that build from season to season, yet each season had its theme that leads to entertaining season finales that almost stretched over the last 3 episodes of each season.

Watching this show blitzkrieg style isn’t recommend due to the 60 min length of each episode, If I had to do it again I would have tried to keep it’s at a season a week. That would have probably kept me from having that burnout feeling towards the end of the series. The Wire would be a must much recommendation from me, I’m sad a neve got into this show when it was airing that could have been fun to witness.

The 2019 Bears season is over. What a disappointment, there was so much hype after last year’s level of play and in the supposed progress we made in the offseason. The offense installed the 2.0 version and Mitch was making leaps and bound type progress. All that hype washed away after the season opener loss to our archrivals the Green Bay Packers. To be fair I did hold on to some hope that they could pull to it together but, halfway through the regular season it a was fools’ errand to still believe that this team was going to be better than where it was last season.  

It will be a long offseason, hopefully, I can fill it up with some golf and baseball and hockey.

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Weekly Post 12/2/2019

Highlights:

  • Haircut and beard shape up

Lowlights:

  • Feeling all the repercussions on all that thanksgiving food

The goal for next week: Get to the gym

With No-Shave November coming to a close I decided to the beard through the holidays. To get ready for the Christmas and Holiday party season I needed to get a haircut and for the first time, I was also going to need to get my beard cut and shaped. The usual story is that I don’t touch my razor at all for the month of November. As my jobs have been getting more and more professional, walking around with a raging neckbeard was not appropriate. I compromised and kept the neck nice and clean but left the length of the beard as long as it could grow out. This lead to some issues around my mouth, it became very hard to drink anything out of a cup without a straw. The liquid would just run out the sides of my mouth and down onto my shirt making a huge mess every sip. In the era of the war on plastic straws, I am most certainly not going to be carrying around a metal straw in my pocket all day every day. 

The only choice was to get to the barber and let them do their magic. After my guy was done it felt like I had a whole new face. No hair would hit my lips or get in the way of my breathing or tickle my nostrils. The real mega moment though was when I had poured myself a nice big glass of ice water at home. It was an oddly refreshing feeling that I can only describe as one of the most comfortable drinks of all time. I had not realized how annoying drinking was when all the beard hair kept getting in the way my drinks.

For next year not only will I continue to condition from day one of growing out the beard but will also try and trim the edges as well to keep drinking from feeling like an impossible task.

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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 10/14/2019

Highlights:

  • Pizza Party With the Famliy
  • Chicago Marathon
  • NO work on the weekend again!
  • Bears Bye Week

Lowlights:

  • Missed out on a skins golf tournement
  • Bears Bye week

Goals for next week:

Stay under 230 LBS for 2 days this week

With the Chicago Marathon taking over the city this week there was a ton of fun energy building all week. So the family decided Saturday would be a great say for a pizza party! The apartment complex where my brother lives have a pizza oven/grill outside next to the pool deck. It was way too cold to take a dip in the pool, but I was eyeing the hot tub pretty hard all day lol. My mom made enough dough and brought all the topping you could think of. We were all jacked up for this stellar pizza setup. The wind turned this adventure into a major struggle. The wind gusts were the overpowering heavily vented casing of the pizza grill leaving the inside temp close to 420 degrees and taking close to 22 min to cook a single pizza. I was shooting for 500+ degrees and hoping the pizza would be cooked in 12 to 15 min. With the extra time in the oven, the crust was becoming undercooked compared to the toppings. After two pizzas in the in grill, we decided to move into one of the party rooms that was set up to be a kitchen that you would see on the cooking channel. The kitchen is equipped with a super nice Wolf range oven. This monster of an oven was able to cook three pizzas at one time and have no problem keeping the temp over 480 degrees letting us catch up and get all 7 pizzas out in a short amount of time so everybody could enjoy their pizza at the table together.
The day after, Sunday the Chicago Marathon ran right past my house and gave me a great opportunity to practice my photography skills especially shooting in manual mode with some very fast subjects running right past me. This exercise turned out to be very hard, keeping the runner composed in the frame while panning seemed almost impossible. I tried to use the eyepiece, the back screen and just holding the camera in my hand without aiming at all. Pictures taken using the eyepiece kept the subject most centered in the frame. While not using any of the assets on the camera and panning using my hand and keeping my eyes on the subject yielded the best-looking results since the camera speed most accurately matched the runners at full speed. Not sure if I’m ready to share my photos just yet. I am still pretty new to this hobby and do not have the best practices for hosting and displaying pictures that are 75-6 MB each. Once I have that process figured out I will update this post and start making a gallery page for everyone to view.

