It has been a long time since I last posted anything. I am going to try to do this again more regularly.
In the interim a few things have changed and a lot of things are the same. My dad died. It was last October. You can see the obituary here. Yes, for some reason my daughter's name is well just completely wrong, but it is what it is. After that we moved mom in with us. It's been a new experience, but an enjoyable one being close to family and my daughter loves it too. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He is in section 55 grave 3315. If you download the ANC explorer app you can actually see the headstone which is not actually as strange or morbid as it may sound.
My daughter started school last year. My wife got a position as a music teacher at a private school in Tyler. Therefore Evie was also able to go to that school. I think they both liked it. This year, however, my wife is not working that job anymore, and my daughter is being homeschooled. I'll likely post more on this later.
Otherwise I am still working at my same employer. Still pretty much doing the same thing. You can view my LinkedIn profile if you are curious.
So more recently I have for the first time in a long time tried to actively lose weight. As part of that I have actually joined a gym, although technically my wife joined first and I ended up adding myself to her membership, some time later, because it wasn't much more expensive. Now that we're tied into a one year commitment I have found a motivation to go fairly regularly. It has been almost three months since this journey began. I have to say that I have actually been enjoying going to the gym.
The gym is through one of the local hospitals in town and it's pretty close to the house which makes it convenient. They have lots of weight equipment, a spin class that I currently have no intention of going near, a pool and otherwise all the equipment you would expect to find in a gym, I would imagine. Except that this equipment is all networked and uses something called MyWellness, there are apps for that too. They keep track of your exercises and use a metric called moves to tell you how active you are.
I also purchased a Garmin Vivosmart HR+ because well it seemed like a good idea at the time. I found one on eBay factory refurbished. It was less than half of the retail price. I think it works great in so far as helping me keep track of my steps and otherwise it's a nice watch. Plus the phone integration is helpful with incoming calls and texts and other notifications.
Another neat app I have been using is MyFitnessPal. It is owned by Under Armour, but it's still a great app. You can use it to keep track of your food intake and it syncs with the Garmin Connect app used by my Vivosmart HR+ so it knows how many calories you have expended. It syncs with a bunch of other apps too. My wife has a Fitbit and it syncs between their app as well.
It seems this post has turned into me talking about fitness. Kind of funny I guess. Though to be honest, it's actually been working out. In the 82 days since I started this I've lost twenty pounds. That's about a pound every 4.5 days. Which I think is a fair rate of weight loss and more importantly sustainable.
Much more recently, however, I have, at the request of my wife, been trying to do this whole30 thing. To be honest I don't know much about it and I am still reading the book but so far it's been difficult. Especially cutting out sugar and wheat because that's in pretty much everything we have in our pantry. We're making it work, I think. I can't say I have been 100% strict, but I am trying. We're one week in and I am sure that I will post more about it as the month goes on.
Anyway that is enough for now I think.
