Losing a part of me

Category: Exam

  • Day 1280 – Afternoon

    I still cannot believe it.

    I left home at 11:15am so that I would be at the testing centre thirty minutes before the scheduled start time of noon (that is not only recommended, but ISC2 states that if you are not at least fifteen minutes early then you are considered late). I was driving down Walker’s Line when I realized that I had not taken my meal replacement shake with me, which had been my plan. With all of the stress and anxiety in my gut, I did not want to make things any worse by going into the exam room hungry. I stopped at a convenience store and picked up a sleeve of peanuts. They did not have any unsalted peanuts, and I know I will be paying for that tomorrow morning when I step onto the scale. With my emotional turmoil I decided that was a problem I was willing to live with. I even splurged… seeing that the nutritional facts were pretty close, I picked the salt and vinegar flavour.

    The staff were welcoming and helpful, but that would not be helping me to get through the next two hours. They had me take off my watch, ring, and my dogtag (although they let me keep my chai necklace), and empty my pockets of everything except my drivers license. It all went into a locker and I was escorted to the exam room.

    As I sat at the computer at the testing centre filling out the post-exam survey, I was trying to think how much more studying I would need to do before I would be confident that I was ready to re-sit the exam. I clicked ‘End Survey.’ I raised my hand to call the proctor over. She had me rescan my palm print, checked my ID, and escorted me out of the room.

    As I was reasonably certain that I would not like what I would see on the score report, I did not mind that the administrator told me to collect my things from my locker before collecting it. I was actually relieved by this because I was extremely thirsty, and along with my wallet, watch, keys, and jewelry I had also left the half-bottle of water that I was drinking as I arrived.

    ‘Congratulations! We are please to inform you that you have provisionally passed the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP®) examination. Your examination result is provisional in that it may be subject to further psychometric and forensic evaluation before a certification decision is reached.’

    I did not even read past the first word… my mind exploded with relief. Unlike last week, I did not wake up this morning with that sense of peace that came with the acceptance that I was unlikely to pass and that it did not matter. I was stressed, I was anxious, and I was frazzled. I wrote in my journal this morning that I was a bit out of sorts and that I had not slept well. All true. I walked into the exam room with that same heavy weight that I have been carrying on my shoulders for… how long? I don’t even know.

    I have another high-stress situation that came up this morning, but that is going on the back-burner until Friday. This evening I am going to go for a walk, then I am kicking my feet up and relaxing. Tomorrow I have several engagements that will keep me busy, but none of them are stressful – three meetings with friends for either coffee (the two in the morning) or cigars (the evening, and my cleaning lady is coming between those. On Friday I will deal with the bullshit.

  • Day 1280

    I have been a bit out of sorts since I woke up this morning. I did not sleep particularly well, and I am worried about how that will affect my entire day. My sleep score was only 60, and I know I was up several times throughout the night. A couple of times to pee… and a couple of times to fret about my exam. One way or another that will be behind me in six hours.

    The fibre that I have been adding to my meal replacements seems to be helping. Yay!

    The bathroom scale was kind to me this morning, with a day-over-day drop of nearly 1.5 lbs. On Day thirteen I am down twenty-three pounds, which is nothing to sneeze at. I always knew that Week 2 would be nowhere near as successful as Week 1 was, but I am still happy with the incredible ongoing progress I have made. To be clear, today is not the week-over-week weigh-in… that is not until tomorrow morning. With that said, in the last six days my weight is down 7.4 lbs.; even if I give back a couple of ounces from this morning’s huge drop tomorrow, I should still be down, on average, an amazing one-pound-per-day. I am getting ahead of myself though.

    This is going to be a very short journal entry. It is now 9:50am; I am planning to leave the house at 11:15am to get to the exam centre thirty minutes early, and I will spend the time until then doing some last minute studying.

    Have a great day folks!

  • Day 1279

    I was going to say that I spent the morning procrastinating, but in truth I have been diligently writing emails that needed to be written. I have also (at long last) made an appointment to get my eyes checked (I suspect it has been three years since I did) so that I can then get new eyeglasses, which I suspect has been a problem for me the past year or so.

    While my bowels are again stopped up (It has now been two days since a successful movement) I am not worried because it has also been thirteen days since I last ate solid food, and …

    Okay, that was fortuitous timing. I was right in the middle of writing about it that I felt the urge, and was quite successful in the endeavour. Here’s to the fibre I have been (since Friday) religiously been remembering to add to my meal replacements in the morning!

    I have often in the past talked about how my clothes fit was a good indicator of my progress. I have a masonic ring that I purchased in the autumn which over the last couple of months has been quite tight on my ring finger. There have been days when I wore it on my pinky, and others when I did not wear it at all. These last couple of days it has fit much nicer – it is a bit tight going over the knuckles, but is comfortable to wear. I look forward to it being even a bit looser in the next few months.

    Yesterday I reported that my weight had, for the first morning weigh-in since I started on the program, was slightly up. This morning it righted itself, with a 1.6 lb. drop from yesterday (and a 1.2 lb. drop from the previous day). I was not discouraged yesterday; I know that there will be days when this happens, and I do not have to be worried or disheartened on those days. When it happens I need to remember that what tiny progress I lost on Day Q will usually more than be recovered on Day Q+1. As I have written in these pages so many times, weight loss is about the downward trend and not about individual plots on the graph.

    My sleep score last night was up from the abysmal previous night, partly owing I would think to the fact that it recorded 8.25 hours of sleep. It reported that I did not get enough REM sleep. Still and all, a sleep score of 75 is much better than yesterday’s 56. I’ll take it! How well will I sleep tonight? That depends on how prepared I feel for my exam… which is tomorrow. Right now I do not feel like I am adequately prepared. I have less than twenty-four hours to get just a little bit more prepared… if that is even possible.

