Monkeyhouse Zendo

Spent some time feeding the graveyard ducks with Emily in the morning. The ducks and geese were generally well behaved. As we left I noticed that someone had broken the face off a small Buddha statue that is near the back “entrance” to the cemetery.

Errands and cleaning followed by a visit from Laura, Cedar and Sam.

Spent some time in the evening recovering lost notes for Memento. The virtual machine is gone but I set up a new wiki for project notes and identified a couple books to read.

For the month of July I’m going to be making a concerted effort to post daily, exercise, improve my diet and again become established in meditation. The daily posting will be of primary importance as it is intended to keep me honest regarding the other aspects of the project.

Goals

• Post daily
• Exercise at least 5 days a week
• Track my diet on a daily basis
• Meditate at least 15 minutes every day

Exercise is primarily going to be strength training with light cardio on the off days. Diet is primarily tracking what I eat and develop a more long term plan over the course of the month. Meditation is to establish myself in daily practice again.

I ran across a reference to Dale Chihuly in the opening page of the book Iconoclast. It only took a moment to look him up on Google but a half hour to tear myself away from his website. Absolutely amazing glasswork.

An old story regarding maintaining one’s composure and equanimity regardless of what life throws at you.

Hakuin was a famous Zen master in Japan. He lived in a remote village and was often praised by his neighbours as a man of pure living.

Once, a beautiful, unwedded girl in the village was found pregnant. Being a very conservative village, the family was furious. The girl refused to confess who the man was, but after much beating and harasssment by her parents, she finally named the master Hakuin.

In great anger, the girl’s family confronted the master, but all he would do was calmly say, “Is that so?”.

After the baby was born, it was brought to Hakuin and he took very good care of the child. He begged for milk and other things the little one needed from his neighbours. By this time, Hakuin’s reputation was completely destroyed, but that didn’t trouble him. He was often scorned by the villagers, but that didn’t bother him, either.

A year later, the girl-mother finally broke down and confessed the truth. The baby’s father was not Hakuin, but a young man who worked nearby. The girl’s parents went to Hakuin at once and begged profusely for his forgiveness, and to get the baby back.

Hakuin willingly gave back the baby and all he said was, “Don’t worry about it. Go home”.

Once upon a time there was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he should hammer a nail in the fence. The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. But gradually, the number of daily nails dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.

Finally the first day came when the boy didn’t lose his temper at  all. He proudly told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper. The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence.

“You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out, it won’t matter how many times you say ‘I’m sorry’, the wound is still there.”

• Wife was ill
• Grew another eye on the back of my head
• Wife is better
• I was ill
• The eye is still there
• Exercise is hit and miss
• Emily loved the Lightning Thief
• Emily loves Lady Gaga
• Still hacking out ideas for Memento
• Going to get the eye removed soon

Brisk five-minute warmup walk. Then alternate 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes.

I ran. I smell like some sort of farm animal.

But it was for a good reason as I was helping Kurt and Tanya move into their new place. It’s really nice and the view from their deck is going to be amazing in the spring and autumn. Emily spent the afternoon playing with Annie and I helped move stuff from the old house to the new. I may end up going bow hunting with Kurt this autumn if the whole diet and exercise plan pays off. I’d considered working out when I got home but was pretty wiped out and still sore from Thursday.

Jyllian has been sick with the stomach flu or something so we stuck close to home on Sunday. I read a chapter out of my python book, got some other reading done, goofed off on EVE, puttered around the house and looked after my girls.

My diet pretty much sucked on Saturday. Sunday was a little better.

I start running again tomorrow. I’m really not looking forward to it.

Strength training goals for the next 88 days:

• Squat my body weight
• Bench press 3/4 my body weight
• Overhead press half my body weight
• Do one single god damned pullup

Squat: 50lbs
Overhead Press: 45lbs (bar)
Deadlift: 65lbs
Pullups: 3×5 negatives
Prone Bridges: 3×30s

I weigh 206 lbs and I can’t do a single pullup. Even the negatives are hard to stall at my weight. I want to get another tattoo but I’m not getting it until I can do five.

I’ve been thinking for some time regarding motivation and how to get my doughy ass into shape. I work in the computer industry and am a gamer which generally are not conducive to physical fitness in and of themselves. I want to be fit and healthy and strong so I can continue to enjoy life with my wonderful wife and see my daughter graduate college and move on to her life. So how do I map this goal onto my mmo mentality?

The answer came from an xkcd comic in which a stick figure was doing pullups to level up STR before running to level up CON. I’ll just map activities onto the D&D stats with the intention of “leveling them up”:

STR – Stronglifts 5×5 strength training
INT – Nonfiction reading, mathematics
WIS – Meditation, reading philosophy
CON – Couch to 5K running plan
DEX – Start TKD again once I’ve gone six months or so on the STR and CON.
CHA – Lose weight as a side effect of STR and CON, maybe moisturize more often.

STR and CON training will need to alternate days so I’ll probably alternate INT and the reading aspect of WIS so the initial schedule will look like this:

Mon – CON + INT
Tues – STR + WIS
Wed – CON + INT
Thu – STR + WIS
Fri – CON + INT
Sat – STR + WIS
Sun – Slack

Next up, the World of Chorecraft…