My weight has continued to trend the right way and I am looking to have the scale stay in the high 220s. The breakfast smoothies and lunch salads are making the difference in my weight loss but, alas the salads are becoming boring. How long will I be able to stay with the ultra-consistent meals??? I’m not sure but the progress on the scale is making the fight that much easier to win.

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Weekly Post 9/16/2019

Highlights:

  • 2 Workouts
  • Meditated
  • New Camera Lens
  • Finished another book

Lowlights:

  • Pretty sore for my workouts
  • Still, haven’t hit the golf course

Goals for next week:

  • Stick with the morning smoothies
  • 3 Workouts
  • 2 Meditation sessions

It was a pretty productive week. especially in the health department. For some reason, I have found it very hard to find time for a 15-minute meditation session. I was able to get one session this week and I’m pretty proud of that. I’ve read that most of the benefits come from being disciplined and staying consistent to earn all that meditation can bring. I need to make a better concise effort to work this into my weekly schedule. The harder part for me was finding a place that is pretty quiet and is isolated from all the foot traffic at work or even go outside and stay a good distance from the roads. It might be a little scary sitting in a park all alone with my eyes closed. It might be a little easy for something to happen to me, so I will try and stay inside, for the time being, I also snuck in 2 work out this week as well, I will be focusing more on my diet rather than burning calories to see if I can achieve my goals faster.

I was able to finally was able to pull the trigger on a real deal lens for my Sony A7II camera. I had been using the kit lens and achieving some good results with it. After taking some online courses and learning the mechanics of the lens and how wildly advanced my camera is compared to my amateur skills. I started to do some of the course homework shoots. shooting in manual mode at night or taking a fast aperture sorts picture. I found that I was pushing the kit lens to its limit and missing out on some nice shoots sue to the lens that came stock with my camera. This was a large investment for me but, it will help take better pictures and this lens with stay in my arsenal of camera gear even if I upgrade my camera body.

Finished up another audio book making it 8 books in total this year. Extreme Ownership was very intriguing to me and was jam-packed with a lot of actionable ideas that I have already begun to bring into my work and personal life. Each chapter was broken down into 3 parts. First was a battlefield story from Iraq. Middle being what the leadership principle is how it helped win the battle and the last being the application to the work environment. I plan on reading the rest of Jacko Wilik’s books due to how fast and to the pint he got. Always a fan of efficiency, Next on the list is the book that was adapted to the movie Field of Dreams.

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Weekly Post 9/8/2019

Highlights:

  • Played tennis
  • Breakfast smoothies

Lowlights:

  • Missed 2 workouts
  • No Golf
  • Chicago Bears Lost

Goals for next week:

  • Make a Smoothie every workday
  • 2 workouts
  • 1 meditation session

There was a lot of expectation for the Chicago Bears season especially with a season opener against the NFC North divisional rivals Green Bay Packers. This whole offseason we heard that Mitch Trubsusky had advanced enough to the level that Preseason game reps were not needed. To be fair this was a trend other teams around the league were also participating in to keep the team as healthy as possible for the entirety of the season. In a knee jerk reaction, a day after the Bears offensive production yielded scary low results. and showed that we desperately needed those in-game reps during our pre-season to tighten up. I will not turn this blog post into a game recap, but maybe I might expand that type of content into an additional post to separate them and keep these short and simple.

I got invited to play Tennis with some old college friends at the park this weekend. I have not played since maybe, gym class junior year of high school? They were able to lend me a racket and a quick recap of the rules and some formalities of the sport. I was little up on my tennis knowledge since the US Open was dominating the sports broadcast world for this past week and a half. It was fun playing some doubles matches on a Saturday afternoon in the park, the weather was perfect for the 2 hours we played and I even was able to score some aces on more than a few serves. It would be cool to get out there and play some more tennis before this Chicago weather kicks in.

I’ve continued to make breakfast smoothies and I feel the difference from eating at Mcdonalds every morning. Not sure if its all the vitamins or the lack of caffeine and milk that I have deleted from my diet but, I feel much better and have also lost a little weight. My body does miss the caffeine, I will have to grind it out to make it past the dependency and come out clean on the other side. Hoping to make my iced mochas a treat again and not an everyday habit. I’m still on a quest to shed some pounds, I’ve never have attempted to lose weight without working out. In the past couple of years, I’ve lost the time and/or excitement to work out, which always has to give me this weird paradox. Working out hard one day and eating while attempting to stay at a caloric deficit but, my body would be ultra hungry for 2 days after I work out and I would end up at a caloric surplus. Missing out on that instant gratification, I would lose all hope to go back to my non-health-centered lifestyle. The major goal here is to lose weight without working out to help curb my appetite. Hopefully, I will gain some motivation to go for a run or lift some weights once my body has adapted to the 2000 calories a day. Overeating at when adapted will only be 800 calories extra meal, which will be in the same range as my workout effort and will my hunger satisfied and not reaching for sweets or that extra meal.

