2025 Week 2 Thursday Thoughts
Monday, January 6th, 2025.
Getting up and about in the early morning on a commuting day in the dead of New England Winter takes a little more planning than it does in the summer.
There is a deadly game that I play with myself on these nights/mornings. It is still pitch black outside when my alarm goes off on days that I need to commute into the office. If I find myself awake in the middle of the night to pee or from a nightmare or for any other reason, the temptation is always there to poke my phone screen and see what time it is. It could be 2AM, and maybe I get to sleep for another full 4 hours. Or I could find that it is 5:25AM, and the dread of knowing that I will hardly be able to fall back asleep again before my alarm goes off will set it.
And then there is another choice. Just don't look at it. I don't want to know. I will just try to go back to sleep and hope for the best. More often than not, this is the choice that I choose. I don't think that there is anything poetic or philosophically significant to that.
Anyway, the specially planning that must be done has to do with the cold. It is just remaining below freezing these days. At no point during the day does it warm up past 32. If anything, I think it has stayed in the teens lately. When it is warmer, I usually get dressed first thing after getting up before moving on to the rest of my tasks. When it is this cold, though, even just being unclothed and out of the covers for a few minutes is really unpleasant, especially when you've just woken up, so I have taken to just pulling on my sweatpants and donning a snuggie the purposes of putting on coffee and eggs in the kitchen.
Once blood has started to circulate through my body again, and the automated processes are doing their thing, that is when I will finally brave the wardrobe.
Again, I do not think that there is anything significant about this. I just like that I am noticing it. I am paying attention to my own life again. One thing that I strongly dislike is when I feel like I am just on autopilot. What is with that? I feel if I am not paying close enough attention to recall and write about the things that I am observing, thinking and feeling, then none of them actually happened. It becomes wasted time. Wasted life. Maybe there is something significant about that.
I played Warframe on my phone on the entire ride into Boston. It is silly how enamored I am with that game. The fact that it does full cross-play with PC on my phone is ridiculous, and I find that the auto-aim/auto-fire touch controls are actually excellent and easy to use. This could become a real problem.
Somehow I always manage to forget just how crazy the first week of an academic quarter actually is. Last minute course add requests. New students unable to navigate our systems. Prepping for and running orientation sessions. Our wacky and ever-changing "I Am Here" process. Chasing after under-enrolled F1 students. It all hits at once, and it is chaos.
Add the fact that our whole degree audit system was down for the first half of the day on Monday, and we had a recipe for a wacky and chaotic day. And it was. I had a fantastic in-person appointment with a wonderful young man in the Security program, a phoner with an international student in peril, and a basket full of emails. I was almost kept late due to a super last-minute meeting about the creation of an accounting course. I was famished at the end of the day; I did not have a chance to even step out for lunch.
That afternoon I did develop a love for Incognito, another British acid jazz/funk band that has been around forever. There was no obvious place to start so I have just been listening to the greatest hits album that covers several decades and has something like 40 tracks. I think I am becoming a jazz flute guy. I just love how this music makes me feel.
On the train home I was able to get a start on The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. This is the second book by her that we are reading for our little book club. I think S.T. must really like her, having picked her twice. I see why. Her writing style is casual and relatable but sneakily good at cutting to the heart of people and letting you know exactly who they are. I think I share Susan's love of being around passionate people.
That evening I jumped into VR Chat with Andy, Joel and Johnny. We played beer pong and hung out on a rooftop. It was nice.
I would like to get back onto a diligent habit of tracking my food and exercise now that the holidays are over and S.T. and I are practicing good alcohol hygiene again. This day I took in about 1042 calories, give or take, though I ate a bunch of lime tortilla chips on the couch with S.T. after hanging with the guys as we watched some Worst Cooks. A low day. I am going to need quite a few deficit days to make up for the excess of the last couple months.
Tuesday, January 7th, 2025.
Extremely vivid dreams. I got the feeling that I had seen through the confines of reality. I had split the veil and seen through the dream that is waking existence. It felt very real. This is what happens when I don't drink.
There was not much on the work schedule for the day, though that did not necessarily make for a light work-from-home day. It was the last day for students to complete the I-Am-Here process.
Rather than putting it off, I made myself prepare my powerpoint presentation for that evening's online orientation as soon as I was caught up with my emails, which was around 11AM. I did not need to make many changes. This is my 5th orientation, after all, and that is just here at Northeastern. I can safely say that this is not my first rodeo. Isn't that neat?
Still, I get very riled up and nervous about doing these, though usually only something like 5 people show up to the Winter sessions, and my part is only something like 25 minutes. Still, that makes it all the more important to me that I get it right. I only do one of these per quarter, they are short, and you only get one chance to make a good impression.
It was very cold that day. Again, in the teens in terms of temperature. Still, I pulled on my sweatshirt and got on the treadmill. It sucked. I can admit that. With the deficit of calories, I do not have the energy that I had when I was drinking most every day over the last couple of months. My blood sugar is probably way down. Far fewer carbs in my system. My legs feel like lead and my lungs suck. Still, I thumped out 5.52 miles in an hour. Its not even a pace that some people would call running. But it is where I am at right now.
Yes, I did end up doing a bit more Warframe in the afternoon before it was time to start the orientation at 4PM. I jumped on a bit early and the nerves really got to me. I was thinking about executing on every step: when to start the recording, when to start my screen share, when to stop the recording, when to stop the screen share. What I really wanted to avoid was showing everyone my desktop background like I had done in the previous orientation. That time it was Scar from The Lion King. This time it was just a desert road from Road 96, but still.
It went fine. Literally four people showed up, but I gave a really nice presentation to those 4.
