In the Zone

It's a beautiful summer day in Minnesota, I hope everyone here had the chance to just sit outside and get a little bit of sun (and yes, we all freak out too much about sunburns and skin cancer - getting 15 minutes of good solid sunlight without sunscreen is still good for us - Vitamin D - as well as just puts us in a better mood!)

Sports athletes talk about being "in the zone" when they're on a hitting streak, shooting streak, etc. - some even describe feeling like everything seems like everything around them is in slower motion and they are at full speed. I don't know if I would exactly describe all of that for me, but I'm heading into my last week of my first of 4 semesters of graduate school (yes, I'll be 1/4 done on Thursday!), am handling the constant busy-ness at work, and am continuing to lose weight, and mostly just feel great. Yeah, sometimes I feel tired, but usually it's a good kind of tired :)

I was chatting with my manager this morning and told him how good I felt lately and how much I was getting done despite all the things going on, and he said he once heard the quite "If you want something done, give it to a busy person". Why is this so true? I know in college I performed a lot better with the 18-credit semesters than with the 12-credit ones. The summer job I had in Omaha, I got WAY more work done in our busy times than in our non-busy times. And in earlier years in Rochester, I was involved in a LOT of activities (probably more than I should have been) and yet I maintained a much more regular exercise and workout routine than I did the last couple of years, even though I was much busier.

So...I guess maybe my very good friend from college hit it on the money with the phrase he always used: "I'll sleep when I'm dead". Words to live by :)

192

Happy Mid-August to everyone! For those of us in Minnesota, I hope you are all enjoying the nicer summer weather we've had this week.

Today is the end of week 22 of my Atkins diet, and I weighted in at 192 this morning, which is a total lost of 31 lbs. The past month was not a huge amount of "loss" because of a 5-day vacation in Maine (and who isn't going to eat great food on vacation, not to mention great seafood in Maine!) but even with that trip, it's still going pretty well (over 1 lb/week average). Yesterday was particularly fun because we went and did some clothes shopping, and I bought 3 new pairs of skinnier jeans (not to be confused with "skinny fit" jeans as my build is not designed to wear those no matter how much weight I lose!). Just to give you some perspective, last winter (before I started this) I finally had to break down and buy two pairs of jeans and a pair of black pants in bigger sizes because I couldn't fit into the clothes I had anymore. The jeans I bought yesterday are 4 sizes smaller than those, and still actually had some breathing room. I'm going to give my larger-sized clothes to charity this week so that I don't have anything to fall back on (not that I have any intention or thought that I'm ever going to slip to that level again). My goal is still 180 by the end of the year - even if I go at the 1 lb/week pace, that is still easily doable (and if I don't quite make it, no big deal, I WILL make it by next year!).

I'm also entering my final two weeks of summer semester for grad school - it's hard to believe that I'm already done with 2 1/2 months of this 14-month program, it's going fast! I get a WHOLE WEEK off between summer and fall, at which point both Erin and I will be in classes, so you may not see us much in the fall (hopefully we'll get a few breaks!) My fall semester looks to be pretty full, as I'll not only be taking the 8 credits of the program classes, but a 3-credit elective. Eleven credits plus work, plus activities...well it's going to be full. But I'm looking forward to it.

Back to studying...

Retired

...or at least repurposed at some point. Yes, after nearly 10 years of faithful service, my little blue Linksys WRT54G has been unplugged and replaced by the router I purchased today. The Linksys was not failing or working incorrectly - actually it's probably been the most consistent piece of computer equipment I've ever owned. But it was finally starting to show it's age - no wireless N, no guest network, no gigabit, no IPv6, and I think now that I'm pushing more bandwidth through it, it wasn't always keeping up. I'm going to bring it to mom's house and plug it in there, and it will probably run another 10 years.

Any piece of technology that lasts 10 years (and is still useful) is pretty good...Linksys WRT54G, I salute you!