"The infection", "The voice snatcher", "Harold's whooping cough". No one knows its true name, form, or source. All that is known is when it comes, and trust me it will, it shows no mercy to those in its path. It starts as a small tickle in the throat upon waking. That's the first clue. Next comes the mild headache and general tiredness. Then the main course, three damn weeks of coughing non-stop. Finally the coup-de-gras, another three weeks without a voice. The upside for me during the whole experience, I usually don't feel all that bad during the whole thing. The initial throat tickle isn't fun, and the ab workout from the coughing is less than ideal, but it's not anything that can prevent me from doing any of my day-to-day. The one thing that does prevent me from my day-to-day is the constant complaining of people around me. Apparently the cough does annoy people around me.
I bring this up because this winter, I not have officially started my fourth round of this great little sickness of mine. First was after the very first chill of the winter this year, sometime early November. That didn't last too long, maybe a week and a half. Next came just before my trip to Israel. In fact, my preparation for my trip to Israel included massive vitamins, and trips to the gym to keep up my body so I wouldn't be sick in Israel. That ended just after the New Year, a good week before my trip. In Israel, my best friend followed me and struck four days before my trip ended, causing me to return on my scheduled flight rather than taking a few extra days to enjoy Israel for myself. That bout was fun, it lasted the full 3-4 weeks. It even got to the point where I was politely asked to stay home for a couple of days.
Now marks the beginning of my fourth bout, arguably much more tame than before, but not nonexistant. My plan is to still keep going to the gym because it somehow keeps the deamons at bay. Also keep up my daily airborne dose. This weekend will be spent at home mostly as well, besides two trips to the gym and one trip to a Hillel event. Hopefully the bed rest and indoors will help things along as well. The worst so far was this afternoon at work. I'm not sure what kicked it off, but at around 3:30 I just had some random coughing fit. By 4 I just had to leave to avoid the accusing eyes of those around me.
Friday, March 06, 2009
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Barbara is a whore
My apologies to the millions of Barbara's out there, sans the one the aforementioned crossfit workout is named for. The kicker is I was part of the group that only completed three rounds of the workout rather than the prescribed full five rounds. Even still it took just over half an hour to complete. This of course was after I decided to waste about 24 of my good pullups, situps, etc. on my warm up for the day.
For those observant out there, you might also realize that it's almost a full day since we did the workout. The worst part about the workout has to be the pushups. By now I'm actually enjoying my "almost self-sustaining" pullups. Situps don't leave me sore for days, and historically haven't. Squats have lost their debilitating effect since the marathon session of 250 followed by other weighted squats and whatnot. Pushups however leave me sore for days. I can't cross my arms in front of myself without feeling like my chest is going to 'asplode. It's pain.
Good news is I get to take the next two days off. I'm going to need the rest if I'm planning on joining on Saturday's fun. Saturdays usually have a grueling workout planned called FMP, Full Mission Profile. These workouts are usually modelled after real life situations, and are much more intense than the regular wod. An example is the Predator FMP, a mission to retrieve downed military property from enemy territory. I'm not sure what this weekend will bring, but if I even try to go through with it, let alone actually "complete" it, I'll be super proud of myself.
Aside from the physical, the diet has been progressively easier. Must mean I'm doing it wrong. Apparently fruit, while allowed, is only supposed to be on a one serving per day sort of basis, and on top of that only before / after a wod to give / replenish energy. Well, I'm not sure I like that a whole lot, especially since grapes have now become my best friend. The crunch of a carrot, followed by the sweet of a grape, I can almost pretend I'm eating real snack food.
Lunch by far is the most difficult meal of the day to prepare for. I'm almost ready to call it quits on finding a place to eat out and get a somewhat paleo meal. Lunch today was the first meal I ate out since starting, and at that it was a chicken salad. The "cheating" items were a little bit of cheese and the likely amount of salt in the salsa I substituted for dressing. On the plus side, it was very tasty.
Dinners are easy by contrast. Just cook up some bit of meat, prepare a veggie to go on the side, and viola, dinner. Follow it up with a handful of nuts and my dried cran-strawberry, and I've got the perfect sweet, semi-salty finish up to the day. Funny considering I got the "unsalted pistachios". Still taste a bit salty if you ask me.
