Losing a part of me

Tag: life

  • Day 1273

    I slept two nights since yesterday. I’ll explain.

    After the debacle that was yesterday I knew that I would not be going to the Grand Lodge event in Toronto today, but I had promised someone that I would give him something there. I arranged for a brother to drop by to pick them up on his way. I did not fall asleep until nearly 1am, so when my doorbell rang before 6:00am I was not nearly well rested, but I got up and dressed and did my thing… which is to say that I took Her Floofness for her walk, and when we came home I fed her, brewed a half pot of coffee (I realized I did not have sufficient coffee to brew a full pot) and mixed my meal replacement shake. I sat down at the computer and did my email thing and even opened up my blog page to write… but did not write a word. My sleep score was 56 – plenty of deep but not nearly enough overall.

    At 8:30am I realized how exhausted I was and decided to lie down for a bit. Princess Sophie jumped at the opportunity to join me. I am not sure that it was as deep as the overnight inadequate sleep, but it was actually longer – I woke up around 2:30pm! I prepared my meal replacement shake, I actually had a bowel movement (only my second one in nearly a week), and brushed my teeth again. While I would normally never do this, I weighed myself again, and was pleased to see that I had dropped another pound and a half since this morning. With that said, I have not decided if I will keep it… weighing myself at 7am versus 3pm? Yeah… it will depend on what the bathroom scale says tomorrow morning. If it is down from this afternoon then I will keep it, but if it is up then I will wipe it. Anyhow, I then sat down at my computer to pay some bills.

    I am trying to think more positively today than I did yesterday afternoon. Yes, the exam cancellation completely screwed me for the next several weeks, but nobody is shooting at me. I will try to be patient and wait to hear back about rescheduling the exam. In the meantime, I am going to drive to the supermarket – I am out of coffee, and I have some dry cleaning to drop off. Once that is done, if the rain has abated then I will take Her Floofness for another walk before sitting on the balcony with my book – an author that I love releases a new book in his series every July 15, and I downloaded it that day planning to read it after my exam. Since that did not happen I will try to read it today.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1272 – Afternoon

    I did not pass my exam.

    In my defense, I also did not fail my exam. I arrived at the testing centre as prepared as I could be, perfectly at peace in the knowledge that I very well might (dare I say would probably) fail the exam. At least I would know what I was up against, and what my shortcomings were. I would then come back home and relax for a couple of days… and then I would reschedule the exam (at great expense, but leave that for now) for sometime in August or September, and I would continue studying… with greater focus on the areas that I needed to focus on. Because I was comfortable knowing that I would probably not pass, I was just glad that the stress and anxiety would be behind me.

    I drove into the parking lot, I paid for parking. I walked into the building and walked down the long corridor (I have been here before so while I forgot what floor it was on, I at least knew my way there). In the hallway there were emergency lights blinking… not a good sign. I got to the elevator and a building maintenance manager flagged me to get my attention. There had been an electrical issue that was not resolved and was deemed to be a safety issue; the building had been evacuated. It did not bode well for a quick turnaround that I did not see any large groups of students or workers congregating outside of the building waiting for the all-clear signal to return to their classes or offices or whatever. The maintenance manager told me that the power company had to come in to do a safety inspection on a transformer, and if that was the case then it was highly unlikely that anyone was going back to work today.

    I stood outside the front door of the building and logged onto the testing centre website to try to reschedule. With any luck, they would be able to book me for the next hour at a test site within short driving distance (there is one that is a 20-25 minute drive from where I was standing). Why did I do this all standing outside the front door? It was the only shaded area, and while I love the sun my smartphone screen does not, and would have a) been hard to read with my polarized sunglasses, and b) would have, within a few minutes, have gone into sum/heat protection mode (I do not know what the actual term is) which would dim the brightness to the point of near-illegibility. I logged into the site, paid my dues chatting with their AI chatbot, and then finally was chatting with a person. I never expected they would be able to accommodate that quick reschedule, but hope springs eternal. SPOILER ALERT: I was right and they did not.

    While I knew that would likely not happen I was at least hoping they could reschedule me for tomorrow… or later in the week… or next week. They could do none of that. In fact, the global body for the testing centre had not been informed that the local testing centre was evacuated so they are not even sure that I will get a replacement voucher (the exam costs USD$750) in order to reschedule it. As I type this it is two hours after my original exam time and at least three hours after the building was evacuated and there is still no indication (either from the testing centre or from the local news) that there was anything, so I am starting to sweat about that…

    When I got home I called them, and they told me to call the testing organization (Pearson Vue administers tests for hundreds of organizations and I would need to escalate to the certifying body). At least they gave me a direct phone number… it astounds me how difficult it is to find someone to speak with these days.

