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.

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!