Still Missing out on some golf. My schedule is starting to book up especially with Football back in full swing. My weekends don’t seem to have time to go play 18 holes in a day. Maybe I, should be to playing 9 holes instead? Halfing the holes is still golf and I’ll take any golf over zero golf. It is also time to start thinking about offseason training to make the 2020 season the best golf yet.

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Weekly Post 8/26/2019

High Lights:

  • Finshed my Excel Course
  • New Stand up desk
  • Quick 9 Holes

Low Lights:

  • Rained Out Golf league 

It was a whirlwind golf week with my Tuesday Golf league getting rained out. There are very few weeks left which makes this a big loss. last-minute invite on Sunday to play 9 holes did help soothe that burn for a missed round. We even ended up playing those 9 holes at Jackson Park. I played the first 4 holes really well. My swing was on plane and I was able to keep the ball off the tee and hit the fairway or just off the edge which I believe helped me keep my swing intact by not hitting a difficult lie. That is what usually throws me off a good clear mindset and lets the doubt and mistrust in my own swing for me. Typical mental midget stuff for me I guess, this is why I need to really get back to drilling the swing at home. If I can keep this swing all the way to back 9 were talking about personal record-breaking scores 🙂

In other news a huge upgrade to the home office this week. I purchased one of that mechanical stand-up desks. https://www.autonomous.ai/ So far so good, It was a little bit to set up. It took the better part of the afternoon. It took even longer to wire up all the cables to keep them as hidden as possible. To be fair I am a little OCD when it comes to hiding and tucking wires so that’s where most of the time was spent. The desk does look good and works well so I pretty dure this was a good purchase.

To cap this week off I was able to finish off my Udemy Microsoft Excel course. It took a while the as the course is just over 17 hours long and does come with a bit of homework but I was able to keep up with the course while the instructor was explaining the projects. I wish I had taken this course way earlier in my working career. I always knew that there was a lot more power to Excel than what I was using. but most of my work project only required my novice level of skills. This course did teach me a lot of basic level information that will increase the speed at which I can build worksheets. that alone was worth the price of the course but, the real added value of this course. It has opened my eyes to what the next levels are to this program and where I can direct my attention to further advance my skills and become an Excel Jedi Master.

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Weekly Post 7/22/2019

High Lights:

Low Lights:

  • Missed league night

Finally actually made some time to start learning to code in Python. I created an account on Udemy and purchased a course called “Automate the Boring Stuff with Python Programming”  I did some quick research and found on a couple different forums that this course was mentioned everywhere as a great place to start cold without any type of programming knowledge.  I’m only about 90 minutes into this course and still excited to complete it.  It is a lot of new information for me so I will have to pace myself to be able to comprehend all of it and hopefully put it to good use in the near future.

I finished the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain-John J. Ratey, Eric Hagerman   This was a fast data packed book, The audiobook length was just over 8 hours. The main theme of the book is how exercises/physical activity increase the quality of life thought your whole life.  It even goes into detail about how exercise will help the deteration of your brain by actually growing it in you later years.  I Might do a full book review on this one in the future.

I got invited pretty last minute to play in a golf outing at Cog Hill with the Disabled Patriots Fund This was a pretty fun outing that had a bunch of fun event holes along with the usuals like Longest Drive and closet to the pin competition. Unfortunately the weather did not cooperate all day.  It was a 9 am Shotgun and it drizzled all the way until the 12th hole and the sky’s opened up and dumped a bigtime downpour for the next 5 holes. We tried to play through it but at one point the everybody that was still on the course and to get cover under trees for about 18 minutes.  This was kind of fun as we had about 9 carts all huddled under 4 huge oak trees.  After the big down pour then sun cam out for the rest of the wholes but everybody was soaking wet and with hot sun and what felt like 100% humidity the rest of the round was kind of uncomfortably swing and walking in super damp clothes.  It did get to smoke a great cigar while we played though and hey if you can’t golf in the rain your cutting your golf season even shorter.

AVO cigar on the 8th hole on course #3 at Cog Hill