    After several minutes on hold with the ISC2 (that’s the certifying body) I spoke with a very nice and sympathetic gentleman named Edgar who promised to escalate my case and assured me that the team he was escalating to would help me to reschedule. When? That’s a good question… it might take 3-5 business days for them to get back to me with my rescheduling voucher and then it might take another 2-3 weeks for a free appointment at the testing centre.

    What does all of that mean?

    1. I am obviously no further ahead on my certification than I was when I woke up this morning.
    2. The anxiety and stress that I have been experiencing over this exam is still with me, but now instead of having a set date when I would be past it, I have another unknown which might be… who knows when.
    3. Instead of coming home with the exam behind me I know I will now be continuing to study until… WHENEVER THE F&CK THEY LET ME TAKE THE EXAM.
    4. Instead of coming home and booking airfare to Newfoundland to go visit friends, I am… well, NOT doing that.
    5. Instead of going to my Provincial Lodge event tomorrow (and hopefully smoking an extremely fine cigar to celebrate passing) I am staying home and studying.

    …the list goes on. This literally screwed up the rest of my summer.

    So why, you may ask, am I writing this here? Because it was all that I could do to not stop off at a pub and order two pounds of chicken wings. I was so sorely tempted, knowing how f&cked things are, to throw my hands in the air and to give up. I did not do that. I came home, made my phone calls, and then sat at the computer to type this. Once again, something else blew up the next few weeks of my life… but this time I was able to stay on track. How? I have no idea.

    This evening I will be smoking cigars on the balcony. I suspect I will take the night off from studying, and might even rent and stream the new Karate Kid movie. If I can be strong then I will not open a bottle of scotch (which right now I am sorely tempted to do). Tomorrow I will resume my studies and will wait… I was about to say wait patiently, but who are we kidding? I will wait very impatiently to hear back from ISC2 so that I can rebook the exam. The absolute earlies that might happen would be late next week but I doubt I will be able to book before the week after. Yay to two more weeks of my anxiety stress and dialed to a fourteen.

    …and I know that when I finally do walk into the testing centre it will take every bit of willpower for me to not yell at them that the least they could have done was phoned in that they were evacuated so I would have received an email canceling and I would not have driven down there and paid for parking. I have this image of a kid from a movie in the 1980s who is trying to collect for his paper route and keeps yelling ‘I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!’ Yes, parking cost me all of $7 but that is a very small cherry on top of the very large heap of shite that this inconvenience caused.

  • Day 1272

    As I prepared for bed last night I realized that my hunger was going to keep me awake… especially when paired with my anxiety over the exam I am writing this afternoon. I am still studying, but I am at peace with the fact that I am almost certainly going to fail. Anyways, back to the hunger. I had enjoyed my last meal replacement around 8:30pm, and two (three?) cigars since. I had ingested the Rideau Canal since 6:30pm. What was I to do? I bit the bullet and took another pinch of grated cheese. Yes, I have one small pinch every morning as I feed Her Floofness, but I make it a point to not take more after that. Nothing doing… desperate times call for desperate measures. I took another pinch of it before heading off to bed.

    I still did not fall asleep until 1:00am, but at least I slept pretty well… my sleep score was just barely down from the two previous nights to a 76 and according to my fitness watch, it was ‘Fair, shorter than ideal, with plenty of deep.’ I can live with that. I also only got up to pee once after finally falling asleep, and that was at 2:00am, which means that from 2am to 7:30am I slept five consecutive hours. I did stir at 6:15 or so feeling the urge to pee, but I decided I could wait. Ultimately this afforded me an entire extra 75 minutes of sleep that I likely would not have had if I had gotten up after 6:15.

    While I have been stressed and anxious since mid-March, that has mostly been for personal reasons. Today’s heightened anxiety is for professional reasons – I am nervous about my exam. While I do have more to say about my weight loss program, I really want to spend the next two hours getting the last minute studying and cramming in before heading out for the exam centre. Depending on how things go, you will either hear from me again later today… or tomorrow morning. If I do not post again today do not read anything into that – I might just be distracted.

