March 30 Updates

Welcome back everyone! As always, it is great to see you. It was sort of a frustrating weekend but we cover the good and the bad here so get comfy and let’s discuss the latest.

A Meh Weekend

Let’s start with the weekend. It will definitely go down as a meh weekend. For one, Teresa came down with the flu, so movie night was cancelled. Hopefully she is better soon.

That’s okay though! Even though the main Saturday plan got cancelled, I had a great event lined up for Sunday - the latest meetup of the Pittsburgh Hounds group.

The Sunday event was taking place at a place that is a bar and a dog place. So they sell alcohol, but they also have a big outdoor enclosed space where your dogs can run around off leash. I had never been and was pretty excited to go.

I think I’ve covered this here and there on the blog, but my sleep schedule has become a late-night schedule as of the past few weeks. I’ve been going to bed around the 3am-4am range. In a typical day (today included), I briefly wake up around 830am to feed Pancake and Podo as well as take Podo out for a pee, and then I go back to sleep until sometime in the Noon - 2pm range.

As such, it was going to take some determined effort to wake up for this Hound Meetup - the event started at 10am, which means we were getting picked up at 9:40am, which means Podo needed to have already done a full walk by then. Erika didn’t even consider attending this - no way, she said. Way too early. I was determined to take Podo though. He has the time of his life running free and screaming his head off at these events. He’s such a good boy I owe it to him.

So anyway I make all these arrangements and arrive at the venue at 10am, and I find out that you need to present your dog’s vaccination records to enter the event. Somehow I missed this in the event description…probably because the fine print of the event is on Instagram and I refuse to use Instagram when the sole purpose is following the Pittsburgh Hound group. Since I live down the street from one of the people who organizes the events, I just find out about the events through them.

Normally this would be fine, except the vaccination records happened to be in Erika’s email, not mine (Pancake’s were in my email, which added to the sense of bad luck around this whole thing), and Erika was passed out asleep so my several calls to her did not reach her.

So, Podo was super-duper excited because obviously by the time we’re inside the building being told that we can’t actually attend the event, he sees what’s going on and is losing his mind over how awesome this is going to be…and then we had to just walk home. It was the most significant let-down I’ve felt in a while. Not to mention it was a three mile walk home, since we had gotten a ride from the event organizer, and they needed to, you know, run the event.

That was what largely defined Sunday. It wounded my soul to not be able to bring Podo to this event. That’s life though. It was an honest mistake on my part and I tried. We’ll be ready next time.

So, that was the weekend. A cancelled movie night and a botched Pittsburgh Hound meetup. Not the best time I’ve ever had.

Work Updates

Let’s take a peak at the work stats from last week, which was week two since our mini-reboot taking place in March here:

Readers of last week’s post saw that I am workshopping a six week schedule. After the six weeks, you take a week off. You get one day off during the first chunk of three weeks (called a personal day), and another in the second chunk of three weeks. You also get one half day per week. The goal is to work our way up to doing two hours of each discipline per day. We are taking weekends off.

420 is a meaningful number under this organizational system, because it’s working two hours per day four days a week, and 60 minutes per day on the half day. That’s 120 × 4 + 60 = 420. First of all, that is another surefire sign that I made a good decision in re-ordering my pot card last week (it still hasn’t gotten here yet). Second, it shows that last week we actually did all the game dev work that we set out to do. That was good.

Speedrunning saw a slow re-introduction, which is what I was expecting. The part of me that doesn’t really want to do any work at all knows that any number higher than 0 will get the more productive part of me off our collective backs for the time being, since at least we showed an improvement. Of course, that strategy only works for so long, since we now need to try and keep inching our work up as we close in on two hours a day per discipline.

This week is already showing some signs of time crunch. I had to dedicate most of yesterday to talking through work plans with Erika since, simply put, she’s having trouble acclimating to me starting to work more. It means I’m not as available to hang out - especially since I’m still doing the vast majority of the house chores, including all of our cooking. I’m also taking Podo on a two mile walk any day that it’s warm out since I want the kid to get some exercise. Weekdays are getting busy.

This resulted in yesterday being my choice for the personal day of this three week chunk we’re in. Working at night the way I had been wasn’t really working for Erika anymore. I think in order to do everything I’m trying to do, I’m going to have to start waking up a lot earlier, even though I would really rather not. As such, I’ve been up since 8:30am today. That’s part of what I talked through with Erika yesterday. If I sleep late I end up working late, and I think Erika and I have a history of hanging out when she gets out of work that we’re missing now that we haven’t been doing that.

It’s back to the early mornings for me. Timing aside, last week was a pretty good work week. Game dev is chugging along and has seen plenty of updates recently. We just need to keep putting in our two hours a day. Speedrunning is still being built back up, so I’m shooting for 30 minutes today.

Nine Pounds in Nine Weeks

The modest weight loss of 2026 is still going strong. Our seven-day average weight dropped by 0.7 last week, bringing us to an even nine pounds lost over our nine weeks of consistent effort. Here’s the data:

I mentioned that my pot card is on its way here in the mail. I think I’m going to try and have some pot this weekend in place of my usual quart of ice cream on the weekend cheat meal thing I’ve been doing lately. Trying to outpace a quart of ice cream a week in a weight loss campaign isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and having pot around will be a good motivation to give up the other vice for a weekend. Wish me luck. This continues to be slow, but we’re still inching downwards.

I think that’s it for now. I’m feeling a bit dull at the moment. At any rate I’m off to start game dev for the day. Have a great week everyone. I am rooting for you.