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June 2020 in Review
Jul. 1st, 2020 03:54 pmHealth/Fitness
Average Calories consumed per day: 1801
Average exercise per day, in calories: 160
Weight: 169.4
This is 20 cal less in both consumption and exercise than in May. Weight is about the same. It is pretty clear that if I want to start losing weight again, I will need to exercise more and/or eat less. I do kind of want to start losing weight again. It's not clear that I want to do so badly enough to change any habits. But I'm going to continue to track because I am still down ~14 pounds from my all-time high at the start of 2019, and tracking will make it less likely that I regain that. Also, I am in the habit of tracking now and it only takes me a couple of minutes a day.
Writing
I wrote some stuff this month. Let's see if I can sort this out.
The Lord, His Monster and Their Lady: I finished writing this out based on the original outline, and it came in at 94,989 words, so that was about 5000 new words.
Fellwater: I restarted work on the ridiculous BDSM erotica novel that I first began writing in ... 2016? *checks* Yup, 2016. I reworked the outline a bit, added in a frame story, and picked up the main story where I'd left off. It's at 101,000 words now, about 9,800 of which is new. My new outline says it needs about 23,000 words more. We'll see if I feel like finishing it this time. It's such an absurdly niche product that it doesn't seem worth the trouble of coaxing myself into working on it when I'm not in the mood.
Editing
Pretty much as soon as I finished The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, I decided that I wanted to re-do the climax, so I wrote a new outline for the new climax and started work on that. I've done 6900 words of new writing for the new climax, which is mostly complete now. At this point, I'm less in the "writing new scenes" stage and closer to the actual "editing" stage, where I have to massage the existing text into place and remove some bits that are no longer relevant and add some other bits to support the new climax.
Art
I started work on the cover art for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. My first thought when I began was "I will not remotely be able to pull this off so I'm just going to end up with a sketch that I will have to show a real artist as 'I want something like this, only good.'" I did that with the cover for Demon's Lure.
But the cover sketch came out as "this isn't bad", so I've been slowly working on refining it. I've got all the major elements down in grayscale, and am starting to do the background in color.
Tracking
Many years ago, I used to make "activity log" spreadsheets, with a date for each row and a column for every project that I was tracking. These spreadsheets were unwieldy: I had to do a lot of scrolling to see all the projects, and it was annoying to aggregate stats for, eg, different writing projects.
Halfway through 2014, I stopped using the spreadsheets entirely. For the next few years, I mostly tracked progress on a month-by-month basis, with word counts for books and general updates for other things.
About a year ago, I started keeping a folder in EverNote as a virtual bullet journal. Each week, I'd make a new note in the folder where I listed my work schedule, any appointments or scheduled maintenance, and any other goals I had for the week. Each day, I'd cross off the completed items and make some notes about whatever I'd done. It was useful in two ways: it made sure that I didn't forget about scheduled events, and it was cheering to look back on a week and see everything that I'd gotten done.
But a journal is pretty useless when it comes to metrics, and I missed having a spreadsheet where I could use functions to quickly calculate totals for any given period. I didn't want to go back to my old unwieldy activity log format, especially since all the things I wanted to be able to track would make it even clunkier.
But it struck me that I could make a less-clunky version by making a single "label" column with a pick list.
I ended up going with a five-column spreadsheet, and each activity on each day gets its own row.
The "details" column is "whatever I would have written in the bullet journal". This lets me have a free-form field. I've been using it to elaborate on tasks, but the most important use is psychological: it gives me a place to whinge about things that were unnecessarily complicated. ("Called Wal-Mart about paper prescription I'd dropped off, had to call Sarah Cannon Cancer Center to have them call Wal-Mart to tell them to fill prescription, so that Sarah Cannon could call me back that it was sorted and then Wal-Mart texted that they'd filled it so I could finally pick it up.") The "details" column also means that I don't need to make a category for everything that I feel like including in the bullet journal. I can just put in some text in the details field and move on. Yes, things without a category are things I can't do easy metrics on, but they're also things I didn't care about metrics for.
