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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.

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Weekly Post 10/21/2019

Highlights:

  • Fired up the grill
  • Driving Range Session 

Lowlights:

  • Ate 2 Desserts On Monday
  • The Bears Are Embarssing 

Goals for next week:  Zero mocahs during the work week.

In the long-time effort of trying to reduce and or eliminate caffeine from my diet. Mochas/expresso has been the toughest to raign in. Kicking the soda habit only took three months. Albeit I did stop cold turkey style, the coffee is much more a social/ fun engagement for me layered with the added benefits that the jolt of caffeine gives on those weekend end mornings after a fun night out.
Maybe I need to change my goals to something more achievable in a short time and put some wins on the board and build off that success. So starting to this week My new goal will be to only have mochas 3 or fewer in a week. I will strive for 2 of those to be on the weekends and stay away from the weekdays as much as possible.

A quick recap of the Bears the past weekend. We sucked and I’m not ready to talk about it yet. This season is dangerously close to falling off a cliff. Not sure who to blame here but it feels like a lot of bad coaching decisions have not prepared this team at all for this season.

Got to fire up the grill this week for the first time in a while. Since both, I and the wife are back at work full time and the baby is at daycare. Family time has been condensed to 200 minutes daily. This has cut out a lot of time for things like grocery shopping, dry cleaners, golf. One of the services we have found to help maximize the time spent at home and not running errands was Hello Fresh. This meal-delivery service drops of ingredients for 3 meals a week. All of the ingredients are separated in a way to ensure a meal in less than 30 minutes. There have been some meals that took longer than that but all of those were due to a longer oven time, but the prep time is wicked fast. All of these meals are designed to be cooked with the least amount of tools and create as little mess as possible to eliminating the need for me to grill anything. I’m sure we could be grilling most of the meats that have come in the meals but they mostly cooked in a pan with sauce. So it was a real treat when I found some great looking bone-in ribeyes at the market this past weekend.

The weather was a little warmer on Sunday so I went to the range for an early morning practice session. I hit the first 5 or 6 balls well then the next 25 progressively got worse and worse. This time though I was able to work my swing back to some decent ball strikes. That process took way too long if memory serves me right it was close to 40 balls which do not is able in a regular round of golf. This is why we practice though. The best swings of the day came form hitting my 52 and 58-degree wedges. All of a sudden I’ve developed some distance control. I played a game where I would aim for the 25,50,75s yard flag and was sticking balls within a couple of yards and hitting the flag a few times. This is a major game-changer for me, if I can take the distance control to the course I should be giving my self ton of more par chances and maybe even some birdie puts on the Par 5s Now I just have to get out and play but it does feel like the golf season here in Chicago is about to slam shut.

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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 10/7/2019

Highlights:

  • Broke under 230 lbs
  • trying out intermittent fasting
  • No work on Saturday

Lowlights:

  • Bad take and bake pizza
  • Bears lost

Goals for next week:

  • Lose 1 lbs

I started to experiment with Intermittent Fasting. I choose to begin with the 18-6 protocol. With a 6-hour eating window and 18 hours of fast every day. This should increase the rate my body drops that unwanted fat I’ve been packing for so long. It will be hard to execute this diet if I have to move off my cushy 9-5 pm work schedule say to my early 6-2 pm shift will make that window to small since I will be up on average for 3 hours than usual. Meaning I will most likely not have a long run but will be having to cycle on and off depending on my work schedule. This will be an exploratory experiment to see if I can handle it and to observe how fast my body and mind adapt to the eating schedule.
It was another tough Bears loss to the Raiders in London. We looked and preformed flat and willfully underprepared the entire game. Credit to Coach Gruden for beautifully scheming Mack out of the game. This is all I want to say about this game as this season is quickly becoming depressing.

