What POSITIVE CHANGES are you making in your life?

dysjunct wrote: Interesting. I’ve never heard of Polar Seltzer. It might not get distribution out in my area, although there’s plenty of other flavored fizzy water.

I live in the La Croix region of Utah county. According to local tradition, one must never finish a can, leaving the container on the kitchen counter for days.

Cat drama on Friday night. On Wednesday and Thursday night, I allowed Archie to follow me upstairs while I was putting out food for Valerie and cleaning her litter box. Archie sniffed around a bit, and then proceeded to help himself to some of Valerie's food. As usual, Valerie remained invisible. Friday night, I didn't close the door all the way after checking on Valerie. I settled down to do some reading, when suddenly there broke out this horrible cacophony from upstairs. Growling, shrieking, hissing. Felt like it went on forever but was probably three seconds. I shouted NO and the noise abruptly stopped.

I rushed upstairs and found my cat slinking away with a slight limp and a guilty expression. I took him downstairs. Then I went looking for Valerie, and couldn't find her in any of her usual hiding spots. Then I thought that it was possible that she ran downstairs and through the open door to the main floor or even the basement. After 20 minutes of searching those floors, I went back upstairs and found her. My ex left behind a desk with two drawers and a space that looks like it was made for a third drawer but is just an open space. Valerie was curled up in there, looking as scared as usual. I slowly reached in and gave her some pats for a while.

So that's a setback. I going to maintain their separation for at least a few more days and then try for a space swap. In the mean time, my sister sent a care package of miscellaneous new cat toys, and I have doled a few out to both cats. Archie played a bit with his new toys, and later I could hear Valerie running around upstairs playing with her toys.

Sometimes a symbolic barrier works to separate them, but allows them to interact. I have a baby gate that my cats can walk through. But they don’t, and it keeps one cat mentally separated from the others, gives them the ability to see and smell each other, a way to walk away when unhappy; yet when there is supervised time, the gate is opened and they pass through.

I now have abs, sort of, for the first time in my life. I have had to give up on weighing myself, and measuring my proportions because my body just doesn't like to fit with standard measurements of what a fit and healthy body looks like. I have very disproportionately long arms and legs and a very big chest and so many traditional measurements like BMI fail miserably for me.

4 and a half years ago my wife died and I was about 240 pounds on my 6' 1.5" frame. Out of grief I stopped eating and started exercising and dropped down to 200 pounds in 3 months. I was fit and thin and at 18% body fat, great for my age, though BMI said I was still overweight. What I did was unsustainable and over the next 4 years the weight went back to 240, but a good proportion of that was muscle.

I gave up being vegetarian after 25 years and my body loved the protein and muscle appeared for the first time in my life. I started rock climbing and discovered that in spite of what you may believe, the muscles you need most are in your core, so my big torso got even bigger. I still have a bit of fat as being in your late 40s that is hard to shift and I don't want to starve myself like I did 4 years ago.

But anyway, my stomach now has lumps on it and the shape of abs that are quite obvious to the naked eye. Normally you get abs because you have such a low body fat that they are uncovered but I seem to have found another way by having your abs so large they poke through the fat. I still look huge and in a lot of angles it looks like I have a beer gut. There was a guy on Celebrity Big Brother many years ago in Australia who was self-conscious of his body and got silicone ab implants over his beer gut and my kids joke that is what I look like now.

But to me that is a huge achievement. I always wanted a ripped body, and while I don't realistically look ripped and often look like a standard overweight middle aged man, and shockingly BMI says I am obese, I am proud of those little bumps on my stomach.

Man, good for you. Genuinely. That's awesome.

@MuMu, I can relate to the buried abs bit, that’s how I was until I got injured from lifting WAY too heavy, stupidly, and wrong. Now I have diastasis recti and when I do a sit-up it appears that an alien is trying to escape my midriff

Yesterday was Happy Divorce Day to me! The judgement took effect finally and I am no longer hitched!

Mu, that is an inspirational story. I am sorry about the passing of your wife. There is nothing I can say that won't sound stupid, but I'm glad you are getting healthy.

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So I went to the urologist and he is putting me on 500 mg of Levofloxacin, which is basically Cipro. I'm allergic to sulfa drugs (skin rash). My PSA test scored an 8, which is not crazy high, but he wants to treat my prostatitis so he can retest me in eight weeks. But Levofloxacin, like Cipro, can cause tendinitis and/or ruptured tendons, especially in woman over 60. I am a man in my mid-fifties, and just moved from doing PT to using the back machines at our campus gym, and so I'm worried my tendons will snap like winter rubber bands if I continue my workout routine. I only have about 20 lbs. on the machine. It is embarrassing, but I have discovered late in life that working out gives me a lot of energy during the day, so I need to figure out if I can continue, or just do cardio on the treadmill or what.

