simplerich

It’s not entirely true I’ve reached mid-life. I’m not even sure when midlife is. I am sure I’m older than I’ve ever been before, and while I prefer that to the alternative I’m not crazy about the up-coming trailing zero my age will soon have.

I’m just now coming off a week long vacation that was perfectly timed. In the days before the vacation my boss said to me that he could tell I just wasn’t feeling it any more. I was going through the motions of the job, but I wasn’t fully vested in it. He was absolutely right. I was burned out and not sure if the job had changed or I had changed or if it was just my impending trailing zero causing me to seek change for the sake of change. I’m still not sure what was going on when I left. I’m not entirely back yet, tomorrow is day 1. But I know now that I don’t want to go back. I talked to him today about demoting myself two or three levels just to improve the quality of my life and decrease stress. It’d add a financial stress, but I’ve got money socked away and I lived on that money before. I’m sure I could again. He thought I was kidding. I’m not sure how serious I was.

All that being said, work ennui happens at times. Work isn’t who I am though. It’s something I do. As I approach the zero-trailing birthday I’m paying more attention to myself, my food intake, and my exercise. The tool I’m using to do this is Sparkpeople.com. I hate all the buttons because they all mention it’s an online diet. I’m not using that part of it. I’m using the tracking tools. Tracking my exercise and tracking my food intake. If it goes in my mouth it goes on this site. Just the awareness of what I’m eating helps me make better choices.

Sparkpeople.com has a great community feature with message boards, built in e-mail for within the system, and a wealth of articles you can read about all sorts of topics from health issues to diet to exercise. I really like the site. I like it enough to recommend it. I used to like fitday.com and suggest it to people. I set up an account there years ago. Sadly, in the intervening years it has not changed one bit. Everything else on the Internet has grown more feature rich and easy to use, but not fitday. It feels old and clunky now.

So, if you’re of a mind to go all fitness minded with me join Sparkpeople.com and add me as a buddy in there. I’d be happy to share what I know of it with you and I remember when I quit smoking, 3 years, 1 week, and 3 days ago as of today the support of a buddy was very important. I’m all about friendly helpful support. I like to give it, and I am the type who needs their positive strokes so give me a shout out if you’re interested. My name’s simplerich there too.

The Midlife Crisis – Part 1 of ??? by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.