  • Day 1271

    I do not remember at what point I stopped updating my offline journal – that is, the one large document that included all of the posts from my online blog – but it occurs to me that I should seriously think about going back and updating it. I do not really want to see a lot of the worst of my entries from the deepest times of despair, but I suppose I can just copy-and-paste without reading them. We will see. That will not happen before Thursday – today is my last complete day to study for my exam which is at 1:00pm tomorrow afternoon, so my main focus until after the exam will be that. Wednesday I will be at a provincial Grand Lodge event, which takes us to Thursday.

    I should mention that I did resume updating my weight tracking spreadsheet from my bathroom scale. That is much easier to do, and does not involve going to each individual day to cop-paste. All I needed to do was to expert all data from the scale since the beginning of April and then copy-paste that into my spreadsheet.

    The new shirts and jacket that I ordered are out for delivery according to FedEx, and I will have them in time for my event on Wednesday. That is a relief. While I do have a suit that I can wear, it is tight and I will feel more comfortable wearing something that is tailored to my size. The disturbing truth is that from the day the tailor measured me for these new clothes I gained over ten pounds… that is just over a month ago. Fortunately I have these last five days lost all of that. Phew! As terrible as I feel that I needed to have bigger clothes made, that would have been amplified had they now been tight.

    Yes, today is Day 5, and according to the bathroom scale I have dropped a little over ten pounds. I am pleased but far from satisfied. I have a long way to go, as I said yesterday, until I am anywhere near satisfied. Maybe ‘satisfied with my progress so far’ is a better way to write that.

    I need to start exercising in order to make sure I continue to not only lose weight, but also to ensure I get back into shape. My doctor will tell you that I am in great shape for a man a fucking overweight as I am (she would not use those exact words), but that is not good enough for me. I would like to run a marathon next year. Before I do that, I need to start walking again before I can start jogging again. I am going to wait a couple of weeks before jogging for a number of reasons, but as for walking I might start as early as Thursday, depending on the weather. Yes, I have a treadmill… but if the weather is nice I would much rather begin my journey again in the fresh air.

    My sleep score last night was equal to the previous night. I suspect that if I was not drinking what amounts to a small swimming pool every day it might be a bit higher… but alas, I am going to continue to drink as much water as I can. Water is great for the body, but it is also a big contributor to weight loss… even if it did not help to fill my occasionally hungry stomach. I only woke up three times to pee in the night last night which is a 25% improvement over the two previous nights.

    I did finally move my bowels yesterday which was a relief (no pun intended). I neglected to add fibre to my morning meal replacement, but will make a point of doing so this afternoon.

    Owing to something I needed to get done for a buddy yesterday, I was not as productive as I would have liked to be. I did get some studying done… but not as much as I hoped to. Today there will be no disturbances, and that is what I am going to do.

    There are so many things I probably should do with regard to tracking my renewed weight loss efforts, but I am not ready to do that yet. I know that my Body Mass Index (BMI) is a disgusting 42.6, up twelve points from my best ever in October 2023. I have to assume that means that I would again be classified as morbidly obese, but looking to see at what point I would drop out of that… I am not ready for that. I know that I need to set short, medium, and long-term goals for myself, but for the time being I just want to follow the program like an automaton. I will drink my meal replacements and do nothing more other than journal about my emotions.

    The friend who came over yesterday is one of two who has gone through the same medically supervised program that I did. He understands a lot of what I am going through. He and his wife went through it and they lost a lot of weight. It is good to have people that I can speak with who have been there.

    My only plans to go out today are to go to the store to pick up milk for my coffee. Other than that, I expect I will migrate between my desk and my balcony, studying either inside or outside. I will continue to try stabilizing the timing of my meal replacements, which might be easier today at home than tomorrow (when I have my exam) and Wednesday (when I will likely be in Toronto for the day). Speaking of which, I had better remember to bring my meal replacements with me if I go to Toronto… I do not want to be caught having to break the program as I am still trying to make it a habit… and while I am doing so well.

    While I have felt hunger at times, I suspect that yesterday was the first day that I did not consider the program (which is by any measure extreme) a hardship. I was able to get through it without a great deal of difficulty. There have been times these last few days when cigars have helped to distract me from my hunger, and I will continue to use them as a tool. I was going to use the word crutch but no, it is not a crutch. I am not leaning on them, rather I am using them to bridge the hunger meal replacements, much as a snack might bridge the hunger between meals.

