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September in Review
Oct. 2nd, 2019 01:04 pmHealth/Fitness
I started doing kneeling push-ups and stretching a few times a week. I am trying to work myself up to 50 kneeling push-ups, and then I'll switch to regular push-ups and do fewer of those. On the one hand "I'll just do a 20-25 push-ups" seems unlikely to impact my strength by much, and on the other, it's easy to convince myself to do it: "It only takes like 3 minutes, just get it over with."
I did less walking this month, down to 63 minutes per day from 76. I also spent more time cleaning, which I count as exercise in the RealAppeal tracker (as "light cleaning", which is about 2/3rds of the calories-burned-per-minute of "walking"), but didn't log in Google Fit, which is where I get my month-end report.
In addition, I took the last five days of September off from both exercise and food-tracking, because I was visiting family and didn't want to bother with either.
I'm up a pound for the month, which does not feel surprising under the circumstances, or worrisome. My long-term plan is to lose a pound a month, and weight fluctuates enough that a pound one way or another doesn't mean much. If I'm still flat or trending upwards at the end of November, I'll lower my calorie target then.
It is amusing to be losing weight slowly, because standard weight-loss strategies all revolve around weekly progress and I'm like "I don't expect to make progress in a week, and don't really expect to make progress in a month. Maybe in three months we'll know if it's still working or not."
Still down 11 pounds for the year. Still willing to track and stay under 2000 calories daily. Good enough.
Writing
I wrote around 1500 words of Spark of Desire. I was seriously not in the mood to write fiction last month.
I made a few notes for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, and the untitled next book in The Demon's Series.
The Business of Writing
However, I did finish initial edits on The Twilight Etherium. \o/
I will need to do more edits. Not looking forward to that.
Art/Other
I have been using to-do lists, and one of the items on my to-do list has been "sketching." It has been surprisingly hard to actually do this one. I usually think of sketching as an easy if not useful thing to get myself to do. But apparently it's not.
When I did get myself to sketch -- I think a total of three times last month -- it was mostly gesture drawings, using gesture-drawing web apps. I do not enjoy gesture drawing. But I would like to someday learn how to sketch without spending several hours on every drawing, so. It's probably good for me.
I should probably watch some tutorials or do other things in an effort to learn and improve instead of struggling randomly.
Also, I really need to do the thing where I do the timed gesture drawings as a warm-up and then let myself draw something for a while, instead of feeling completely exhausted after 15 minutes of quick sketches and quitting.
Socializing
I went to visit my family! I flew out to my parents' home last Thursday, while my brother and his wife flew down to meet us, and we spent a long weekend together. I also spent much of Saturday with Kage, Sophrani, and Envoy, who all live in the area.
It was a laidback weekend of conversation, eating good food, and watching videos and some tennis with my mom. (She loves watching tennis, and I like watching it with her).
Happiness
Fine, I think? Maybe I will start mood-tracking again.
Scorecard for prior month
~ Help Lut & general adulting: I will mark this as done, even though there is one adulting task that I continue to procrastinate on.
~ Use to-do lists: This is working pretty well. I use a combination of lists and "what I actually did". Each week has a section of "things that are scheduled for a specific day" like work and appointments, "one-off tasks I need to do" like "coordinate plans for upcoming trip with friends" or "write month-in-review post", and a section of recurring things that I do multiple times per week, like push ups and stretching. I cross things off as they get done, and put a ~ beside the things I do multiple times to indicate how much is done. If I don't get a thing done, it rolls over to the next week. It's been useful.
My current week has too many one-off tasks, though. I will probably need to figure out a way to abandon tasks rather than rolling them over to new weeks indefinitely.
~ Score 20 writing/editing points: finished editing The Twilight Etherium, so got this done.
~ Do not beat self up for any productivity lapses: I wish I'd remembered this was on the list. n_n I did a reasonable enough job of not beating myself up, though.
Goals for coming month
~ Help Lut & general adulting
~ Keep up with the weekly to-dos
~ Finish 25% of a new book (working on final edits for The Twilight Etherium can count in place of some of this.)
