October 4, 2016: Me Day - Age 31

Wow, I've been doing these for five years now? Time flies, people grow, and goals progress.

Wake up and watch the sun rise.

Longboarded over to Cupid's Span and threw down a time-lapse of the sunrise as I practiced handstands, jammed to some favorite tunes, and ogled the sky.

Also caught the sunset before dinner in a floating island lighthouse as the sea lions beautifully belched.

Measure physical stats and take fitness pictures.

I did not, in fact, get totally ripped over the past year. I was making good progress for the first three months, and then I decided that with my increased startup boss workload and Max's erratic sleep patterns causing complete chaos in my nighttimes and mornings, something had to give, and that something was hitting the gym in the morning. So actually I just did bodyweight stuff at home and stayed almost the same measurements over the past year, until two months ago when I started lifting again now that Max is sleeping consistently once more, so now I'm putting on mass. Let's try this again. I can't promise that I won't decide that sleep or work is more important than the gym, but at least for now I'm making progress, so let's see where I get to next year.

Weight:
143.6 lbs
+8.3 lbs
Body fat:
12.6%
+1.7%
Chest:
33.25"
+0.75"
Right arm:
11.50"
+0.25"
Left arm:
11.00"
+0.25"
Waist:
28.00"
+1.25"
Hips:
35.25"
+0.75"
Right leg:
20.75"
+0.50"
Left leg:
20.50"
+0.75"
Resting HR:
76 bpm
+6bpm

Measure my max push-ups and pull-ups.

44 push-ups, +6: fast, strict, chin touching the ground.
17 pull-ups, +1: fast, no kipping, chin above bar.

Take a long walk.

I had hiked to the max in Golden Gate Park the day before, so I did a combo longboard ride plus walk in the morning, and it was great.

Read from a favorite book.

I reread Ender's Game while sitting in Yerba Buena Gardens and was thoroughly in its thrall. Now there's a book with some good examples of characters being strategic about their lives.

Get blood tests.

I ordered the same blood tests from last year from DirectLabs. Every single test was in the normal range. Boring is good. Don't have elevated iron this year, cholesterol is even better than last year, and Vitamin D isn't quite as good.

Count my possessions and get back down to 99.

Replaced/upgraded a lot more things than last year, while thinking about them less than ever. Loving the quality of life improvement from my new high-end wireless gaming headphones. Simplified my T-shirt selection process with more solid-color T-shirts from Uniqlo.

  1. Boxers
  2. Boxers
  3. Briefs
  4. Gym shorts
  5. Headphones
  6. Hoodie
  7. Jeans
  8. Jeans
  9. Mouse
  10. Mousepad
  11. Necklace
  12. Oculus Rift
  13. Pajamas
  14. Phone
  15. Pillow
  16. PlayStation 4
  17. Sandals
  18. Shoes
  19. T-shirt
  20. T-shirt
  21. T-shirt
  22. T-shirt
  23. T-shirt
  24. T-shirt
  25. T-shirt
  26. Wallet
  27. Water bottle
  28. Water bottle
  1. Boxers
  2. Boxers
  3. Bracelet
  4. Brown pants
  5. Comforter
  6. Fork
  7. Hoodie
  8. Jeans
  9. Jeans
  10. Loose pen
  11. Nightstand
  12. Phone
  13. Pillow
  14. Polo shirt
  15. Shirt
  16. Shirt
  17. Slow cooker
  18. Soldering iron
  19. Spire
  20. Spoon
  21. Sweater
  22. T-shirt
  23. T-shirt
  24. Vibrams
  25. Voltmeter
  26. Wallet
  27. Water bottle
  28. iPad

Take stock of finances.

I increased my savings less than I expected because of even more aggressively investing profits in my businessess and trying to trade even more money for time.

(If you're me, you get to see finance stats here. Since you're not me, you see nothing.)

Do Quantified Mind testing.

Looks like Choice Reaction Time, Mental Rotation 2, Sorting, and Verbal Learning 2 are getting slightly better with age (well, more like practice) still, and Finger Tapping continues to decline with age (or maybe lack of practice, since I only had four data points this year: 30, 30 and 1 month, 30 and 11 months, and 31. Was just not doing it in between, but even with a probable lack of practice and aging, we see no decline (and in fact the last two data points on Finger Tapping were above the trendline, so any decline was in the first couple years.) So yeah, not mentally dead yet!

Call my family.

Good calls with Mom, Dad, and Bro. Lined up some visits, too.

Have a spectacular dinner with Chloe.

Chloe took me out to Forbes Island, which is apparently the world's only floating island? It has a lighthouse on top and an underwater restaurant on the bottom. We randomly saw some of her friends there. It was romantic, although I can see why they don't make more of these given the combination of eating food and swaying in the sea!

Reflect on the past year

I sat down with my journal and evaluated three areas: what went well, what didn't go well, and how my relationships are now. Summary: CEOing your growing, early-stage startup while parenting a toddler takes big, messy bites out of everything else. It was all I could to keep everything from backsliding too much while moving forward on career and family this year.

What went well? This past year, I:

What didn't go well?

How are my relationships?

Not that great. Closer to George since we are making more time to regularly hang out, both to play video games and board games, and now recently hanging out with also Scott a bit more with the biweekly brobreks, so that's a bit better than last year. Of the other people I like to hang out with, I saw most only 0-2 times this year. For family, I did pretty good at refreshing everyone over the winter, and about to do the same thing again but with fewer people and only one trip out of us. Won't see bro or any Montana relatives, but will at least see Mom, Dad, Helen, and Chloe's parents.

Organize my files and computer desktop.

Check!

Add at least one tradition.

I didn't have time to do this, as the day got packed!

Destroy at least one habit.

For a while, I was reading tech news to keep current to help with understanding the space around fundraising, but I've decided I've had enough of that, so I unsusbcribed to all my sources of news apart from two focused about coding educational technology.