Can’t think of a title for this one

It’s probably not the most efficient use of time scrolling through iTunes to find a song title that relates to what I’m writing about, so that’s enough of that.

A better week than last, at least in terms of my mood and energy.  Work at the home in New Bedford went very well.  I did 3.5 hours of therapy in 4 hours, I stuck to the patients’ written goals, and it was a good experience overall.  I will definitely take advantage of more opportunities like that in the future when they are available.

Through two days I’ve felt pretty good at work.  My caseload is certainly lighter and it’s a better crop than the past couple of weeks.  I actually feel motivated to read some research and do some extra preparation for some patients with disorders I’m not familiar with.  While I do find myself getting a little bored at times, it helps to have these weeks every now and then when I can catch up on some paperwork and screens.  During the busy weeks I got myself into the habit of leaving paperwork for the next day, only to have it keep piling up.  This week has been good so far for catching up.  During weeks like this I would definitely be interested in going to another home in the afternoons to see some patients in need of treatment time, just to break up the monotony.  I guess the company is interested in me go to a home in Falmouth for bonus work a couple of nights a week if I was interested, so I’ll talk with them about that on Friday.   It’s hard to turn down the opportunity for money, especially given the rates I would be making for bonus.  I would almost double my weekly paycheck with two or three afternoon/evenings a week of moonlighting.  However, I have to be careful not to overextend myself.  I tend to stress out over very little and I don’t want it to completely interfere with the gym.

Speaking of the gym, I’m three-for-three this week.  Did parts A and B of the FL workouts Monday and this morning, with an abs/cardio session yesterday.  That’s probably it for this week unless I go for a walk tomorrow or something.  The diet hasn’t exactly been tight as I’ve given in to some twice-baked potatoes and Oreo pie we had laying around after Easter.  As usual, though, I think my calories are pretty good. I was 193 on Saturday and I’d like to be 192 this weekend.

I ran out of protein powder the other day so I ordered 10 pounds of bulk metabolic protein (lower-carb, slower-digesting) which should be here in a couple of days.  That will last me about 3-4 months.  As with anything, ordering online is the cheapest way to go.

In the meantime, I picked up a small bottle of chocolate Muscle Milk protein which might be the best tasting shake I’ve ever had.  I mixed it with water, a splash of milk, frozen spinach, and a tablespoon of peanut butter and it tastes like those frozen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup ice cream things you buy at 7/11.  Of course it looks like pea soup, but I’m clearly beyond that.

Bonus Time!

As it started out, this past week was just no fun at all.  I still wouldn’t consider it a bad week, but I had no motivation and no real interest in being at work.  I think the blues were going around at that place because nobody seemed to like their caseloads.  A lousy harvest lately, I guess.

In any case, my paycheck was a little fatter this week after working bonus last Saturday, and it’s going to be even bigger this week thanks to my first off-site bonus time that I’m about to do in New Bedford.  I’m kind of nervous because I won’t know any of the staff or patients, but  the evals and goals will all be there for me to go off of.  Sort of a paint-by-numbers day.

The opportunity for weekend bonus (or even late afternoon/evening bonus if we go off-site) is one of the great things about being a salaried employee for Genesis.  It’s not mandatory, the pay is pretty awesome, and if I’m swamped on Fridays and can’t get to new admits who come in later in the late afternoon or evenings, my boss is pretty good about letting me come in Saturday and making it up.  Having the opportunity to go to visit other nursing homes will be a good change of pace, too.

My March Madness brackets aren’t shot to shit yet, even though it feels like it.  I lost an Elite 8 team in USC, two Sweet 16 teams in Clemson and UConn, and a couple other teams I had losing in the next round.  As expected, I picked the wrong 5-12 upsets, and Notre Dame, Villanova, and Western Kentucky screwed me.  However, through one round I’m 23/32 games for a 72% winning percentage.  When I won a few years ago by picking all four Final Four teams, I won 70% overall.  My Final Four picks are all #1 seeds this year, with UNC, Memphis, Kansas, and UCLA, with UNC over UCLA in the final and they are all still alive.  I’m still in this thing.

Okay, off to work!

“The Rookie Wall”

No gym yesterday and no gym this morning.  This week if off to a very tiring start.  After work yesterday I came home and sat in the recliner watching History Channel specials on Atilla the Hun and the Vikings.  I’ve had over 7 hours of therapy in each of the two days and I’m pushing 90% productivity.  The caseload is up to 13 patients including a couple I have no desire to see.  It hasn’t been a bad week so far in terms of how the work has gone, because it’s gone well, but my mood is in the tank.  This is the first week where I have no interest in working.  All of my outplacements in grad school lasted about 10-12 weeks, and that’s the length of time I’ve been with Genesis.  Maybe I’m hitting the rookie wall like Adrian Peterson did in Week 12.  I’m not used to the fact there there is no foreseeable end.

