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As the soreness fades, the strength returns

I’ve done a horrible thing to myself. Last year I wrote bunches of posts about how I was exercising, eating right, and losing weight. In about 3 months I lost about 20-25 pounds. People were coming up and telling me that I looked great, looked like I lost weight. My motivation was my upcoming wedding and not wanting to look like a fat slob in my wedding pictures that I would look at the rest of my life.

I achieved that goal and I am happy with the way I looked in my pictures. And then I went on the honeymoon, and then I started grad school, and then my back pains started happening, and one excuse after another caused me to stop exercising.

Fast forward about 9 months, and after just celebrating my one year wedding anniversary, I have put back on all of the weight that I had originally lost. What I worked so hard for in 2-3 months, was lost in 9. I can not contribute everything to not exercising, because my eating habits went down the toilet too. I started drinking the occasional energy drink and soda. Fast food started creeping into the weekend meals. Overall is was everything I wanted to stop doing, and I started right up again.

So here I trying to get back into shape again, and this time come up with a better maintenance plan. The good news is that Stacy is working out with me. We just started this past Sunday, and have been very sore the past few days, but just as of this morning, the soreness has started to fade, and I am hoping that muscle memory kicks in and I will be able to resume what I used to lift in my work outs in a shorter amount of time.

Joining Project 52, focusing more on quality writing

When I restarted this blog for yet another time LAST year (yes 2009, you are last year) I really wanted to focus on quality feature type writing. I always preferred “magazine” style writing as we called it in journalism school to the news reporting of newspapers and agencies like the AP and Reuters. I wrote a few pieces like this over the past year. The Mint review, my retirement finance piece, and last but not least, my piece on quitting the game of Warcraft.

These are the types of pieces that I’d like to continue to write, but I don’t think these can be produced once a week with my current schedule. Work, school, life, you know all that, I’ve mentioned it before in previous posts as well. But I am joining Project 52, a personal challenge to myself, that others have asked of themselves as well. I want to write more. I enjoy writing.

So that’s it for now. Let’s see what 2010 brings for Perfect Mike Dot Com. Until then, You can keep up with my Google Reader links which is probably what I update most often these days, followed by my Twitter.

One life, Debt free

It took a long time, but over the past few years, more like almost a decade, I have been working to get out of credit card debt and never return.  The day has finally come.  No balances.  The only debt I have now is my mortgage and my car.  So my next goal is to pay off the car.

Debt Free Youth

What I’m reading: Inherent Vice

This is going to be a new feature on the site giving a plug to the current book that I am reading. I will tag them all “What I’m reading” so you’ll be able to find the archives easily. The first book came highly recommended by my friends back on the East coast. It is my first experience with the author, Thomas Pynchon, and I have to say I haven’t been let down so far. I don’t like to give too much away about books, but it’s a detective novel.

It even has a youtube trailer, which is the first time I’ve seen that for a book.

If you are looking for a quality piece of fiction. Something to take your mind off of the day to day worries of the world that reads very quickly and is highly entertaining(no pun intended), this one is recommended.

Inherent Vice

How busy are you? Not busy enough, maybe.

I think that I am a pretty busy person. Everyone’s definition of busy will vary of course. Some people occupy there time with lots of different activities or hobbies, and that is what keeps them busy. Others might only focus on their job or their education and do absolutely nothing else, no hobbies or interests at all, yet they are so immersed in it that they remain busy. Then there are those who aren’t busy at all. They may work and have other interests and hobbies, but at the end of the day they have loads of time to just sit around and watch TV or watch the paint dry. Here is my current list of activities

I hope I’m not forgetting anything too important. I left out some of the parts of day to day life that we all do, whether we consider ourselves busy or not. Eating, showering in the morning, staying in touch with our friends and family, etc, these are things that I would hope pretty much everyone does, but on average it doesn’t determine if someone is busy or not.

From the list above you can see that not all of the activities are a specific task, but they are things that I value. The first three are pretty straight forward. Work, exercising and grad school all are concrete actions that involve going to a specific location and performing a specific action for a specific amount of time. If you read my blog regularly, you know that I actually exercise at home. But it’s still a specific task. Stacy and I did buy bikes recently though, so now some of these can blur together. Time with my wife and exercising can be done at the same time when we go out for bike rides. Time with my dog, can also overlap on occasion, doesn’t involve any specific task or any specific time, but I would say that over the course of a week, it’s important to me that I spend some quality time with both Stuart and Stacy Again, I value this time above other things.

Blogging is something that more recently has gained value to me. I really do thoroughly enjoy writing, and since I don’t get to do so via any other method, here we are. Right now, writing to me serves multiple purposes. It is a means of relaxation, it keeps my skills as a writer sharp, and allows me to articulate what I am interested in to a broader audience. In terms of how it fits into my schedule, it is basically something that I do when I don’t have to do something else that I’ve already mentioned. I can’t write at work, school or while exercising. And its hard to write while riding a bike or while out for a dog walk.

Being a landlord is something that I don’t have much choice in the matter these days. I own two properties, both of which have tenants in them which require my attention from time to time. This is one of those things, that if all goes well, the only time it takes for this is to go to the bank once a month to deposit the checks, but doesn’t that sound too good to be true? In reality, when things do need my attention, it can be a handful since both properties are on the East coast, therefore a time zone three hours earlier than where I am.

Last and certainly not least is investing. As if my brain needs anything else to occupy its time, I am thinking about ways to make money via investing all the time. To make matters worse, I am actively investing for my father as well. Stock ideas, option strategies, corporate and municipal bonds, nothing is out of scope. This is where my brian basically acts like a vacuum, sucking up information to process from every possible medium. I watch CNBC, I read financial web sites and blogs, I read books on the subject. If it involves a way to turn a dollar into something worth more than a dollar, than I am interested in it.

The main reason I point out all of the things on this list that keep me busy, is that a year ago the list would have been shorter but I was still a busy person. I started exercising regularly in February, I started school in June, and while i’ve had this blog for a few years, only within the year have I really been writing regularly for it. It seems that the more you do, the more you can do. The more you fill up your life with activities, the more you can accomplish. This may seem like common sense, but many people make the excuse that they don’t have time for _________. In reality, if they just start doing it, they will find that they have the time.

So what are you doing?

Tracking bike rides part 2 – RunKeeper

When we went out and got bikes, I found the mapmyride application useful, but after conversing with some co-workers, I think that I will be using RunKeeper going forward. There was some level of fate involved in the decision. MapMyRide requires internet connection for the recording to begin, and the bike shop in Los Altos is in a dead zone, so when we started our ride, I couldn’t record it. I gave Run Keeper a shot, and it started right up.

The advantages don’t stop there though. The runkeeper.com web site is a much nicer presentation of your riding data, with speed and elevation as well as the route presented to you on a google map. There is a free and pay version from the App Store, but I am using the free version right now.