Not really an eventful day today.
Woke up at 7:30 to switch parking spots, as usual for my Rogers living portion of the week.
Woke up just in time to catch my mom who was already in Rogers dealing with skin cancer stuff. She brought me my shoes that I left at her place yesterday.
Thanks, mama. 😊
Looks like Happy, the Z3, has some things that need to be fixed on him. Otherwise, my mom is gonna get locked out one of these days–door locks aren’t working properly.
So I gotta put that on the list.
From there, I headed inside the Super Walmart to buy a new bowl. I was trying to boil a bowl of water on a fire So I could soften up my mouthpiece night guard enough to mold to my teeth in an effort to Stop any night time grinding that could be happening, and I was a little worried that fire might explode the glass, but I was hoping that the water in the bowl would temper everything like it does in the paper cup where you can actually boil water in the paper cup and not bring the cup.
But, alas, t’was not to be.
My bowl exploded, hence the need to go in today and buy a new one. 🙃
So I bought a bowl, then I went over to the gym. I made my first smoothie with my blender, and found that I both really like it and really don’t like it.
It’s really great for blending stuff up, and it’s probably really great for somebody who lives in a house and can really easily rinse off the blade and throw it right back in, but it’s probably the worst possible design for my living style. 😅
Oh well. I’m sure I’ll get used to it and find a way to simplify the seemingly quite challenging cleanup requirements for a car dweller with no running water.
Smoothie was decent. I think it was like a 1-lb bag of spinach. A 1-lb bag of California mixed vegetables, and probably 2 lb of mixed fruit.
Totally forgot about putting proteins in it of one sort or another.
Took a long time to drink it down. It’s still not completely drunk down. 🙃
I sipped on it frequently while working out, and I was there for a very long time–leg/abs day.
🦵
I’ve been struggling, as you know, to want to go to the gym. I was doing really well and actually wanting to go before, but I’m less enthusiastic now.
But I went, and I did all my exercises even though I didn’t want to. And I did cardio. I think I might have walked somewhere around six or seven miles worth today.
I think I started my workout with a 30-minute walk, and then I did all the legs and add stuff. I did skip the inner and outer thigh exercises because I think I actually damaged those muscles. I can’t stretch those muscles without a really weird painful feeling. Definitely doesn’t feel like normal muscle stretching pain. It feels like injured stretching pain, so I didn’t do either of those exercises today, and I’m going to take it easy and not do those exercises at all until I can do a butterfly stretch and have it feel like it’s supposed to feel.
Otherwise, I moved up and wait into exercise areas, so that’s nice. I’m pretty surprised how quickly I’m moving up and wait. I keep expecting to level off and have it be a while before my next bump up, but apparently I’m still enjoying a bit of a honeymoon period.
I did just answer stuff as questions popped up during the day. It continues to be slow going, but I did finally answer my last question that met the daily goal of 22 questions, finishing up that phone call somewhere around 12:30 a.m. 🙃
After the gym, I headed over to Andres’ house. Jim messaged me and asked me to go scan his truck because it had been running poorly, so I went over and gave it a scan, found some codes, and spent a little while trying to help figure out the issue. He’s got to misfire, but it’s a really weird one. It only misfires at higher rpms, anything above a thousand. Doesn’t misfire at idle. And it’s got a weird ticking noise that is rhythmic with the combustion in the engine, but it doesn’t sound like a lifter. It sounds like an exhalation of air, like puffs of air as if it were a lifter tick, but air escaping, but it’s not coming from the exhaust. It sounds like it’s coming from the intake. I put on my mechanics stethoscope and took a listen, and the sound is coming from the area where the fuel line goes down through the intake manifold to the fuel rail. Sounds super funky. Don’t know what to make of it.
I gave him some suggestions for how to proceed forward. Somebody had worked on it relatively recently and had removed and replaced the intake manifold gasket, and this sound is coming from underneath the intake, so I’m wondering if maybe something got damaged?
Anyway, I went from there over to the Walmart Neighborhood Market just down the road and did more just answer work while watching the BYU Arizona State basketball game on my phone.
