Catching Up

Time has flown since my last post. Let’s get right to it.

On July 20 I decided to stop drinking alcohol. There wasn’t any sort of triggering event like a traffic stop or wicked hangover or embarrassing night out… I kind of just decided it was time.

A book that helped me a lot was This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life by Annie Grace. It helped me think about how to think about quitting, if that makes sense.

It’s been going well. I’ve only had a few cravings — Scotch on my front porch, white wine with cheese, a red wine with a steak — but for me the pros outweigh the cost of pushing down those cravings. Cutting out the alcohol has accelerated my weight loss and helped me better control emotions like anxiety and despair. I’m awake earlier in the day, and more productive.

I’m down 19 pounds from my all-time high of 207 from this summer. Riding Peloton 3-4 times a week has helped, but ultimately the loss is driven by diet. In addition to cutting out the alcohol, I’ve been doing calories-in/calories-out, endeavoring to stay below 1800 calories/day or so. On top of this I add intermittent fasting (16 hours of fast, 8 hour window for eating), which basically means I skip breakfast and then don’t snack after dinner.

We have a family vacation planned for the end of December which will be a lot more fun for me if I’m feeling slimmer by the time we go. If I could be in the low 170’s by then, it would save me a lot of clothes shopping. I bought a lot of new clothes (Bay Area casual) when I joined LinkedIn that I quickly outgrew thanks to free breakfasts and lunches at the cafeterias!

Work sabbatical continues, and I’m settling into new routines now that the kids are back to in-school learning. I still have personal projects I’m working on, and me and Sherri now have more flexibility to run errands (or grab sushi) in the middle of the day. We’re dedicating more time to lingering projects around the house such as decluttering, rearranging, and organizing. And we’re even actively working with an interior designer to improve the feel of our place.

Recruiters continue to reach out, and I’m to the ‘virtual onsite’ stage with one notable company I think I’d enjoy working for, but I’ve put the process on hold for now until we see how the situation with schools + COVID works out. If the kids end up having to come back home for full-time virtual learning, I want to be in a position to give them the help they need without the added distraction of a new and stressful full-time job.

Everyone in the house who’s eligible for a vaccine now has one. We did Rowan’s second Pfizer shot on Aug 31, so he’s letting that bake. We’re hoping Siena can get hers by the end of November so she’ll be fully baked before the end of December vacation.

If you’re eligible but not vaccinated at this point you’re super bad at risk assessment.

We’re about to dump $5000 into a new Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) for our 2014 Nissan Pathfinder that we’ve only driven 34,000 miles. Turns out this is a known issue and that Nissan extended the warranty for it by two years as a result of a class action, but we didn’t know any of that until a year after that expired. Cool. Icing on the cake is we’re dumping this vehicle in January as we have a new car on order that hopefully arrives then. And the new car doesn’t even have a transmission. 🙂

That’s all for now. I’ll try to send these out more often. If there are topics you’d like to know about, please do let me know in the comments. And as always, thanks for reading.