Inversions: Challenge cycle Nov to Dec

New cycle, new challenge points. 4 goals, six weeks, but this time, some inspiration from George Orwell. 

 

 

Six Week Challenge The Fourth: Nov 12th to Dec 

 

Goal 1: WAR IS PEACE: Challenge my war on myself - Find and change one negative thought cycle or behaviour a week

 

I've developed some negative patterns. Not caring for myself, eating things that I know will bite me back, avoiding new experiences, that kind of thing. I don't necessarily expect any changes to stick; but awareness of habitual thoughts and actions is the first step.   

 

Goal 2: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH: Challenge my ignorance - Complete monitoring every day

 

I've started using Patients Like Me to gather information about what's actually going on inside my head and body. This involves at-least-daily quick updates of overall mood, and recording what each of my major symptoms is doing. I may talk more indepth about this at another time. I will also attempt to keep a daily log of what I do, and publish it here on my blog. I may or may not publish my recorded charts of symptoms at the end of the period.

 

Goal 3: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Challenge Immobility, Inflexibility, and Atrophy - do my physio exercises daily

 

Well, that one's obvious. Although, if I manage to do other physical things, I get bonus points here.

 

Goal 4: DOUBLETHINK: Challenge my mind - Research and write at least one article on my blog a week about something I've learnt

 

Again, this is pretty obvious. I'm going to say it has to be at least 400 words, although I will allow new recipes, tea reviews, book reviews, introspection, and similar. 

Goals are subject to review and update if I find they are not working, or similar. 

This goalset is somewhat less physical than the previous ones I've set, rather more meta and very introspective. I will still attempt to maintain and increase my physical activity, but my focus is very sharply on what's causing me to not be doing said physical activity.  As always, my greatest enemy is myself.

19, out and about

After some lag, more posting.

Yesterday was a pretty odd day. I was up all night trying to sleep - partially because the dearly beloved was sick and also not sleeping, and partially because I slipped and googled 'London Parkour' and got inspired. And then my brain would *not* shut up.

The upshot was, I got a good 3 hours sleep.

It was a beautiful day outside - sunshine, almost no wind, just lovely. A little chilly to my Queensland sensibilities (15C), but still.

I was stuck inside. I was waiting for 3 deliveries. First nice looking day in WEEKS, and I had deliveries. I pouted about that for a while, and then found a stretching routine, and then did that sitting in the the sunshine that came through my front windows.

I also wrote about my plan to do parkour soon. I'm not fit for it yet, but hey, there's an easy way to get there - sweat. Lots of it.

So, I cooked myself something interesting, and tried a new tea, and took photos and wrote about both these things. Since by then all my deliveries had arrived, I then took advantage of the fact the sun wasn't going to set until 8.30pm or something silly, and got out of the house.

I picked up my prescriptions from the doctor's, put them in and collected them from the pharmacy, and then went down the road to check out a park I saw ages ago but hadn't investigated.

Turns out it has a bunch of climbing gear, balance logs and things. For kids only. Maybe they won't mind too much if I use it when there aren't any kids around? One can but hope.

I also took a bunch of photos.

And then I went home and got some sleep.

Back again - monkey wrenches, new goals, and what next.

It's been a long few weeks.  Also, some flowers I saw yesterday.

Going to Kirkland was awesome, and I'm putting together a post with photographs and everything. I have, however, uploaded most of my photographs to the usual place.

Coming back from Kirkland was not so awesome. I couldn't sleep because the plane was doing this weird vibrating thing that felt like being shaken awake every 30 seconds or so. So I kind of started passing out a lot once we came down from cruise and started approaching Heathrow. Oh well, joys of travel.

The three weeks since then have been ... suboptimal. The first week was recovery; I pushed myself really hard mentally and physically when I was in Kirkland, to go places and see things. Whilst I'm glad I did, it wore me out on a lot of levels. I spent the week after we got back mostly asleep, because I was really that tired. And then, because I was silly and didn't book to go see the doctor before we went, I ran out of meds. So the following week was kind of spent trying to work up the energy to go request a prescription, since I couldn't get an appointment sooner than the end of January. To make life more fun, the Wednesday before leaving for Kirkland I had a really bad shoulder spasm. It's just about recovered now - a month later. I also had a bit of a strain in my left ankle, which made travel interesting. Oh, and last week? The dearly beloved brought home a cold. He's been suffering since before last weekend, but I caught it by Friday, and that really put paid to achieving my 6 week fitness goals.

Oh well.

I console myself with the thought that I got very close to most of my goals - and that had I had one fewer monkey wrenches thrown in my works, I probably would have got all of them (except the one that involved doing something every second day).

So, today is the start of a week of rest, before formally restarting for the next 6 week goal period. That said, I've already decided on my goals for 18th June through to 30th July. Here they are with my previous (30th April to 11th June) goals:

Stamina - Running.
I started out with 1.5km in 15min. My goal was 2km in 15min. My most recent run (in mid May) was 1.8km in 15min.  I'll work towards my original goal, with a backup goal of 3km in 20min.

Strength - Pushups.
My previous goal here was to go from 6 really old lady pushups to 12 really old lady pushups. I achieved that, so now I'm going for 12 full extension from knee pushups.

Strength - Lower/mid trapezius development.
I went from 3x10 4kg one arm rows to 4x4 40kg bent over rows. This round, I'm working on doing an incline pull up, I think they're called. Basically, lying on a bench under a bar, and pulling myself up to that bar. The end goal is a full pull up of course, but hey, baby steps. I have no idea what my baseline is in terms of the bodyweight exercise, so I'm going to test myself out as soon as I'm well.