In any case, I think I am becoming a pretty good speech-language pathologist and anybody who has been evaluating me so far seems to agree.  Yesterday there were a couple of hours in the afternoon where I bombarded with patient after patient and question after question from families and staff and I think I did a really good job of answering everything on the spot and giving appropriate recommendations.  At the very least I think I appear confident and knowledgeable.   My time management still needs some work but that will come around.

No exercise Tuesday and probably none today or tomorrow.  I have confidence that I can return to my plans very soon, my diet is going very well and I keep getting skinnier.

Laptop Chernobyl

Nuclear reactor #4 in my laptop had a meltdown, and a cloud of radioactive debris is currently making its way toward Plymouth Beach.  Poor plovers.

Since smoke was literally rising from the AC adapter, I really think it’s that instead of the actual computer, but still, I don’t feel like paying for anything right now and if it was hot enough to be melting plastic, I wouldn’t doubt that there is some irreversible damage to the computer itself.  I was able to back up my information with the remaining battery life and put it in our home computer on which I am currently typing, so it could be worse.

I guess we’ll have to add “new computer” to our wedding gift registry.  Anybody have that kind of cash?

Things to Improve Upon

The main area I need to improve upon this week is work.  Last week was long and my caseload keeps increasing, which means the amount of paperwork I have keeps increasing.  Despite staying late a few days I have paperwork left over that I need to finish today even if it means a really long day.  I had to stay late a few days and I anticipate the same thing this week.  Luckily I was able to come in Saturday for almost 4 hours and do some evals I wasn’t able to get to Friday, so I made a few hundred extra dollars in bonus.  This week is going to be even longer in terms of time spent at Bourne and a couple of surrounding nursing homes as I put in for bonus time, but that will mean a couple of gigantic paychecks in the next coming weeks.  It’s a pretty big trade-off to cut into my leisure time like this but it’s readily apparent that this is my life from now on.  Right now I really don’t want to go to work.  Typical Monday.

Financially I’ve been much better the past couple of weeks with spending.  I’m only buying essentials, I’m paying off things right away, and I changed my direct deposit so I higher percentage of my paychecks go into savings and 401K.  I really enjoy reading about all this financial/investment stuff and I can’t wait to have enough knowledge and money to apply it.  I’m still in the tracking-where-my-money-goes stage.  I’ve cut back on my pleasure reading (though I wasn’t getting much pleasure out of Lord of the Flies anyway) and sticking to the Kiplinger book for now.  I wake up every morning at 5 and mark it up with a highlighter for about an hour before going to the gym.

In terms of diet and the gym, last week was really good. I did two lifting sessions, two cardio sessions, and went for two 30-minute walks.  I weighed in at 194 pounds on Saturday morning, down a pound from the previous weekend.  I only had a couple of cheat meals last week so the diet itself was good, too.  I just did an abs/cardio session this morning, so off to a good start.

Punched in the Head

After trying to verbally deescalate a situation with a very angry demented man at work, I got punched in the head and had to fill out an incident report. No damage, but that dude was strong. Also my “18-0″ Patriots mug that I made during our 3-hour pottery session last month is gone after some therapist knocked it off the table (it was on the middle of the table, I don’t know how she did it), so I’m pretty pissed about that. I didn’t get out of work till 6, so all in all it wasn’t the greatest day I’ve ever had. I’m hoping today will be better.

I didn’t do any exercising, though I did get at ton of walking in around the facility at work. Mom also had some sort of pasta/hamburger/marinara sauce thing already on the table when I got home (actually now that I think of it I think that qualifies as American chop suey), so I’ll count that as Cheat Meal #1 for the week. That means nothing tonight but since Molly isn’t home I doubt she’ll bring home pizza on a Thursday.

I came close to bailing on the gym just now but I’m dressed and out the door in a minute. Doing Part B of my workout. I’m not going to bother posting the numbers as I don’t really care what they are. I just want to lift for 45 minutes and be super-tired after.

Maybe I should do a strength workout in case I have to fight off any more demented WWII vets?

Lord of the Flies

I stopped reading State of Denial after about 50 more pages because I have no interest in reading about that right now. I’m too engrossed in the upcoming elections to be thinking about Bush’s mistakes (though it’s pretty clear reading this book that these guys had no plan going into this war at all).  I still don’t know who I’m going to vote for.  Maybe I really am an Indepedent despite how chic it is to be a democrat right now.  The biggest problem, in my opinion, with the past 7 or so years is that this White House had no real opposition.  It became a completely one-sided government and completely divided the country down the middle.  History might change how Bush and the Iraq war are viewed, as it did for other presidents, but in terms of unifying the country, these guys completely failed.  I don’t think a democratic president/congress would necessarily do anything different for the country with all of the republican-bashing.  When I just think about who would make the country better as a whole and take the media out of it, I can’t decide between McCain or Obama (as it still looks like a longshot Hillary will be involved).  Obama still seems a little too slick for me, and as a person I trust John McCain to not blatantly lie (as much).  This will come down to the debates and reading more about their policies.  Anyway, enough about all that.  I don’t know anything about politics, I’m just on my high horse after reading 1776 and John Adams.

