"It's Been Such a Long Time..."

As soon as I sat down to write this post, Boston's "Long Time" immediately started playing inside my mind.

Yes, indeed, since the last time I posted here, "It's been such a long time.  I think I should be goin', yeah.  Time doesn't wait for me; it keeps on rollin'.  Sail on, on a distant highway, yeah, I've got to keep on chasin' a dream.  I've gotta be on my way..."

Specifically, it has been almost a year since I built my "Hellboy" shovelglove, began working out with it, and enthusiastically started a blog.  What have I accomplished since then?  Well, quite a bit, both personally and professionally.  In terms of weight loss and shovelgloving, though?  I'm embarrassed to admit, not so much.

About two weeks after last posting here, my family seized the opportunity to move back to our true "home," in the northwoods, on the southern shore of Lake Superior.  I accepted a position of employment five hours north of where we had then been living with our four children and one dog.  For my first several weeks on the new job, until I could move our entire household here, I lived alone in a tent, making the 5-hour drive south every weekend to be with my family and to move all of our things into a storage garage.  For the rest of the summer, we expanded to two tents (plus a smaller one for food storage), and my whole family lived at a campground near my place of work.  Finally, after about two months, we completed the process of purchasing a house, and have been busy settling into our new home ever since.  The 126-year-old Victorian is a grand building with great bones, but has required a good deal of sweaty, tender, loving care.  (BIG thanks to my wife for the hard work she has done to beautify our new home!)

At any rate, it's with some amount of humility that I must confess that, throughout this process, my shovelgloving screeched to a halt, and my adherence to No-S has been spotty, at best.  In addition to the tumult of moving, starting two new jobs (one full- and one part-time), building up a tattooing business on the side, and fixing up an old house, I also suffered a back injury in November 2015 (not from shugging!), which put quite a damper on my ability to exercise for several months.  This condition has improved to about 90% of baseline now, but has also been joined by a somewhat severely impinged right shoulder.  I have at least managed to not gain weight, but am still hovering right around the 240-ish pound mark.

Well, "Time doesn't wait for me; it keeps on rollin'."  And with my 40th birthday now just two months away, it is definitely time for me to get back on track with achieving my previously-stated goals.  I am perfectly comfortable acknowledging my human-ness and forgiving myself for temporarily falling off-course, but for the sake of accountability, I've decided to re-emerge here and, once again, publically state my intentions to do the work and make these dreams a reality.

In addition to having recently rejoined the excellent, old karate dojo of my youth (this time with two of my own children as classmates), I will be resuming shugging, Monday through Friday, stretching nightly before retiring for the evening, walking often, and committing once again to the No-S habit of sensible eating.

Please stay tuned for regular updates, including workouts, progress pictures, and weigh-in's!