Jack's Diary

Petal001 said:
Watch the part time hours as that can escalate.i missed out on claiming medical bills from my insurer as they changed the rules and I was not aware . I did complain but I’m up against a big company .
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Ouch - I hope those bills aren't too huge, Petal. Nasty stuff.

Today didn't go quite as planned. What messed me up was that the more I thought about the install Monday, the more I realized I didn't quite get exactly what has to be done, and really have to test it out and then document the process. Right in the middle of that I realized I hadn't recorded my time for one of the days, and I had to go back and reconstruct it. Huge PITA! Never do that again. I really have to tighten up the hours tracking now that I'm part-time.

I never did get to testing/documenting the process, it's going to get done tomorrow. I wasn't sure if I should do the work today or not, as it would push me over 40 hours for the week, and I'm only supposed to be 20 or 25. The work just keeps flowing in, and all of it is important.

The other thing hanging me up was that I wanted to finish my flashcards, because if you fall behind you can't get caught up. I will probably lower the limit, but I just wanted to get through the weekend at least.

Another problem is my wife is pretty stressed out these days because she over-scheduled - she got selected for a concert that she didn't expect to. So with me around the house just bit more and her in a state, things are tense. I got out of dodge after she started getting on me for how I put the dishes in the dishwasher. I went to the beach then Panera, killed about 5 hours. We talked it out a bit when I got home. It's not like we haven't been there before.

So, anyway, I got the flashcards out of the way, I got the invoice out of the way (just sent it). I'll get up tomorrow and start working on the mySql test. I figure about 4 hours. Then visit my mom's for a bit because my brother-in-law's daugther is coming, having seen her for a while. That will give me the afternoon to catch up on flash-cards and guitar. It's not ideal, but nobody ever said it was going to be that way.
 
Here's an artist who came up on my Pandora feed. Lovely piano, really easy on the ears, not overly new age, just a nice balance between classic and current. A little bit sad, but underneath there's a kind of joy. Seems like you could listen for a while without getting sick of it.

 
jackbenimble said:
Unfortunately, not this year. I think he (the Vanguard tax guy) said they changed it to 4/15 as of next year
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I use a solo or one-participant 401(k), and I know I can contribute up to 4/15, not so sure about setting one up though. As an independent contractor you should be able to do the solo 401(k). IRAs and 401(k)s are really confusing.
jackbenimble said:
My wife is Japanese
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Good reason to study Japanese, and you have a readily available tutor.
 
Jack is your wife a professional musician .
Sorry you feel all stressed . It's not a good feeling . Hope you enjoy visit to your mom ,good to see family .
 
alligatorob said:
I use a solo or one-participant 401(k), and I know I can contribute up to 4/15, not so sure about setting one up though. As an independent contractor you should be able to do the solo 401(k). IRAs and 401(k)s are really confusing.
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That's encouraging, Rob. I will for sure double-check it.
alligatorob said:
Good reason to study Japanese, and you have a readily available tutor.
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Well, yes and no. The problem with a girlfriend / wife is getting them to convert to their native language. I was able to pull that off when I was in France. However, I've never come close with my wife because her English was always better than my Japanese. Not even really close, although if we had stayed in Japan it would have surely been different.
Petal001 said:
Jack is your wife a professional musician .
Sorry you feel all stressed . It's not a good feeling . Hope you enjoy visit to your mom ,good to see family .
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Thanks, Petal. You are really very nice to encourage me like that. As a matter of fact, I've finished an 11-hour day of work getting this thing out of the way, just finishing up now, waiting for an upload I can send out.

Yes, my wife is a classically-trained opera singer and pianist.
 
An 11-hour workday, Jack? That's not good. Are you sure you're not a work addict? Take some time just to relax, won't you?
 
Cate said:
An 11-hour workday, Jack? That's not good. Are you sure you're not a work addict? Take some time just to relax, won't you?
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Lol, Cate - no absolutely not a work addict. It's a case where the customer has special requirements regarding the install (which have never been done) and the tech is going to be there tomorrow morning, in Europe so more like tonight. There's no way he could or should figure out how to do it, so it just kind of landed on me. I just heard about it on Thursday, then the poor guy called me Friday wondering what he was supposed to do.
 
I kind of screwed up - I got up at 5:30 am today to do that work and was washed out by the time I finished it around 7. I went to bed at 9 which as way early for me, and here it 1:30 and I'm "UP all night!" as the old local overnight show called it. I'll probably do my Japanese flashcards, maybe watch a video, and get back to bed by say 3 or 3:30.

A week or two ago, getting desperate with repetition of my Pandora channels, I finally just hit "shuffle" and what a difference. I'm getting songs from everything I ever created a channel for - various flavors of rock and jazz, blues, opera, punk, pop, bop, classical, grunge, Gregorian - I love the variety. It's cool to hear an old Stone's tune followed a gorgeous Gregorian chant then an eighties hit like "Down Under".

Today (yesterday) I had

1. A couple of pieces of angel food cake or something like that at my Mom's house.
2. A half a bowl of delicious tangerines.
3. Three bananas, maybe 4.
4. For dinner, a salad with an egg and the (high-calorie) salad dressing and a kind of chicken with a pleasantly crunchy sort of breaded covering.
Missing from this is the midnight snack I usually have because of my weird sleeping schedule today.
 
Today:

Lunch was a tuna melt way too large of a batch of fries
Dinner was a bunch of sliced ham and a salad with some cheese cubes. Skipped the hi-calorie dressing at least.
 
Jack I hope those hours were a one off and you at least get paid for them .
tuna melt sounds delicious. I not had in long time !
 