I also ate dinner–which consisted of an entire box of Cold cereal and soy milk. 🙃
I have one more box of cereal to finish off before it’ll be the smoothie diet for a while.
Going to be a challenge to transition, as my stomach is so used to being stuffed full. I think it’s going to have to take a little while for it to shrink back down in size. I also need to make sure I’m getting plenty of protein so that I actually feel full.
When I got back to the gym, there were a few people trying to jump start a car, and I helped for a little bit. Alternator isn’t doing its job, so it’s likely bad. They decided to just leave the car in the parking lot and the young lady said she’ll have her dad just come take care of it.
So then I jumped on a treadmill, figuring I might as well burn some more calories while I keep working and right in my journal. Might as well be walking while doing that stuff, which will help me get my physical condition back to what I’m comfortable with.
I have a dad bod, but I certainly haven’t earned it because I’m not a dad, not that I would want a dad bod even if I were a dad, but I have no excuse. 😆
So I walked for another 2 mi, which is how I got to somewhere around I think maybe 7:00 for the day in total? Somewhere around 15,000 steps for the day, I think.
In other news, looks like Suriname is off the travel list. My friend John talked to his friends from the Netherlands who didn’t have much good to say about Suriname or the islands that also were Dutch speaking.
So that knocked his interest down quite a bit, So currently the leading candidate is Germany. He speaks a little bit of german, and I speak probably 10 words of German, but it would be fun for him to go to germany, and though I’ve actually physically been in Germany before, it was during a night train trip from either Austria or hungry back to Paris to fly back to the United states. And my being in Germany consists of waking myself up in the middle of the night while on the sleeper train so that I can be at least awake for a moment while I was physically present in Germany.
So though I’ve actually been there, and never count it on my list of places I’ve been because I’ve never actually seen it even though I’ve been from one end of it to the other. 🙃
So John is looking up things in Germany to see if it indeed is going to be a place that he’d like to go. If so, will buy our tickets and head out there, maybe stopping off at some other countries as well. I’ve never been to the Scandinavian countries, so I’d love to go there if there’s time. Germany’s not a small country, though. It’s not huge, but it’s definitely not small, and this is probably going to be a one- to two-week trip.
Gratitude List:
- I’m grateful I was able to have my first smoothie success today, despite the drawbacks.
- I’m grateful for continued progress with exercise
- I’m grateful to be able to help people in need
- I’m grateful for the fact that my mom enjoys driving Happy around. I got a picture of her today with it in the Walmart parking lot with the top down. 🥰
- I’m grateful that I’ve been able to sleep here in the extended Walmart parking lot without anyone seeming to care.
Success List:
- I can’t really think of much in the way of successes for the day, but moving up in weight on the leg curl and the rope pull down crunch is a success
- And walking as much as I did today is a success
Improvement List:
- Quick to frustration. Just answer redesigned the earnings report, and now it’s less functional, less user-friendly, and just… Irritating. It boggles my mind why they would spend time making an aesthetic change to the earnings report that simultaneously reduces its usability, when there was no need to make any change at all for any reason, and the time they wasted making that change that actually makes our lives as experts more challenging, they could have spent fixing issues that are long-standing and significant. So… I was very frustrated. I was more frustrated at first when it appeared that there was a maximum of 10 rows that I was allowed to see without refining my search. After probably an hour, including complaining to customer service because it looks like the sheet was just broken, I finally realized that those 10 rows were scrollable. I was scrolling the whole page, but those 10 rows themselves were scrollable. So you can still see everything, but you have to scroll through it little by little, only able to see 10 rows at a time. Ugh.
Making changes that reduce functionality create irritants. Those irritants build up over time. It does the opposite of establishing and building Goodwill. It creates yet another annoyance and yet another annoyance and yet another annoyance.
I don’t have much good will left for just answer other than that it’s a convenient way to provide for my needs. Otherwise, I feel more like I’m trying to help the customers have a decent experience in spite of just answer and their many many roadblocks to good service.
And rant.
😅
So… That thing I can do better… Slower to frustration. 😅
G’night y’all.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 