There was a sweet deal at Mariano’s for $12 for 2 Take and Bake pizzas. As a big fan of these pizzas, this was a no brainer for me. The 2 types of pizzas were straight sausage and 3 meat. We ate the 3 meat on the first night and it tasted great, the next night we heated the Sausage and boy did it disappoint. There was to much cheese and the cheese tasted watery. It as was painful to eat. I only made it 1.5 slices before I gave up, they were that bad. I finished the rest of my dinner with a nice big bowl of Jerry Garcia ice cream. I will give Mariano’s another shoot if this deal pops up again. Who knows I could have just been unlucky and picked the only bad pizza out of the place, and if it’s just a bad as the first one it will only be a 6 dollar loss and I’ll get to have ice cream for dinner again.

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Weekly Post 9/30/2019

Highlights:

  • Bears Win again!
  • Famliy Wedding in New York City
  • Big Ass Steak

Lowlights:

  • Drank way to much
  • Barley a healthy meal all week

Goals for next week: Get my diet back on track ASAP!

What a fun 4 day trip to NYC. The weather was just gorgeous for an early fall wedding in the heart of Manhattan. The wedding started promptly at 7:30 pm on Saturday, which gave us almost 3 full days to enjoy the sights and sounds of both the workweek and a sun-filled 73-degree day to have brunch and lunch in the park before it was time to get settled and all gussied up for the wedding at the library. I won’t bore you with all the details of the event except for 2 facts.

1) I was handed a glass of champagne as I walked into the ceremony and my glass was refilled a few times before the entrances started #score
2) Caviar was served – this was my first experience with caviar. It was served on top of a thin slice of butter which was then spread on a thin slice of a hard roll.

I thoroughly enjoyed the caviar and did not expect to like it as much as I did. I will be looking to try this again when I’m back in Chicago and not in the heat of the moment and taste it again with a fresh pallet. I will need to do some research and homework to make sure my second try won’t be tainted with sub-par Caviar (I’m sure that’s a thing, right?)

We had a few warm-up dinners before the reception on Saturday night and the wife and I ordered the 46oz 45-day dry-aged Bone-in Ribeye steak. This thing was massive and took a long time time to eat. It was cooked very well at Medium. With having to cut and chew so much meat the meat cooled off just a bit too much for my liking. The steak was accompanied by fingerling potatoes and cooked radishes, I could have done with something else other than the radishes. It was cool because all the vegetables from dinner were grown in the garden just outside of the restaurant which was a pretty cool garden to table freshness. I also treated my self to a couple of Old Fashioneds that were pretty decent.

Old Fashioned Cocktails with Average Ice
Old Fashioned Cocktails with Average Ice Cubes

It was a banger of a weekend and there was not a moment that wasn’t spent withs friends or family with tons of drinks and delicious food. Coming home from this trip I could feel the difference the 4-day gluttony fest had on my body. I fell so heavy and have lost some energy. I am looking forward to getting back to my morning smoothies and lunch salads and feeling lighter on my feet.

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Weekly Post 9/23/2019

Highlights:

  • Bears Won
  • Short Work Week

Lowlights:

  • Still Worked 6 Days

Goals for next week: To continue have smoothies for breakfast

Bears won so this week instantly became a great week in my book coupled that with a holiday week here wasn’t much to complain about. Even though I did work 6 days this week it was not the usually hectic and frantic workplace that I usually experience in 6 days.

Bears played well against a winless Washington Redskins team. It’s early in the season but every win is major since our loss to the Green Bay Packers and how strong the rest on the NFC North division is playing at the moment. Add that we have an intense second half of the season scheduled as well we cannot afford any more step backs.

Been getting into a nice groove with my Breakfast smoothies. I no longer crave anything else in the morning until I am hungry for lunch. I also have been working in some salads for lunch from the salad bar. So far I’ve been having a smoothie 5 time4s a week and a salad for lunch 3 times in that same week. This has been a major improvement in my weight management strategy. Plus all that extra vegetables have to be doing some good as well. I have been enjoying the progress seen on the scale and have given that extra motivation to stick to my routine to faster reach my goal of getting under 220 lbs.

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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.