1. My true passion in life is writing and creating things with my mind. However, in my daily life, I work as a personal trainer. I have been at it for nearly 10 years and I must know my stuff to still be employed doing it. I didn’t realize how much of an impact I’d had though. I had a person I’d trained for several years in their home reach out to me. They had a pretty bad injury and once cleared from PT they wanted to train with me again. I don’t do in-home training anymore though. They were perfectly happy to drive 20 miles from their home to my work if it meant I trained them. That really made my day to hear.
2. I have gotten to about a week of cutting my caffeine intake by roughly half. I can’t, and won’t, totally give up caffeine. That being said I do know that my intake level was way too high. I love energy drinks. I love pre-workout supplements and have for decades. My goal over the proceeding weeks is to get energy drinks back to a ‘few times a week’ deal rather than daily, or 2x daily. I ordered a nice stainless steel travel coffee mug so hopefully spending money on that will motivate me to drink more coffee.
3. I wasn’t paying attention at the gym. I went to get on a stationary bike for a few minutes of intense cardio. These bikes, especially the upright ones, typically have a pair of compartments to place a drink, towel, or phone. So I set up the seat and put my towel in the left side compartment. As I said I wasn’t paying attention so I went to put my phone in the right side compartment but instead my phone dropped onto the floor. My first thought was since I wasn’t paying attention I had placed my phone on the edge or something and it had fallen off. I put the phone back into the right side compartment and it dropped straight through to the floor. Why? Because there was no compartment, just a hole. I had to laugh at the foolishness of literally dropping my phone through that empty space twice before actually looking to see what was up.
4. An interesting event that keeps on occurring recently is the huge flocks of geese that fly past my window several times a day on most days. At first, I chalked it up to migration but it’s now the dead of winter. Usually, in the hour or so right before or after noon I’ll hear a flock of probably 20-40 geese honking as they fly by. Then it happens again. It’s typically 2-3 times if I’m sitting at my desk working. I wonder if I am in their typical flight pattern, or if they just think I enjoy hearing a chorus of geese honking several times in rapid succession.
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| Flock of seagulls this is not. |
5. It was pretty funny to see an old man bargaining with an automatic door at a grocery store. He was pushing his cart toward the door to exit and obviously, the door should automatically swing open. It did not. If it was me I would have just pushed the cart into the door and forced it open. This old man decided to speak kindly to it as if that might make it reconsider not opening. Again, it did not. I am not sure if he had the strength to force the door open but he didn’t try. He ended up going out through the in door as that one was working without issue.
6. I had a hankering for a meatball sub. So I went to a nearby sub shop that I don’t typically visit. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure if they were still in business. I stopped and the ‘open’ sign was lit. I opened the door and it was way too dark and quiet. I thought about turning around but a guy’s head popped up behind the counter. I placed my order and waited. I never heard a sound from the kitchen. No phone ringing, only the sound of the television playing. After 6-7 minutes he came back around with the sub wrapped. I felt a bit bad since he was seemingly all by himself so I left him a tip. He made sure to pick the tip jar up from under the counter before ringing me up. The sub was good though.
7. I’ve had the same pair of old-school over-ear wireless headphones for probably almost 7 years. For someone who used to break their headphones at the gym sometimes after only a few days it has been a luxury I’m not used to. However, it might be about time to put these out to pasture. The outlet to plug it in to charge is now so worn that I have to move the wire in a very specific way to get it to begin charging. I currently have the headphones plugged into my laptop with my mouse pad draped over the charging outlet as it’s the only way to get the dang headphones to keep charging. When you have to go through that much effort just to charge it might be time to 86 them.
8. The first real snowstorm of winter came this week on Cape Cod. We lucked out as we only ended up with 3-4” of heavy wet snow. The highlights were my Fitbit showing me in my heart rate zone for 35 minutes, meaning it was either really heavy snow or my cardio is terrible. The other highlight was me using the heavy wet snow as a makeshift car wash. I grabbed handfuls and rubbed it into dirty spots on my white car. Hey, it worked. Froze my hands a bit but saved the money it would cost at an actual car wash.
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| Real snow, but not a real lot of snow. |
9. I’m addicted to the Playground feature on the new IOS update for my iPhone. It allows you to turn almost any photo into an AI-created animation. I spent way too much time going through my photos and having Playground turn people into animations. What I found particularly funny was that when I ran the program on several photos of me as a child they turned me into a girl. This wasn’t a one-off, no it was several different photos. I didn’t think my hair was that long when I was 4-5 years old, but I guess AI thought differently.
