Officially Lucky ❡ a blog by Clint Ecker

I’m not sure why I’m writing this, I thought it would be helpful to me and hopefully to other people.

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I’m slowly trying to transition myself off working way too much and spending too much time at my computer after work hours.  

I’ve come to the realization that this behavior had began doing more harm to me than help.  It all began to stack up after a minor “anxiety attack”—mostly just a multi-day period of heightened anxiety, which is very unnatural for me—that lasted most of a weekend a few weeks ago.

Because of this, I began backing off the computer and spending more time with Jacqui. Going outside, doing things outdoors and focusing on myself and my life outside work (we’ve been seeing movies, we’re going to build a raised garden bed in our patio, I’ve been eating lunch away from the computer).

I still have momentary bouts of time where my mind goes racing about work, online stuff and I still get over-anxious about work stuff from time to time, especially when I wake up too early as I do in the summer, but I think it’s slowly subsiding.  I am coming to believe that a lot of it is my wholesale pullback from a mode of life I’ve sustained for decades.

I’m trying to attain a mental balance that doesn’t drive me nutty and a stress level that is beneficial and not crippling.  One thing that was really hampering me for a while was my injured foot.

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I’ve been going through a bout of plantar faciitis which has thrown a monkey-wrench into my half-marathon training plan.  It’s been a bit depressing to watch Jacqui and Cesar notch their milage up every week while I can’t run.  I try to ride my bike while they’re running, but its not the same and I can’t run during the week to blow off steam.

This, combined with the increase in time spent online and work stuff was really messing me up and culminated in that little weekend freakout a few weeks ago.  I wasn’t really doing any kind of appreciable physical activity for almost 6 weeks when it happened.

So I’ve been going to the gym and trying to do non-foot-impacting exercise like working out on the elliptical, the rowing machine, and weight lifting.  I’ve also been doing yoga and it’s really awesome.  Not only is it physically demanding, but the focus on breathing and relaxing is one of the few things that can calm me down and bring me back into myself.

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I’ve also been seeing my doctor, just for a physical checkup.  He thinks I might have borderline heightened blood pressure and is checking into my bloodwork because of my family’s history with Diabetes.  

Unfortunately all this mental anguish has been heaped upon me at the worst time, and I’m worried that it’s going to affect my blood pressure.  Generally when I would wake up in the morning I would have perfectly normal blood pressure, but since all this began, I’ve been finding more and more that my systolic measurements are a tiny bit higher (in the 130’s) whereas prior it’d been in the 120’s.  The real thing that my anxiety peaks is my heart rate.  It hasn’t been uncommon for me to wake up in the morning with my heart beating in the neighborhood of 90 bpm, whereas normally at rest I am in the low 70’s.  I definitely shouldn’t be waking up at 90.  I’m hoping that with continued time away and more exercise this will pass, but it really depresses me some days.

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Anyway, no one should worry about me, I’m getting it all worked out and of course I have the Jacqui to help me and she’s amazing.  I just wanted to commit this all down somewhere and maybe ask if anyone out there in the world has tips or tricks for such a scenario.  I hope the things I’ve found can help someone, too!

Unzip the epub:

You’ll get a ton of files puked into the current directory, so put it in a clean one:

Now you can edit whatever you want, but you probably just want to edit the CSS file, right?

You can edit the actual text and TOC too, so just poke around those other files.  When you’ve made all your changes, you need to re-package the ePub.  Go back into Terminal.  First you have to zip in the mimetype:

Then you zip the whole thing up:

Now you should have a target.zip in that folder. Rename it to whatever you want, as long as it has an .epub extension.  You should be all set!