The incidence rate for tendinopathy is 0.1% to 0.01%, and the incidence rate for tendon rupture is less than 0.01%.Mar 5, 2019

Ok, so I'm just going to work out, to keep my back happy, but not increase my weights for a month.

Cranberries wrote:

Warning: Spoiler!

I have no idea how to work out, I'm just emulating the machines at my physical therapist because it pretty much eliminated ten years of low level back pain.

It can be a big topic, but some general principles are:

• You should be doing both resistance training (machines or free weights) along with some kind of cardio.
• For resistance, if you are training for general health and not bodybuilding, you're fine sticking to big compound movements. That means movements which use as many muscle groups as possible, over the longest range of motion. Deadlifts, squats, bench press, etc. Not curls (only works biceps), calf raises, etc.
• Free weights are preferable to machines, because they make your body work harder to stabilize the weight. But they are harder to learn good form with. The Starting Strength YouTube channel has good tutorials, search "starting strength how to deadlift" etc.
• For cardio, do anything that is easy on your joints, doesn't matter. Swimming, rowing machine, bike, jump rope, whatever. It's better to do cardio at the end of a workout so that you're not tired when lifting weights; that's asking for trouble.
• Unless you are rehabbing an injury, or concentrating on learning a movement, you should be progressing in some way. Weights need to go up, or rest times between sets need to go down, or you need to go farther on the rowing machine in the same amount of time, etc. Your system only adapts in response to stress. Too much stress will injure you, too little doesn't cause adaptation, so find the balance.
• Make sure you're getting adequate sleep and protein.

If you want a specific program, what I'd recommend is a fairly typical beginner one. You have two workouts, Workout A and Workout B.

Workout A: bench press, barbell row, squat, cardio.
Workout B: overhead press, chinups (or lat pulldowns), deadlift, cardio.

Once you are warmed up, do 3 sets of 5 reps for each exercise at your work weight. If you successfully do all the sets and reps, then the next time you do that exercise, add five lbs.

You schedule thusly:

Week 1
Sun: rest
Mon: Workout A
Tue: rest
Wed: Workout B
Thu: rest
Fri: Workout A
Sat: rest

Week 2
Sun: rest
Mon: Workout B
Tue: rest
Wed: Workout A
Thu: rest
Fri: Workout B
Sat: rest

And so on, alternating weeks. Ask questions if you like, here or in PM, I'm happy to help. I helped my 72yo mother-in-law get to a bodyweight deadlift (she was concerned about osteoporosis), so I have some practical experience helping people who've never really trained before. Not a professional or anything, so you get what you pay for.

I quit my job. It was a bad fit. Looking for something else and shaved my beard for interviews. I look kinda like Toad from Mario.

Got lunch today with one of my few friends from the post office. He expressed sincere interest in playing D&D. After the holidays, of course.

Not Sure wrote:
The megaminx (12-sided) is one of the best things to take on next, because it's very similar to standard cube, but in slightly different ways.

It's a long rabbit hole, though. Have fun.

So this was an annoyingly accurate prediction. I went from “oh, that’s a fun documentary, I’ll get a set which has a 3x3x3 and a 2x2x2 and a pyraminx” to having, in addition to those:

- a Jperm 3x3x3 which is magnetic and lubed and lovely and clicky
- a megaminx (that’s a dodecahedron for you regular nerds)
- a 1x2x3 domino
- two 2x2x2 shape mods (panda and penguin)
- a 3x2x2 shapemod (banana)
- 4x4x4

Current status:
- kind of happy with the beginner method of 3x3x3, not really feeling it on the CFOP or Roux front (regular nerds: those are methods to solve a normal cube faster but which require a lot of memorization of specific algorithms).
- Megaminx feels close to being cracked but I can’t do it yet. It doesn’t help that a lot of sites that pop up on “how to solve a megaminx” use different notation.
- 4x4x4 is fun, but the algorithms for dealing with parity errors are long and annoying to memorize.
- the shapemods and domino are fun but trivial. Mostly good for trolling the kid by scrambling them after she goes to bed and then blaming it on gremlins.

After five weeks, the kitten finally decided that she wanted to join the rest of the household. She came down the stairs last Sunday and meowed loudly at the door until I let her out and onto the first floor of the house. My cat often hisses or growls when she gets to close, but a week later and there has been a significant decline in the hissing and growling. My cat has also learned the kitten's name, because on a couple of occasions, he hissed when he heard her name, even though she wasn't even in he room.

The new problem is that the kitten is a wriggly ball of near infinite energy. She loves to curl up next to me and writhe wildly, rubbing herself against me. I am having a difficult time typing this post because she has jumped up on my life a half dozen times since I started typing, and she frequently tries to walk on the keyboard. She hasn't knocked anything off a table of high shelf yet, and my old cat has never done then, so it might be a trait that just isn't common with brown tabbies. She is about nine months old, so I have at least three months and maybe a year more of the high-energy antics on the way.

