A tired proverbial ostrich sends regrets

As can be inferred partly from my television viewing, I am hardly as much a Force for Good as I ought to be despite how very dysfunctional so much of society and governance seem to be. This would be true even simply locally, whether in the UK or the US, without considering the severe problems faced in the wider world.

I was feeling a little down last night and skipped my workout. I thought sleep might help but after well over nine hours of it I find that I was wrong. It takes much of my available effort to tread water in looking after my own life and family: paid work, household chores, parenting, etc. A significant fraction of my remaining time goes into rest and escapism so that I can recover. This keeps fatigue, depression and despair at manageable levels.

Even just being reasonably well informed is draining and angering. I thus have much respect for those I know who positively put much time into trying to make things better for us all. I admire the fortitude of those who can engage with awful things in society more frequently and deeply while still holding on to their normal lives and their sanity.

I can easily do some things: I can vote, I can donate a little. Once my children are fledged and I have a simpler life back in the US then I can probably do more. That's less and later than what's needed. I am sorry not to be pulling my weight anytime soon but I don't see why that would be any consolation to those less comfortably placed than I. Perhaps I like my comfort just a little too much.

Amateur investing

A while ago I noted that over the past several years bond prices have moved in ways I don't understand so when they returned to around their historical peaks I sold what I held. After all, I could then realize a gain and given past performance I had no confidence that they were not about to jump back down 10%. So, naturally, while I was away on vacation they climbed handsomely and are now at a historic high. Oh, what a lovely trade war.

That is fine: I am being somewhat cautious so I expect to miss plenty of opportunities. So much is difficult to predict. And, some paper trading last week with one of my latest investment ideas again failed to confirm that I had yet found anything worth applying to real money. The important thing is that I remember that I am but an amateur who has much yet to learn about financial markets.

Variation in workouts

In today's workout I performed over 6% better than on Thursday's otherwise-identical one which seems quite a difference to me. I have mentioned puzzlement over these differences and one of my suspicions was variance in how the cross-trainer sets the resistance level. I noticed that I was breathing rather harder today so I guess that the resistance is not the explanation: at least in this case perhaps the change is not in the machine but in how hard I feel able to work out. This does not get me much closer to predicting how well I will do next time. I try not to mind if I do worse on some days; I don't want my workouts to become an overly difficult chore.