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Curiosity

So the other night I was locked, drunk, wankered and or otherwise appropriately inhebriated by the golden liquid of ale and beer.

I emailed a friend that I hadnt contacted in quite a long time, our friendship took a nose dive 5 years ago.

I got into a sticky situation and he abandoned me for a good reason.

The odd thing is that he contacted me back.

I instantly got reminded of a lot of things. Our previous experiences, good and bad times. I am still thinking about it. A lot of our likes and dislikes are shared and I am pretty sure that we still do a lot of the same things.

Memories... From the corner of my mind. From the back and from the depths and new ones to find.

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Progress of sorts I guess

Last weekend I went out to take some shots, it was of my buddies group.

It was quite hurried and I wasnt focused. I didnt enjoy it as much as I wanted to, it was kind of like I was just taking shots to say I had done something over the weekend, I also wasnt in focus for much of them...

I am having issues with focusing properly but this time I learnt that I should take more pictures with the view finder and not the screen so much, which is helping more, the thing is that taking shots through the view finder I find it hard to control the settings, that will all come with more practice?

There is a way to do it and I will have to research more.

I am finding the secret to a good picture is focus, focus, focus.

The other settings are also important but more important would be the focus.

I also took pictures of stationary objects which I dont enjoy so much and as my camera isnt full frame I cant get the most out of a scene unless its far away.

I also have been exercising semi regularly so thats a plus too, instead of just sitting on my arsehole and getting no exercise in the mornings.

This is also helping stress and confidence as it always does, now to just make it more regular.

Also on the up is communication with family as I have a little more free time I can spend that with them too, this is excellent and the small investements so far have really been worth it, I love my family and I dont love working 24/7 but I have been doing that up until lately and I am excited for christmas and a few days off.

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Brain dump

Life is hard, it only gets harder, the good news is, if you work on it, you get better at it, the difficulty never decreases, but how you want to deal with it and adapt your ability to deal with it, is up to you.

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Discovering focus

I have always known that I lacked the ability to focus very well, I get distracted easily and I can never just do one thing at a time, even the decision to write this was spontaneous as I wanted to do some house designs for some ideas ive been tinkering with in sketchup. I had just finished a workout and later I want to do some photography(attempt it anyways)

Realising this has been pretty easy, finding the root cause and not the root reason is turning out to be much harder, I always thought that I was just bored easily but thats not exactly the case, I get excited easily too. Right now my own mind is telling me about all the other things I could be doing right now... Im not joking, its quite difficult to stick to one thing when your always thinking about something else.

The past few days I have been thinking about a Bruce Lee quote that I quite liked,

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times." - Bruce Lee

This has been more evident to me lately in work, as I have to focus to get anything done, I had hoped that this would translate to my out of work experience but sadly lately it has not been the case, I do notice small improvements and on way to improve is simply by blocking other things out of your mind for the time that you want to focus, again, very simple idea but to apply it for someone like me is incredibly difficult as I just want to do everything all at once and its is like a severe need or want to do other things, experience everything.

Now since I am older(I think? At least my body is...) I realise that you have to just do one thing at a time to get anything out of it, not just “faffing around” as my father would say. Concentrated effort will produce consistent results.

So after that, the conclusion is that you have to really pick what you want to do, at least for periods, maybe phases is the right description? A phase of being into something may not be a bad thing, you really get into or develop a liking for a subject and during that there is the potential to develop a lot of knowledge or skills in that area.

I think I will leave my rather elementary ramble there for the day.

#FOCUS #CONCENTRATION #ZENFOCUS #WORK #RESULTS #PERSEVERANCE #DETERMINATION #STRATEGY

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Has it been a while?

So Baba is home and tomorrow will be 3 weeks he has been around :) It has been a somewhat wild ride getting used to him, I think he is not so much getting used to us really but we are adapting and getting better at not being completely taken over by his presence and we can actually get on with life a bit like we used to.

I spend quite a lot of time laughing with him, all the little things that he does is fantastic, its all 100% raw, no filter. He doesnt know how to act, hes just a new born and so to watch him develop over this short time has been truly great.

Things I have learnt about having him around, sleep... Well that used to be nice. He gerally wakes us every 3 hours to feed, or we wake him up. We are trying this programme from a book, Contented little baby. It seems to be working, apart from last night, he slept nearly 8 hours straight!!!

What I have learned about babies so far, they cry when they are one of the following, hungry, soiled themselves, tired, something is irritating them. Usually so far I have found that the thing that irritates them the most is trapped wind, they need to be burped after a feed quite thoroughly.