To alleviate my cat's stress, I am leaving the door open to upstairs so that both cats have a bigger living space. Normally I would leave the upstairs closed off for most of the winter, because it gets inadequate heat, which is a typical problem for an older one-and-a-half story house. When my ex lived here, I had a baseboard heater installed upstairs, but it runs a little too warn for me, with a minimum on setting of 75 degrees. Leaving it open right now for the cats means that the baseboard heater is running all the time, and warm is escaping from the ground floor to the second floor. My first floor is a little chilly even with the heat on, because the exterior walls are minimally insulated. So today I hung an old sheet over the top five feet of the door going upstairs, to minimize the heat transfer but leave the way accessible to the cats.
Assuming the cats continue to peacefully co-exist, I will eventually close off the upstairs for the rest of the winter.

I am continuing to date even though I am feeling a bit burned out right now. The woman that I went out with last weekend likes to play board games and her teenage daughter plays Dungeons and Dragons. But she texted me yesterday to cancel our date for today because she is ready to go exclusive with one of the other guys she is dating. It probably didn't help that almost everything is closed on Christmas Day and the roads are unusually slippery today.

Over the course of the last 15 months, I have been on a total of 22 dates with 7 women. I am having an easier time getting a first date since I got better photos from a professional photo shoot. I am also pretty good at first dates, as more than half of these women went on at least four dates with me. But I can't seem to move from dating to being in a relationship, and I am starting to feel discouraged. But I feel that if I keep trying, I will get better at dating and also hopefully meet someone compatible. But I feel like 3 out of the last 4 women seemed pretty compatible until they broke things off.

A woman sent me a friendly message through one of these dating sites last week, and we started texting each other today. Based on her profile, I feel like we only have mediocre potential, based on limited common interests. But it's entirely possible that we might discover some chemistry in person, so I look forward to meeting her later this week.

It's been an interesting couple of months for me, which is my usual understated euphemism for a fucking terrible ride on the batshit crazy rollercoaster. Without offloading too much, because this is after all a thread on positive changes, I've been trying to hold everything together with varying degrees of success through seeking an exit from a misguided career move that turned punishingly sour, a construction project that became something of a nightmare financially, emotionally and very nearly legally, and the very unpleasant cherry on the top with my mother having a stroke in the middle of all of this.

Most importantly - she's recovered without any permanent effect and happily back at home. It's brought home some thoughts and emotions on advancing age, feelings of separation, and all the associated guilt and regret that brings with it. It's a catalyst to re-imagine one's priorities. I also had a frustrating unrelated call from my estranged father who called me in an inebriated state late one night. He was more honest with me on that call than he has been in pretty much my whole life, but man I hate drunk phone calls. Thinking about these two events together may have started a process of reconciliation with him, but it's a hard road as there is considerable baggage to deal with there.

Let's get to the positive changes then!

Construction work is 95% done and we've managed to recover to a strong enough position financially to be able to tell the contractors to fuck right off (literally, not figuratively) and to get tradesmen in at our leisure for the final fixes. I've been running myself physically into the ground over the past nine or ten days putting right much of the stuff that they screwed up - including moving about two and a half metric tons of rubble that was dumped in scattered heaps in both our and a neighbours garden (believe me, there are plenty of stories to whinge about here) - but we are finally in a position where we can live a normal life and slowly get to the right end point. I'm sure we'll look back on this period and laugh, although it might be more of a pained grimace on my part.

New job starts on 3rd January with a major international toy company, a big shift from the last few years of booze and pharma. Feeling positive and they are super excited about having me join. Really stoked by the idea of selling fun for a living.

Having spent the past few months sleeping on the floor next to the couch (which was occupied by deference by my spouse) due to the work cramming us into one room, we are not only getting proper sleep again in a real bed but I have also recovered the physical and mental space to re-engage with the things that I enjoy. At one point I severed many of my online connections because I was so overwhelmed with stress that I needed to reduce the number of things trying to grab my attention. For a period I felt fraudulent by putting on a veneer of "everything is just fine everybody!" but, eventually, it got the better of my preternaturally sunny side. My wife was a hero for pushing me out of the door on Wednesday nights to meet with my gaming buddies, although the guilt of being out 'having fun' was gnawing at me the whole time.

Man, I'm sharing a lot with you guys, which is unusual for me at the best of times. Weird that I find this a safe space, I think it's just something that comes across as intuitive for so many of you that it feels natural to me too. The couple of posts I made here today felt great as a way to start reconnecting with normality, and I now have about three hundred unread posts to catch up on. Hoping to also re-join the discord and maybe even get in an online game in at some point

I missed you guys - yes even you.