February 2025 in Review

[rowyn]

 Health & Fitness

Overall health for most of February was Not Great. After feeling mostly-okay on the 1st and 2nd, I felt much worse again on the 3rd. For probably half of the month I was having regular but minor pain, and for basically all of February I had high levels of fatigue: taking multiple naps every day and too tired for much if any exercise. I started setting the bar for "have exercised" very low, including at one point "finished filling one (1) bag of trash in the basement and carried it out to the trash cart." Because if that's all I have energy for, I might as well count it.

I reached this extremely low bar 17 times in February, so hey, that was something. 

Eating habits were not bad, in the sense of "I generally managed to eat enough food." My appetite started to recover towards the end of the month. I have continued to avoid eating more than tiny quantities of my usual high-fat snack foods (ice cream, brownies, hot chocolate). 

I'm having my gallbladder removed on March 3, so I expect to feel much worse for several days and then hopefully I will gradually feel better at after that. The surgeon said most people have a few weeks of digestive turmoil after gallbladder surgery and then everything goes back to normal, but some people have long-term issues, especially with eating lots of fatty food at once. No telling which I'll be.

Writing

Work on The Secret Dragon continues slowly. Book was at 23,325 words at the end of the month, so 8,560 new words in February. Still haven't started another soloRPG. Maybe this month?

Part of me is like "8500 words? This is so slow. I'll never finish writing it at this rate." And the rest of me goes "please bear in mind everything else going on and chill." 

Oh, right. Everything else is going on too.

The Business of Writing

I finished initial edits on Be That Way and sent it to first readers. At least one person finished commenting on it (because they told me) but I am following my usual policy of not looking so I don't get neurotic about it. I told first readers they had until May because between gallbladder and moving plans, I doubted I'd get back to it any sooner than that.

I started initial edits of A Game to You, more so that I could check the "edit" box on my habit tracker than because I think I will finish editing it in 2025. 

Art

I did some drawing in February: portraits of Caliper and Raeku from Be That Way, random drawings of ocean and a rose, and some miscellaneous hand sketches. I checked the "draw" box 14 times; I generally didn't push to finish pictures in a single day. 

Reading

I finished first-reading Tuftears' Timecrossed Engineer, and went back to reading The Spellshop. After I finished that, I read Jaycee Jarvis's Taxing Courtship. Also read a graphic novel, If You'll Have Me by Eunnie. I started reading Martha Wells' The Cloud Roads on February 28; haven't gotten very far in it yet.

I opened a Storygraph account to see if that'd help with tracking. I am not enamored of it yet but I guess I like it marginally better than Bookwyrm? It does some things that annoy me -- like when I mark a book as read, it defaults to "no date" for when I started or finished and I have to manually adjust it 3 weeks later when I notice (and no longer remember when I started or finished). But maybe I'll get used to it. It might be better about the date behavior if I mark books as "currently reading" before I mark them as "read", idk. It does use the current date as the default "start date" when I mark a book as currently reading (which I had to fix for The Cloud Roads because I changed the status on the 27th but didn't start reading until the 28th, but at least it was close.)

Three books and one graphic novel in a month is not a tremendous amount of reading by my childhood standards (I was a book-a-day reader before I went to college). But it is evidence of Reading Regularly: good enough. I checked the habit box for "read" 26 times in February. Yay!

Moving Preparations

I filled the trash cart every week in February with unwanted things that I didn't think anyone else would want as a donation. I have failed to do this for tomorrow, mostly from lack of energy. I will also fail to do this next week, because I'll be recovering from surgery and also not supposed to lift much weight at one time. (I am allowed to pick up my cat, though, so that's good. Not that she likes being picked up much so I rarely do, but it's the principle of the thing.) 

However, this week I accomplished the much more important task of donating all the books. 19 tubs of books. I'm keeping some books but I donated the vast majority to a used bookstore.

I have a bunch of other stuff I'd like to donate -- all Lut's clothing, for one category -- but made zero progress on that.

I need to call movers and buy plane tickets and figure out cat and car transportation. (My plan is to pay someone to move the car, while the cat will fly with me. But I should see if I can get good drugs for Lyric for the trip because she hates even short car rides. And also I don't know the exact logistics for these things.)

Goal Scorecard

• Finish initial edits for Be That Way: done!
• Contact primary care physician if I haven't heard from specialist by 2/7: Yes I did have to follow up, and yes I did. SUCCESS.
• Contact at least one (1) place about donations. Of anything.: I contacted TWO places! Because the first used bookstore I tried didn't have space for all the books I have to donate. The second one did, which is why I stopped at two.
• Finish reading Timecrossed Engineer: Done!
• Call parents a few times: Three times! Yeah, that's about as good as it gets. On the bright side, I will be living with them soon and will no longer need to use the phone to contact them. So that'll be nice. Phones should be seen and not heard.

February Stretch Goals completed

• Write some of The Secret Dragon: 8500 words! 
• Made progress on clearing out stuff I no longer want
• Track what I read: I even got a Storygraph account!
• Got a HIDA scan and scheduled gallbladder surgery: okay so this wasn't a stretch goal, but these were important things and they count.

March Goals

• Have gallbladder removed
• Recover from gallbladder surgery
• Call parents a few times

Yeah that's gonna be it for the Actual Goals. Everything else will have to be a stretch goal. Surgery recovery is supposed to be "one week to recover, one month before you can lift heavy things," so in theory I should have around 3 weeks where I can do things like write/draw/edit/sort out logistics for move. But in the spirit of being gentle with myself, I will not count on it.

March Stretch Goals

• Talk to vet about traveling with Lyric and see what they recommend
• Contact moving compan(ies). Figure out date for moving.
• Get plane tickets for move (including whatever ticket Lyric needs)
• Contact real estate agent about selling house.
• Maybe donate/throw out stuff by carrying small quantities at a time idk?
• Track what I read
• Exercise (at all)
• Write some of The Secret Dragon
• Edit A Game to You or another book
• Work on a book outline for whatever I'm writing next
• Play a romance soloRPG
• Work on cover art or book illustrations
• Keep up on my Dreamwidth feed
• Ask Bookbub for a Featured Deal and run another ad campaign for a book
• Get backmatter updated for whatever book I promote
• Pick an old picture to redraw

Comments

[danceswithlife]

Re StoryGraph: Yes, if you use the "currently reading" option, it will put in a date when you change that to "read". Also, when you use 'read' and put in a date manually, you can put in just the month, if you want. I hope your post op goes well! BTW, there is a supplement called Cholacol by Standard Process that helps with fat digestion that I've been using since my gallbladder surgery. Also, I had the same experience you did with not remembering meeting the anesthesiologist, but just waking up later back in my room.

[rowyn]

Good to know! So far I haven't had any issues with eating.

[tuftears]

*cheers once again for the first-reading of Timecrossed Engineer* Once I finish rereading it, I may see if you want to have an opinion on the revised parts!

Aiee, imminent Rowyn-moving! How does paying someone to move the car work--do they drive it down or are they going to tow it/put it up on a flatbed?

It'd be kind of tempting in these days of Less-Safe Airplanes to road trip it... Not so much for mew with an electrical vehicle but I could probably manage as long as I worked out a sequence of stations I could charge at along the way.

[rowyn]

Driving for 16 hours with my cat in the car is not even slightly tempting. x_x

I don't know whether car transports drive it or put it on a flatbed. Guess I'll find out.