In my last post I said this one would follow in a few days;
that it’s been closer to two weeks is a good indication of how life is going at
the moment. I set myself some new annual goals back in February and this is the
first time I’ve gotten around to reviewing progress.
One. The forever delayed podcast. Still forever delayed. I
have plenty of plans but other stuff just gets in the way.
Two. Strength & Fitness. I’ve made some good progress
with the weights set I got for Christmas, especially since lockdown began. I
now wish I’d bought more weights than I did as it’s been impossible getting hold
of extra plates from Decathlon. I’ve found some really good workouts on Youtube
that make use of dumbbells, barbells and floor exercises, and have been doing
programmes between twenty-five and forty-five minutes around four times a week.
I did have a slight setback early last week when I strained my back, and was initially
concerned about a recurrence of an old sciatic disc injury, but I’ve made a good
recovery since and have started to build back up resistance again. On the
running front I’ve been going out two or three times a week, doing 5k at least
once a week. I managed a personal best of under thirty-nine minutes a couple of
weeks ago, but so far haven’t managed to get beyond 5k.
Three. Stabilise weight at 100kg. This is one area I have
gone backwards. Two months ago, before lockdown, I was 104kg, now I’m 106kg. A
quarter to a half of that weight may be muscle gain from regular lifting, but
at least half is fat or at best water retention. The lockdown has made it very
difficult to maintain intermittent fasting and time restricted eating. I’m working
from home full time, my wife and kids are also home, the successful diet routine
just doesn’t fit. It’s not that I’ve been binge eating, but I’m eating three
meals and a snack on most days (the kids have been doing a lot of home baking).
I’ve also been drinking more beer, not every day and not binging, but as I don’t
have to get up at six most mornings and there’s rarely any place I need to drive,
there’s no real barrier to unwinding with a few cold ones. Hopefully, if I can
keep my fitness up, I can restart my diet once my routine allows.
Four. Improve Technical Knowledge. I’ve been doing some cool
stuff with DAX and Power BI at work, and I recently took part in a week long hack
using telemetry data where I used PowerApps for the first time. It was genuinely
interesting and with a bit of support from Microsoft I built a mobile app that
wrote back to a SQL Server database. The plan was also to look at streaming
data in Power BI for the first time, but unfortunately the hack was cut short
due to the pandemic and the longer-term project it was queuing up has been paused
for a few months. I’m hoping I’ll be put back on it when it does restart. It
looked like I might get furloughed at the end of last week, instead I’ve been reassigned
to a different team, which is not a bad thing as I’m going to be exposed to Azure
Data Explorer and Azure Synapse for the first time.
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