Week 5 Review

Spring is here in North Carolina! Gold pollen everywhere, car washes slammed, and -- typical for North Carolina -- temperatures ranging from the 30s to the 80s, depending on the week!

Beautiful week of weather for my week 5 journey. We are running consistently now 4 days a week hitting 12-13 miles each week. Times are coming down but nowhere near the goal of sub-26 min 5k. It is breath and hamstrings on the hills. Those are my limiting factors right now. Nonetheless feel on track for this goal, and the end of April will be a better predictor. Meanwhile, my 15 yr old Jacob just hit a sub-5 minute mile this week, a goal he had - so we were thrilled for him. After running, it is straight to the gym to work on the strength goals.

We recently added a family membership to the YMCA while keeping our Anytime Fitness gym membership. So have been going there recently. It is odd in that the benches at the Y are a little less cushiony and I found repping 255 today harder than normal. Normally this would be like 8 reps and it was tough getting 6. Maybe it was the hard run prior, but I wonder if anyone else has found just switching benches had an effect on lifting the same weights? Otherwise, strength goals are going good. Added a lot of volume work behind the major lifts and definitely helping strength and size. On track for this one.

The sugar pull is a hard one. Dreamt last night I had some chocolate something or other. It has been maybe 6 weeks without anything sweet! The green smoothie each day is a different story -- getting the water and protein shake in but not so much the kale, green apple, banana one. So, feel committed on the sugar goal and 'meh' on the greens.

Work on AI was solid this week. I was able to create a model that pulls in phys-chem data from drug compounds and then assess those on drug development viability in a certain dose form. I finished on Friday with an export into excel that told me if those drugs were good or not good candidates, based on criteria, using a multitude of factors. This was really just a full day of work, and most of that was debugging broken links or learning that Kaggle won't allow live links but Google Colab will, etc. My short term goal is to pull a large data set of developed drugs and drugs that were axed from pipelines into a model to determine viability of repurposing or perhaps picking back up for a specific niche play. As I have said elsewhere, I have no tangible goal set for AI other than to 'dive in'. Learning the landscape, the dominant players, where the proverbial puck is headed (congrats to Ovechkin, btw), and most importantly learning to utilize the tools at our disposal.

Growing up I loved the guitar. My heroes were Alex Lifeson of Rush, Steve Howe of Yes, Pat Metheny, Al DiMeola and many others. Now, that I have 'all this time' I am not practicing nearly enough for the thing I really love! So, really feel committed to increasing time on focused practice here. I am making headway on the Stray Cats song ("I won't stand in your way") and need to have it nailed by end of month to be on track. I guess I am 65% there.

My biggest challenge emotionally is my son Grayson. God Bless him. He struggles with a lot of impulses, none of them healthy. We are on week two of buproprion and buspirone combination therapy. He also, from time to time, continues to self medicate with Delta-8 cannibinoids. He is safe at home and dutifully going to work each day. We are putting his money directly into the bank and currently driving him. Also took the phone away, as the car and phone are direct culprits into acting on impulses. My hope is he gets in a steady state adult like rhythm such that we can float his phone and car back in some months and he can make better choices. Time will tell. In the meantime, I will give this burden to the Lord.

In John 14:1, Jesus tells his disciples (and us) to not 'let our heart be troubled .... believe in God the Father and believe in Him'. My joy was definitely being robbed by the above situation and trying to solve it in our own wisdom. I know some of my non-Christian friends always expect us to be happy and perky and 'the salt and light' we are called to be. But honestly, we all struggle at times with the same issues everyone else does. My hope is that my moodiness in this area doesn't push people away from the Lord, if they know I am a follower. But there is always an underlying peace that is deep within. Nothing can shake that peace, in that -- it will all be ok in the end.

Hit IKEA this week and worked on cleaning up a very cluttered front area of our house. Way too embarrassed to show before and after pics, so anyone reading will need to take my word. We are 80% done with this minimizing clean-up and purge.

Gen Con tickets secured, hotel booked. 4 days of Indianapolis craziness. Downtown Indy and no visits to Eli Lilly! Just 24/7 geekdome .... this will be our 3rd straight year going. We grew up gaming when it was still in Lake Geneva and contemplated going to Gary Con (which always conflicted with DCAT week), but decided to just keep to Gen Con at the end of July. It will be Belize in July then to Gen Con. Complete joy there :) To this end, I will check off some family experiences (son-in-law and son going) and knock out the gaming quote of 40 games. I also did make some headway on the RPG campaign. Probably 1 month away from that starting.

Other stuff ---- We won trivia last week (Redemption Tuesday Night) so down to $400 I think to hit this goal. About 2/3's the way through Robert Heinlein's the Moon is a Harsh Mistress novel. Really enjoying this one. I started Lucifer's Hammer from Niven/Pournelle but couldn't get past (what I thought) was a bit overly juvenile story-telling. I liked reading the Mote in God's Eye back in high school, but that was -- well -- back in high school. I am sure it read like deep lit to me then. Now, not so much. Still working through Brave New World, as well.

Last -- next week is Disney/Universal Studios/Family Visits in FL!

AV