Update for 8/7/2016

Project updates

• Life maintenance – My schedule still feels cramped from this stuff, but I felt more hopeful last week than the week before.
  • Diet – The last day of the dairy-free experiment is Tuesday (technically today, but pretend I posted this two days ago), and the next Tuesday is the last for the gluten-free one. Cooking: Gluten-free, dairy-free, low-sugar brownies (based on this), which were also low carb because I tend to eat slightly too much of carbs and not quite enough fat and protein, so I used almond flour instead of the other gluten-free flour I bought. If I have to plan my desserts carefully, I might as well make them do work for me. A diet is like a game, balancing multiple factors to reach a goal, and part of my hopefulness last week was that after bumping up a bit, my weight decreased again to slightly lower than the previous week, which makes me feel like all this effort isn’t completely futile.
  • Exercise – I continued to exercise every day last week, walking on a nice tree-lined path nearby, but I’ve noticed that by the end of the day, the memory of those walks feels dreamlike, I think because it’s early in the morning, the setting looks like something from a movie, I’m kind of zoned out listening to whatever’s playing in my earphones, and the other people on the trail pass by without interaction, like ghosts. On Saturday I finally went to the gym to test the idea of getting my cardio by walking there and back and using the exercise bike, which worked well, especially setting my pace with the RockMyRun app, which plays curated playlists of music at whatever tempo you select, though it uses too much data for me, so for now I’ll just use my metronome app. I also started exploring workout log apps.
  • Daily routine – My morning schedule has settled down enough that I can make it to work consistently on time again, and much of it was because I didn’t have to wash the dishes or make my lunch in the mornings because I stayed on top of the dishwashing better and spent some time making several lunches at once, so I’ll try to continue that pattern.
• Math relearning – I made a decent amount of progress on this last week, but it was mostly reading, so it didn’t feel like much. I did, however, write some comments about the project that I’ll post on the wiki this week. I think I can also post something on GitHub this week finally. And on Friday I had dinner with Jeremy, and our conversation about the book he recently read, In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World, motivated me to keep moving on this project.
• Dusk – After my dinner with Jeremy, I took a spontaneous side trip to a park I’d been wanting to explore, and I took a few pictures to test out different viewing spots and angles, but I didn’t find the sky very inspiring that night, so I didn’t posted them, but maybe some other night I’ll take pictures there that will find their way online. On this visit I was reminded that walking down wooded trails in semi-darkness is a little scary, since I didn’t know what random criminal might be lurking, but I felt reassured by the fact that I was in the middle of a residential area and had seen a police car nearby.
• Media – I decided to succumb to the Stranger Things hype, and I ended up binge watching the whole thing over the weekend. It was like the movie Super 8 if Spielberg had collaborated with Guillermo del Toro instead of J J Abrams. I was especially impressed with Millie Bobby Brown and might look for more of her work. Speaking of movies, a few have come out that interest me–Star Trek Beyond, Jason Bourne, and Suicide Squad–so on top of our Star Wars marathon hopefully sometime this month, I’ve been making plans with Jeremy and Tim to watch those, which is nice because I’ve been feeling an unusual itch lately to watch something in a theater.

Life updates

• Apartment – As an addendum to last week’s story about my lease panic, I forgot to mention that I took the opportunity to observe my coping mechanisms, and the steps that helped me were (1) taking action ASAP by calling the apartment office, (2) writing a list of my worries, (3) making preliminary plans for worst case scenarios, (4) joking about the situation in a conversation with Jeremy, and (5) distracting myself with lunch.