Was home visiting family. Great to see everyone! Very humid.
I've started using Sleep As Android again, in conjunction with my Pebble. Great app. Hoping to optimize my sleep.
Eating at night – doing better! I am viewing my nighttime eating as an addictive behaviour rather than satisfying hunger. I mean, do I NEED to eat? No. So I should be able to decide not to. If I feel like that power to decide is not available to me, that means I'm addicted. And who wants to be addicted?
We have had a run of rain here which is better than intense heat because I've missed two garbage days in a row because of travel, so our garage litteraly smells like hot garbage.
Been travelling, seeing family, and working. All good. No free time to contribute to HG Launcher, etc. Not much time for blogging. It is supposed to be a work trip with vacation on either side for me but the vacation parts have been action packed.
Eating-wise, I've been doing OK. Not as much crazy over-indulgence as usual. This seems to be helping. I normally am way more active on vacation so combining it with not going nuts is a way to either not gain, or actually lose weight.
I've been #reading Pillars of the Earth, still really engrossing even after all this time (it is a very long book and the writing holds up throughout) and started #watching OA S2 last night. Pretty interesting, not sure where it's going.
Yesterday we had a birthday party for my son at a bowling alley. I was in charge of making sure the kids went up in the correct order on my lane (two lanes of four of five kids). My wife took some pictures and some of them were live photos so they have some movement in them.
There was one photo of me and I look grotesque. Hunched back (from Akylosing Spondylitis), overweight, moving stiffly, ostomy on my abdomen clearly visible for all to see.
It was a shock. I mean I know I have some health issues but I have had to convince myself I am all good in order to keep on trucking. I don't have time for pity parties. I can't stop and think of what a freak I am. I need to live my life and set a good example for my son. There was a time when I wasn't like this and I hold on to it.
Meanwhile, I have now seen myself the way others must see me. That look in their eye is pity. Or disgust, I guess. I don't know. What they don't see is a normal person. I am way too far from the middle of the bell curve for that. The question now is what can I do about it?
Stretching – been neglecting this for MONTHS. It helps with my posture. I am going to do my stretches and some push-ups right after this and before I get back to work. It only takes five minutes.
Weight loss – sigh – I have been doing IF (going from 10pm until noon the next day, if I can) but I need to extend the window and eat less inside it. I'd like to cut out nighttime snacking altogether meaning I am going from 7pm until noon or something. I am going to do my best. I would also like to maintain it on weekends, although that is very difficult from a social/family view point. I'll see how I do.
Clothing – what the hell can I do to hide my ostomy. It is blatantly obvious. Losing weight might help. It must gross people out or freak them out. I guess I can wear hoodies all the time, except when it is really, really warm out.
When I do laundry I always follow a couple of set procedures:
Socks – when putting away socks, always put unmatched socks on the far right of the sock drawer (or some other consistent location). When you put the next load away, take those unmatched socks out and try to pair them up with any socks from your current load. I think you'll find more than a few match up. If the same sock is unmatched over a couple of loads, throw it out or use it for something (sock puppet!).
If doing a couple of loads, make one load mostly “pants”. It is a lot easier to put away a load of the same type of item and often if you are dividing a load up there'll be a common article of clothing making up 1/3 or ½ of the load. Throw all these in together. Quicker put away.
Hang shirts on the right every time, and try to take from the left first. Eventually, all the shirts (and jackets, etc) you never wear are on the left. Put things that you need (suits you wear once a year, winter coats, etc) on the far, far left and put a marker between these and you “working set” (I use a suit in a suit bag as a border) and then you can donate the clothes that end up on the left after a while (maybe a year).
If you struggle to put away laundry, and you have access to laundry in your home, do smaller loads. Just do a load every 3 days or something. Put that away. It takes no time at all to put away 3 days worth of laundry. This gets you into the habit.
Got some good news from my doctor yesterday, long story but there was some stuff going on (noises from breathing while out of breath) that could have been something but it is nothing. I was super relieved to hear this.
Meanwhile, the adventure continues re: car parts, running errands, making sure there's something good prepared for dinner, and trying to fit showers in when I would rather be in bed.
I am loving Notion.so, still, which is odd. Normally, I get sick of “productivity apps” very quickly.
Got an amazing sleep last night, woke up before my alarm and that is it, I am dehydrated from not getting up in the middle of the night to get a drink... I'll take it.
There are wild fires North of here and the smoke is heavy. It's like it would be if you were sitting next to a campfire and the wind was blowing toward you. My eyes and throat are irritated. Still rather be here than in the thick of it, so I can't complain, I guess.
Notion.so continues to be a great product. I am looking forward to the phone app getting offline capabilities but not sure if that will happen. I am an old hand at being offline so I guess I can figure out how to print important lists if I will need them (it is pretty rare these days).
I have been very busy this week outside of work (and at work, but I always have more than enough to do there, thankfully) so I haven't gotten much done on that open source project I've been trying to help with. I did manage to make a new branch last night and start to poke around at the bug I am trying to fix, I think I figured out the relevant line of code I was hunting for so I'll try to get more done tonight after everyone goes to bed.
Lately, I have been trying out Notion as a way to track TODO items. I always tell people I like either using a spreadsheet or a plain text file for this (or the equivalent in paper form, etc). Notion feels like that.
A text page in Notion is like a text file. Free form, write what you like. A “database” in Notion is like a spreadsheet. And you can embed linked tables all over the place that go back to the database.
So here's how I am using it. I can have a “Project page” where I keep resources and notes on a project and embed my master TODO list but filter it down to display just the project TODOs. Every time I try a new “app” or “system” there's always some limitation imposed by the system which makes it hard to organize appropriately for the way I think about tasks. Notion seems to solve that problem.
Are there drawbacks? Sure. No working offline is a MAJOR drawback. But one I'll live with for a while. I can always fall back to email to draft notes and lists when offline (e.g. flying). If I want some data I might need (e.g. while camping, I guess?) I can dump it into another format (e.g. markdown files) as you can export the pages.
It is also “slow for capture” which is a problem I have learned to get around after trying so many systems. What I do is use IFTTT when I need to quickly capture something. I have an IFTTT note widget that sends an email to me with the address macdonaldster+TODO@g.... This gets auto-tagged as “TODO”. I frequently clear these into whatever system I am using to organize. In this case by adding them to the master task list in Notion.
So this will be interesting to 0-3 people (barely). I recently (after programming for over 2 decades) submitted my first PR to an open source project on Github. The process was remarkably easy!