That looks like enough. I gotta get back to writing eventually; it's been a while.
I started doing kneeling push-ups and stretching a few times a week. I am trying to work myself up to 50 kneeling push-ups, and then I'll switch to regular push-ups and do fewer of those. On the one hand "I'll just do a 20-25 push-ups" seems unlikely to impact my strength by much, and on the other, it's easy to convince myself to do it: "It only takes like 3 minutes, just get it over with."
I did less walking this month, down to 63 minutes per day from 76. I also spent more time cleaning, which I count as exercise in the RealAppeal tracker (as "light cleaning", which is about 2/3rds of the calories-burned-per-minute of "walking"), but didn't log in Google Fit, which is where I get my month-end report.
In addition, I took the last five days of September off from both exercise and food-tracking, because I was visiting family and didn't want to bother with either.
I'm up a pound for the month, which does not feel surprising under the circumstances, or worrisome. My long-term plan is to lose a pound a month, and weight fluctuates enough that a pound one way or another doesn't mean much. If I'm still flat or trending upwards at the end of November, I'll lower my calorie target then.
It is amusing to be losing weight slowly, because standard weight-loss strategies all revolve around weekly progress and I'm like "I don't expect to make progress in a week, and don't really expect to make progress in a month. Maybe in three months we'll know if it's still working or not."
Still down 11 pounds for the year. Still willing to track and stay under 2000 calories daily. Good enough.
Writing
I wrote around 1500 words of Spark of Desire. I was seriously not in the mood to write fiction last month.
I made a few notes for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, and the untitled next book in The Demon's Series.
The Business of Writing
However, I did finish initial edits on The Twilight Etherium. \o/
I will need to do more edits. Not looking forward to that.
Art/Other
I have been using to-do lists, and one of the items on my to-do list has been "sketching." It has been surprisingly hard to actually do this one. I usually think of sketching as an easy if not useful thing to get myself to do. But apparently it's not.
When I did get myself to sketch -- I think a total of three times last month -- it was mostly gesture drawings, using gesture-drawing web apps. I do not enjoy gesture drawing. But I would like to someday learn how to sketch without spending several hours on every drawing, so. It's probably good for me.
I should probably watch some tutorials or do other things in an effort to learn and improve instead of struggling randomly.
Also, I really need to do the thing where I do the timed gesture drawings as a warm-up and then let myself draw something for a while, instead of feeling completely exhausted after 15 minutes of quick sketches and quitting.
Socializing
I went to visit my family! I flew out to my parents' home last Thursday, while my brother and his wife flew down to meet us, and we spent a long weekend together. I also spent much of Saturday with Kage, Sophrani, and Envoy, who all live in the area.
It was a laidback weekend of conversation, eating good food, and watching videos and some tennis with my mom. (She loves watching tennis, and I like watching it with her).
Happiness
Fine, I think? Maybe I will start mood-tracking again.
Scorecard for prior month
~ Help Lut & general adulting: I will mark this as done, even though there is one adulting task that I continue to procrastinate on.
~ Use to-do lists: This is working pretty well. I use a combination of lists and "what I actually did". Each week has a section of "things that are scheduled for a specific day" like work and appointments, "one-off tasks I need to do" like "coordinate plans for upcoming trip with friends" or "write month-in-review post", and a section of recurring things that I do multiple times per week, like push ups and stretching. I cross things off as they get done, and put a ~ beside the things I do multiple times to indicate how much is done. If I don't get a thing done, it rolls over to the next week. It's been useful.
My current week has too many one-off tasks, though. I will probably need to figure out a way to abandon tasks rather than rolling them over to new weeks indefinitely.
~ Score 20 writing/editing points: finished editing The Twilight Etherium, so got this done.
~ Do not beat self up for any productivity lapses: I wish I'd remembered this was on the list. n_n I did a reasonable enough job of not beating myself up, though.
Goals for coming month
~ Help Lut & general adulting
~ Keep up with the weekly to-dos
~ Finish 25% of a new book (working on final edits for The Twilight Etherium can count in place of some of this.)
That looks like enough. I gotta get back to writing eventually; it's been a while.