Apart from that, I have been smashing PR’s in the gym, I have finished a cycle of Hepburn method for squats, bench and I am just a couple of days into cycles of deadlift and shoulder press. This week alone I have PR’ed my deadlift twice, the second time was the day after I made a 10Kg PR on squats for 3 doubles... It still hasnt sunk in fully really. I then decided to take 2 days off for recovery, today is day 2 and I think I might just go for a jog today, some cardio. Oh thats another point too, my cardio has been going up at almost the same rate as lifting. Quite strange but there you go, my lifting and cardio gainz have gone up! All over this 3 weeks I thought I would be able to train more but I am happy with my progress, I am most happy with my squat and bench press, my deadlift was always my strongest lift and bench weakest squat was mostly form issues which have now been resolved and I am actually starting to nearly lift something impressive, well maybe by the end of the month if I bump it up another 10Kg that will be sweet.

#TOOLONG #GAINZ #FITDAD #HEPBURNMETHOD #PROGRAMMEDGAINZ #LIFTINGTOLOOKGOODNAKED #BARBELLLIFE #BARBELLTRAINING #BABYGAINZ #BABA

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XD

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XD

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Taking stock

Thats right its jumbled reflection time again. So much to do and now that I have more time am I spending it wisely or just wasting again...

Finished section 7 of my course took the test and got 2.5 right of 6... Is that really a viable score? I will have to revise the section again. I hate that, its not like I dont try hard but it just seems like my retention is not the best always and this day was bad? Ok thats a blatant lie, I just didnt focus enough while studying is obvious.

Tonight instead of enjoying a few episodes of a series I will try to make up for it and revise the section again, I know where I went wrong, as usual it was with remembering specifics, this time specifically formulae.

So thats good at least.

In other news, I have gotten round to Kelly Starrets “Becoming a supple leopard” hoping to unlock some secrets to getting more gains with that for sure. I have steadily been trying to get some damn gains and I am actually doing well with that. Squat is improving, looks like my bench is also improving and my overhead press? Well lets see next session, how it goes.

We have also nearly got the house ready for the arrival of the little one, we have organised all our storage space and one of the remaining things to do is put my bike rack on the wall so that we can store the bike and save some space in there, we might even put the chair in if I think of a way to mount it on the wall. We are making sure to use all the space properly thats for sure and I am trying to maximize it by using walls. So just a few additions and we will be done.

My workout today really kicked the shit out of me, 4 rounds of a barbell complex. I was walking on the treadmill to warm up and also during the rest periods between sets, I have to say that my fore arms are fucking bolloxed, really and truly bolloxed.

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So many thoughts

Studying has been consistent now for 2-3 weeks and I am seeing increased focus and attention spans. That was up until yesterday. I finished studying and then started to download some stuff dl some stuff to watch later. Few things, documentaries and films. Meanwhile I opened steam and updated wasteland 2 as I havent played it since last October...

That took an hour to down load and install and in that time I worked out quickly, just push ups and KB goblet squats while partially watching a documentary, Rich hill, it seemed interesting but the characters and the places and settings seemed somewhat familiar, as had Animal kingdom which we had tried to watch while we were eating lunch before that, I then switched to, Into the wild. I didnt finish any of them, just parts really. I also watched part of the Ghost in the shell border series, just part of the first episode and while I found it more interesting that the other films I was trying to watch I also quit that and started playing Wasteland as it had finished updating and installing.

I think I just wanted to get a lot done. Actually I didnt finish anything, which is pretty bad. If I am to sit down with or commit to an activity I should finish it.

Also last night I went to a farewell dinner for a lady whom I only met on my wedding day, she has been a friend of my sister in law for 20 years or so and as she also knows my wife thats how I happened to be there.

I should have known that it would be a prayer filled evening as my wifes sister is involved in a lot of church activities and her friends are usually too. There was a prayer for the food, quite long and after the first 30 seconds I lost count of how many lord gods, were said. The second prayer was also quite god, Jesus and lord Jesus heavy, it was for my wife and I and our unborn baby. The third given by a pastor was the penultimate, every third word was Jesus, god, lord or combination of, seriously he was just sticking the words into sentences whether they made sense or not.

I lived in Ireland for 12 years, which was supposed to have been the stronghold of Catholicism in western Europe, for a year I was taught by a monk. Luckily he was a good man and not a pedophile and didnt try to molest or rape me. Even when we prayed together as a class I have never heard so much god and lord jesus and lord god in all my life. It was absolutely incredible. If a word could be worn out, this group could do it in record time. If you have never been to Ireland before, usually in every grandmothers house, the whole fucking place is littered with pictures of Jesus and Mary and the cross and there are holy water fonts around a lot of the doors and stairs and god bless is said quite a lot but never have I witnessed anything like what I saw last night.

