Thoughts and reflections form the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.
Progress on my goals
Boat plan
It’s a slow weekend for the boat plan. I should be bedding in a hatch (again), but it’s raining on and off so there’s no chance a sealant will set and form a watertight seal.
I guess it’s an easy weekend boat wise!
Actually, I’m a bit pissy because my employer has required me to do work over the weekend to get through a deal that could have been done during the working week but for my firm’s incongruent policies.
What a load of crap.
So even if the weather improves, I won’t be doing useful things tomorrow.
Gym alternatives
This was pretty cool and a massive end-of-week win.
My new gymnastics rings turned up:
Not sure how I feel about unlocking the warrior within when I did at least notionally participate in war without gym rings, but I get that they need to sell gym rings and the alpha-hustle-warrior bros love a warrior branding. To be fair, I probably would have in my early 20s.
Anyway, can confirm these are great. The measurements in feet are sewn into the webbing so there’s nothing about these that isn’t simple but robust. The rings feel good in the hand and the plywood was still grippy even when I was starting to sweat. I’m impressed.
Which brings us to the best bit of this tale: Itried out my new location and it was AWESOME!!!!
That’s right, dudes! My new gym is an abandoned Napoleonic era fort!
By hanging up the rings I was able to pretty much do the entire upper body section of my workout plan. I actually went for a bike ride instead of doing leg exercises, but I reckon I have a lot of options for box jumps and stepping movements on the top there.
I trialled this out in the middle of the day on a weekend and the only people I saw were fishermen outside and one stray tourist and her kid.
So, yeah. I’m going to cancel my turbo-expensive gym membership and do this for a bit. It’s cheap, it turns out it’s better for my current training routine than my normal gym, and it’s a three minute walk from my boat.
The gym rings cost me about £32 and here’s an affiliate link to Amazon because I genuinely believe these are a worthwhile purchase, even though it was an Amazon purchase and I don’t like those guys.
Distractions and detours
Writing club
I had to leave writing club early this week because I had to take the dog out while Lady SierraWhiskyMike was away. However, we got through the homework from the last week. I’d effectively written a sci fi/ space opera thing, which I’d thought was pretty good until one guy wrote about a block of cheese in a fridge willingly growing mouldy in revenge at the human that had been eating it.
Well, when the writing prompts hit you, you just go with what you’ve got!
So that was pretty cool and now I feel totally unoriginal by comparison. Well played, that man!
Weekend work. Yay.
We’re all overtasked in the office and therefore rather than set boundaries with the clients I’ve been tasked to do homework over my weekend, which is a boundary I’ve rigorously enforced.
It seems that whatever boundaries are agreed with my current employer, they will simply walk across them when it gets difficult.
To be fair, I only put in a little over an hour’s work: but it was my hour. I’m now thinking about work on a weekend, and it’s not like my job is inherently fulfilling.
Potential new jobs update
I’ve been confirmed for an interview at the end of the month for one of the new jobs I applied to. Maybe something will come of it? Potentially exciting!
Non-FIRE goals
My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)
New Born is hard. I’m barely keeping up at 2/3rds tempo and it doesn’t sound like I know what I’m doing.
I mean it’s a grade 7 piece and I’m definitely not yet a grade 7 student, so maybe I should dial down my optimism like 10%.
Still enjoying the lessons, but this one is a bit of a beast to overcome and I told my teacher as much. He basically laughed and told me “That’s the point!”. Which is what I pay him for, to be fair.
Actually, that’s a good point: the value of the lessons so far has been that my teacher pushes me when I know damned well I’d be coasting if left to my own devices. Definitely worth the money, probably should’ve gotten lessons sooner.
Fitness
As predicted: this week sucked for fitness and I only got my minimum amount of training in Mon-Fri.
Then Saturday came around and I trialled the new gym at the fort before cycling to town and back to do my weekly food shop.
So I’ve simultaneously not trained frequently enough and am also pretty tired because when I did train, it was a decent session.
I think that’s an OK outcome? Does it average to “good enough”? Yeah, I reckon it does.
Final thoughts
So this week was a dry thrashing at work that overran to my weekend, but the new gym rings set-up is a game changer for having an inspirational training location and saying myself some serious cash.
I think it ups my investable income by like 5-10% if I just don’t pay the gym and invest the subscription money instead.
That’s not an insignificant improvement, especially when it shouldn’t alter my quality of life. If anything, having my gym on my doorstep (er, pontoon? Mooring?) should improve my situation.
Lady SierraWhiskyMike is back tonight, so hopefully she can help out a little. However, next week we’re going back to the UK for my sister’s wedding – so that’s pretty awesome, and it means I only have a three-day working week. Craving a rest right now…
My financial independence campaign continues!
