Another Week Gone By

 The weekly update post...

1. It was an interesting week on getting healthy - there were two days where I absolutely did not make the best decisions in eating, one day that was iffy, and the other four that were perfect. A couple weeks ago I mentioned how I always wanted to do at least 4 rounds on the treadmill each week; but after the last two weeks of doing 5 and 6 times, respectively, "only" doing 4 times this past week felt like a bit of a failure. In any event, I continue to feel good about the progress I've made in changing my state of mind, focus, and working on better habits for this process. This coming week I have a weight check with my doctor's office, so I am hopeful that I will see some small progress, if for nothing else to see some concrete reward for the work I've done thus far.

2. Life in general continues to be a bit of a chore recently. My dad continues to be in the hospital with COVID Pneumonia; today is day 15 of hospitalization. After a lot of downs for him since he went to the hospital, we are hopeful that the last few days signal that the worse is behind him. He still has a long ways to go, has pretty high oxygen needs, so things remain serious. But the last few days have allowed us some reasonable hope, and I am thankful for that.

In other areas of life, work, for whatever reason, has been increasingly busy the past few weeks, and likely the next few weeks to come; ultimately, I will always take busy over not being busy, but with some of my obsessive/compulsive tendencies I will have to work a bit harder mentally to make sure I give myself a break by thinking and engaging in different things. We continued to do some work around the house - I suppose one advantage from the pandemic and us limiting going anywhere is that we stay on top of the household chores much better. The sun was out yesterday, so we spent time outdoors raking leaves, and I did one last (hopefully) mow of the yard. 

We also decided how we would handle Halloween this year. While our town set hours, and I can see how trick-or-treating could be considered a mild to moderate risk activity for transmission of COVID, we will not be partaking in the traditional format. If our community/county were doing a better job of wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding large groups - and thus of suppressing the virus, maybe our decision would be different. But as it stands right now, our local hospitals are above capacity, our rate of transmission has doubled to over 10% in the past 2-3 weeks, and the number of cases keep setting daily records. I don't understand how in such an environment people believe that it is responsible to continue to live like everything is normal, but I imagine many will do so. Not us. This year we will do trick-or-treating with Maia inside our house, with her going door to door with each door in our house, and we will pass out candy. We'll probably try to do an appropriately thematic movie or something as well, and perhaps some special food to make a day of it. It obviously won't be as a great for Maia as a traditional trick-or-treating would be, but I feel good about the decision relative to 2020; I simply wish more people in our community would be willing to share some of these sacrifices so that we could be more effective at suppression of the virus. Dare to dream, I suppose.

3. On reading, I finished No. 76 this week - How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang, which I found to be a pretty compelling read. I've started The End of the Day by Bill Clegg, as well as diving into Rick Perlstein's massive Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, which I'll likely be reading for a few weeks.

No special recipe this week, making tacos for dinner tonight, a simple meal but one of my favorites. Life rolls along.