Updates, milestones, birthdays and more

Hey there my Hive friends and followers!

I figured it´s about time to post something else than my regular contests here, something authentic and topical, something that will also answer questions that I sometimes get from you guys. My wife just went out for a stroller walk / ride with our daughter so I have like an hour or two to write this post before they get back and the apartment will be again filled with our baby´s joyful screams and babblings that are so cute to hear but not so "writing friendly" if you know what I mean :)

So yeah, let me start out this little update post with the person that has been requiring the most attention from us and that´s our adorable little big girl Flora aka Florinka, Florecita, Florisek etc. etc. Just 3 days ago, on May 4, she celebrated what we called a "half birthday" as she turned exactly 6 months old that day. In fact, my (full :D) birthday was shortly before that but the numbers are getting awkwardly and uncomfortably high in my case so I´m definitely not going to talk about it :D Back to Florecita instead. I cannot even express how much of a blessing this little bundle of joy has been to us. You might remember from my older posts about her how confused, tired and lost we felt during the first weeks in the new role of being parents but Florinka has been trying really hard to make parenthood as easy and comfortable for us as possible. She is just so much fun to be around during the day. She is super active (maybe even a bit hyperactive :D) and physically advanced for a 6 month old so she does require a constant attention and supervision, which is actually quite tiring sometimes, but for the most part, she is in a very positive and joyful mood, smiling and laughing most of the time. She does have occasional mood swings in the evening and it might be a bit difficult to make her sleep sometimes but once she falls asleep, she almost always sleeps through the whole night without a single wake up or a cry. Last night, for example, she slept 12 hours straight, from 10 PM to 10 AM. Very unusual for a 6 month old, I know. Most of my friends who have babies of similar age still have to wake up with their babies like every 2 hours or so. Honestly, I don´t know if I could manage something like that, especially with my insomnia, so thank you Florecita for being so generous to us! :) I wish I could share some videos with you to show you our little princess "in action" with all her funny moves, sounds and gestures but we want to give her some privacy and anonymity here, which would be impossible in videos (I mean at least with my notorious photo / video editorial skills :D) so let me at least show you a picture of us that we took on her "half birthday" :)

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Now a few lines about me and Hive. There was a milestone that I would normally celebrate with big joy and pride but because of the circumstances mentioned below, I´m not sure if I should even mention it. I just turned the 79 reputation. I was always excited about reaching all kinds of milestones here on Hive when I was a fulltimer here and I even remember that I did some calculations back then according to which I should have already been in the elite 80+ rep club by now but because of the reasons described in some of my older posts (for example here), I had to give up on the fulltimer status more than a year ago and my growth here has been slowing down since then, just like my overall activities and engagement. Another reason why it feels a bit weird to celebrate any milestones here for me now is the fact that my power down will eventually be much more significant than I originally planned. And this is where the Hive update starts to intertwine with the real life update.

After moving from Prague back to my hometown and figuring out all the necessary things and processes to settle down here as a family, my plan was to find a "real job" so that I have a regular source of income to cover our life expenses and can also thus stop the power downs and selling off Hive. The idea was that I would probably go back to what I did before Hive and that was mostly translation and copywriting / staff writing. I used to be pretty good at these things. I translated hundreds of movies and documentaries from English to Czech after I completed my university studies (I actually have degrees in English Philology) and I thought I would just pick up where I left off back then. However, I didn´t realize that these branches were among the very first ones that have been recently taken over by AI. I quickly found out that the demand for translators and (any kind of) writers has dropped dramatically as more and more companies let AI do these kind of jobs now. So obviously, finding some job will be much more difficult for me and it´s already obvious that it will most probably be a job from completely different fields of work where I won´t be able to take advantage of my education, background and experience, which will probably also result in (much) smaller salary than I hoped for. Yeah, pretty dismal news and findings on this front but it is what it is.

With that being said, unfortunately, this is also why my power downs will most probably have to continue, no matter how hard and frustrating it is for me. I mean it´s really not easy to watch the stake that I have been building here step by step, Hive by Hive, for many years be ruined and sold off at these ridiculous prices. And it´s not fun either not to be able to give the appropriate amount of support to my Hive friends and favorite authors as I was used to do for so long. I really miss the times when my upvote was worth something and when it could even make a difference for some people here. I mean having to sell off your Hive earnings really sucks but right now, there is no other option for me. The only thing that I can do right now is to promise myself and the community that once I find a job that will cover my expenses, I will start building my Hive stake again, be it from the very scratch or from a few thousand Hive that I might manage to spare somehow. We will see. A massive price pump would help me a lot here but honestly, I don´t count on one anymore, as much as people love to talk about the bulls, moons and lambos these days. Despite all that, what we can really see is Hive dropping down the market cap ranking slowly but steadily almost every week. But this is for another post and I don´t want to digress to much here.

Another kind of update that I promised some time ago was the work out update. As you might remember from this post, I happened to be able to set up my own (tiny) home gym and I was really excited to start working out again and get back my shape from Prague where I used to work out regularly. In fact, the first weeks were pretty promising as I was making quite a lot of progress and it seemed that I would be back on track soon. However, later on, I kind of started to feel like stagnating again. I blame it mostly on my inconsistency as even though I literally have the gym in my own apartment now, I still don´t work out as regularly as I hoped. Unfortunately, with the approaching summer, it will be even harder to be more regular with my work out routine as the scorching sun will most probably turn the gym into a sauna but whatever, any work out counts and I need to get as many of them as possible. Right now, the maximum weight that I can put on the bench press is 90 kg (I mean I could lift more but I cannot put more plates on the bar as they are too big but light, I picked the wrong plates :D) and I can pull off as many as 7 reps in one set with those 90kg, which means, according to some online bench press 1 RM (1 rep max) calculators, that my current 1 RM is somewhere around 110 kg. Not bad after such a long break but I was still hoping for a slightly better result. We will see where my shape and performance will be in a few months from now. I will try to keep you updated on this thing too.

So yeah, that´s it I guess. I´m sorry it eventually turned into a quite lengthy and ranty post but I don´t do these things often so hopefully, you were not bothered too much. I´m also sorry there were not more pictures here as my blog has always been greatly visual but I somehow don´t find any that would fit the text. I will try to come up with some nice colorful travel posts again soon though, I miss writing them and I still have a lot of unused material from a variety of cool places that I have visited. If only I had more time for all the things that I would like to do, engaging here with you guys being one of them... Thank you so much everyone for your support, feedback and engagement, even though I cannot really give much of that back right now :/

Yours

@phortun

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This post was created by me for the Hive blockchain exclusively. All rights reserved.

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Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about Nature, Traveling, Photography, Animals, Ecology, Crypto, Sport, Fitness and discovering secrets and beauties of the World, feel free to follow me as these are the topics I mostly write about. Have a wonderful day and keep on hiving, guys! :)