During the prayer for my wife and I, I got bored and took up my phone, I put it on silent(it was already on silent tones for key pad and unlocking) and just fucked around for the prayer.

Needless to say my wife was not impressed, she believes that a person should stay quiet and do as the others do to show respect. Close my eyes and sit patiently. I didnt, I was bored and wanted to leave. So I did the next bext thing I thought possible, stay quiet but occupy myself.

#TOETHELINE #CATHOLICISM #GOD #ATHEIST #LORDJESUS #WHATISRESPECT #RESPECT #HOWTORESPECTWHENYOUDONTBELIEVE #RESPECTISNOTBLINDAPPLICATION

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Michelle Obama enforces nanny state rules...

#nanny state #benevolentbutwithnosalt #salt pushers #saltisthenewcoke #getyourseasoninghere

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Reflection and ramble time

Of late... So many of my blog entries start like that. Fuck it, why broke something that aint fixed? Something like that anyway.

So its officially slow season and boy am I enjoying it. At this time of year I can go to the gym / workout every damn day. Thats right. Gains ville, time to reach my previous max in a month and then make gains on a new max for the 2 months after that.

I am again following a version of Hepburn method, I say version because I am blasting through the cycle to reach my previous training maxes, also my shoulder seems to be good so I am benching again. So at the moment I am planning this for the next 3 months,

Squats, I will squat triples until I dont have anything left in the tank each round of a cycle to reach 120Kg, after that I will raise each cycle by 5Kg and do 2 triples per round for a cycle.

Deadlifts, repeat above except until I reach 150Kg as that was my previous max.

Standing shoulder press will be a fresh cycle of standard, 3,2,2,2,2,2,2,2 each round turning a double to a triple progression. Current shoulder press is 40Kg for 5,5,4 that translates to 14 total reps so if I stat on 40Kg then the initial round will make 17 total reps so thats fine by me 3 reps over load.

Bench will be as above for shoulder press. I have started bench on the working weight of 75Kg and it seems to be going well, although last night my chest was pretty tight, I was happy as it was only 48 hours since the chest session before it.

In other news, Gov. departments are fucking gay. No more to say than that.

In the gym last night I had to wait around for a rack, there has been a dramatic increase in the no. of people squatting and using the racks for shrugs and standing shoulder press.

While I was waiting I warmed up doing some groin and hip stretches as normal, lunge stretch, squat stretch, butterfly stretch, barn doors ( a new addition) toe touches, cant remember after that.

So while I was warming up the rack opened but I wanted to finish my stretches because I feared a groin injury the other night but all seems to be well, must have just been a strain. Anyways this guy  steals the rack before I have a chance to hop on.

He had been using one of the leg presses and is actually just using the rack for some type of row or deadlift, lets call him Bob for the following story.

Bob had been on the leg press where your back is against a padded board that doesnt move and his legs are the moving parts of the press, he was just pushing about 120Kg but his form was not fantastic, however I was warming up and wasnt paying full attention, I was also unaware that he was supposed to be supervised by a trainer who was actually leaning over the lying ham string curl machine just staring in the opposite direction, I think he had just taken a shot of juice before coming to work, he had that look about him. Bob was growing more and more frustrated and was demonstrating this by increasing the volume of his grunts, when he was maxing out but there was still not attention from his trainer he finally put his weights on hold and shouted at the guy, “I am here not over there!” the trainer looked around for a brief second but went back to gazing immediately after that. The disregard was so funny. Funny because the guy was trying but his form sucked and I felt that the trainer just wasnt interested in correcting the guy again. This was confirmed his mixed look of pity and apathy.

Bobs next challenge was to do some rows, despite a very good demonstration from the trainer emphasizing form, technique, breathing and keeping a straight back... Bob just went for what looked like the opposite, the trainer took up his gaze into the distance after a few seconds.

The scene should have been straight out of a comedy, on par with some of Richard Pryors best!