Breakfasts aren't a problem considering I usually end up skipping the meal. Today I even considered waking up early to make myself something, just to change it up. I went to bed early, even got up pretty early too. Then my tired body just decided to lay down and let sleep take me back to my normal wake up time.
I've started highlighting the foods in the "eat" and "don't eat" section of my book just so I can build a mental list of things I like and what section they're in. Given this list, I'll start expanding my repertoire of food items I'm able to prepare. Just a mental note on my part.
For those observant out there, you might also realize that it's almost a full day since we did the workout. The worst part about the workout has to be the pushups. By now I'm actually enjoying my "almost self-sustaining" pullups. Situps don't leave me sore for days, and historically haven't. Squats have lost their debilitating effect since the marathon session of 250 followed by other weighted squats and whatnot. Pushups however leave me sore for days. I can't cross my arms in front of myself without feeling like my chest is going to 'asplode. It's pain.
Good news is I get to take the next two days off. I'm going to need the rest if I'm planning on joining on Saturday's fun. Saturdays usually have a grueling workout planned called FMP, Full Mission Profile. These workouts are usually modelled after real life situations, and are much more intense than the regular wod. An example is the Predator FMP, a mission to retrieve downed military property from enemy territory. I'm not sure what this weekend will bring, but if I even try to go through with it, let alone actually "complete" it, I'll be super proud of myself.
Aside from the physical, the diet has been progressively easier. Must mean I'm doing it wrong. Apparently fruit, while allowed, is only supposed to be on a one serving per day sort of basis, and on top of that only before / after a wod to give / replenish energy. Well, I'm not sure I like that a whole lot, especially since grapes have now become my best friend. The crunch of a carrot, followed by the sweet of a grape, I can almost pretend I'm eating real snack food.
Lunch by far is the most difficult meal of the day to prepare for. I'm almost ready to call it quits on finding a place to eat out and get a somewhat paleo meal. Lunch today was the first meal I ate out since starting, and at that it was a chicken salad. The "cheating" items were a little bit of cheese and the likely amount of salt in the salsa I substituted for dressing. On the plus side, it was very tasty.
Dinners are easy by contrast. Just cook up some bit of meat, prepare a veggie to go on the side, and viola, dinner. Follow it up with a handful of nuts and my dried cran-strawberry, and I've got the perfect sweet, semi-salty finish up to the day. Funny considering I got the "unsalted pistachios". Still taste a bit salty if you ask me.
Breakfasts aren't a problem considering I usually end up skipping the meal. Today I even considered waking up early to make myself something, just to change it up. I went to bed early, even got up pretty early too. Then my tired body just decided to lay down and let sleep take me back to my normal wake up time.
I've started highlighting the foods in the "eat" and "don't eat" section of my book just so I can build a mental list of things I like and what section they're in. Given this list, I'll start expanding my repertoire of food items I'm able to prepare. Just a mental note on my part.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Computer science, instant gratification, and when they don't show up at work
The one thing that I always loved about computer science is the "build and run" gratification that you get. Sure it takes a while to code perhaps, but you can see most of the time how this piece is going to fit into the thing you're trying to build. And once you have a piece done, compile and run. Get a simple answer, it will run or some semi-colon is missing. The part you wrote is either now present in the program, or causes the program to freeze.
Historically that was the case anyway. Now that the project are bigger and more complex, things get more interesting. Lets say you wrote this piece of code, and yes it did work, and everything was fine. Well one day, some person decided to run your piece of code while eating a blueberry muffin. This person usually prefers cantaloupe, but today was a treat. All of a sudden because of this seemingly unrelated coincidence, the power goes out for the entire neighborhood. Those are the fun bugs to find. And no, my software hasn't caused a blackout, yet.
I can appreciate bugs that have some sort of cascading effect. Those are sometimes even cool to watch. These are the bugs where a beaver chips a tooth, which causes a log to be cut incorrectly, causing the damn to fail, flooding a campsite, and that's why your boots outside the the campsite are soaking wet (true story, got the tooth to prove it). Bugs like these have sort of a long path to follow, they're mostly straight forward, and it's relatively obvious where one leads to the next.
