Listen to the Rain

That's what Laila says while she stands in place and swings her arms around.

The last time I wrote about exercise in general was December last year, after my physical, and I'm pleased to say that I still keep up my exercise regimen. I do at least five nights of exercise routines and walk for at least four miles every day, though I've been increasing that over time. On days when I'm in the office I generally walk at least five miles just at work, not counting walking to and from work--I used almost all of my lunch hour on walking.

The main reason I've been stepping it up is that I still haven't gotten back to the level I was at before my appendicitis. I used to be able to do dozens of pushups (in sets of 10) and after a couple years of trying to work back up to that I was having no success, so I thought that I needed to step things up. I've been seeing some results but not as much as I'd like, and having looked a bit into it...apparently I'm not eating enough protein. I put my daily limit at 100 but the standard advice is more like ~2 g per kg of body weight, and I can tell you that I don't weigh 50 kg. בשר בחלב makes it impossible to put extra cheese on a burger or have a side of yogurt dip with meat curry, but I think I just need to eat more meat. I'm almost entirely vegetarian nowadays and while I have no complaints about it, it's true that I was stronger when I ate more meat.

I was also stronger when I was younger, though. That's a big confounding factor.

I've also been trying to get more sleep. I am...historically not good at that, but I went to a work seminar about sleep that drove home, once again, getting enough sleep is critical to basically every single aspect of your physical and mental health and if you don't get enough sleep and feel okay you're fooling yourself. I've been trying to get to bed earlier but lately Laila has not been obliging--she's been waking up at 5:30 a.m. and crawling into bed to cuddle with us. This is very cute and I'm happy to accommodate her, except she's not actually sleeping, she's drawing with her water pen. Today she didn't come in until 6:30 a.m. but I also didn't manage to make it to bed until 11:45 p.m. because I was cleaning the kitchen and prepping my lunch for tomorrow. Need to get better about that.

I finally used up all the beyond beef in the freezer by making a big vegetable scramble, and I've been putting some eggs and feta on it and bringing it to work. I don't think I was deliberately avoiding my usual salad due to all the worry about parasitic diarrhea, but now that I write it down, it might have slightly been a consideration. At least we get all of our greens from a CSA that comes from farms in Illinois. I'd hate to get sick before we all go visit my sister in Hawai'i at the end of the month.