    I have said before that forcing a happy face when one is down can be a way to actually induce the happiness eventually. I am trying to put on that positive and happy air these days, and I hope that after tomorrow’s exam I might start to feel it. Until then? The exam and its implications are all consuming.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1270

    As I had the previous day, I stuck to my program religiously yesterday… with the (again) pinch of grated cheese that I nibbled as I was giving Princess Sophie hers. In fact, owing to a weird schedule and a possibly failing memory, it is possible that I ingested even less than I am supposed to – I might have only had three meal replacements rather than the four that are medically recommended. I have made a note to try to do better both with remembering and with the consistency of timing so that I make sure I do get all of the vitamins and nutrients that I need to be healthy.

    In addition to those, I had my coffee (as usual) and, as I was sitting on the balcony studying (and because it was 36° and sunny) I decided to pour myself a cold iced tea. I sweetened it with aspartame rather than the raw sugar that I use for my coffee, and I do not think that would be considered a cheat.

    I also drank my water. Folks, it is much easier to remember to drink copious amounts of water when the weather is scorching than it is in the winter. I am easily going through at least four litres of water a day, and probably more than that.

    Remember my plan from yesterday morning? I had gotten up to pee however many times the previous night, and so I was going to try to make a note to stop drinking after 8pm? That did not happen… I studied on the balcony until nearly 9:30pm, and then sat there watching TV on my iPad. It was still hot, so I kept drinking water to stay hydrated. When I went into the house to get ready for bed I counted the empty water bottles next to the sink… between the time I finished my evening meal replacement (around 7:30pm) and the time I went to bed I drank a little over 1.5l (54oz) of water. The result? I peed three times between coming into the house and going to sleep, and I got up from sleep another four times. Will I never learn?

    Despite that, my sleep was much better than the previous night. My sleep score was 79, up from 58. I’ll take it.

    Yesterday afternoon I was asked by a couple of friends to go out to a bar for the evening. I politely declined, telling them that I need to study… and in fact that is what I did. What I did not tell them is that I was on Day 3 of my program and I was not ready to spend a night at a bar surrounded by all of the temptations of food and drink. It is much easier for me to keep my resolve if I stay home alone.

    Today is Day 4, and I am remembering some of what I was going through on Day 4 on my previous attempts. It has now been two days since my last bowel movement, and so I added fibre to my meal replacement this morning. I was very sluggish on Day 1 & 2, but I think that is behind me. I remember that I was very cold from within, owing to the sheer volume of water I was drinking. Wouldn’t it be nice for that to happen while it is this hot? It hasn’t kicked in yet if it is going to… I’ll keep waiting.

    My weight has dropped drastically these last three days but that is not unusual for the first few days of the program. Wouldn’t it be nice to see that trend continue? It is unlikely. Yes, if I stick to the program, then my weight will continue to drop… but not at the tremendous rate it has fallen these three days. As it is, I have already dropped all of the weight that I gained this last month.

    This year has been a dumpster fire for so many reasons. My weight dipped below ‘that horrible mark’ only one day this year – back in January. Since then it has skyrocketed and I do not even want to say how bad it got. Suffice it to say, I want to get back below that horrible mark, and if I can do so by the end of September then I will be a happy man. No, that is not entirely true… I will be a relieved man. I will only be truly happy when I have lost every single pound that I gained back since falling off the wagon two years ago.

    Is it a coincidence that I fell off the wagon when my heart was shattered in November of 2023, and then again when it was shattered in April of 2025? I doubt it. I am the only one to blame, but it does not take a genius to recognize that the actions of others is the root cause of these falls.

    A good friend of mine has been asking for help with his computer for a couple of months, but every time we have scheduled to meet he has been called away for work at the last minute. As of this minute he is supposed to come after work today, and unless there is an incident that necessitates his working overtime then I will see him then. He is one of my friends who has gone through the medically supervised program that I did, so he will understand that no, I will not let him take me out to dinner as a thank-you, but we will be able to sit on the balcony with a cigar to chat and catch up. It will be great to talk with him because he knows what I am going through and if he cannot advise me then he can at least listen with a sympathetic ear.