That evening, S.T. and I took in the full 3 hours of the Netflix Monday Night Raw debut. It felt like a pay-per-view, to be honest. It was a really fun show. I was a bit disappointed by the finish to the main event, but I'm curious to see where it is going. It was an insanely packed show. Its really great to see wrestling so embraced by people again. We talked about how nice it is to see people actually booing the bad guys and cheering the good guys instead of trying to disrupt the show. Don't get me wrong, that was its own kind of fun, but I like this better.
I made a crafty little curry dish for dinner. It had carrots, an onion, sweet corn, green pigeon peas, and a couple of breakfast sausages. I did not both with the rice. It was good! I can iterate on this.
All told I took in about 1300 calories; again, this is likely higher with chips and veggie snacks over wrestling. I also ran for about 777 calories according to my fitness app. A second day in a row of good habits.
Wednesday, January 8th, 2025.
Another busy work-from-home day morning. Lots of emails. I chased after my under-enrolled F1 students to get them to meet their visa requirements. Thankfully there were only 5 of them, and most of them I had already spoken with.
The drops for students that had not completed the I Am Here process were supposed to happen, but I am pretty sure that they just... didn't. I am not unhappy about it, but I don't like warning students about things that don't actually happen. They may be less likely to heed my words the next time when it actually does.
I did find a little time to engage with the community market system in Warframe, and I sold enough prime parts that I had scraped together afford a full set of blueprints for Gauss Prime. My first prime warframe! And I had not even yet finished fabricating my first non-starter, normal frame. I looked forward to grinding for the materials later that night. Everyone that I met to trade with was very nice.
There was a CED operations meeting at noon that I had just about completely forgotten about. I had not put it on my schedule. I rushed in like nothing was wrong, though, and it was very short. I really like the new program manager for CED. She is extremely busy but very real, and I appreciate that.
Afterwards I squeezed off another 5.5 miles on the treadmill. It was easier than it had been the day before. A couple of good nights of sleep really help with that. I did some light lifting afterward and got cleaned up. It was getting close to 2:30PM and I had a platelets appointment at the blood center at 3PM, so I was under a time crunch to make sure that everything was current for work.
Two Princes was playing when I walked into the blood center, and I like to imagine it was in celebration of my glorious return after having missed my donation in December.
This donation took just about two hours. There was a young woman, literally 18 years old by her date of birth, who came in shortly after me and began doing platelets as well. I thought about how I was a little younger than her when I started doing this. It was well before she was born. I heard her make her next appointment for just two weeks from now. She was going to do platelets every two weeks! I really admired the dedication. It genuinely made me happy.
The blood center was actually a very positive place that afternoon. The phlebotomist ladies were all in good spirits and joking with a couple older guys that were donation. One of them asked me about my haircut. Just genuinely positive vibes all around.
I got through another 10% of The Orchid Thief and read a bit of the Warframe wiki. It was about 5:10PM when I was finally out of there. I did not hang around the recovery area and just headed straight for my car. I've done this enough. I know my limits.
Once home, I caught up on a few work things that I'd missed while away and put a quarter cup of rice in the rice cooker. I got my grind on in Warframe and, after a couple of hours, I had the materials that I needed to fabricate the systems, neuroponics, and chassis for Gauss Prime. I'm so in love with this silly game. It feels like Destiny, but it does not feel like it will punish me for taking time away if I need it. I'm sure that I barely understand the depth of it and I am sure that I will hit the bottom at some point, but for now I am having a really nice time.
That night over dinner I joined S.T. for a couple of episodes of Hell's Kitchen before we went to bed a little before 10PM.
I did wake up a couple of times in the night and felt a vague anxiety about having to go into Boston the next day. I always feel this, and then I always feel great about my day on campus.
Not counting yet another few lime tortilla chips and the lorna doon cookies that I ate at the blood center, I took in about 1489 calories and supposedly burned 775 on my run. A third pretty good calorie day in a row, even with another 500 in cookies and chips.
Thursday, January 9th, 2025.
Another snuggie morning where I waited to get dressed until my body had adjusted to the cold. Its not so bad. We have heat in the house. A warm bed. Electricity. Things are good.
On the train this morning I got a seat with a nice surprise. There was a heating vent right by my feet. I felt like a cat, snuggled up to where it was warm. It was luxurious.
My first fabricated warframe, Volt, had finished while I had driven to the train station, so I was able to mess with him a bit and do a little bit of grinding for void crystals on the train ride. I'm finally in something other than the started frame! I'm not an obvious newbie anymore!
The wind was strong and biting when we stepped off onto the platform at Ruggles station around 8:20AM, and I hustled across the street to my office.
This morning I had a very positive meeting with Natalia. We talked about our winter breaks, including her trip down to Disney with her mom and daughter. I learned that in Russia, Santa is called Father Frost. I told her that I think it sounds badass.
Today I have two student meetings. If I can, I am going to try and catch the 4PM train back home so that I will have time to run before meeting with Buddy, Shawn and Neil for Helldivers 2, but if its not possible that is okay too. I just need a little under 10 miles to reach my weekly goal of 26.2, and I can do that across Friday and Saturday if need be.
I'm looking forward to Saturday. There is a bunch of boxing on Peacock at 2PM out of the UK, and its been a few weeks since I've seen some good boxing. I forgot to reflect on that, how I got weirdly into the sport of boxing in 2024. Its nice. Its something that I never really thought of before in my life, and now I think about it a lot.
Next week will be a short one. We are headed to Anthro New England one week from today. I'm nervous about sharing a hotel room with Sebai. He's my friend, and a good one, but we've only met in real life twice, and I'm not great at sleeping around other people. He'll also be up here by himself, so I'll feel a bit responsible for sticking with him. I'm probably over-thinking it. It should be fun.
Til next time.