Posted by I was off last week and it feels like so much more than a week ago that I said goodbye to Dad and drove back here. Just so much different stuff happening with Thanksgiving and getting the house ready for Christmas that it makes it seem like more time has passed. It makes it harder to return to work which I had to do yesterday.
There is a routine to the week with certain meetings on certain days. To be honest, sometimes that is the only clue I have as to what day it actually is. There is a sameness to every week as it feels like the same issues just keep getting recycled. I had to have a conversation with my boss about things that happened in August and September and things we had already discussed. I know there have been many changes at work and people in positions of power want time to plan and discuss but a lot of us are geared towards action and we want things to do so the endless weeks of scrounging for things to do and waiting for decisions gets old. It makes it very hard to get up out of bed and go in on days like today when we had snow flurries and it was very cold.
So we are in the middle of our performance appraisal system. Really, is there any good way to tell people how they did over the course of the last year? And we are implementing a new system so there is fun trying to navigate the various screens. Like most software tools, it is big and bulky and has lots and lots of features but it isn’t intuitive so getting beyond the basic information is difficult. One thing we had to do was a self evaluation which is something I can’t stand. Those things are built for the aggressive self promoters who have no problem telling you how great they are. Not for those of us who are already hard on ourselves and don’t like sounding like we are boasting. But, because I have a new boss and because he’s located across the pond, we have very few day to day interactions, so I decided I needed to make the best of it. He tells me today that this is a learning curve for him because I guess he’s not used to people rambling like I tend to do. (No, really?) Yeah, I’m not a bullet point kind of guy. But he tells me he actually likes it because it was from the heart and authentic. See I’m full of surprises.
The best part of today was it was one of my work out days. Yes, that can often be the highlight of my work day as sad as that sounds. I think I mentioned this but my normal trainer on Tuesday left and I had a temporary person before Thanksgiving and so this was the first time I worked with the person I’ll be working with going forward. She’s not very tall but incredibly fit. She’s got a slightly different style so we did a lot of work with dumbbells; the other guy was more into the TRX. And she kicked my butt. Well, really my shoulders because that’s what we worked on.
As a total tangent, I honestly have a great deal of respect for people in the fitness field or really anyone who manages to stay in decent shape. Having been a couch potato and a blob, I know how difficult it is and how much discipline it takes to keep to a regular work out schedule. There’s a guy in the office next to mine who carries a bunch of extra weight and I overheard him talking with someone about how he’s booked a certain time each day for the gym but he never makes it because he always finds something “more important” (his words not mine). And it is true that we all make choices about how to spend our time and it is also true that work isn’t paying for you to go to the gym but you aren’t going to be working forever. At some point, you will no longer be of use to the corporation and they will kick you to the curb. And you still have a lot of life left to go. Do you want to spend it dealing with the health problems that will eventually come from being a desk jockey all day. In the long run attempting to fix the latest work “crisis” is not going to be more important than your health. (Another in a continuing series of why I don’t fit into the corporate mold)
And tonight is dance lesson night. Got a double lesson and, after a week off, it will be good to get back to it. I’m sure we are going to work on the Argentine Tango although I haven’t looked at it since the last lesson. But I’m a pretty fast study so I think it will come back. The choreography isn’t especially complicated. I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out.
Facing Diagonal Wall 
Believe it or not, guys at work were the whole reason that I got into working out regularly back in the day. When I got hired at my first “real” (salary) job in my early 20s, I found that all of the men that worked in my department were completely out of shape. After months of watching them as I learned how to improve my job skills, I realized that I was also gazing into the future of what my body would look like if I fell into the same life path that they were on.
That made me take up running. Then I moved to a different state that had bitterly cold winters, so I gave up running for cross training-type workouts that could be done indoors during the cold months. The weightlifting that I started doing at that time gave me noticeable results, so that became more of a focus for me. Even after I moved to a different state that has mild winters, I never went back to running.
People look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them that I dedicate an hour or so a day, six days a week to intense exercise. This is outside of all the dancing I do, which I don’t look at as a workout – even though for most people it would be. The way I see it though, a lot of people spend more time than that every day watching all the TV shows they love, so there’s no reason that they couldn’t put in the time to exercise if they wanted. It’s all about what you see as a priority for your life. 🙂
An hour a day. I’m truly impressed with your dedication. If there was one lesson I could go back in time and teach my younger self it would have been to take better care of myself. As tired and sore as I get, it still feels way better than when I was a true blob.