RAWR.

I hate my job at the moment, but that's not the point of this post, it just happened to come up because I'm at work. Anyway.

I'm squatting 90 lbs. for three sets of eight reps. NINETY. My Hub asked me how I felt after the first set last night, to which I replied, "Mean."

"Go take a walk, mean girl," he told me, and I did. While I was toodling around the track, which goes around the whole freeweight area, I beheld several trainers, one having a girl do squats with a 15-lb. weight in each hand, which made me go, "DUDE. I AM SQUATTING THREE TIMES THAT AMOUNT." I felt so proud. Another trainer was doing half the work for the guy that he had on the leg press machine, which baffled me. I went back and reported these things to my Hub, who was in the midst of deadlifts, and he told me, "Welcome to being smug."

Mmmm. Smugness tastes like cookies.

Apparently I'm ahead of the curve yet again among my friends; now they're asking my Hub for help setting up strength-training routines for them. It has occurred to me that I might have more influence than I thought I did, because every time I do something it ends up filtering through to everyone else. Weird, dude. I am so totally not a trend-setter. This feels like the blind leading the blind.

In other news, my food intake has sucked rocks this week and my meditation practice has likewise sucked the aforementioned rocks, both for the reason mentioned at the top of this post: I currently hate my job, because it is giving me vast amounts of stress. I took the day off yesterday for mental health, slept half the day, re-did my meditation (which went much, much better that time), and felt great. Came back to work today: instant reappearance of stress and desire to eat a vat of cookie dough. Goddamn job.

My church is doing a 5K run out at the lakeshore tomorrow morning, and in spite of the fact that neither my Hub nor I have trained for this one whit, we're strongly considering showing up just for the hell of it. Might as well. Why not? Money goes for a good cause, and if we need to walk, we walk. There are not words for how much I love having my Hub on the fitness bandwagon with me. Having to do this all by myself sucked in a number of ways; this is just lovely.

My shoulder still feels fine. Even better, I don't seem to get sore after workouts very much anymore; my muscles are tired, but are not on fire. Yay. I suspect that'll change when it's time to switch up exercises and I find new muscles to annoy.

My balance is improving. Seriously. I thought it was pretty good balance before, but apparently this is one of those things where I had no idea what I was missing before all my stabilizer muscles started getting stronger. Even just standing up is different; the little wobble I barely noticed is now gone. This is so wacky. I guess spending a lot of time having to keep a barbell balanced on my shoulders as I go up and down is, surprise surprise, making all my balancing muscles get their damn act together for a change. EXCELLENT.

Flexibility also improving; go figure. I do like this weight-lifting thing; it has all sorts of nifty benefits. And, yes, I like it much better now that it's no longer threatening to kill me.

I officially love the assisted pull-up/chin-up/dip machine. LOVE IT. Granted, part of this is because I harbor a delusion in my subconscious that I may someday be persued by ninjas or pirates (or vampires, or zombies, or lions, or pretty much anything; I have a lot of chase scenes in my dreams) and as such I will have to be able to pull myself over a fence or up into a tree. So doing assisted chin-ups and pull-ups makes me feel very happy about life.

Oh, and I must alert you all to the fact that sugar-free/fat-free pudding plus milk plus protein powder = VERY NIFTY MORNING SNACK. That is all.