I've stared at the blank screen for 26 minutes now. Of course, the other screen was blaring at me. If it counts those 26 minutes, this will be a forever-to-750 post. The whole time I've also been doing free step. I'm not sure how effective that is anymore. My friend Sam's been telling me about a program that has "muscle confusion" at its core. Every day, it's something new, and it's using different muscle groups together in unconventional ways. The theory, which is apparently quite successful is that your body never knows what's coming next and so it's like when you do several reps and then you skip a day and your body is working to rebuild. Only every day it's something entirely different so after a few days your body is just working like crazy on rebuilding all different muscle groups at the same time. I'm intrigued. Of course, free step is quick and easy and I can walk for 30 minutes every morning and an hour every night and use the laptop the entire time and watch TV, too, if I want. I have to assume it's doing something.
I am about 11 pounds lighter than I was last year about this time when we do our annual fitness checkup for work. It's worth a decent chunk off of our insurance premiums each year to stay healthy. The baseline minimum required was 71 and I got a 75. And weighing less should mean a higher number. Also one of my cholesterols was too high, but it was the one that apparently you can't change very easily. They had plenty of recommendations for changing the other one and none for changing the one of mine that they didn't like. But otherwise I had a lot of good scores. I wonder if you lose points for not getting enough sleep.
It was so nice out this evening. I took out some last minute trash to the curb and decided to fill a greens can while I was at it. I had worked in the yard a little bit on Sunday and trimmed some trees and pruned some bushes, but left the trimmings where they fell. It was so nice out that I decided to get a can out and wheel it around and pick everything up. Might as well, we're paying for greens service every single month and rarely use it. One of these days I'll get a lot cleaned up now that I have an awesome wheelbarrow. I have a spot on the side yard that's just piled high with tree branches and other stuff. But I need to get a saw out there and chop some of the stuff down into smaller pieces. I could probably fill 2 or 3 greens cans. Which is fine, since we ended up with 3 of them. There was one (full, naturually) here when we moved in, then they delivered us one with service, and then when they screwed up our billing and took our other cans, they didn't take that can. So when they brought it back, they brought back another greens can. Waste Management isn't a good company.
Took Carol the cat to the vet this morning. The doctor (not the one she's seen the last few times) came in and asked some questions and then started telling me some pretty standard basic stuff and was upbeat. I kept asking questions and the way she answered them it was obvious that she actually hadn't bothered to look at Carol's chart before coming in. So finally I got her to go read the chart and when she came back she was much more subdued and had fewer choices and even mentioned putting Carol to sleep. We did another round of blood tests just to see if she's gone downhill since the last round in January and then they used an IV to pump fluids into her. She was noticeably heavier when I carried her out to the car. Tonight she started eating after a very short time of having the food in front of her, like 20-30 seconds. But, she didn't eat very much and since then has acted uninterested in food. I suspect that she's on her way out, but at least now we'll have a more authoritative answer.
We had a minor reorg to the massive reorg we have six months ago. They flattened out a little bit of the org chart in another group. Instead of refilling a recently vacant position, they elevated all the "l2's" up one to report directly to my boss' boss. (So now he has six peers instead of 3.) The org. chart looks really funny now. My boss' boss has eight people (seven direct reports lined across the page and the one administrative assistant off to one side) and two of those positions are vacant. And then there's some smaller groups lined across the page, until you get to me. I also have eight direct reports, including one open position we hope to fill soon. And that doesn't count one more person who I believe is coming on board soon who will report to me but do work for another group that will also pay his salary. (His specialty isn't the same as theirs. He'd support them but they'd have no adequate structure for him to fit into.) Fortunately, some recent changes has made my quite a bit simpler and probably also simplified things for the people who report to me and actually do the work. Except Thursdays. Thursdays I have one-on-one's with my staff. Most meet with me for 5-30 minutes every other week and one meets with me for 30 every week. So that's pretty much my Thursday afternoon every week.
But that's fine, there are a lot of really smart and creative people reporting to me and most of them work in an area that I didn't come up the ranks through so they're always teaching me new stuff. I love this job.