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Teddy Roosevelt

Another slow week this week, not much changing or going on, just getting into a groove with workouts and meals and trying to build up my teammates and get us ready for the season. Today is also my mom's birthday and I was able to go home for a day and see her and the family which was nice.

Personal Updates

Regarding work, I started to ramp back up on the job that I have been working for the past year which has been a nice way to spend my time and make some money, as I only will have about a month left of doing that work. I also was able to connect with the other contact that I had had for a potential internship opportunity this past week which was great. I am not sure exactly what I will be doing or how much of my time it will take, but I am open to the experience and excited to see if it is something I may want to do post-graduation.

Lift-wise this week I was able to stay pretty steadily where I have been with a minor setback on Wednesday. I sliced open both of my hands doing tug-of-war after our run and it left my fingers pretty cut up. I am almost back to normal now, but it will be a few days still before I can stop wearing bandaids to lift and will be able to do everything normally. It is another one of those annoying injuries that only holds me back from doing the extra stuff that I would want to do post-workout. Other than that I feel that I am in good shape and have been lifting decently well, so I hope to ramp that up in this last month that I have before our camp starts. 

Books/Other

After taking a bit of a hiatus from the podcasts for a week or so, I was able to fully catch back up on the two main podcasts I have been listening to, and also found some other episodes from different podcasts that I saved for a later listening. As of now, I am pretty satisfied with the couple of podcasts and sources that I look at or listen to regularly as I feel they keep me informed, help me to learn about different areas that are of interest to me, and are a productive use of my time.

The biggest behemoth of a book that I have gotten through so far I finally finished this week which was nice. It was The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which was another boss recommendation, but I coincidentally have heard it recommended elsewhere whilst reading it. Even though I do not like a lot of the history-type books, I thought that it was super interesting and gave me some insight into what life was like over a hundred years ago, and how one of our nation's greatest leaders came to power. I have some other books in the pipeline that I am excited to dive into and am considering starting to re-read some of the books I have already gone through and take some notes. I think that once I start school or start ramping up my thesis work I will be less inclined to read for pleasure, so I want to continue to pursue my desire to read now before I get burnt out with all of the pressures of school and our season.

Gratitude

For this week's gratitude post I want to say that I am thankful for having a car. There are so many different things that I could choose that are of a similar caliber in my life that would fall into the bucket of things I take for granted, but as I have driven a bit more than I have in a while this past week, and also blew out the tire on my bike, I am especially cognizant of how nice and convenient it is to have a set of wheels. Even if the cars that I have used are not always the nicest and not everything works as you would hope it would, I know there are a lot of people who would gladly put up with all that I put up with and more.

Especially with the extreme heat this past week, I was getting annoyed that the air conditioning in one of the cars was not working even though we had just gotten it fixed. I was sweating in the car driving on the highway and saw somebody on the side of the road walking and realized I should probably just be grateful to have a car at all because I would much rather be sweating in a car with a breeze than walking next to a road carrying all my things when it is over ninety degrees out. Part of what I have enjoyed about reading and engaging with these different podcasts is learning about other people and other times and it really makes me feel small and that my problems are not that serious nor unique. Just like I did not appreciate the ability to use my fingers until they got cut up, I am sure I would be much more unhappy if my car didn't work at all then if the air conditioning simply didn't work. 
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