I'm Ambivalent

Wordle 1,015 4/6

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I feel like I should feel worse about things than I do.

At work, we've made progress and been productive by some measures despite my executive function not being that high.

In Warcraft, that break from my main ended. About eight days ago, on a lark, I joined a group for the last boss, it went well, and I got the item that starts the legendary quest. It was long and tedious but I finished it this past Wednesday. I also worked on some new "do everything" meta-achievement, which is kind of mind-numbing but easy and has a bunch of rewards. So I played my main more than planned. Conversely, the work on the class sets for those alts hasn't gone well, and after I get the three I'm currently close to, it'll be even worse to do the ones after them, so that's daunting.

I'm reading Shada these days. I read it once, a long time ago, but it's interesting to reread now, as I'm rewatching the show with my kid and Douglas Adams is a more faint memory. 

I tried to play Modern at Friday Night Magic yesterday. I forgot my deck, of all things. I played Draft instead. It was fun enough, and good for me for trying something new, but of all the stupid mistakes to make...

I seem to be hitting a wall in terms of fitness and weight loss (not the same thing). I'm not sure that's bad; I'm already well under the American average. But I'm a lot less fit than I was right before covid, so I feel it's reasonable to try to do a bit better.

Right now I'm exhausted and in pain because we biked to the kite festival. 3.1 miles one way, with a lot of standing and running around in between.

Calories in, calories out

Wordle 1,007 5/6

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On 1/28, I started weighing myself daily when possible and writing it down. Simply paying attention to it had no noticeable effect. (Disappointing but not surprising.) It helped me slightly cut down on snacks or desserts, I guess, but my weight would predictably tick up after the weekend or eating out in general. Always between 171 and 180, not bad at all by American standards, but not as good as I'd like. This is related to the fact that I haven't been able to jog regularly since 2022, and the fact that biking the kid to school is far less exercise than I was used to, and I wasn't even doing that for most of the winter due to cold temperatures and the e-bike's flat tire. I just thought about my weight but did nothing about it for most of that time.

On 3/15, my weight ticked down to 171.4, the lowest since I started tracking it. That, unfortunately, was a Friday. We ate out that night as a family. The following day, we met a friend and some family of hers at a restaurant for dinner. The day after that, we had leftovers, but there were still a lot of them. Thus I started Monday a few pounds higher. But I got a taste of being in shape and it left me hungry for more. So, Tuesday, I went jogging for the first time in months. (In my defense, I'm still not over the plantar fasciitis, and I've got other kinds of exercise in the meantime.) I took it very easy to ease back in, 1.56 miles in 16:51 minutes, less than half what was standard 2 years ago, but anything is better than nothing.

Right after posting this I did some calisthenics and ran that route again, at or after the last minute before a Girl Scout's event. Let's hope I don't regret that...

It's not wallpaper, but the paint here is yellowish...

Apparently the 15th was Wordle #1000? Interesting.

Wordle 1,000 🎉 4/6

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A lot of little things this week seemed calculated to drive me nuts. 

At work, to boil a busy week down to eight words, everything was harder than it should have been. 

• One subject matter expert retired a document I had already put work into. 
• Another subject matter expert reapproved a document without changes but I had questions of my own they didn't answer or apparently even understand. 
• Someone asked to make changes to an org chart when I was the only one around, and I had to say no because I didn't know them and the org chart showed they had no authority, but I probably could have handled my response better in other ways. 
• We had a briefing about a new task tracking system, and while the transition is unquestionably bad news for us, I'm more concerned about how unprofessional my teammate was to the messenger. 
• The kid had school inservice Thursday and Friday and I had to pick her up before a meeting. 
• Inputs for two urgent documents were late, and when they came, addressed the less urgent of two. 

Work aside, the kid seems grumpier and brattier than usual for no apparent reason. I've ramped up use of my orthotic shoe inserts to the point where I've worn shoes more than in most of the past 4 years (wow, there's a milestone), and it's getting warm enough that my feet get sweaty and therefore itchy. I'm even hearing a faint dripping in the walls off and on. T. can't hear it, and I can't hear it all the time either, but when I can, it's persistently annoying.

My mood is surprisingly good with all that in mind! Good influences include the weather, getting a little more exercise (which are interrelated, of course), getting more sleep, and making progress on some incremental things at work. Also presentism; I was miserable Wednesday and Thursday but Friday went unusually well. The WAR went well, I got some overdue admin work done, and we did some fun shopping before/around gymnastics. 

Healthy engagement with multiple hobbies might also be helping. Variety is good?

• I ordered some Magic cards online last week and made changes to my Modern deck this past Sunday or Monday, but haven't actually played it yet. Some of that shopping Friday was at Labyrinth, where I got a Doctor Who deck. Not the one either the kid or I was the most enthusiastic about, they were out of both of those, but it should still be fun. 
• I've mostly been spending my time in Warcraft doing Normal raids and easy Mythic+ on multiple alts, to complete their sets for the tier. It's a moderate challenge and a moderate amount of variety, and definitely a lot more interesting than trying to get the legendary on my main. 
• A couple weeks ago I checked out the first book of The Murderbot Diaries from the library, mostly on T.'s recommendation. I'm enjoying it. I'm now halfway through the second book. It's not big or deep enough to keep me engrossed for years, but for every Wheel of Time, there's a The Dresden Files, so maybe that's just as well.
  