Bugs that I will not stand for are bugs that just hop along causing all their ruckus at the end. It's like a tick in the yard that jumped on a dog, then on the cat that the dog chased, then on the floor, that you stepped near to get infected with something bad. The cause of the result just got passed around and there's less of a evidence path to follow when finding where you might have a "tick colony" or something.
Which leads me to our nice bug today. Apparently while running our software, you can run someone else's software. We have a dialog that says you shouldn't do that, but computer users don't like to read dialogs, me included. Well, while running these two unrelated pieces of software, after closing their software, the subdirectories in our software's directory all get renamed. To make this even more fun, it only does this after running a specific portion of our software. This portion is specific, but large. We can narrow it down, but to run each test scenario takes upwards of 30-40 minutes to get the answer.
Thus mixing my two least favorite items, devious bugs and non-instant gratification. Today was a long day...
Historically that was the case anyway. Now that the project are bigger and more complex, things get more interesting. Lets say you wrote this piece of code, and yes it did work, and everything was fine. Well one day, some person decided to run your piece of code while eating a blueberry muffin. This person usually prefers cantaloupe, but today was a treat. All of a sudden because of this seemingly unrelated coincidence, the power goes out for the entire neighborhood. Those are the fun bugs to find. And no, my software hasn't caused a blackout, yet.
I can appreciate bugs that have some sort of cascading effect. Those are sometimes even cool to watch. These are the bugs where a beaver chips a tooth, which causes a log to be cut incorrectly, causing the damn to fail, flooding a campsite, and that's why your boots outside the the campsite are soaking wet (true story, got the tooth to prove it). Bugs like these have sort of a long path to follow, they're mostly straight forward, and it's relatively obvious where one leads to the next.
Bugs that I will not stand for are bugs that just hop along causing all their ruckus at the end. It's like a tick in the yard that jumped on a dog, then on the cat that the dog chased, then on the floor, that you stepped near to get infected with something bad. The cause of the result just got passed around and there's less of a evidence path to follow when finding where you might have a "tick colony" or something.
Which leads me to our nice bug today. Apparently while running our software, you can run someone else's software. We have a dialog that says you shouldn't do that, but computer users don't like to read dialogs, me included. Well, while running these two unrelated pieces of software, after closing their software, the subdirectories in our software's directory all get renamed. To make this even more fun, it only does this after running a specific portion of our software. This portion is specific, but large. We can narrow it down, but to run each test scenario takes upwards of 30-40 minutes to get the answer.
Thus mixing my two least favorite items, devious bugs and non-instant gratification. Today was a long day...
Why does a challenge have to be difficult?
As of 1pm today, I was prepared to commit paleo suicide. Yes, it's not even through day 2 all I can think about is a damn hamburger with fries. Man does that sound so good. The hard thing right now is finding something that feels filling, besides physical activity. A cruel irony if you ask me. If I'm actively doing something, then I can stand the light foods, even no food, which is actually really bad. I can't help it, if I'm doing something physical, then I don't need the "bad" foods. The flip side to this though is if I'm not being particularly active, lets say maybe for 8 hours a day while I'm sitting at work in front of the computer, then the lighter paleo foods are not filling what-so-ever. Gram for gram, if I ate a simple hamburger with katsup, 2 pickles, a leaf of letuce, onion, and a BUN, I would be plenty satisfied. I've probably eaten twice that in carrots, celery, apples and oranges and I'm having a hard time feeling satisfied.
On the plus side, since sleep is part of this whole challenge, and since last night's baseline workout of "Fight gone bad" (google it, seriously) basically kicked my ass, I slept like a baby. Went to bed around 11:30 pm and stayed that way until naturally waking up (no alarm) at around 6am, then just dozing until around 7:30 or so.
One more thing, it has come to my attention that this challenge also include a prize to be won. As if looking and feeling great isn't good enough. The person that makes the most progress in fgb, does the best in fgb, sticks to the paleo logs / diet, sleeps more, loses inches, gains inches, loses pounds, whatever, gets a little vacation getaway south of the border. While this isn't something that I'm particularly excited about, I am certainly interested in "winning", and that means against other people not just myself. :P
On the plus side, since sleep is part of this whole challenge, and since last night's baseline workout of "Fight gone bad" (google it, seriously) basically kicked my ass, I slept like a baby. Went to bed around 11:30 pm and stayed that way until naturally waking up (no alarm) at around 6am, then just dozing until around 7:30 or so.