I was struggling to come to terms with the fact that the guy just wanted knowledge off the trainer but seemed to blatantly ignore it when given and just do his own thing, the trainer then ignored him. It was childish sure but it was so fucking funny that I actually burst out a little each time I saw it and I was watching diligently after Bob shouted the first time :)

#HEPBURNMETHOD #HEPBURN #BARBELL #BARBELLFORLIFE #BARBELLTRAINING #SQUATS #DEADLIFT #SQUATEVERYDAYORATLEASTEVERYSECOND #TRAININGCYCLE #LINEARPROGRAMMING

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Progressing

A hot topic for me of late is progress and how much I am making. There is a new edition to the family on the way and I am in two minds about leaving my current position and my current choice of country. I spent a large part of yesterday learning and catching up on my course. It was great, I haven't been able to since last November really. This course is improving my understanding of how to run my career and my personal life better and more efficiently and will have a lot of carry over to the rest of my life choices. I decided mid way through to speak to my boss to share my choice of course to find out that he had also started a free one online on coursera, I was intrigued. Both of us are trying to improve, to get better at our positions by learning. He's my boss so technically he should know better and more than me. Which he does but it was encouraging and intriguing that he was also learning the same subject matter as me. A nice little push to up my game, I am quietly competitive and it has made me think that if I want to up my position and get further I have to at least match him.

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Well that escalated quickly

So I just finished some documents for work, this is my one day off a week and my boss told me after dinner that he needed it tonight.

Seriously, I was getting pretty pissed off but I am striving to find the good in every situation and the good in this is that I will just know in future to do these specific documents at the start of every project and then if he needs something then it will just be a simple revision.

The negatives are that for this I wasnt clear of all elements because he just told me to do the document, didnt furnish me with the correct info. The positive of that is that before I sent it to him I did everything I could think of, that meant that he only had to do the absolute minimum himself to amend it.

I had, when he called been pretty fucking pissed off that he had told me to do it, being my only day off and considering that we have a 48 hour shift coming up, I was working myself up something rotten and what happened due to that was that I couldnt think straight or concentrate and I was pressing the wrong keys... I had to stop myself and get my head right, put it all aside and get it done, little bit tricky considering I didnt know the correct information to begin with but it was done.

The take home is that there always is a positive, always, from the slight annoyances to the worst situation that you can think of at the time.

It doesnt require a perspective shift. I am absolutely 100% against fantasy bubbles as any of my friends or family would tell you. Please dont misunderstand me, it requires something more challenging but ultimately more rewarding in the end, a close analysis of the elements and the possibilities of their different combinations and outcomes, with this the different options will become clear and you will have less troubles, if you know whats coming, its harder to be uneasy over it.

#ALWAYSLOOKONTHEBRIGHTSIDEOFLIFE #POSITIVE #SILVERLINING #DONTHATECREATE #OPENMINDFORADIFFERENTVIEW #EVERYSITUATIONISALEARNING #LEARNINGEVERYDAY #OVERAROUNDORTHROUGH

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Goals and reaching them, what does it take?

So lately I have been wondering what it takes to reach your goals. You see a lot of quotes and phrases bandied around on various platforms on the Internet and most of them have a grain of truth. Can a person only have one goal? I may or may not have spoken about this before but the head of my deptartment is a workaholic. Simply addicted to work. He recently stopped watching TV and using Facebook and has solely concentrated on work. Everything in his life is focused on work and working more. While in some way this is admirable it is also I believe unhealthy. He demands a lot from his staff, a lot from me. I have sacrificed, believe me. I have sacrificed time and got sick on jobs and ignored it, worked through having extreme dehydration and diohrea, injured directly from work related activities and still my advancement is as I see it not swift. 36-48 hour shifts. 26 days working in a row. No problem, dedication was never a question, advancing my own skill set specifically for my work, working in a position that I told them I was not happy about for over a year. I wonder what is enough for these people. I wonder what it takes. Is having a life outside of work so much to ask? Should you always be on call? Lives don't depend on me, I am not a doctor or a health care professional. I work I events. To this end I have seriously been thinking about moving out of the middle east and getting work else where. It's the only solution I can see that will work. Life is not valued here, only how much you can be used and abused, I have sacrificed a lot to get to the station I'm in. The challenges become greater and greater and the rewards are just to survive? Where is the quality in life of working 6 days a week in the slow period? 60 hours a week slow period... Why? In the busy period... It is completely insane, it's just continuous sometimes your lucky to get sleep in a night.

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You know, it could always be worse.

So at the moment things are pretty stressful, gov. documents are fine to deal with as long as a clear list of requirements are given first. When that is not done, the situation can become tiring quite quickly. Repeated visits to gov. offices for the same application is bad enough, to find out that each visit uncovers a new challenge is something else.

By nature I am perseverent in my own way. This has been proved in the past in various different ways that are uneccesary to delve into here.

