And the results of my 4th Expedition:

43 lbs.

...beating out The First Expedition by 2 ½ pounds. Booya!

During this time, my daily blog posts with titles led up to this playlist creation:

The setup to The Expeditions were blog post titles involving song lyrics involving the night.

The First Expedition used titles in the style of The Big Bang Theory.

The Second Expedition used movie titles and the trailers from films I watched during my workouts.

The Third Expedition was sadly a wayward misadventure that spun out of control into the wastelands.

The 4th Expedition dove into cyberpunk, retrowave, and synthwave.

The 5th Expedition is...you'll see.

Now...we're on to November 20.

Hello October!

I went on a 9-day streak of going to my town's gym before breaking it Sunday. I had planned to continue the streak , but instead, I did lawn work and began moving my tools, workbench et al over to my gym space as I've removed the old elliptical and recumbent bike. It was hard for me to do anything in the other garage because of the onslaught of spiders, bugs, and mice. But more importantly, the lighting is awful and it has a sloped floor. It'll be good to create things out of wood again.

After creating my lunches for the week, I prepared my breakfast and dinner soy blends for the next 6 days. I would have made that 7th, but I simply ran out of cooked soybeans.

Again, I want to underscore the importance of having go-to meals. There's not even a consideration of breaking my diet when it's so easy to eat. At $7.98 for 25, the reusable Snap Pak Food Storage Containers from Sam's Club are a great resource to use .

I'm a little bummed that I didn't go to the gym to work on Sunday. However, it's 1pm-6pm operating hours on that day are ridiculous. I really do need my early mornings to get the most bang out of my workouts. That said, it wasn't a rest day for me. After the breakfast cardio, it was a functional fitness kind of day, followed by my dinner cardio. But, I shouldn't hang my hat too much on my workouts, while up to now, I haven't given much thought to building up my cardio, the core of my weightloss comes from my diet, not these workouts. I have to remind myself of it, as workouts are harder than simply making the right food choice. Now, in the future when I am at the weight I want, things will get interesting. But for now, it's only about weightloss. And if I can pick up enhanced cardio along the way, that's just more awesome for when I implement a running regimen come March 2019.

...and I'm absolutely excited about my progress by then. Even now, I feel lighter, possess more agility, and experience increased range. There's about 8 days remaining before I weigh-in and I'm gonna like the results...for about an hour. And after that hour of celebration, it's time to look forward and move into The 5th Expedition with a November 20th weigh-in.

I don't know what I was thinking. I CAN'T get rid of my desktop. In a high school world that was once only jocks, cheerleaders, and the Greek chorus, I was the chief computer geek. How can I rail against a desktop? I mean, I was typing up BASIC from a book when I was 5—which is a quick segue to my next point...I'm returning to C. Way back in college, I took a C class. At the time, I had a lot on my mind and didn't put much into it (unfortunately). Since C is the foundation of so much, I'm returning to it. Now, will I be a coder or is this just another passing interest for me—a ship of the night of intellect. I do that: I become keen on an area and begin to develop it, but I see a shiny new interest and I'm off to explore it. A part of me wishes I was the type that could stick to one discipline and fully find my potential within it. But, I am in reality like I am in MMORPGs, a hybrid class.

I really need to buy a new workstation one day. Back in 2015, I bought a Dell Optiplex 780 for around $80 off of eBay. Cheap price for a business class computer, a model that I once supported. Clearly, it was OLD when I bought it, but for my needs, it was fantastic, even if it had a DVI video card with no HDMI outputs. I would have figured by now that its hard drive would be ticking away and it's why I've got a WD NAS to throw files toward.

...but honestly, do I need a big rig with enough processing to punch me in the mouth? I don't do PC gaming anymore—well, maybe an addictive round or two of Civ V off of Steam—even that, I haven't done this year. I'm actually content with what I have—well, I like to wipe Win7 off of it and throw Linux Mint back on it—oh, the illusion of contentment!

I'm not a fan of midday workouts at the gym. Whether its late at night or in the early morning, I'm definitely the kind of guy that likes to train when the moon is out and the world is asleep. On Saturday afternoon at my town's gym, it just wasn't the same as this past week. There was just way too many people out, too many cars, too much...known. The night has an indelible mystery of its own. But my gym opens at 8 on Saturdays and 1pm on Sundays. SMH. It's likely that sometime soon, I'll sign up with Anywhere Fitness so that I can have my weekend gym. Admittedly, I love that Fitness Your Way privilege from my insurance.