Emilie Burke
Quarantine day 9 and outside time is keeping me sane
Emilie is an Army Wife, Data Engineer, and CrossFitter with a love for working through her thoughts in this space on the internet. She lives with her husband Casey and their pup Bo in Savannah, GA.
I think I’d like to get into the flow of writing my goal posts again. They’re not for anyone but me really.
I didn’t do that this month because I was focused on my EOY process, but I did do a monthly goal setting process. Clearly we’re a bit into the month now, but here’s a picture from the other day.
I’ve been really inspired by Amy’s initiative to spend time 20 minutes outside. So that’s what I’m aiming for. In my mind, it has to be an intentional 20 minutes. In our last house, I did this a lot, but since moving we don’t really have a space that makes sense. I set up a camper chair in front of the house and that’s been okay.
The other night, I decided I’d have dinner outside. The lighting was so good. I just had to snap this. You’d think I kinda knew what I was doing.
Working through the CrossFit L1 book and I loved this snippet.
Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Keep intake to levels that will support exercise but not body fat.
Practice and train major lifts… Similarly, master the basics of gymnastics…
Five or six days per week mix these elements in as many combinations and patterns as creativity will allow. Routine is the enemy. Keep workouts short and intense.
Regularly learn and play new sports.
I bought a new desk for work. I settled for the Autonomous standing desk. My plan is to stand until lunch and then sit afterwards. When I lived in Baltimore, I only worked at the standing desk, so this is a great step in the right direction!
Last Saturday morning’s view. This pup of mine is something special.
Just a bit of a hodgepodge of life lately today.
Emilie is an Army Wife, Data Engineer, and CrossFitter with a love for working through her thoughts in this space on the internet. She lives with her husband Casey and their pup Bo in Savannah, GA.
Oh that time of year where we sit down and think about how grateful we are for all the things that have happened. This year was an amazing one. Despite a deployment, it was great for our marriage. Because of the deployment (at least in some ways), it was great for my career. I had so many travel experiences, including visiting The Great Wall of China which was on my bucket list.
In a lot of ways, this year feels like a wash when it comes to my physical fitness. I started the new year weighing 2 lbs less than I weighed when 2019 started. Despite little-to-no change in my weight, I made strides in two things related to my physical well being.
First, I rebuilt my fitness habit. Because I strongly disliked the gym I had a contract with for the first half of 2019, I was slowly going to the gym less and less often. In April, one contract terminated and I took the opportunity to shop around for my membership.
Second, I PR’d every single one of the major lifts- the squat, deadlift, press, bench, squat clean, squat snatch. I am the same weight and much stronger than ever before. For example, my bench PR went from 90 lbs to 141 and my squat PR went from 170 to 205.
Money-wise we did okay this year. Because I did well at work, I netted an almost 35% pay raise from the beginning to the end of the year (these were smallish jumps along the way). We both maxed out our Roth IRAs and contributed a lot to our work-related retirement accounts (401K for me TSP for him) and got our full matches. We handled an unexpected 15K expense and rebuilt our emergency fund. We went on an incredible honeymoon to Bora Bora.
All-in, we did really well this year. The problem, though, was that we really let go of budgeting. We made a lot of money which is why all of this was okay, but a little more intentionality could have done a lot more.
I was promoted twice this year. I’m still at a company where I feel incredibly fulfilled. I’m challenged professionally- I’m uncomfortable, but also learning a lot and being stretched.
I didn’t make as many contributions to Open Source as I wish I would have, but I made some- at least 2 contributions to dbt, one to dbt-utils, and 4 to Meltano. Through work, we released the Snowflake Spend package, and I wrote a blog post outlining a framework for Assessing Data Team Maturity that was really well received.
It was a great year for my career.
Honorable Mention: Consolidating Responsibilities
I think these six posts lean into to what I wanted to capture this year- being more present, saying no to things, actively choosing what I say yes to, savoring sunrises, accepting the things I cannot change, and controlling the things I can.
Just going to dive right in…
Yep! I read 36 books this year! The notably new thing that happened was that I leaned into fiction, reading 14 fiction books. Prior to 2019, I read one fiction book since graduating college.
I didn’t get it done in July- the deadline for having it in time for Christmas, but I just sent this out to the finished this week! It’s still our ornament for the year!
I shared a bit about our financial progress above, but I think this is mostly true. In a rough outline:
Well done to us. Last year, my goal was to end the year with a positive net worth. Now we’ve gone from that to 100K. Wow.
As I wrote about in Making this space mine again, I trashed this goal.
I ended the year with a 250 lbs deadlift. I’m very far from 300 lbs, but 250 is a lifetime PR and even though I had to fight for it, it wasn’t the worst.