Last night, sure enough, I had some vanilla ice cream in root beer (no calorie root beer, at least) Two glasses, about a bowls worth of ice cream.
Today, I had a salad and two bananas for lunch.
For dinner, some chicken and a salad.

I also had a couple of slices of a kind of sticky cake my wife bought at Stop and shop.
Just now had a banana.

I can't sleep, and worse yet, my wife can't sleep (and blames me). That's like a disaster because if I go back to bed, I'll keep her awake again and it will be even worse. But I don't feel like relocating downstairs. Tomorrow's a long day for her and she'll be stressed and grouchy and it will be MY FAULT, as it usually is. Why couldn't I sleep?

The good news is I left work at 2 today and had a nice afternoon. Straightened how I'm going to invest with Vangaurd and again was shot down on being able to contribute for 2019 on the solo 401k, also confirmed it on Google. Well, I can't worry about that. I have a better understanding of what I'm going to contribute to at least.

Went to the beach, and listened to a Japanese listening test. The middle of 5 levels, it was pretty difficult, although it got easier toward the end.

I'm working on two flashcard decks using a program called "Anki". Once is a Kanji Review - recognition only - and I usually get through my 100 or so of 2200 cards in about 50 or 20 minutes. I'm gradually advance my "mature" cards, once I read up on how to work with Anki parameters, I got some movement there. I'm up to 75% from 69% a few weeks ago.

The 6K vocabulary deck is a lot more time-consuming, usually takes at least an hour. There are two levels of review, one for "learning" and one for "young". And of course, there's a third level for "new". The problem is that the more "new" you learn, the more unmanagable the reviews get. So for now, I've tamped down the new to 25 a day. I hope to pick up the pace, but I don't want to burn out. I'm about 13% into a deck of 6K, so that must roughly 800 learned. My first big milestone will be to hit 2K in vocabulary, so about 48 days. The main thing is just plug away at my 25 a day. It seems easy, but you have to wade through the learning and reviews which can get close to 100 each before you get to the new ones. Although today, they seemed to come down a little.

Still haven't been picking up the guitar - it's been at least a week now. I'm just leaning pretty hard into the Japanese. I still have time for some Netflix movies, but usually, they are Japanese anime. I'm watching the second season of Carole and Tuesday right now. But, I think it would be easier if I just watched Terrace house or something.
 
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jackbenimble said:
Last night, sure enough, I had some vanilla ice cream in root beer (no calorie root beer, at least) Two glasses, about a bowls worth of ice cream.
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Hey Jack, do you feel like that qualifies as a binge? I don't usually think of people in your weight range as having a binge problem, but that's probably wrong.

Aren't you in Massachusetts? Your beach must feel pretty cold this time of year.
 
Petal001 said:
Hi Jack hope you got back to sleep . And peace reigns again
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Well, I ended up going downstairs to sleep. It wasn't bad. I could play The New Earth without using earphones, took another pill, and fell out pretty quickly. The wife was ok when she got up - we'll see how she is tonight...
alligatorob said:
Hey Jack, do you feel like that qualifies as a binge? I don't usually think of people in your weight range as having a binge problem, but that's probably wrong.

Aren't you in Massachusetts? Your beach must feel pretty cold this time of year.
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I have a definite bingeing problem - for example, if I open a box of cookies at night, the whole box gets eaten, like two rows of cookies or say a bag of popcorn. Ice cream, though, I really try to limit because it's as bad as anything. Actually, knowing I was posting about caused me to put the brakes on a little bit. It's kind of embarrassing to post but that's the point I guess.

When I'm in good shape and exercising regularly, like I used to when I played tennis or jogged, I could keep my weight below 165. But with the knee and lessened activity, my struggle is to keep it under 170. Today I was at 167, which is pretty good for what I've been at recently.

As far as the beach, it hasn't been too cold this winter and it's not like I'm there every day. When it's really cold, I start at the end of the beach to have that north wind at my back, and will be a bit warmed up by the time I turn around. And of course, just bundling up. I should get a scarf really. But it beats walking the treadmill in a smelly gym, that's for sure.
 
jackbenimble said:
I have a definite bingeing problem
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Thanks Jack, that is interesting. I will show my ignorance and admit that if I see a guy like you (or like I imagine you) I just assume no eating problems there. But it seems to me you may just be a guy who has managed to maintain his weight despite the binges.
jackbenimble said:
It's kind of embarrassing to post but that's the point I guess.
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Yeah, it is the point. And now I think I have a better insight into why you are here. It seems this demon we all struggle with has different faces, but its the same demon. I think you posting about it helps a lot of us, we who are trying to better understand the demon in hopes that will help us live with it. No need to be embarrassed, not here anyway, many of us share the problem.
 
jackbenimble said:
When it's really cold, I start at the end of the beach to have that north wind at my back, and will be a bit warmed up by the time I turn around. And of course, just bundling up. I should get a scarf really. But it beats walking the treadmill in a smelly gym, that's for sure.
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For sure! I love walking on the beach in winter - I think I love it more in winter than in summer. (But of course, no swimming in winter - some wild people do, in clubs, to encourage each other, but not me! Brrrrr...)
 
aiminglow said:
(But of course, no swimming in winter - some wild people do, in clubs, to encourage each other, but not me! Brrrrr...
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I was in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska on the Arctic Ocean in July once. We went down to the water at midnight, the sun was still up, low on the horizon, and due north, you could see the arctic ice in the distance. One of the guys with us wanted to go swimming, and he tried, got in to his thighs then turned around and came back. The water was about -2 C, salt is a natural antifreeze. I only put one finger in, that's as close to the polar bear club as I ever want to get. I am sure Jack's beach walks were much more sane.
 
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