One more thing, it has come to my attention that this challenge also include a prize to be won. As if looking and feeling great isn't good enough. The person that makes the most progress in fgb, does the best in fgb, sticks to the paleo logs / diet, sleeps more, loses inches, gains inches, loses pounds, whatever, gets a little vacation getaway south of the border. While this isn't something that I'm particularly excited about, I am certainly interested in "winning", and that means against other people not just myself. :P
Monday, March 02, 2009
Paleo Challenge - Day 1
I wasn't planning on starting the whole challenge. In fact, last week I had already sort of gave in considering I absolutely love quite a few of the foods on the no-no list. Most notably, this is going to be hard without: cheese, potatoes, pho (noodles), the random sweet, tacos, and just about every other food I'm accustomed to just spontaneously eating. To top it off, I recently went on a shopping run to get a stockpile of these illicit items.
After work today, l was actually planning on going straight home, then it changed to stopping off at Barnes & Noble to look at some Mac related literature. Then came the decision to turn left to the BN, or right to crossfit. I'm guessing you now what happened next. To my pleasant surprise, my partner in crime Lynn was there to join in on the fun. Kumar and Devan were sadly absent. Kumar even talked to me at work today asking if I was interested in the challenge, and also joking how the paleo diet for a vegearian could very well kill you... Way to look on the positive side.
The paleo challenge is designed as follows. It's a 90 day long event where each participant is to keep a log of foods eaten, workouts completed, sleep gotten, and feelings felt. There's a log book that it's all supposed to go in, and weekly we'll post our progress on the main gym blog. Every three weeks, there's a baseline workout that we'll do, we'll weigh in, measure up, and perhaps take and post photos to track our progress.
Most everything I'm planning on keeping track of in my little log book, but as for the feelings part, I plan on just incorporating them here and maybe put the important bullet points in the log book. So far, I haven't gotten much sleep... the challenge only started today :P. I'm hoping to get to bed early today though. I woke up feeling a little on the sickish side, but as always after a good workout I'm feelin' fine. Keeping on my gym schedule is just about the only thing that I think will help keep me on my eating schedule. At least for my dinners anyway, lunches and "breakfast" I'll just have to keep the workout in mind. Just as a disclaimer as well, I already feel pretty darn good just including crossfit in my routine without changing / monitoring diet and sleep. I've got relatively high hopes for the 90 days if I can stick to it. BUT... I have relatively low hopes for the period of time after this "challenge". I'm not particularly good at open-ended goals, but a 90-day goal, I can keep that in mind.
I'll keep me posted.
After work today, l was actually planning on going straight home, then it changed to stopping off at Barnes & Noble to look at some Mac related literature. Then came the decision to turn left to the BN, or right to crossfit. I'm guessing you now what happened next. To my pleasant surprise, my partner in crime Lynn was there to join in on the fun. Kumar and Devan were sadly absent. Kumar even talked to me at work today asking if I was interested in the challenge, and also joking how the paleo diet for a vegearian could very well kill you... Way to look on the positive side.
The paleo challenge is designed as follows. It's a 90 day long event where each participant is to keep a log of foods eaten, workouts completed, sleep gotten, and feelings felt. There's a log book that it's all supposed to go in, and weekly we'll post our progress on the main gym blog. Every three weeks, there's a baseline workout that we'll do, we'll weigh in, measure up, and perhaps take and post photos to track our progress.
Most everything I'm planning on keeping track of in my little log book, but as for the feelings part, I plan on just incorporating them here and maybe put the important bullet points in the log book. So far, I haven't gotten much sleep... the challenge only started today :P. I'm hoping to get to bed early today though. I woke up feeling a little on the sickish side, but as always after a good workout I'm feelin' fine. Keeping on my gym schedule is just about the only thing that I think will help keep me on my eating schedule. At least for my dinners anyway, lunches and "breakfast" I'll just have to keep the workout in mind. Just as a disclaimer as well, I already feel pretty darn good just including crossfit in my routine without changing / monitoring diet and sleep. I've got relatively high hopes for the 90 days if I can stick to it. BUT... I have relatively low hopes for the period of time after this "challenge". I'm not particularly good at open-ended goals, but a 90-day goal, I can keep that in mind.
I'll keep me posted.
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