Monday, August 1, 2011

Day 3, A Daggone Monday

Oh goodness…I’m sitting here with my stomach painfully full. It’s swollen with the goodness of my wife’s cooking for the night. (We trade cooking [and dish-doing] responsibility every other day, for the most part. Honestly, she’s not the only one that cooks. I’m on the hook tomorrow.) Since I still taste my dinner, I might as well start there, then do a time warp and jump somewhere else in the day. Or, better yet, I’ll start with getting home for the day, when I got to walk in the door to my wife mixing up a batch of beer bread she was planning to roll out as pizza dough, give her a little kiss on the neck, say hello to my pups, and give my boy a big hug and kiss.
I hate Mondays because they’re the longest time I spend away from my son. Yes, I work 40-plus hours per week. So does my wife. We don’t have the luxury to do otherwise. But we DO have jobs with family-oriented management who allow us some flexibility in our work schedules, and it’s something we appreciate greatly. Those details are for another blog entry, perhaps, but suffice it to say Mondays are the one day I always spend the least time with my son, and I hate that.

Anyway, hellos were said, hugs and kisses were given, heads were petted and patted, and I realized it was pizza night. (It’s not that Mondays are pizza night, it’s just that my wife was making pizza.) Unfortunately, I had some immediate garden-tending to do, so I grabbed a bottle of the Inversion IPA and went about the gardening while Angie made dinner: pepperoni pizza on the aforementioned beer bread crust with the pesto remnants from last night for sauce and big salads on the side: (a colon within a colon?) mixed greens, a bit of carrot, green onions from our garden, sliced up pepperoni, a healthy dose of cheese, and some croutons dowsed in an Italian dressing. I scarfed my salad, and subsequently threw back three slices of pizza, all washed down with the last of my barbera from last night. Geez I’m full. But it was a full day. This seems just.

Another night of poor sleep, but better than the last. I tell ya, the pills just don’t help me much. After lying in bed for a couple of hours, tossing around in bed like a cyclone then spending a good 15 or 20 minutes watching Angie and Liam sleep, I got up at about 6:30, leaving my wife there sleeping with Liam, who ended up in our bed earlier in the morning. We don’t always do that, but we sure aren’t against it.

Naked Juice was on sale yesterday, so I grabbed a few at the time, and I started the day off with a Berry Veggie. Then a pint of orange juice and a quick perusal of the garden. Angie telecommutes on Mondays, so I dove into the routine, got showered up, packed for the gym later in the day, and headed out to work.

I got to the office around 8:00am. I ate a handful of blackberries my wife picked last night. I love the fact we have an espresso machine at my office, and I made myself a mocha (3 espresso shots, 2% fat milk, and 2 heaping teaspoons of cocoa mix), and had a packet of instant oatmeal with flax seed. How busy was my day? I finished that coffee at 11:30.

Work is work, but it was one of those days where I nearly shit myself once (crass, I know) due to an unexpected phone call and was otherwise like a hamster on a wheel: trying my best to accomplish SOMETHNIG, yet not really succeeding at much. Meetings. Reports. Pushups, but only 20.

~~Sitting at a desk all day isn’t great. It’s not good for a person. You burn Calories doing anything, sure. (I already have a blog entry I’m dying to write about baselines, I just need to find the time.) But I try to break up my days with something: sit on an exercise ball instead of my chair, stretch, what-have-you. Today, the one time I thought about it, I dropped and did 20 pushups. Yup.~~

Lunch started with salted almonds. Servings per container…how many? My ass: let’s make that…5, at most. A bit later came a banana, then peanut butter and blueberry jelly on double fiber bread. (Whole wheat bread is great. This is like whole wheat bread on steroids, I guess: 6 grams of fiber per slice. Thank you, Rudi’s Organic Bakery, wherever you are.)

~~Important point: eat natural peanut butter. That other stuff, it’s pretty much hydrogenated oil with peanut flavoring. It’s terrible for you. Natural peanut butter…sure, it’s not almond butter or whatever, but it’s a trade-out you should make if you haven’t already.~~

A bit of some of those whole wheat pretzels, which are also very high in fiber. (I’ll explain my fiber hang-up sometime. You’ll understand.) More work. On good days, especially since I work through my lunch, I can slip off to the gym in the late afternoon for a quick workout. Today was one of those days when I left the office at about 5:30, then headed for the gym after emailing Angie to apologize for the long day and sucking up my guilt about not going straight home to be with my family.

Yes, it was a gym workout day. The “what” of my workout isn’t the point, though I will share. But it’s not meant for comparison. Again, I want to do that blog on baselines, but….

I decided last week to start making myself do a bit of lifting again, and I don’t like to do a lot of that, so I did two supersets. A superset, if you don’t know, is when you do one exercise then immediately do another, take maybe a 60–90 second rest, then repeat. I tend to do three supersets per pair of exercises. So I did a superset of various pull-ups (8 reps per set) with various pushups using an exercise ball (12 reps per set). Destabilization can really bump up your workout. Then I did a superset of squats (6 reps each) with some light-weight clean and jerks (8 reps each), which can make you feel real close to popping a lung. But no lungs popped. Then I got on the treadmill for an interval workout: ¼-mile slow, ¼-mile fast, 4 repetitions, a little over 2 miles run total. It was honestly a struggle to make it through. Internal drive is important. We all have it.

My automotive drive home loops me to the beginning of this blog, which I’m writing while drinking a bottle of some Argentine malbec. I love malbecs. I love wine. And I’m really, really tired. It’s 9:30pm. I want to read, but I have a feeling it will keep me up later than I should stay up. “They” will say one should read to wind down before going to bed, because that will help one sleep. “They” must not read very interesting books.

So I’m going to slug down this last bit of wine in my glass and go to bed. I’ll fall asleep quickly. I’ll probably sleep okay until about 3:00 or 4:00. Then I’ll wake up a bit, and the tossing and turning will begin. I’m not being pessimistic—I consider myself an extreme optimist, but I’m also a realist who knows myself all too well. So good night, orchid. You were such a lovely gift, and I generally have such a green thumb, and somehow I’m killing you. I suppose I know how, and I’m trying to correct it, but maybe it’s too late. Sorry ‘bout that.  

No comments:

Post a Comment