Push Ups

I’ve limited certain types of physical activity to avoid incontinence issues.

This morning, first thing out of bed I did ten pushups and stayed dry! Of course, I woke up 30 minutes before that to go to the bathroom and couldn’t get back to sleep.

Now I no longer have excuses to do pushups, planks, and other exercises that might cause leakage. I plan to do ten pushups every morning until it gets easier. I’ll try to do ten every hour and see if I can get in 100 a day.

I haven’t had any diet soda, or any soda since before Christmas, 2020. It’s now January 30, 2021. The bloating is gone, water retention in my legs is nearly gone. I’ve lost enough weight with just eating better and cutting soda that a couple weeks ago my daughter-in-law and son mentioned it.

I hate being cold which makes me not want to go outside and walk. In past winters I’d just go get my 10,000 steps at the mall. But NOT with COVID-19 and not yet vaccinated!

I also no longer have an excuse to avoid my stationary bicycle. I’m healed up enough now, that I ought to be able to sit comfortably. The only reason to avoid it would be if it hurt to sit and peddle. It’s been five months since surgery, so I should be able to do it. Now I just need to dig it out of the room its in.

Stress

I’m also nearly done with my busiest time of year. It started off busy but not swamped like we usually are. I support payroll and accounting software and all our clients do W-2s and 1099s and 1095s. We were swamped this past week because the main supplier of forms got hit by COVID-19 and most of our clients didn’t get their forms until this week.

Usually, we only have a handful of stragglers. I had over ten hours of overtime between last week and this. My brain got overextended using all my creativity to think of the easiest way to find problems with client’s balancing their W-2s.

Two clients had turnover in payroll clerks mid-year and they didn’t know how to balance payroll before printing checks or as part of their quarterly reporting. I spent three hours Wednesday with one client and about the same with another on Friday. Since January 31st falls on a Sunday, February 1st is the deadline to submit W-2s and 1099s to the feds and for the postmark of the employee and vendor copies.

I’ve been at this job 23 years come February 9th. This is my 22nd year end, and other than my first when I felt totally lost, this has been the worst ever. Thanks COVID! – NOT!

However, yesterday afternoon, about 4:50 PM I started to relax and my stress felt like it was melting away. the constant go-go-go! of the past few weeks of work should start easing up. All the work that was put on hold to deal with year end now kicks in. I’ll still be busy at work, but it’s dealing with the backlog. I should get it all done by March and things will ease into their relative sameness until time to start testing changes and updating documentation for next year end.

Productivity

Yesterday I woke up to go to the bathroom about 4:30 AM and couldn’t get to sleep, so got up about 5:30 AM. I got a lot done. The process repeated itself, but I got up just after 5:00 AM and started this blog post.

I’ve got a lot I want to get done today. I know I have goals that will exceed the amount of waking hours and the amount of energy I have to do them all. I’ve always had that problem. Knocking some of the things off my list is a further reliever of stress.

I’m thinking more about some hobby projects and hope to have the energy and time to focus on them soon.

I’ll put this unwanted wakefulness to good use, since it coincides with the motivation to get things done.

My hope is that it becomes a self-feeding wheel of success.

I may even get my taxes done today. I think I finally have all the tax forms from my employer.

I hope, like the whole world does, that 2021 keeps looking up and things get brighter.