My 2014 Update
My back hurts. I should have made a new years’ resolution to not get a sore back.
New for the new year.
New job.
Lots more walking.
Old muscles that have made new appearances.
New vacation plans.
Uh, there should be more and I can’t think of anything.
I’m in my third month at the new job. I like it. The work is challenging and the people that I work with seem, for the most part, to be hard working and capable. I’m in procurement, specifically IT procurement, and this has enabled (required?) me to pick up and dust off my knowledge of contracts and negotiations and put it to good use. The organization that I work for doesn’t finalize annual budgets until late November/early December. As you might suspect, that results in everyone trying to renew or extend their IT spending in the last three weeks of the year. The same weeks that are shared with holidays and families travelling to visit relatives. It seems to take twice as long to get the same approvals that come easily at any other time of the year. I’ve been going home exhausted every night since mid-December. But it’s a good kind of exhausted, you know?
I’m walking a LOT more than I did at my old job. I wasn’t under any impression that I walked a lot when I worked for Marriott, but my eyes (and feet) have been opened and I see the error in my thinking. About two years ago there was a health fair at work and they distributed pedometers for people to keep track of how much they were walking. I knew from my pedometer that I was on the low end of what I would consider ‘enough’ walking for one day. I’ve used that pedometer several times at the new job and the lowest number of steps (and I suspect that my pedometer wasn’t working correctly) I had in one day was more than four times the steps from the previous job. I’ve been able to feel the difference too, which leads me to my next observation.
Like the swallows at Capistrano, I have muscles that are returning. My calves once more resemble bikers’ calves—they bulge out more side-to-side then front-to-back—and my calf muscles touch before my knees do. I can see a difference in my thighs too, but it isn’t quite as pronounced as my calves. I have access to the gym in the building and I might have to do some work on my upper body.
My sore back is also muscle related. While I am doing more walking I am also carrying a laptop backpack. I need to pay attention to my posture because I’m pretty sure I am not keeping my back straight and it’s leading to soreness on the side opposite from where I normally carry the backpack. I switched shoulders this morning and while it seemed to help it also felt weird using the non-dominant side.
I’ve been trying to think of something nice to do with my wife for our anniversary in June. It will be our 25th, so it needs to be more than just dinner. Here’s what I’ve suggested as a possibility. The week of our anniversary we fly to Chicago, rent a car and drive to Milwaukee. There, we stay at a nice place and see our Nationals play a couple of their three-game series against the Brewers. Then, we drive back to Chicago, stay at a nice place and catch another couple of Nationals’ games against the Cubs before flying home. Say, four to six days and four or five baseball games? Before you get thinking this wouldn’t be appreciated by Mrs. Ender, you should know that she is looking forward to celebrating her birthday with upgraded seats for several of the Nats vs Cardinals games in April. It is my wife, you see, that is the baseball fan. I was raised on football and am a relatively recent convert to baseball.
I know that there should be more that I can’t remember, but that will have to wait for a different entry.
Ender is out.