All in all, it was a great 2019. And set a high standard for 2020.
Emilie is an Army Wife, Data Engineer, and CrossFitter with a love for working through her thoughts in this space on the internet. She lives with her husband Casey and their pup Bo in Savannah, GA.
They say that the way into a person’s heart is through their stomach. I’d like to challenge the assumption: The way to a person’s heart is through their dog. If I never get another Christmas present, but people just give presents to Bo, I think I’d be mostly okay with it.
For Christmas, Bo got the blue bed that you see in the background here. I can tell he likes it, but this dog sure does love this couch. I couldn’t resist taking this picture. He looks so peaceful.
C had a work Christmas party this year. We got to dress up and lean into the spirit. It was at The Clyde, a new venue downtown. The CO’s wife organized the whole thing, and she did a wonderful job. There was outside catering, an open bar, a DJ, and good fun.
This year’s Schario family Christmas Jammies were Toy Story themed, in honor of TS4 which came out this summer.
We spent most of Christmas here, wearing exactly those jammies. We watched Christmas Vacation and The Santa Clause.
I gave Casey the Nintendo Classic for Christmas. (He gave me Airpods Pro.)
I was worried about how the game would go over, but it’s been a huge hit. While this is from Christmas, we’ve spent a lot of time since lounging on the floor playing these games. I got the Nintendo Classic, an extra controller, and two extender wires.
Another Christmas gift, this time from my mom, was this whole workout outfit. These workout leggings from Lululemon are the most comfortable leggings I’ve ever worn. Anyone who knows me knows I hate wearing pants, so when I workout in leggings, I always rush home to change into shorts.
I like these so much though that I wore them for a whole day! I didn’t immediately try to get out of them, and I’m already considering buying another pair. They don’t have pockets, though, which is frustrating.
This was our cheese plate on NYE. Unfortunately, it was also the only NYE picture I took. My b.
Emilie is an Army Wife, Data Engineer, and CrossFitter with a love for working through her thoughts in this space on the internet. She lives with her husband Casey and their pup Bo in Savannah, GA.
December was amazing. It was a bit of a crazy month, why with the holiday madness made extra crazy by Thanksgiving being extra late, but it was also a really wonderful month with no travel, lots of visitors, and delicious meals.
This month also marks my 12th without Facebook or Instagram. And I’m so happy about it.
This year, the IRA contribution limit is 6K. We have $500 auto contributions set up every month. I knew that we’d max it out, but this email was a cool one to wake up to. This is the second year in a row where we’ve both maxed out our Roth IRAs and put hefty contributions into my 401K/his TSP. Marriage and adulthood are so fun.
This whole system is totally automated. I haven’t written about how we do our money recently, but the tl;dr here is:
Automation is the way to go.
My training focus is going to change come Jan 25, so I’ve been trying to max out the major Starting Strength lifts before that happens. I’m writing this a couple of weeks after this picture and I have to say, I’m pretty please with these maxes.
This year, I put 20% on my squat, almost doubled my bench, and lifetime PR’d all my lifts. Even though my weight it about 20 lbs higher than I’d like for it to be, I’m pleased with the work I’m putting in, and optimistic that this will be the year I get my weight closer to where I’d like.
Along the lines of reflecting on a year’s progress, I was very pleased to crush my reading goal this year. I set the goal of 32 books and closed out the year at 36. It’s a nice consolation prize given I missed my goal last year by 4 books (finishing 32 of my goal of 36).
We have a $10 personal waffle maker from Amazon. One weekend, I bought cinnamon buns (out of a can) and turned them into waffles ala the picture. So easy, so fun, such a cool weekend breakfast.
We finally set up a guest room, buying a cheap mattress from Amazon that Liz suggested. I’m so glad we did because we had 6 visitors in December and 4 of them slept right in that room!
Setting up the guest room is an exercise in going through all those boxes that made it there when we moved in and haven’t been touched since.
Since I knew we weren’t going to be here that long, I feel myself hesitating to really put energy into these things. We haven’t put anything up on the walls in our master bedroom.
This was a step in the right direction
Speaking of visitors, CLAIRE VISITED. I showed her Savannah! We watched Army-Navy, visited Kevin Barry’s and Savannah Smiles, ate at The Farmer’s Market and The Emporium downtown.
I promised to return the visit to Philly
We also ate at The Bodega, and how cute were these everything bagels toasted with cream cheese. The veggie cream cheese was so colorful I couldn’t resist taking a picture.
Emilie is an Army Wife, Data Engineer, and CrossFitter with a love for working through her thoughts in this space on the internet. She lives with her husband Casey and their pup Bo in Savannah, GA.