Quick run-down for today so I can go to bed. I stayed up WAY too late last night reading.
Item 10.1 was getting organized for my workouts and tracking. I don’t know which exercises I’m doing yet (I have a set of 26 possible ones), I don’t know which ones I will like or sets/reps/weight. I haven’t even done my initial weigh-in and measurements yet. That’s all scheduled for tomorrow. But I organized my thinking at least, updating from 2018’s initial planning.
Item 10.2 was an evening about astronomy. I have been skipping the RASC meetings of late, just not interested enough in the topics, and they’re available for later viewing on YouTube if I want to watch. But this month’s topic was different — I’m the one who suggested the speaker! There’s a member in Toronto who has done some amazing astrophotography while travelling to Australia, including of objects we never get to see in the North. It was a great presentation, well-presented and well-organized. Very enjoyable.
Item 10.3 was a small restaurant treat for ourselves. Andrea had a Toastmasters meeting, I had RASC, the schedules weren’t meshing very well, so we decided we’d do take-out tonight. It ended up that we had a bit more time than we expected, so instead of doing something super fast, we opted for Lone Star fajitas, which all three of us enjoy. I don’t know WHAT they did to the steak tonight, but it was amongst the best that I’ve ever had, and that’s saying something considering how much I love their offerings. And we realized it’s probably been almost 3m since we last partook. A nice little treat for us tonight.
I mentioned yesterday that I have my new BowFlex set up now, and I want to start using it this weekend. While it is a “good problem” to have, my challenge is to figure out which exercises to do and why. For example, the manual that comes with it suggests 26 possible exercises for Chest (3), Shoulder (6), Back (4), Arm (4), Abdominal (2), and Legs (7). But there are some other variables at play, of course.
Of the 26 exercises, 10 are seated, which is likely not a bad place to start for me. There’s only one seated one for legs and one for shoulders, but all the others have multiple options. In the short term, seated exercises will take some of the pressure off the rest of the body, reducing the likelihood of injury too.
But for the muscles? I thought there would be more overlap for some of them:
Deltoids — 9, but some are all Deltoids, some are only specific ones;
My goal for the workouts is primarily overall toning and conditioning, but I would like to build up some strength and power too. Not necessarily right away, but I wouldn’t be against it. I know my short-term goals are going to be more reps at lower weights, which is fine with me.
Measuring progress and results
Obviously, the measures for progress are pretty simple for these types of machines…frequency of work-out, number of exercises, number of reps per set, number of sets, and weight. Ideally, all of those increase, just not simultaneously.
Results are a bit harder to come by for useful, practical indicators. My goals is overall well-being, but I think I’ll have to settle for some more traditional measurements (many of which I’m stealing from #50by50ish #50 – Lose weight – Part 8, off-scale success):
Weight;
BMI;
Neck size;
Arms (upper, bicep, forearm);
Bust;
Chest (below nipples);
Waist (1/2″ above belly button);
Stomach (belly button);
Hips (widest part);
Legs (thigh, knee, calf)
When it comes to more well-being indicators, I’ll go for a simple 10 point scale:
Social Flexibility — willingness to do other sports (1-10);
Lifestyle — confidence/openness to social outings despite size (1-10);
Mental Health — feeling mentally healthy in the last period (1-10);
Financial — Expenses related to size (1-10);
Medical — Overall feeling of physical health (1-10);
I do have some milestones that I’ll steal from that other list I had in the post linked above:
Initial commitment (Psychological)
Commit to the journey
Announce goal
Set up Seinfeld progress for plan
First workout for BowFlex
Setup bicycle machine
First week of 3 workouts
Weight measurement (Physical)
Ongoing tracking of weight and BMI
Ongoing photos
First weigh-in
First pound
First set of measurements
Overcome a plateau
Change of 1″ in waist
Change of 5″ in waist
Change of 10″ in waist
See differences
See my toes past my belly
Tying shoes without effort
Kneeling without pain
See my abs / muscle definition
See difference in photos
See difference in clothing (275 / 240 / 205 / 185)
Fit into ~30″ pants
Hugs from Andrea and Jacob
Monthly fitness test
Fatigue limit for all 26 exercises
Pushups
Expand fitness test
It’s good enough for my start, and Jacob and Andrea are going to help with my measurements and stuff this weekend. Onward! Oh, wait, I didn’t share the list of exercises that I’m choosing from:
Big news for the day. Another odd day working full out for regular work while trying to keep some momentum going at home.
