2023-11-27

Coping with stress when there is no time to relax

 I have a lifestyle which can be stressful for me. 

It might not be stressful to others, and might seem incredibly busy to still other people. Probably I'm just leading a normal life for a married person with a child and a full time job. But regardless, stress can build up for me. 

 One of the things I find aggravates my perception of this stress is an unrealistic expectation about when and how I should be able to relax. This weekend, for example, I spent a lot of time doing things I might not have chosen for myself. I enjoyed some of them, others were more like chores, but none of it was particularly terrible to do. I even got to take a nap today.

 But I feel no more relaxed today than I did coming off the week on Friday afternoon. I feel like a weekend should recharge batteries but maybe it is my own personal issues leaving me almost dreading the week to come.

 After doing some soul searching, I think it comes down to physical activity. I am simply not getting enough exercise. For a while I had been walking 45 minutes a day in addition to my normal activities, then things got busy at work and instead of finishing off at the same time every day (roughly) I ended up working until my son got home from school. This is the time of day I normally hang out with him, get some chores done, and make dinner. All of this means no time for that 45 minute walk. 

 I had also been trying to get that time in on the treadmill in the evenings if I wasn't getting time outside after work but somehow that fell by the wayside as well. It's a feedback cycle. You get tired from stress, which leads to exercising less, which leads to lack of stress maintenance, which leads to more stress. 

 Time to break the cycle. I am going to try to get on the treadmill again if I don't hit activity (steps, essentially) goals during the day. I can try doing this before bed. I realize you aren't supposed to exercise before bed but some fast walking on a treadmill doesn't seem to interfere with sleep at all for me. I will also try to do more pushups, stretches, and other exercises during the day as a break from sitting at my desk. 

 I'll report in here in a while to see how this is all working out. 



2023-11-24

Gaia finds candidates for interstellar ‘Oumuamua’s home


 See: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_finds_candidates_for_interstellar_Oumuamua_s_home

I am not an astrophysicist but reading between the lines it seems unlikely that:

  • this piece of space debris would interact with some many systems as opposed to getting caught into orbit (gut feeling)
  • originate in a system without some type of larger bodies since the hypothesis is this might be a natural object that has flaked or chipped off something else after a collision (or be a technological relic)

Combining this with the competing theories of the nature and behaviour of the object, I think it remains in the realm of possibility that this was either a relic or active interstellar piece of tech. Do I think that is likely? No, not at all. But I do think it makes sense to at least continue to entertain that as one possible explanation.

 If the result of the Gaia analysis was "it started out here, there's a bunch of rocky exoplanets, doesn't look like it interacted with any other systems and coming here was a fluke" I would change my tune.

2023-11-22

Like a very tired phoenix, this blog is rising from its cold, damp ashes

After years of trying different blogging systems which mainly focused around generating the blog and uploading it (or variations on that like the systems where you commit stuff to a git repo and it builds remotely or Obsidian Publish) I have returned to ye olde Blogger and found I have content here going back QUITE a ways. 

 I was going to flatten it all but I think I will leave it. 

In doing this, I have been struggling to come up with a good reason to blog. I want to write things, and publish them on the web, as a way of clearing my head. It isn't evident that this has value to the rest of the world but writing publicly does seem to alter the way it feels to write. 

My current issues:

- health - found some skin cancer on my ear, cardio health is in the toilet from my last bout with COVID, and I need to deal with my posture and terrible eating habits. 

- tech - is a reckoning coming for ChapGPT in court with all the copyrighted docs they used to train 

- weather - Edmonton, the city I live in, is sitting above zero with very little precipitation during a time of the year when we expect dustings of snow interspersed with bigger snowfalls and temps at least -10c during the day; what is the next spring and summer going to be like after a Winter like this?

 - meal planning, meditation, walking the dog, it's all fair game to write about here - the fact that no one but me will ever stumble on this means writing here is pretty low stakes. :)

 


 

2015-07-22

2015-07-18

2015-07-10

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