    Other than the visit from my buddy, my plan is to once again study until I cannot read the words on the page for one more minute. My exam is scheduled for precisely 49.75 hours from this minute as I type, and I am nowhere near confident that I will pass. I will do everything in my power to do so, and if nothing else I will walk into the exam room confident that I have done all that I can to prepare.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1269

    I made it through Day 2 of the program mostly unscathed. As much as I hate myself and my weight gains these last eighteen months (and especially the last three), I know that I have to force myself to stay on track because the only way that I will ever not hate myself is to force myself to lose the weight. I suppose I should clarify that it is the only way that I will not hate my body… there is so much more going on that it is hard to think that this alone will solve my ills.

    Did I stay true to the program yesterday? Yes I did… with one very minor cheat (which I repeated this morning). Princess Sophie has me trained to sprinkle some shredded cheese on her food in the morning, and when I did I took a very small bit for myself. I cannot see the harm in that… at least not if it is my only aberration from the program. Other than that, I had four meal replacement shakes, most of a pot of coffee (with a very small bit of milk and sugar), and a metric fuckload of water. It is no wonder I slept worse last night than the previous… I was up to pee four times! While I will try to drink as much water today as I did yesterday, I will try to be smarter and drink less of it after 8pm.

    While I will not be discussing hard numbers for a while, I am happy that after two days I am down 8.5 lbs from what I weighed Thursday morning, which was my heaviest weight in something like three years. There are so many reasons why, but the end result is that I hated myself more that morning than at any point in a long time… as pertains to my body. The rest of my mental crap? That’s another story.

    Aside from catching up with an old friend and colleague via video chat this afternoon, my plan is to spend most of the day studying. My exam is in three days and I am still not confident that I am ready for it. I am going to do my best though.

    I am also going to do my best to stay true to the program today.

  • Day 1268

    It was Sophie’s fault.

    Okay, that is both wrong and unfair. The explanation for it, unjustified though it may be, is that I was extremely hungry as I prepared to end my class yesterday, and my plan was to have a meal replacement shake before taking HRF Princess Sophie out for her walk. She was having none of that. She was ready to go out immediately and no amount of coaxing would change her mind. We went out for a long walk… she insisted on seeing the sights and greeting her friends and possibly sniffing every blade of grass in her park.

    When we got home I was even more ravenous, but knowing that I was on Day 1 of my program I could not go crazy. I did, however, decide to prepare those three eggs that I was going to give away or throw out. All in all I could have done much worse, but I still felt guilty about it.

    This morning there were no eggs in the house. After we got home from our morning walk Her Floofness wanted to go to see the neighbour, and knowing that Sue had told us that Charlie would be there today, I was more than happy to accommodate her. I came back home and put on the coffee before preparing my meal replacement shake.

    Four shakes per day for the foreseeable future. Not fun… but I have put on a disastrous amount of weight since my life fell apart, and it is time to get off that ride and to try to get control of my life back from my emotions. That starts by losing the weight… again.

    It pains me to know how heavy I am. I had done so well, and then my life fell apart… in fact, it happened twice over a 19-month period. Thanks, Lady. No, I will not go into detail. Yes, I am somewhat bitter. That doesn’t matter though… it is time to pick myself up off the floor and get back on track.

    I got an email yesterday that my new sports jacket and shirts are en route from Hong Kong and should arrive by the end of next week. I am excited to receive them; I am equally hopeful that within a few months they will no longer fit, and I will be back to wearing my original weight-loss wardrobe… hopefully by the beginning of September?

    I have been sleeping poorly the last week, in which my fitness watch registered a sleep score over 70 only once. Last night was the first night in over a week that it was slightly better… an 81. I hope to continue that trend.

    It is Friday, and thus my last day of class. I had some technical issues yesterday which means that I am going to have to rush through a little of the material today but I am still confident that I will be able to get through it all. This evening I will light the Sabbath candles as usual, but for the first time in a long time I will not be eating my ritual challah bread to say that blessing. Nor will I be saying kiddush on the wine… I am back on the program.

    Because I had eggs for both breakfast and dinner yesterday I might consider yesterday to have been a Day Half rather than a new Day One. Sabbath or not, today I am drinking my meal replacements, coffee, and a lot of water… and that is all that I will be ingesting. I hope that I can follow that discipline for a few months and not just a few days. I have fallen off the wagon too many times. I have to be strong this time.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1263

    This weekend has been unique in my experience. I drove to Strathroy Friday morning and my buddy greeted me and immediately took off. He and his wife are spending the weekend away. I walked into the house and was greeted (somewhat) by sixteen legs… two children (9 & 6 years old), a dog named Buddy, and two cats. If you know me at all you will realize that the first eight legs were no problem, but I am quite allergic to the last eight. Won’t this be… fun.