Business and pleasure

Wordle 994 5/6

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Work was productive over the past week, but not in fun ways. That effort to organize our backlog has paid off in that I could get to work, or put people to work, on the oldest or most urgent tasks with more certainty about what those were. Good for me. But there were a lot of little problems about how to work on them, and whether the information we've been given is actually accurate. Twice now a certain team has told us a document was good to work on, and then after we got around to working on it and put several hours into it, told us it was irrelevant and should be retired. If that happens a third time we're talking to management. 

Also, I got a scare when I did a security training and realized I hadn't reported international travel 2 years ago. It'll probably be fine, but still, that was stressful.

Haven't been sleeping well lately. T. seems to have plateaued on CPAP progress. Also, around 2 AM on the 6th I got up to go to the bathroom and nearly fainted. Something like that has happened twice before (this was the first time, and the second time was a couple weeks ago or so). Even though I didn't literally faint the two recent times, the fact that it's a pattern is a bit scary, so I made a doctor's appointment for Friday. It was inconclusive.

Over the past week I've been playing Warcraft a little bit less than let's say 2 months ago, and casually. I've got the Mythic Battle of Dazar'alor plate set (not soloable because that's in a legacy content gray area, but still casual) and three tints of the Dragonflight season 3 tier sets on various characters, and I'll probably continue doing so over the next few weeks, but no comprehensive or challenging goals seem interesting.

Monday or Tuesday I asked for advice on Reddit about my Modern deck and got some good ideas, so Wednesday I ordered a few cards that should hopefully make my current deck better. I don't want to spend too much, but I enjoy the hobby and hopefully would enjoy it more with these changes. I also spent some time organizing my cards. About 10 years ago they were organized fairly well, but there were two problems: (1) they weren't labeled, so it was hard to figure out what that organization was, and since then I've got new cards here and there that I never sorted. So Monday I labeled everything and started sorting the unsorted stuff. Progress. 

Friday was the monthly parent/family gathering for the kid's school, and was parent's night out at the kid's gymnastics class, so that was socializing, plus a date. Fun.

That's enough

Wordle 987 5/6

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Monday was a bad day in almost every sense, to the point that I resolved to do things differently with work and my hobbies. 

• Work was a mess Monday. The same problematic tasks as last week continued, and a task that's been on my to-do list for months got tangled up in it as well. I powered through my role in it in an afternoon and did what I was told by rote, despite suspecting that the work I was doing was already out of date. 
• Domestic life was also messy. During the day Monday I got on the roof to work on the leak, so good for me for getting around to it, but it didn't work, so it feels worse in hindsight. On Sunday I thawed a 3-lb. leg of lamb for dinner, forgetting that T. was going to a political event Monday evening. Just figuring out a recipe I could do with it with what I had on hand was a pain, and I had to do it while handling the kid solo, including getting her to practice her guitar. T. cares about that a lot more than me, and I resented it a bit. (Not relevant to the aforementioned resolutions, just to my mood.)
  
• As for my hobbies, in some senses, Warcraft went well Monday. On my main I was in a group that killed Fyrakk on Heroic, the main activity for getting the legendary, for only the third time, and on an alt I've been neglecting for a couple months I did a whole bunch of easy-but-rewarding stuff, almost finishing their class set. But I'm frustrated anyway, because the Fyrakk kill was such a messy and unrewarding process! Killing him was basically the luck of getting invited to a good group. I died halfway through, due to someone else's mistake (and that's not just my opinion, the leader said so), but still, it sucks and my contribution was negligible. I'm not sure if the problem is my choice of class, my gear, my tactics in the moment, or all of the above, but I suck. And even if I had done better, it's still not a fun or meaningful process, it's just rolling the dice multiple times to hopefully get an item to maybe do better. 

So I'm done with my main. Maybe for good, definitely for the season. I finished my usual goals earlier than usual, went farther than usual, and am making myself miserable trying to go even further than that. I need to focus more on work, less on the game in general, and definitely less on my "main" character.

I stuck to that well enough for the rest of the week, playing in relative moderation and getting our backlog organized comprehensively. I didn't finish any tasks as such, but I started one and feel like I'm in good shape for more. 

Tuesday I also got orthotic shoe inserts, so I've been steadily wearing them more and getting used to them. (Recommended by the podiatrist way back here, and getting fitted for them was an errand on Jan. 22, and now they're fiiiinally ready for me.) 

Friday I went to Friday Night Magic. Lost two rounds, got a bye, and didn't stay for the fourth. Not too much fun. Maybe it was just bad luck or bad matchups, but I might want to consider doing things differently.