Item 9.1 is still my website stuff although there’s not much “new” on it. They have my old account “restored” now, and I have told it to restore the backup to see if THAT site also had the same issue I’m seeing with the new one or not. Wait and see. So that is obviously not the big news.
Item 9.2 was Jacob’s return to in-person schooling today. He started a new school (Grade 7 Intermediate, attached to the high school he’ll go to in two years), he is still in French (his choice to continue, we did raise it as a question to discuss with him if he wished, but he was good to keep at it), it’s in-person after 18m of virtual schooling, and he has to wear a mask all day. Oh, and he’s in a portable. Some major changes going on there for a young man who is not that fond of changes in general. I won’t say it was a screaming roller-coaster-level success, but he coped. He was pretty tired tonight, but we drove him over and picked him up, followed by an outing to DQ for the end of the day as a treat (he loves their slushies aka old Mr. Misties). We’re settling back into a routine,
Item 9.3 was also big news. I now have a home gym for the basement. I used TaskRabbit to hire a contractor to assemble my Bowflex, which is now set up in my basement. Sweet. Now I just have to figure out how to use it. 🙂
Another odd day working full out for regular work while trying to keep some momentum going at home.
Item 8.1 is still my website stuff. I thought I had it “fixed” last night. Then, this morning, I went to do something, and the problem was back. I took a break from work to go down a rabbithole for a bit, and and then kicked it to tech support. It’s fun talking to tech support about this kind of stuff. Here’s how the conversation goes…
Me: I have a problem with X.
Them: So you have a problem with your website not loading.
Me: No, I have a problem with X. The site loads just fine.
Them: Let me look into it.
Me: (Start typing out the stuff I’ve already tried…did A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. Could be I or J, but I can’t adjust those, and I’m out of options. While I’m typing, they say, “Do A and B, that will fix it”.)
Them: … pause
Them: Okay, I see you’ve done A-H. Did D not help at all? No? Hmmm…
Them: Okay, well we can try I, and J, hang on.
Them: Okay, it’s fixed. Here’s the printscreen showing it loaded just fine.
Me: That part was always working. If you click HERE and then HERE, it doesn’t load. Here’s the direct link.
Them: Hang on.
Me: (hanging)
Them: Okay. I can replicate it. I’ll have to escalate this to L2.
Of course, this is after they have had five back and forths by email where they kept telling me to use the live chat because it is more efficient and faster. Yep, faster to get to the point where L1s can’t help, and only L1s work chat. They also assure me it is normally resolved in 3h but might be faster.
Twelve hours later, no answer yet. Honestly, I’m not faulting them. I’ve exhausted all the simple things, and a few of the intermediate solutions. Something else is going on, and nobody online or in the forums seem to be able to pinpoint a likely culprit. On the positive side, the site is working fine for the public-facing stuff. I just can’t load two pages on the back-end. Might be more, I haven’t tested them all, but I’ll wait and see what they come up with…the original server is just about recovered, so they might choose to just put me back to there, which would be fine for the PolyWogg.ca site. I hadn’t updated it in a few weeks while I was on vacation, so I haven’t lost anything. And anything that I DID update, like a comment that might be missing or a book review, I can either live without or replace easy enough. Annoying, not serious yet.
Item 8.2 was an outing for dinner tonight because Jacob starts his new school tomorrow. Normally, we go out for dinner after his first day of school, a mini celebration, but we expect he’ll be pretty tired tomorrow night, so we went tonight instead as a pre-celebration and to distract him a bit. Necessary? No. Fun? Yes. Healthy? Yes.
Item 8.3 isn’t done yet, but I’m going to work on it for the next thirty minutes. I coordinate a little mini-reading club each month, and I haven’t updated badges for July and August yet. I did some preliminary work back in July, just need to close out and catch up.