    We spent Friday afternoon in the back yard. They had a blast on the trampoline, and I sat on the patio trying (unsuccessfully) to read. I mostly watched them and relaxed. I prepared spaghetti for dinner, and then we took Buddy for his evening walk to the park. Buddy is a four-year-old Labrador retriever who probably tips the scale at around 100 pounds. He is not overweight that I can tell, he is just a lot more dog than I am used to. As a comparison, HRF Princess Sophie weighs in at just under 18 pounds. The difference did not really hit me until we were out on the walk, with the kids on their bike and scooter. Buddy stopped to sniff and chew and whatever, and when I pulled on his collar to tell him it was time to go I was met with a resistance that I am just not used to. Walking him would actually be exercise.

    Did I mention that sometime during the afternoon, as I was sitting in the house for a few minutes, he threw up? This is not unusual for dogs, I know. What was unusual was the size and texture and odour of what came forth. It smelled terrible, but looked like it should have come out the other end! I grabbed some paper towel and picked up the now-confirmed solid component of it and put it in the kitchen sink. Whatever it was, you can be sure that it had spent some time in his digestive tract, if not actually in his stomach. I apologize, I am not an expert in these things. Once I had cleaned up the entire mess, I returned to the sink and rinsed off what ended up being three very small (6-year-old sized?) socks. I was not quite sure what to do with them, but I did not want to potentially contaminate the laundry basket which would not be addressed for at least two days. I decided to leave them to dry off in the basement bathroom. I made a mental note to tell Amanda they are there.

    Taking care of very picky children and eating well can go one of two ways: You can prepare two separate meals for you and your charges… or you can resign yourself to eating crap. With the knowledge that my extreme diet starts Thursday, and that I would have to pack them into the car and take them to a supermarket, inviting the constant fight of ‘Uncle Mitch can we get this?’ I opted to try to do my best with what they were eating. As I mentioned earlier, I prepared spaghetti for dinner Friday. I had been told that the kids took care of their own breakfasts (mostly cereals) so Saturday morning I made myself an omelette and a bagel (of which Buddy stole half when I was not looking).

    The kids had started haranguing me to go for fast food for lunch on Saturday within 20 minutes of my arriving on Friday. Their dad had already told me that it was okay, so we ended up at Wendy’s. I tried in vain to get them to accept Harvey’s but at a certain point there is no point in arguing with a 6-year-old. Had I known that there was a toy giveaway at Wendy’s it would have made more sense. The meal was enjoyable though – the kids really are well behaved, and a lot of fun – so I did not mind.

    While they tried to convince me to either go out for or order dinner in (as well as every other meal all weekend), I managed to convince them to pick something that we had in the house. Chicken nuggets and French fries are not the worst things they could have picked. I eschewed the nuggets for some pasta salad that was in the fridge.

    When I told my buddy Friday that I had packed ten cigars, he told me that they would last me at least until the following morning. Ha ha, right? Well I do have one cigar left as I sit writing this two days later… but only one. I also expected there might be something to drink by way of adult beverages… I mean, what kind of person leaves their kids with someone and doesn’t make sure there’s at least a bottle of scotch somewhere? To add insult to injury, I noticed Friday afternoon there was a wine bottle in the fridge… but when the kids were in bed I discovered it was half a bottle of peach Bellini. Not cool.

    Okay, at least there were three bottles of decent beer in the downstairs fridge.

    Today is my fifty-third birthday. With all of the well-wishers on Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as a few more personal ones, I do not feel much like celebrating. Truth be told, if I was not here with the kids I would most likely be working on my computer at home, possibly preparing for my class tomorrow (although I think I’ve already done that), and then smoking cigars on the balcony. It was nice to be feted last week at the barbecue, but I really have not felt festive this year. Can anyone blame me?

    I should mention that my godson’s birthday is in two days, so I ordered him a present from Amazon which was delivered yesterday. I do not think they realize that today is my birthday, and I am fine with that. When I find out what time the parents are due back I will decide whether or not I will take them out for lunch… I probably will because I doubt they will be home before 1:00pm. We’ll see.