Since I generally log writing by words and exercise by minutes, I made separate columns for those. The "Y" is because a lot of things I don't care how long they took, just whether or not I got them done.
The activity/project distinction lets me track new writing separately from re-writing or editing on the same story, and in other areas I can use it to look up stuff like "when was the last time I mopped the kitchen floor?"
I've only been using it for a week, but so far I'm happy with it. I use a separate sheet in the same workbook to track calories, so that I only need to keep one document open for both. And there's a couple of columns off to the side for me to put in future events.
Moreover, it is no harder to update the new spreadsheet than it was to update the old journal. If anything, it's a little easier: I can start to enter the pick list items and then Google Sheets will pull up a match for me to select, instead of having to type the whole thing.
When I want to do metrics, I can use CountIfs or SumIfs functions to calculate totals for various categories/date ranges. Very simple.
The funniest thing about using it is that it feels like a "there's an app for that" concept, like I'm reinventing something that someone else has already done better. On the other hand, this is extremely simple to use and works on all of my devices. It doesn't have built-in reminder capability, but I have seldom bothered to set appointment reminders for the last three years and it's not been an issue. I am sure there are better products out there for most people, but for my particular idiosyncratic wish for "a way to have metrics on my schedule/to-do list", it works well.
Goals Scorecard for June
Goals for Next Month
* A few years ago, I called Christian Brothers Roofers about my leaking skylight, and they sent a man who climbed up onto my roof, caulked around the skylight, and told me he thought that it was a fluke due to the intensity of recent storms prying at the skylight, and caulk should take care of it. He gave me his card and left -- "No charge, let us know if it happens again." I have kept that card for years in anticipation of this day. He made a very good impression.
Stretch Goals:
Average Calories consumed per day: 1801
Average exercise per day, in calories: 160
Weight: 169.4
This is 20 cal less in both consumption and exercise than in May. Weight is about the same. It is pretty clear that if I want to start losing weight again, I will need to exercise more and/or eat less. I do kind of want to start losing weight again. It's not clear that I want to do so badly enough to change any habits. But I'm going to continue to track because I am still down ~14 pounds from my all-time high at the start of 2019, and tracking will make it less likely that I regain that. Also, I am in the habit of tracking now and it only takes me a couple of minutes a day.
Writing
I wrote some stuff this month. Let's see if I can sort this out.
The Lord, His Monster and Their Lady: I finished writing this out based on the original outline, and it came in at 94,989 words, so that was about 5000 new words.
Fellwater: I restarted work on the ridiculous BDSM erotica novel that I first began writing in ... 2016? *checks* Yup, 2016. I reworked the outline a bit, added in a frame story, and picked up the main story where I'd left off. It's at 101,000 words now, about 9,800 of which is new. My new outline says it needs about 23,000 words more. We'll see if I feel like finishing it this time. It's such an absurdly niche product that it doesn't seem worth the trouble of coaxing myself into working on it when I'm not in the mood.
Editing
Pretty much as soon as I finished The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady, I decided that I wanted to re-do the climax, so I wrote a new outline for the new climax and started work on that. I've done 6900 words of new writing for the new climax, which is mostly complete now. At this point, I'm less in the "writing new scenes" stage and closer to the actual "editing" stage, where I have to massage the existing text into place and remove some bits that are no longer relevant and add some other bits to support the new climax.
Art
I started work on the cover art for The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady. My first thought when I began was "I will not remotely be able to pull this off so I'm just going to end up with a sketch that I will have to show a real artist as 'I want something like this, only good.'" I did that with the cover for Demon's Lure.
But the cover sketch came out as "this isn't bad", so I've been slowly working on refining it. I've got all the major elements down in grayscale, and am starting to do the background in color.
Tracking
Many years ago, I used to make "activity log" spreadsheets, with a date for each row and a column for every project that I was tracking. These spreadsheets were unwieldy: I had to do a lot of scrolling to see all the projects, and it was annoying to aggregate stats for, eg, different writing projects.
Halfway through 2014, I stopped using the spreadsheets entirely. For the next few years, I mostly tracked progress on a month-by-month basis, with word counts for books and general updates for other things.
