The Basement
Our living room is livable again, yey! A lot of stuff was trashed and the rest has been sorted into drawers and boxes. I'm not sure how big of a dent we actually made, but it feels like progress at least. We're also thinking of getting rid of this huge shelf that we brought home once. It looks super cool, but is just not very practical. With that thing gone we could install a writing table instead, which is especially good since my fiance's corporation decided to switch to periodic home office indefinitely.
I also managed to sell my first item on the local equivalent of craigslist. I made back a whopping 54% of what I paid initially, but at least it was quick and only mildly stressful.
Fitness
I managed to increase my workout volume significantly again last monday. That left me with a painful soreness and achy knees (nothing serious) though, so I'll have to scale back a bit. Because of this my thursday session consisted only of mobility, foam rolling and warmup sets. This helped with the lingering soreness and didn't do any further damage. Next up is my saturday hiking session, which should be ~12km this time. As I had to skip my mid-week hiking session due to suboptimal knees this will be my only hike this week.
I also noticed how I was considerably hungrier than the week before, which is probably linked to my increased need for recovery. Considering how little actual energy I burned during my 1h workout it's a small wonder that I didn't gain any weight this week. Still, I don't think I want to eat even more to aid recovery, as I just lost a bunch of weight and would like to keep it off. With the (pre-)christmas season looming I'm already quite afraid of gaining in all the wrong places
Going forward I'd like to try an 4-day schedule, where I hike, rest, train, rest, and then repeat. It's a bit unusual to deviate from a weekly schedule, but I've had a lot of success with every-second-day training schedules in the past, so I think I can pull it off. One big factor I need to keep in mind is that I can't be too sore to hike after training, so I'll just have to "punch the clock" and not obsess over increases in volume for now. The other thing is that hiking is more important than strength training to me, so I might have to dial down the occassional workout after a strenuous hike.
Work
We've had our big meeting on monday, where we talked about the reorientation towards partner projects for technology transfer. I really hoped to get an idea of what the strategic vision would be, but it seems like we're just re-branding and keep on doing what we always did. The focus will be on building our capactity to do more of the same projects we already did. So it's more of a scale-out rather than a reorientation, which has me a bit down at the moment.
Apart from that work sucked hard, as we had a few big problems with our current project. In the end it turned out that the project partner reconfigured our test-servers without telling us. Since communication with the project partner was decidedly sub-par, we spent 4 person days searching for a problem that we didn't even cause. After things were set right, I noticed how my mood instantly increased, which was a wake up call as to how work stress influences me even if I don't consciously assign much energy to it :/
As part of our re-branding, I'm also supposed to get certified in our key technology as soon as possible. Which means I'll have to go through the arduous process of getting the payment department to first approve my request, and then pay it on time. On the bright side, training for the certification will let me block off huge blocks of time for self-directed study. So for the next few weeks half of my work week will basically consist of reading moderately interesting literature on computer science while scaling back my day-to-day responsibilities considerably
Other
We've decided to get another cat, as the remaining one seems really needy. The animal shelter informed us that we can't have a single kitten, though, as according to them the cat we already have is too old. So we might get an older cat or two kittens now. We'll go there today and see what happens.
The fiance's nephew will also be visiting over the weekend, which has me stressed a little bit. I'm really more of a loner, so I'm not sure I'll partake in all the activities that need to be done to keep a 17 year old interested. He'll be brought to us by his mother (fiance's sister), who will start at my fiance's corporation next month. So they will be having a dinner out to which I'm also invited. I'm skeptical though, as I know from experience that their work will be a major conversation topic (careerists!). So overall, the stressful work week will be followed up by a stressful weekend, I fear.
Edit: Ah, and the hotel coupon company got back to us, too. They've found it in their hearts to extend the coupon for another year for a small fee (7€). I think we should definitely extend the coupon so we can use it all (hopefully?), but I also feel taken advantage of somehow. We'll probably go for it anyway, though, if just to get rid of the need to make a decision. If I can get the peace of mind for the unbeatable price of just 2 kebabs (that's an SI-unit, look it up) it's probably worth it.