    I should mention that I have not wasted my time here. Last week I booked my CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) exam for next week, and I have been studying for it. I brought my study material, and have read over a hundred pages of what I need to read. While I am still certain I am going to fail the exam, at least I will do so knowing that I did take it serious and tried my best. I will spend at least an hour every night this week reading and studying and preparing for the exam which I am sitting next Tuesday. I am teaching a different cybersecurity class this week and while the content is not the same, it is the same general realm which will be helpful. I am not going to go into that exam unprepared. On the other hand, it is probably the highest level and most important certification exam I will have taken to date… and if I get it then it will open more avenues for me professionally – both for teaching and for consulting. Am I nervous? In ways that surprise me.

    While I am thinking about it, I am probably going to downgrade my home lab that I built over the last few weeks. The host operating system on the servers seems to be troublesome, and there is a lot of talk online that the latest server version from Microsoft is not very stable. I have found at least three issues that might be caused by an unstable host, and I do not want to spend anymore time troubleshooting it. Fortunately, it is only on the actual physical host servers that i am experiencing the problems. The virtual machines (the vast majority of the work) is stable, and can just be dropped onto the new hosts if I end up doing that. We’ll see. This might be a thought I have while I am 200km from home, but falls by the wayside when I am in front of the keyboard. We’ll see.

    Have a great day folks.

  • Day 1243

    My plans for yesterday were simple. If I heard from either of my children I would have dropped everything, but I did not expect to. After breakfast I was going to sit on the balcony to study for an exam that I needed to take later in the day. Following the exam I was going to drink myself into a stupor.

    As it happens, I did hear from my son the elder! It does not happen often, but when I went out onto the balcony to study I left my phone in the house, and so I missed his call. I phoned him back and he gave me some terrific news – he was accepted to an amazing school to do his Master’s Degree! He had to work soon but I told him I would come to see him at his job – he works at the LCBO, so if I was going to drink it worked out perfectly. He was working the cash so he did not have a lot of time to talk, but he asked if I wanted to do something when his shift was over. I invited him to come over for a drink and a cigar to celebrate.

    I went home and made dinner – a piece of rainbow trout that I bought (I actually only prepared half of it) and a side dish of white rice. I finished up a few things and then prepared for his arrival. We had a very lovely visit and while I drank a lot more than he did (I did not have to drive) I think we both enjoyed our conversation.

    Oh… and yes, I passed the exam… but some exams are not worth bragging about. This exam took me about sixteen minutes from start to finish.

    While I got nearly eight hours of sleep last night, my fitness watch still gave me an abysmal sleep score… a 44. I am sure the alcohol had something to do with it. I will make sure to get a few hours of sleep this afternoon before I have to teach tonight.

    I will spend the day today preparing for the class I am teaching this evening – yes, it is another overnight class, but it is a single-day class and I am not as worried about the recovery as I am when it is the entire week.

    Life still sucks… but at least I got to spend a very pleasant evening with one of my sons.

  • Day 1231

    I know I keep saying this but I need to get back on track. What do I need:

    • My work life needs to be on track
    • My eating and weight loss (somewhat of a joke these last few months) needs to get back on track
    • My exercise – nearly nonexistent this last year – needs to get back on track

    I am not even going to address my emotional issues… more on that later.

    My work life, which had been a disaster for months until February, seems to be back on track. January was still not a great month but things picked up a little at the end, and I got through the first two months of the year by the skin of my teeth. March, April, and May were all banner months, and so far I have courses booked for June, July, and August – traditionally very slow months in my industry, so I am relieved that I will have continuous income throughout the summer – and if it is slightly lower than the last few months then that is still far better than nothing.

    My eating and my exercise are probably quite closely tied together, and finding my way back on track with those is also tied to (although not at all related to the cause of) my emotional issues. I know I have to get back on track but I am not sure whether I have the strength right now. There are some days that it is all I can do to get out of bed. At the same time I am extremely upset about my body so I know that I need to get back on track. I have lost so much of the incredible work that I did which took me so long to do. I am hoping that with the warmer weather finally upon us that maybe I will be able to drag myself out of the house for a walk if not a jog quite yet.

    My life is the total shite right now and I have to either get out of my funk or I don’t know what is going to happen. For those of you wondering, yes I know how terrible the grammar of that last sentence is… I just do not have the energy to try to fix it.

    I slept a lot last night, but I did not feel refreshed in the morning. My fitness watch backed that up. Sigh.