About a year ago, I started keeping a folder in EverNote as a virtual bullet journal. Each week, I'd make a new note in the folder where I listed my work schedule, any appointments or scheduled maintenance, and any other goals I had for the week. Each day, I'd cross off the completed items and make some notes about whatever I'd done. It was useful in two ways: it made sure that I didn't forget about scheduled events, and it was cheering to look back on a week and see everything that I'd gotten done.
But a journal is pretty useless when it comes to metrics, and I missed having a spreadsheet where I could use functions to quickly calculate totals for any given period. I didn't want to go back to my old unwieldy activity log format, especially since all the things I wanted to be able to track would make it even clunkier.
But it struck me that I could make a less-clunky version by making a single "label" column with a pick list.
I ended up going with a five-column spreadsheet, and each activity on each day gets its own row.
The "details" column is "whatever I would have written in the bullet journal". This lets me have a free-form field. I've been using it to elaborate on tasks, but the most important use is psychological: it gives me a place to whinge about things that were unnecessarily complicated. ("Called Wal-Mart about paper prescription I'd dropped off, had to call Sarah Cannon Cancer Center to have them call Wal-Mart to tell them to fill prescription, so that Sarah Cannon could call me back that it was sorted and then Wal-Mart texted that they'd filled it so I could finally pick it up.") The "details" column also means that I don't need to make a category for everything that I feel like including in the bullet journal. I can just put in some text in the details field and move on. Yes, things without a category are things I can't do easy metrics on, but they're also things I didn't care about metrics for.
Since I generally log writing by words and exercise by minutes, I made separate columns for those. The "Y" is because a lot of things I don't care how long they took, just whether or not I got them done.
The activity/project distinction lets me track new writing separately from re-writing or editing on the same story, and in other areas I can use it to look up stuff like "when was the last time I mopped the kitchen floor?"
I've only been using it for a week, but so far I'm happy with it. I use a separate sheet in the same workbook to track calories, so that I only need to keep one document open for both. And there's a couple of columns off to the side for me to put in future events.
Moreover, it is no harder to update the new spreadsheet than it was to update the old journal. If anything, it's a little easier: I can start to enter the pick list items and then Google Sheets will pull up a match for me to select, instead of having to type the whole thing.
When I want to do metrics, I can use CountIfs or SumIfs functions to calculate totals for various categories/date ranges. Very simple.
The funniest thing about using it is that it feels like a "there's an app for that" concept, like I'm reinventing something that someone else has already done better. On the other hand, this is extremely simple to use and works on all of my devices. It doesn't have built-in reminder capability, but I have seldom bothered to set appointment reminders for the last three years and it's not been an issue. I am sure there are better products out there for most people, but for my particular idiosyncratic wish for "a way to have metrics on my schedule/to-do list", it works well.
Goals Scorecard for June
- Did not cave to despair
- Helped Lut
- Finished The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady
- Sketched/worked on cover art at least once per week
- Wrote some of Fellwater as tentative next project
- I did do a little reading although I haven't finished a whole book. So, a very little reading, but technical success is the best success
Goals for Next Month
- Help Lut
- Try to get roof replaced/repaired: The skylight is leaking again, and it looks like the mysterious puddle in the extension, from way back when, is also the result of a leak that's gotten worse. The roof is 17 years old, I'm good with replacing it. I already contacted the roofer who patched the skylight problem* a few years ago and he's going to come tomorrow to look at it. Hopefully this will be doable.
* A few years ago, I called Christian Brothers Roofers about my leaking skylight, and they sent a man who climbed up onto my roof, caulked around the skylight, and told me he thought that it was a fluke due to the intensity of recent storms prying at the skylight, and caulk should take care of it. He gave me his card and left -- "No charge, let us know if it happens again." I have kept that card for years in anticipation of this day. He made a very good impression.
Stretch Goals:
- Finish rewrites on The Lord, His Monster, and Their Lady: I'm not planning to finish all initial edits in July, but I do want to finish the new climax and the parts that are connected to it.
- Write some of Fellwater and/or switch to a different book to write
- Work on art/sketch at least weekly