But like I meant to say, I stopped reading the Bush book and picked up my sister’s copy of Lord of the Flies, which apparently a cat peed on a few years ago.  There are a whole mess of high school books that somehow us Plymouth North kids (or at least in my classes) never got a chance to read (Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlett Letter, Death of a Salesman, etc.).  Therefore this is my effort to read something classic, and unfortunately I don’t really like it so far.  I’m about 60 pages in and luckily it’s only 220 so I can breeze through it in a few days.  I guess it gets really violent later on, but I feel like just skimming it.

No gym this morning, I’ll do a bodyweight workout or go for a walk after work.

Sunday/Monday/Tuesday Workouts

I’ve been very active so far this week.  I did a TT bodyweight workout Sunday night, NROL FLII Part A Monday morning, a 30-minute walk Monday evening, and cardio this morning using 15 minutes of elliptical intervals and 10 minutes of incline treadmill walking.  I’m pretty beat after work (7 hours of treatment in 8 hours of work), so I’m going to eat a big omelet and watch American Idol tonight.

Things are going well.  Work has been good (though today felt very long and somewhat disjointed at the end), I’m keeping both my productivity and confidence up, and all that other stuff.  I’m making it a point to see a lot of patients for dysphagia treatments as snacks instead of at meals.  That makes it far easier to space patients out during the day as well as get over the fact that some patients won’t want me there.  I’m starting to care less, which sounds bad but that’s something I’ve had to get over.

I’m eating well so far 2 days in by sticking to TNT and avoiding the cakes and cookies that are always around at work.  I’m really looking forward to some pizza towards the end of this week.

THIS IS SPARTA

Okay, so my excitement about St. Lucia and unexpectedly reaching 195 pounds has hooked me up to the juvenation machine and rekindled my interest in diet and exercise.  Even though I’ve been losing weight (very) slowly but surely by going to the gym two-to-three times a week, eating well for most of the day, then sort of letting go at dinner, and a couple of walks here and there (like the 20-minute-after-dinner one I just took), I’m going back to a more-intense structured set-up.  It will be as follows:

Workouts:

-2 planned New Rules of Lifting Fat Loss II workouts per week (parts A and B) at the gym in the morning

-2 interval cardio sessions, either at the gym on the elliptical machine or by doing 10-15-minute bodyweight circuits at my house

-3 afternoon/evening walks per week which can be done either on or off my workout days depending on weather/time/etc.

The diet won’t change in philosophy, just in commitment.  I’ll stick with TNT and I will allow myself 4-5 cheat meals per week so long as I am very strict during the week.  That means probably pizza on Thursday or Friday night, and a dinner date Saturday night.  Breakfasts at the Laverdures’ are usually pretty fattening but if that is the case than I shall avoid carbohydrates in all their wicked forms.  Dinner dates shall never include dessert and shall rarely include appetizers.  Our customary dinners at The 99 shall include and only include Gold Fever Wings.  Wine shall be limited to several glasses of red on Friday and/or Saturday nights only (not that I want to drink the boxed shit my parents buy, anyway).

Let’s make my goal to be 185 pounds by May 1.

Memorial Day also seems like a good target date for something.  Let’s make that 180 pounds by Memorial Day.  My will be done.

I’ve laid down the gauntlet for myself.  For the next 12 weeks, I dine in hell!!

A Valid Reason for Renewed Commitment to the Gym…

…is pictured above.

Jaylynn and I booked our honeymoon on Saturday at AAA.  We are going to Sandals Grande St. Lucian Spa & Beach Resort for a week on October 14, two days after we get married and we’re super-excited.  We spent over two hours at the travel agency waiting for an obnoxious family who was taking up everyone’s time, but once we finally got to the desk, we sealed the deal in about 20 minutes.  Our trip is all-inclusive and very affordable compared to others we’ve seen.   Before deciding on this I was pretty apathetic about choosing the honeymoon spot (my only real job so far for the wedding plans), because as I’ve always thought, “a warm beach is a warm beach.”  However, after reading about the night clubs, scuba diving, golf courses,  restaurants, and other all-around awesome stuff, I’m psyched.  This is great motivation to get back in gear and get on a structured gym program.  There are (I think) 32 weeks left before this trip.  That is plenty of time to reach my goals.

Speaking of goals, I weighed 195 yesterday morning! After hovering around the 198 mark for a few weeks, I’m down another couple of pounds.  It’s sort of surprising given that I’ve felt pretty sick and only worked out Monday and Tuesday of this week, but I guess I’ve been pretty good about TNT.  The nicer this weather gets, the nicer I feel.  Onward and upward.

Watched 3:10 to Yuma yesterday and it was only ok.  I guess it’s my own fault for not knowing what the movie was going to be about.  I just assumed Christian Bale and Russell Crowe were in rival posses trying to take over a ghost town.  Also re-watched The Da Vinci Code and was reminded that it’s pretty entertaining despite being the worst-acted movie I’ve ever seen.

Watching the Suns and Spurs.  I’ll be back at the gym tomorrow.