Category: On Life

Posts about family, work, life, existential dread… the usual.

On Moving and Opportunities

On By Steven D'AdamoIn On LifeLeave a comment

We’re moving this week. We bought a new house about 15 minutes away from our current house and are now in the process of transporting as much stuff as possible over this week. Saturday is the big move-in day, with a big rental truck, and big furniture, and big plans to be living in the new house full-time come Saturday evening.

Moving to new places comes with a lot of stress, soon to be followed by the stress of selling our current house.

It also comes with new opportunities, aside from adjusting to a living space that we believe and hope will enable us to build the family life we’ve talked about for years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my day-to-day life can change with our new house, and I’m trying to temper my own expectations but also remain open to those possibilities.

We will have a nice front porch and back patio to relax on, readily accessible from the house and also far enough from the noise of our road to feel somewhat private. I’d like to think we will spend many comfortable mornings, and afternoons, and evenings sitting and talking in our outdoor spaces with friends and family.

We will have both a grocery store and a gym (of a reliable franchise brand) less than ten minutes’ walk from my doorstep. Will I be able to reclaim a slice of the walkable suburban lifestyle I had grown so accustomed to during grad school? I sure hope so. I’m excited about the idea of walking to the store with my 4-year-old to pick up milk on a Wednesday night.

We will have a finished basement, soon-to-be-playroom, where our sons can have a space to play and yell and make messes that do not feel disruptive to the flow of our main living, dining, and kitchen areas.

We will have sidewalks in a quieter area removed from main roads and throughways. I hope I will feel comfortable letting our kids roam the neighborhood without fear of cars speeding by every three minutes.

We will have a backyard that is a relatively flat blank slate — just a cement patio and grass right now that, with patience, we can evolve into a vibrant, welcoming, and pleasant garden and play area.

I think we have a lot of hopes and dreams for our new house, and that’s what’s exciting about it. The opportunities it provides us affirm our decision to move. It will be fun to see these opportunities play out.

Steve D

Rebuilding the Exercise Routine, One Day at a Time

On By Steven D'AdamoIn On Life2 Comments

I mentioned in my June Write Day post last week that I had achieved my goal of exercising every day throughout the month of May. I’m very pleased and proud with this achievement. I haven’t had a regular workout routine since sometime during the pandemic.

For the 15ish years between high school and my early thirties, I had a regular gym routine focused on strength training. During that span, I trained with weights, running, swimming, boxing, and rock climbing, and I was able to evolve my routine over time as I moved places and my lifestyle shifted. That all changed when I was laid off in 2019 and lost access to my former employer’s amazing gym. I tried to reestablish a routine at a gym near our house, and then everything fell apart in 2020.

Starting a New Routine

So I’d like to take a look at my routine in May and see how it’s developed. This is partially a way for me to glean an early routine again. Now, I had three main principles for my daily exercise routine for May:

  1. Do anything, regardless of how tired I was. Even if it was just a 10-minute stretch, I needed to prove to myself that I could proactively do something each and every day, regardless of how small.
  2. Focus on small goals. I didn’t go for intricate, 30- or 60-minute workouts from the jump. I knew I needed to build up to that — and I’m still building up to that.
  3. Be responsive to how my body feels. If I felt like I had the energy, I’d do something more intensive. If I felt worn down and just wanted to decompress, I’d focus on stretching and movement.

Building the New Routine

I’m not going to go day-by-day, but I’d like to trace my progress over the month of May to demonstrate how a decent routine can be built in tiny steps.

Week 1

  • 4 days of basic stretching
  • 2 days of resistance training
  • 1 day with a 20-minute yoga session

Week 2

  • 4 days with a 10-minute yoga session
  • 2 days of resistance training
  • 1 day with 4km of walking

Here’s an overview of my first two weeks. Week 1 was heavy on stretching, while week 2 I managed to do a lot of yoga. I also took advantage of a family trip to an amusement park to get in a ton of walking, which I think counts for something.

Week 3

  • 3 days of resistance training
  • 2 days with a 15-minute yoga session
  • 1 day with a 10-minute yoga session
  • Unexpected and unexpectedly difficult trampoline workout

Week 4+ (Last 10 days)

  • 1 day of basic stretching
  • 2 days with a 10-minute yoga session
  • 3 days with a 15- or 20-minute yoga session
  • 3 days of resistancec training
  • 1 day of kayaking, 1300m sprint

Notice in the final two weeks, I started doing longer yoga sessions. You can’t see it in the above, but I also tried to vary the types of workouts I did, as well. I took advantage of a family play date / dinner date at our friends’ house to play on their trampoline with our kids, which was so much more tiring than I expected. I also used one of our regular summer lake trips to kayak, something I love to do and really love the workout.