This particular process has an essential outcome.

I believe in continual improvement. To this end I have after my secondary education undergone and completed some courses, 4 to be exact. All of them funnily enough are related to construction and that was the industry that I used to work in. The last certificate that I received and the one that I am currently studying are to do with my current job in events, but could easily be transfered back to construction or some type of project based work, in truth I would like to run projects of any variety. I enjoy it, it has actually helped to organise and improve a lot of areas in my life because if I can do it for short to medium term projects than I dont really have an excuse for the rest of my life do I?

Getting to the bottom of things, I have never been lucky. It doesnt happen for me really. Not in life, games or something yes. I can sometimes get lucky. Life, no. It doesnt happen. Every time I try to do something, I always have to take the more difficult option... That is always the way.

My father told me when I was very young, “Shane, in life some people are lucky. You are not one of them.” It has always stuck with me.

There is growth from stress, most of my blog entries are about this. I also know that compared to some unlucky people in life, I have almost none. TBH I only have first world problems, which are actually kind of like just annoyances. With all things being relative and no sign of equality in sight I make out pretty well all told. Still, the struggle in some cases is real and I do grow weary of it.

Thankfully I take a trip to our production facility quite regularly and I see people so much worse off than me that I can come back and feel almost elated. That my struggles are as they are is almost nothing compared to the peoples I have just seen.

Are the challenges I have, I wonder, balanced with theirs in that, I have continual and almost unrelenting stress and pressure with my job? Deadlines, shifting and writhing like a snake. Over bearing and schitzophrenic clients that dont seem to know what they want until they see it and change on the spur of the moment... I begin to digress slightly but if all things are relative than maybe my stresses and boulders to push start to compare to others.

Do I have reason to feel un happy or a reason to feel down? Sometimes I think I have full reason to feel angry, sometimes I get enraged, furious with lack of support and less reason or rhyme to the process of things. One of my only talents I have found that is specific to an area is pattern recognition, but not mathematically as the subject would revolve around if you searched for it in google. Pattern recognition as in linking events in time. It helps with planning events that are recurring from year to year, coupled with that is a shitty short term memory but decent to above average long term memory. These skills seem to work well on medium to longer term projects, or programmes. They are th field or length jobs that I would really like to work on, something that progress can be shown on.

My chances for that are still small as I am still learning but I hope that my continued progression and hard work will pay off and my bosses will give me more chances and that my continued self improvement will also pay off.

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Progress is progress, or is it?

So lately I have been concentrating quite a lot on my job and how to progress my career and like so many others I have found that when you do that... You progress. It does however come at a cost, the primary being that other parts of your life, start to fade. That was happening for me, I was concentrating so hard on getting further in my position that I felt I was losing a connection to my wife, my family and everything else in my life.

My job is project and deadline based, that means that everything is timed, everything is “dynamic” the buzz word of the century it seems sometimes. In a world of scientific constants, the only constand that remains the same is that change is a constant. Is there a point where change is no longer necessary? A younger me would cry “Blasphemy” at this ( I am not old either by the way ) but now in a stage of my life where time seems to slip through my fingers at every step... I long for some constants. Some things that can remain the same. Everything is moving and everything is being updated and moving along. 

Am I old before my time?

I have actually forgotten what I was interested in, what I used to like to do outside of work. A large part of my life was, what seemed like a lifetime ago, devoted to getting wasted.

Oh how I loathe my memory sometimes. The memory of how I wasted several years of my development and how I wasted my memory, which is now shot to shit as they say.

Have I made improvements in other areas since? By fuck, yes. Can I continue to? You better fucking believe it. I wont stop, I have to keep going, “Grinding” as they say, the other buzz word of this generation.

As I progress the challenges seem to stack more and the time to clear each one, longer but clear them I am and clear them I will keep up, because with my current level a lot of work is needed.

Focus and drive are essential for success, how can I keep them up?

I have to rediscover something outside of my career, something that I can get better at, not a distraction. Another area, I used to like to draw, and was for an amateur, decent. Creative and passionate and full of ideas.

I used to like to go to the gym regularly and in this period coming up I will have time again but to see your training maxes reset every year really pisses you off and the time to reach them again makes you angry and injuries happen because you get older and your lust for the next plate makes you careless.

Thankfully I have rediscovered my love of reading as mentioned in a previous post but that kind of gets knocked on the head too. There is never time it seems D:

#TIME #GRIND #PROGRESS #PROGRESSREAPS... #ANEWDIRECTION? #ALLWORKANDNOPLAY