    The company that offers the certification for which I am testing tomorrow is called ISC2, and I have been certified with them in other programs since December. I was made an Authorized ISC2 Instructor in April, and yesterday was my first delivery of one of their courses. The class was for the very basic entry-level certification, and is meant to be a 2-day course. The training provider scheduled it as a 1-day class, and I only saw the discrepancy over the weekend. I was worried that I would not be able to inject the class with my usual panache, and in the afternoon felt like I was rushing through material at a pace that nobody (or at least not a beginner, which is who entry level classes are for) would be able to follow. Even with cutting the lunch hour to forty-five minutes and with the rushing my lecture went over time by three minutes. With trepidation in my mind I nonetheless apologized for rushing through and asked the students to fill out their evaluations. When I read them this morning I was elated to see that yes, they all wanted to class to be longer… but gave the instructor perfect scores. That is the only metric that I am judged on, and I was quite relived to see it.

    I have to get working on my studies… there have been too many necessary distractions today and while none of them were wasting time, they were also not studying for my exam. The rest of the day will be dedicated to that. I’m not sure if I will write tomorrow’s entry before or after my exam, but one way or another I’ll see you all on the morrow.

    Have a great day.

  • Day 1275

    It felt like I was walking around with an anvil on my back from the moment I could not sit my exam on Tuesday until the minute I received an email from ISC2 at 2:00pm yesterday afternoon telling me how I could now rebook my exam. Precisely forty-nine hours and fifteen minutes. That weight is now gone, leaving the weight of preparing for what is likely the hardest exam that I have taken in a long time and the stress and anxiety that goes along with that… but there is a deadline for that which is next Wednesday at noon. Suffice it to say I am not making any social plans for this weekend so that I can prepare for the exam, as well as for the class that I am teaching Monday. I maintain a spreadsheet of every certification exam I have ever sat, and for the first time ever I created that new line for my upcoming exam in advance. Why? I do not really know, but it likely has something to do with my anxiety.

    My food intake yesterday was in most respects identical to the previous day. Aside from two things I was able to stick to my program again, but when I got into my car to drive out to the cigar shop I realized the remaining peanuts from what I had purchased the previous day were there, so I finished them. Additionally, once again felt the need late at night to take a pinch of grated cheese. I can assure you that Princess Sophie is happy that I continue to need that as she always benefits from it.

    Even with the cheese my weight continues to drop at a rate of not quite one pound per day, which is tremendous. At this rate (which of course will not continue) I could not only drop below the terrible mark in the next month, but also by winter I could be back in almost all of my tailor fitted shirts and jackets! Wouldn’t that be something… but we have to assume that within the next week or two that rate will drop to 3 lbs. per week, which means that it is going to be springtime before I am back to where I was when I was at my lowest weight and then started slipping. I never want to be this big again… but of course I have said that before.

    My sleep score this morning was the best it has been since June 19, with the comment that it was restorative. It was such a relief after the previous night’s problems with my back that kept me awake. The only thing I took (which I do almost every night) is melatonin. I did wake up a couple of times to pee but other than that I had no problems. I had been worried the last few weeks that it was Princess Sophie sleeping in my bed that caused my sleep issues, but that was obviously not the case last night. Woohoo!

    I was reminded yesterday of two masonic events coming up this summer that I am being encouraged to attend. I made the conscious decision to decline both as they are both food-centric. I do not need to attend a corn roast as (I love sweet corn, especially in season!) and I do not need to attend a fish fry, as much as I enjoy fried fish. I was not at all tempted (nor was it even suggested I attend) by the pig roast that one of the lodges is holding. Religious observations aside, I am satisfied with the progress I have made thus far, but I do not think I am ready to subject myself to temptations. I do not think I have the willpower to resist yet.

    My plans for the day are to read, study, and smoke cigars. I was thinking that I had a couple of things I needed to pick up from the store, but I decided to order them from Amazon instead.

    In the last hour I have been experiencing more discomfort that feels somewhat similar to what I was feeling a couple of nights ago, but while it is radiating into my back, it feels like it might be related to my digestive tract. It feels like something extremely solid (akin to every other bowel movement I have had this past week) is lodged in there and is applying pressure to both my bladder and a couple of other nerves. It has gotten much worse – so much so that in the middle of this paragraph I got up, found a laxative, and then decided to take a shower to try to ease the discomfort. It might be a little better now than it was thirty minutes ago, but I am definitely looking forward to the time when the laxative begins to work. While writing these last three paragraphs I have had to stand up several times to alleviate the discomfort. Suffice it to say that as soon as I am finished with this journal entry I will be shutting my computer down for the next few hours. Hopefully my ‘throne’ chair on the balcony will be more comfortable. By the way, the answer is yes, I have been adding fibre to my meal replacements at least once per day. My program, being an extreme one, is going to cause disruptions to my body. This is not the first time I have started this same program, and I have experienced changes each time… and not the same each time. I know I have had some discomfort in the past and I only hope that this abates over the course of the day so that I do not have to reconsider staying on the program. Of course my first course of action would be to reincorporate a single solid meal per day… but I am hoping that can wait for a few weeks at the least. I would love to get down well below the terrible mark before I have to do that… but my health comes first, and if I have to then I will do it sooner.

    Okay, it is time for me to grab my book and a cigar and to see if my throne is more comfortable than this desk chair. Have a great day folks!