My whole week is about to get fucked over because my mom wants to spend time with me.

This seems like a good time to record what I do each day, as next week when I have a normal week again, I can compare how I adapted to change.

01:04-09-47 = Sleep

Sunday evening after work I decided I would test myself to see how long it would take for my eyelids to become too heavy to resist. The purpose of this was twofold: to have an idea as to what a feasible stream length post-work might be, and also to watch ZebraHoedown suffer eternally in Arena.

I arrived home around 20:00 CST, and functionally probably lasted until 24:00. It took me about an hour to sort out everything I wanted to do before bed (brush teeth, make sure I didn’t have any poop in my butthole, etc.)

My last memory before committing to lying down and turning on my sleep tracking app on my phone was looking at tea on Amazon. I’m still on the fence about purchasing nearly $100 in tea and tea accessories.

10:00-12:40 = Fucking Around

Flopped around the apartment, unsure about how I wanted to progress dietarily.

I decided to eat Waffle Crisp and Maple Ice Cream because:

1. Mom’s gonna go face with those damn cookies and pasta and that shit has Flying so I can’t do anything about it.
2. I’m going to lift later and probably don’t care too much about my calorie consumption today anyway
3. I’ve noticed that at the volume I’m currently lifting, being fed works better.
   1. I can’t wait to be back to doing 1-2 work sets for everything so I don’t feel fucking gassed at the gym all the time.

12:40-3:10 = StrongLifts

I went to the gym.

The last, I don’t know, three to five sessions or so, I’ve been feeling terrible about wanting to go to the gym.

I feel weak, lethargic, achey. A veritable font of excuses.

I never miss a main lift.

My accessories are shit (lateral raises and curls, and I cut out calf raises entirely… though I might bring them back as purely a squat warm-up to improve ankle mobility.) But I haven’t missed a single rep on the main lifts. Nary a missed squat, press, nor pull from this chunky lump. No, sir.

Today I found myself in the awkward position of my Squat progressing faster than my Deadlift. Mathematically this should be obvious: I squat every workout day, I deadlift every other day, and both have 15lbs. increases each workout. I’m not worried about it because:

1. I always do squats first, this means I’m fucking tired by the time I have to deadlift.
2. I will more than likely stall on squats first because of how fast they’re progressing.
   1. This means I have to stay at the same weight while deadlifts will probably continue progressing
   2. I will probably have to switch to a lower rate of increase (10-to-5lbs. per workout) to continue progressing
3. Squats are more important to me right now anyway.
   1. I feel better activation in my glutes from squatting (I like having a nice ass)
   2. I have weaknesses in my right foot, hip, and knee that feel better as I’m recovering from these workouts.
      1. Foot: plantar fasciitis. 9/10 recovered. I continue to use a foam roller under my desk while streaming to ensure proper arches in my feet, rather than having my knees at 90° and feet flat on the floor.
      2. Hip:  femoroacetabular impingement. 8/10 recovered. This was the reason I bought the new chair that I haven’t talked about at all. I would say the majority of the hip pain was recovered after ditching the rickety-shit with the fishing cushion, getting me to about a 6/10. I no longer had issues walking or lying down, but going up stairs and kicking small children and puppies out of my way required me to stand on my wobbly-knee right leg and thrust out with ol’ lefty. Not an ideal arrangement.
      3. Knee: fucking bottlecap to the knee age 10. 7/10 recovered. I don’t think this will ever stop feeling crappy, but I don’t favor the leg anymore because of it. I feel like I can walk, or stand evenly on both feet, without worry about falling over like some kinda bitch.

I forgot my multi-blade razor at home, as well as my shaving cream. This meant I had to use my safety razor (ordinarily a face-only instrument) for all my business, and without shaving cream.

I have been wasting so much money on multi-blade razors and shaving cream, fuck my life.

It turns out that shaving my face for over a year with this thing means I can get the angles necessary to ensure 0% ingrown belly and jockage crops, and that my skin is now thick enough that I can drag this 20’s duster across the land and remove all the darkies from my property without nary a drop of blood spilled.

Beautiful.

3:30-18:00 = More Fuckery

I watched Ratsmah for a little bit while agonizing over tea some more. I found cheaper sources than Rishi for all the varieties of tea I want to order from Amazon (for reference: Pu-Erh, Turmeric Ginger, and Senecha aka Green Tea.)

The Gaiwan set I wanted ran out of stock, which is what prompted me to seek out alternatives for all the shitters in my cart. Ended up with a cart to the tune of $75 instead of $95 which is only twenty dollars, but that farther from a hundred that I spend on trying out something new, the better I tend to feel about the experiment.

22:11 = Realization of Procrastination

I wanted to start streaming at 21:00 but I ended up spending hours trying to come up with a third emote (which I did, and submitted) and reconfiguring my panel header images so they didn’t have random-ass alignments and instead were all centered. I couldn’t find the font I used for the previous headers, so I stole Amazon’s.

The kerning on the old font was bothering me a little too much anyway.

“S END MONE Y”

Nah.

Fuck that noise.

But I really gotta get on stream soon if I want to pretend I streamed on Monday and Tuesday this week, which I absolutely do.

I started RetroGold and felt horrible that I couldn’t watch him and stream at the same time. God damn it.

22:30-09:30 = Streaming

Realizing that I was procrastinating and trying to use excuses to not stream when I was able to, was enough of a kick in the ass to get started.

I felt really encouraged by my performance during the stream. It was the first Hearthstone Arena sessions I have had in which no run went below 6 wins. I had one 11-3 run. My session was ended on a Rogue run at 2 losses because of server updates occurring that Tuesday morning.

As it stood, I had a 7-win average across all my performance. It was not on a single server, however, and though my wins were all legitimate (runs pre-rolled before the Free Win event.) I’m not going to fret over what my per-server average was this month, a lot of other streamers seem to be disregarding the leaderboard this month also.

But I am encouraged to make a try-hard effort in August. If the new cards are indeed being released in August and not merely just being revealed/spoiled, I am going to try to get a 30-run effort done within the first two weeks. I am going to try to secure a leaderboard position on some account, some server, before the meta shifts yet again.

I’ll then select a different alternate for post-release. I’ll detail my procedure for this in a future post.

Following the stream I had less than two hours of sleep before I went to visit my mother, three hours away, for three days. I tried to stream at her house but my microphone did not work with her laptop and the internet connection there was insufficient for a reasonable bitrate.