As you may've noticed, I don't really post here terribly often. A big reason for this is I envisioned starting a tech blog as opposed to just a personal blog. The problem is, technical blog posts take a lot of time and thought to write, and I'm not a huge writer. That said, I would like to start getting in the habit of documenting my life a little more, so from this point on I'm going to just blog about whatever is going on and assume nobody reads it as I assume now 👍
Around the end of July, I got a call from my mom stating that my dad had a heart attack. I drove up to Chicago to see him a few days later, when he was in the ICU. It was a rollercoaster of good news and bad news, and generally just a really stressful few days in the hospital. As things were looking optimistic, I headed home. A few weeks later I got another call that my dad had passed away. He was 71. I don't want to go into too much detail on this, but July and August were just difficult months. And I missed the solar eclipse due to the timing.
The silver lining this summer is that I picked up a few good habits. For the drive home from Chicago on my first trip, I picked up an audiobook to listen to. I've never tried listening to audiobooks, and it turns out I rather like it. I've finished 9 books in about 6 weeks now. I decided that I would start doing some cardio to lose weight, and listening to audiobooks while exercising turns out to be a great combination.
In addition to that, I finally decided to seek some counseling for my anxiety issues. I've been pretty sure I've had generalized anxiety disorder for the last 2 years or so, but the summer putting my anxiety over the top made me realize that this issue won't get better unless I make a conscious effort to treat it. The daily exercise helps with this too, so all the new self-improvement efforts have a nice synergy.
My big goal for the remainder of 2017 is a weight loss goal. In total, the hope is to lose 36 pounds in a span of roughly 22 weeks. So far I've lost about 6 pounds, which is slower progress than I hoped for. I'm adding intermittent fasting (starting with a 16:8 every day) in addition to calorie counting + cardio. I've never tried intermittent fasting as part of a weight loss regimen, so it'll be interesting to see what the effect is.
While in Chicago, my sister mentioned that she ran a marathon and she was planning on running another one next year. Being the little brother, I have a very strong "if she can do it, so can I" attitude. Setting realistic goals, the plan is to run a half marathon in the first half of 2018. If that goes well, I can shoot for a full marathon for fall 2018/spring 2019. I'm not rushing to get to the full marathon, mainly because I'd rather avoid injury and gradually ramp up to that type of distance.
Work is work, I just finished writing a few services in scala. Most of my focus is still R & Python, working with data scientists. Getting some time to play with a compiled language writing REST services is a nice change of pace.
Life is starting to feel a little more normal.