Weight: 181.4 (+0.6 lbs for the week, -5.4 lbs overall)
Savings: $1915 (second job) + $1600 (day job)
Days without soda: 120
Writing to you from my friend’s house as my apartment does not have heat today. Which is awesome because it is freezing rain outside and I pay more than $1000 a month for rent.
The good: My savings are way up! I have $3500 which is maybe the most I have had saved since I finished graduate school. What helped is that I finally got reimbursed for my work events. And instead of putting the money in my checking account, it went straight to savings.
My day job savings goal by December was to be $1600, which I achieved. But I was down about $300 in November and was able to make up the deficit this month. I will take some hits for Christmas, including getting my sister a bike and taking my niece to NYC, but that will come from my second job account.
I have also bounced back from the existential dread about dating from last week, so that is a positive! Sometimes I have (and probably everybody has) downswings you have to work through. I think working so much is actually a good thing in that it prevents me from having too much down time to ruminate. So I am thankful for that.
Starting today, I get five days in a row off from both jobs! Holy crap, time off! It will be nice to chill and I am hoping to read and play a lot of video games and also look into building up my freelance career.
I updated my resume and applied for a recruiter job at a tech firm, which is essentially what I do now, except I would get paid six figures and probably work fewer hours. Not sure if I will get it, but it is worth a shot. Earning that much money would literally change my life. I could pay off my grad school debt in 18 months and be free from this American serfdom.
Even if I don’t get it, at least I updated my resume and did cover letter writing. It’s good to get that muscle working.
Speaking of writing, I made the slightest of slight progress toward my freelance writing side hustle. I signed up for an online freelance support group and their weekly newsletter. They also sent me a free e-book on how to get started so I will read that this week. Unfortunately there is a waiting list for the group, but as soon as it opens I will try to get in. They hold workshops for aspiring writers and have a community that tells each other about jobs that come up. I just need to get my foot in the door and I think things will start to happen.
The bad: I gained weight AND I wasn’t able to work out all week due to my arm injury. The weight thing is actually not as bad as I thought it would be. I overate at work (lots of folks brought in sweets) and broke my diet. To my credit, I didn’t go as insane with overeating (ok maybe mildly insane) as I would have in years past, so I will take that as a small victory.
My original goal was to get to 179 by January but I don’t think I will be able to do that. It’s ok though, I am close and will double down on my calorie tracking in the new year and as long as I don’t gain too much I should be able to continue without too much of a delay.
The arm injury is immensely frustrating. I was making such good progress on my lifts, going to Brazilian jiu jitsu a couple of times a week and feeling stronger than I ever have in my life. It still hurts today, so I will take the rest of the weekend and beginning of next week off. It does feel better, but the healing has been very slow.
I hurt it doing a pullup, but it didn’t even hurt in the moment. I felt it a bit the next day, and then it got slowly worse as I continued to work out, so I decided to shut things down for a week. That was three weeks ago and it is still not healed. If it isn’t 100 percent by next week, I will return to the gym and work around it: doing core, legs and upper body that does’t hit the bicep.
I also don’t think I will be able to do the marathon in April BUT a co-worker was telling me about a half marathon in Vermont the same weekend, so if my bicep continues to hurt I can focus on that. I am bugging out having no outlet for exercise. So maybe the solution is to get back to running, which would not be the worst thing in the world.
Overall: This week was a mixed bag. I gained some weight and wasn’t able to exercise, but I hit my savings goal for December and I made some baby steps toward freelance writing. No BJJ at all for almost the entire month of December, which is extremely frustrating because I pay $160 a month for classes. Fingers crossed the arm gets better and I can return by January.
Still, I am going to focus on the positive as there are always bumps on the road. I am healing, the savings is up and the freelance thing will start happening in January. I will write a 2017 retrospective later in the week so stay tuned for that.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays or whatever you celebrate this time of year!
Late Bloomer Chronicles 