Continuing the Routine

The point is, once I committed to exercising every day, I was able to quickly ramp up to more intense workouts and dedicate more time to my routine each day. I don’t have a firm routine set yet, but I think it’s plain to see one had started to emerge in the second half of the month, effectively splitting time between resistance training and yoga.

Now I just need to find the time to kayak more.

Steve D

June Write Day: Routines

On By Steven D'AdamoIn Fantasy, On LifeLeave a comment

We had a lot going on in May. Between some business travel, some home improvement projects, and living with two little boys who seem hellbent on wrestling each other into oblivion, we were busy.

June will, hopefully, be a little easier. I’m traveling to a friend’s wedding for a weekend this month, and I’m trying to focus on having a couple days to relax and reset a bit; I’m trying not to stress too much about the actual travel bit. Airports are stressful.

Last Month’s Goals

  1. Actually finish two revisions for Uprooted.
  2. Plan next steps for The Herb Witch Tales.
  3. Read three books.
  4. Exercise every day.

Finish two revisions for Uprooted?

No, but I’ve identified the issue. I don’t have a routine. I’ve previously used NaNoWriMo to track writing progress, but it’s not really helpful for tracking… anything other than writing. As you’ll see in the section about my exercise routine below, staying accountable to myself, even in very simple ways, is immensely helpful. So I need to start doing this for all things writing related. More to come on this next month.

Anyway, I completed for full read-through of Uprooted. I think it’s overall solid, except the ending needs some more. As is my habit, I had gotten to writing the ending and just wanted to finish, and so I rushed it more than was necessary. I want to pad it out a bit so it’s not as abrupt for the reader. So I finished one read-through.

I got about halfway through my second read-through, the goal of which is to map out my scenes and their length, so I can determine if there’s a better way to organize my novella into shorter chapters.

In short, I have more work to do on Uprooted, but it’s nothing major.

Plan next steps for The Herb Witch Tales?

Not really. Kind of? While it’s tempting to say I’ll be ready to send Uprooted off to my editor and beta readers once I’m through my next revision phase, that’s probably hasty. I’m thinking I need to get Uprooted to a good spot where I’m comfortable with it as a singular story, and then go through revisions for New Earth.

Doing so will help me ensure that the themes and tones I want both stories to share are properly touched on throughout. Rather than finalizing one, I want to finalize both. So, that’s my very loose plan.

Read three books?

Yes! I finished this goal about halfway through May, and since then I’ve been taking my time with new reads. I’m still working through Raising Good Humans and A Memory of Light, and I’m also listening to Tyll, a retelling of a German folktale that I am honestly not sure what to think about yet.

I’m hoping to finish at least at of these this month, and I’ll find the third somewhere.

Exercise every day?

YESSS! This is the part of this post I’ve been most excited for. I exercised every single day, and after only the first one to two weeks, my exercise habits started to change. I’m going to do a deeper dive on this next week, but basically, the first week of May had a few days of just stretching as my exercise, because it was all I had the mental or physical energy for. I started doing more yoga, even in 10-minute sessions, and that has grown.

I’m continuing the trend for June and starting to formulate a basic routine. I’m just not marrying myself to anything rigid at this point, because I want to keep progressing. I’ve used Samsung Notes to track my daily progress, and honestly, it’s working. More to come next week!

Goals for June

  1. Do something writing related at least every other day. Similar to my exercise routine, I need to set of routine of writing things. Not writing, specifically, or writing X words per day, because I’m not in a drafting phase. But I need to be accountable for the progress that I’m making, so this is my way of doing it. I’m saying every other day for now, because I just need to establish the routine, then build on it. I think this will help me achieve my more specific goals for Uprooted — I’m just keeping things simple for this month.
  2. Read three books. As I said above, I want to finish at least two of the three I have in progress and then find another one to round out the month.
  3. Exercise every day. I just want to keep the momentum going. I think a routine is starting to coalesce in my head, but I just want to stay adaptable for now. This is working for me physically and mentally. I’ll provide more detail next week.

Steve D