I had a busy day at work today, and didn’t accomplish the three things of “change” by myself outside of that time.
Item 7.1 is still my website stuff. So, for a quick recap:
ThePolyBlog.ca i.e., this site, was unaffected by the big server crash.
PolyWogg.ca was restored early on from a backup I had, all seemed fine on the front-end with something odd in the back-end, but not big.
Astropontiac.ca was restored next, all good.
ManagementConsultingServices.ca took a bit longer with some other config issues, but it too is up and running.
So it would seem like it was all good, right? I’ve been actively trying NOT to go down any rabbitholes on this process but tonight I found a small glitch in the back-end of my PolyWogg site. When I tried to go to the main page of the admin panel, I got a 503 error. A bit odd, but umm, okay. I could get the full menu other ways and I could generally access every other page of the back-end, but I couldn’t seem to access the main page. Weird.
It started out innocently enough. If you have a 503 error, the recommendation is to change themes and see if that corrects the problem…it didn’t. Step 2 is to disable all plugins, a small PITA, and see if that fixes it. It did. Okay, easy peasy, it’s a conflict with one plugin, add them back in until it stops working OR put them all back in and disable them again until it starts working again. Except I put them all back in and it kept working. Until I went to access it again today, and I got the 503 error again. And this is despite the fact that I have done a full re-store from backup AND overwrote any particular buggy code with a fresh install of the software. Tonight I got some extra gremlins playing in the setup — sometimes I didn’t get a 503 error code, sometimes I just got a semi-blank screen. Yep, only “semi-blank” — sometimes the side menu was there and sometimes it wasn’t. I was convinced it was a load issue, but I played with the settings for memory, etc., and it was all good. But the pages wouldn’t load right in the admin section.
I decided to go hard-core for a bit tonight, and weeded all my plugins from about 47 down to about 24 active ones. It’s a really harsh cut, and while it improves my speed, it limits a bunch of other stuff on the back-end. And it STILL didn’t solve the problem. I’ve tried everything I can think of, or almost. Even typing this, I thought of one small setup issue I could test. I don’t see how it would make a difference, but worth a shot.
The funny part is after making huge changes to the site to test stuff, three clicks later and I could reinstall from the backup again. The front-end is great, no issues at all. Just a PITA for me on the back-end. I’ve asked in some fora for some suggestions, but I had nothing at the moment. Or so I thought.
I think I just solved it. I took the time while writing this to go check out those other settings, and something clicked in my brain as I did. Two levels down in a menu, hidden from normal view, is a setting I changed long ago. ***But I changed it on the MAIN server.*** Now I’m on the backup / lifeboat server. And sure enough, it’s set to the old settings. I’m not sure that will fix everything, but fingers crossed. If not, I’ve got more work in front of me. Sigh.
Item 7.2 was getting Jacob ready for school. He needs some school supplies, and I saw it as a triple opportunity. First and foremost, I want him to think of it as some sort of “fun” outing. I used to love getting supplies for school, and he got a new lunchbag, as well as some basic things, and a new water bottle. Plus his own agenda for keeping track of all his schedule and homework. He seemed a bit more buoyant afterwards. Secondly, I wanted him to take some “control” of the outing, to feel like there is something in his control despite the level of change swirling around him. He’s already a little stressed with all the change coming at him in two days, but being able to control this aspect, and to get ready for it, might help a little with his stress levels. And third, I also wanted him to have a positive “outing” with Mom. A lot of organizer conversations have been with me in recent months, but this is more of a fun one potentially, and I didn’t want it to seem like I was leading him to water (or a water bottle). I’m more directional on this stuff than Mom is, so I played chauffeur while they went shopping.
And out of nowhere, J had a great interaction with a stranger at Staples, as one of the clerks there has Cerebral Palsy and openly talked to him about it. He babbled like the proverbial brook telling me about her, and then he informed me that THIS Staples is now his favourite Staples.
As I noted at the top, I didn’t do much for this one, it was all Andrea and Jacob, I just facilitated it.
Item 7.3 was a simple health outing for the week. Andrea wasn’t able to attend her chiro appointment today, so rather than cancel, I went in her stead. My back is feeling WAY better.