Diet - general clean up.
My specific goal was no more sugar added drinks, and I managed this, with the exception of a coke on a day that I thought I had an appointment (which turned out to be moved) and a couple of cokes when I was in Kirkland. I've also taken up drinking orange juice again, but I'll probably cut down on that over the next few weeks. I'm going to maintain the no sugar drinks, and add in moving towards Paleo. The major part of this will be reducing the grains in my diet, especially gluten. In concrete terms, grains no more than twice in any four days, except when I am travelling and have no choice. This is a major sacrifice, because I love my gnocchi, and my fish fingers, and a bunch of other things. I need new convenience meals. If anyone has ideas for low-effort, fits-elsie-requirements food, please tell me? I'm running out of ideas.

Flexibility.
This one I screwed up. I was going for every second day mobility workouts, for a total of 21. I managed a total of about 11, I think, before I got monkeywrenched. Part of this was hitting ones I couldn't do, and part of it was my shoulder injury. However, I'll keep trying for this one. Flexibility is really important to me, I just need to find ones I can scale to my level, and not injure myself doing.

Life.
My goal here was to make at least one significant blog post a week. On average, I think I exceeded that thoroughly. On specific ... well, the last three weeks weren't so good for that. Still, amongst other things, I did get into the habit of daily achieving things, and acknowledging those things, which was a major mental health improvement. Over the next six weeks, I'm going to aim to keep up my at-least-once-a-week goal, and include on top of that, at least one photography post, one cooking post, and one knitting post (hopefully of a completed project).

Expected Monkey Wrenches.
Trip to Florence - the dearly beloved is speaking at EuroPyCon, and I'm tagging along. I'm not going to the conference, because frankly I haven't recovered enough to get anything out of it - but I am definitely going to see a bunch of things while there. This trip is going to be 30th June to 8th July. I've worked out my daily itinerary, which should limit the impact on my mental energy. I'm investigating some socks to wear with my footshoes, and taking my boots, so my feet don't scream at me so much. I'm also packing sunscreen. I expect recovery to occupy most of the following week, but this time, I'm going to have medication sorted out in advance.
Olympics - We're going to see the Fencing on the 30th of July, YAYAYAYAYAY. But - London's going to be kind of a mess. This may inhibit my ability to get around somewhat.
Social events - there's a few parties and whatnot on that I've been invited to - and those things can take me a while to recover from. Still and all, planning helps, right?
Other - I probably will have an attack of the meh at some point, or at least one injury. I've got appointments before and after my trip lined up with my physio, to make sure I'm in top shape, and I'll also be doing my best to avoid further injuries.

Okay, that's out of the way.

It does occur to me that with these goals, there's an element I'm missing - the put up or shut up and reward bit. Basically, put up or shut up is a meaningful penalty that I forfeit if I don't achieve my goals, and reward is what I get if I do achieve them. This has the meat of a blog post of itself, so I'm going to turn it into a rant and do it later.

In the meantime, I'm going to carry on with my usual Tuesday - putting away groceries, tidying up a bit, and trying not to fall asleep. Oh, yeah, and Diablo 3. I really want to get all my characters to about the same level so I can clean out my stash, it's annoying.

Oh, and charge up my camera battery and stuff because I have a photography trip to Brighton coming up on Saturday, hurrah!

15, for great justice

Okay, so the 'for great justice' part is utterly random. On to the dailyish installment!

• Finished uploading all my Kew Gardens photos. All 441 of them.
• Put my picks of the pics into a blog post. I was restrained, there's only about 70 photos in there. 
• Redid my website design very slightly so that photos are nicer in photo posts. Especially when there are many of them. Totally coincidence I did this today. Really. 
• Took a photo of my street.
• Wrote a post about my lens dilemma, which included looking up a lot of prices and reviews and thinking and all that fun stuff.
• Then it was midday, and I relaxed. Seriously, I've done a lot yesterday, today, and this past week in general. So ... relaxation. Including a long hot bath and Portal 2.
• Pondered my photography future, tweeted about it. May actually blog about it soon. 
• Read more of "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson. Man, I hate new series. So long before the next book!
• Got my laundry done.
• Had a good nights' sleep.

Should my blog grow up?

I realise I have fairly small readership as blogs go. This doesn't really bother me, but I don't know. Should I try to increase my audience? Is there really a point to doing so? Obviously, if I went down that path I'd probably have to have more consistent thematic input, and possibly even improve my writing somewhat. I'd have to actually do something resembling graphic design for it, and maybe commit to writing a 'real' post once or twice a week, about things that people find interesting. I'd have to standardise my tagging system somewhat, and possibly my titling system as well.

As for focus - well, currently I write the occasional ramble, book reviews now and again, sometimes I post about food that I've made, show off a few photographs, and I have the semi-daily achievements updates. That last I'd probably have to turn into actual writing instead of dot points, perhaps. The rest ... well, I suppose they're all there, but a less awkward format for the cooking and photographic stuff might be a good idea. Focus seems to be all over the place at present, and aside from starting a new blog with single-focus content, I'm not sure how to unify it - or even if it would be a good idea, or possible.

Sounds like an awful lot of work to me. It is something to consider doing. Not as the basis for a living, I don't think I could take the stress. More as a project to see If I Can.

Maybe. Thoughts? I'm thinking about it.