Today is the last day of my nudging blogging and I’m only going to talk about one thing today, instead of the usual three. Because it was surprisingly all-encompassing for my day.
As today is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and I’m a federal public servant, we were off work. A time for quiet reflection perhaps, a bit of reading on the issues.
And in my case, to focus a bit selfishly on me. I’ve been working on body transformation in the last two weeks, or more accurately, setting myself up physically or organizationally for a long-term body transformation project. It has generally been going well over the last 2+ weeks since I had the BowFlex assembled, I would say.
But today was about something bigger. I’m at the end of the month, and I’ve been planning on a monthly check-in to see how I’m doing, where I’m going. Yet I struggled with a bunch of issues today, and it may sound nigh on to impossible, but the organizing of my “monthly update” took me most of the day. Which is impressive since I had already started it LAST night before I went to bed.
I’ve written the full blog about it, but it was a full day of work to get it done. Emotionally, physically, intellectually. I’m happy with it, but it was way more work than I expected. It’s HERE if you want to read about it.
I’ll do a summary of the month of nudging a bit later, and I start my new theme tomorrow.
29.1 was some simple liaison work for, well, work. Connecting people as sort of a networking thing. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t. But seems promising so far. Not part of my day job so to speak, just a bit of extra simple networking.
29.2 was attempting something new for lunch. I’m not very creative with lunchtime options, and since J went back to school, I’ve felt very uninspired, often even skipping lunch entirely or eating late. Today, I tried a Supperworks frozen meal — freshly prepared, frozen, and nukable. It was a turkey meal, with some turkey, bit of stuffing, peas and corn, and then the surprise. It had mashed potatoes but with sweet potatoes, not regular. I may not fully hate sweet potatoes, but I’m not a fan. Blech. Except, not blech. It had some sort of maple crumble mixed in with it, and with kernels of corn mixed in, it was awesome. Forget the rest of the meal, I’d take that as a side all on its own.
28.3 was a full workout. I’ve been feeling a bit down, extra headachy over the last week (most likely allergies), and I’ve not been hitting the workout as much as I wanted. Certainly no EXTRA ones, that’s for sure. Well, today I tweaked the stretching routine fully with the new exercises, tested them all, tweaked the set again and then printed the new poster. After that, it was time for my full body workout, minus two leg exercises that I’ve replaced with extra stretching for now. Anyway, the workout went really well, and some of the exercises were too light for me. I’ll need to up the weight in October, but for now, I’ll focus on increasing reps and sets.
28.1 was a simple lunchtime outing to Kettleman’s Bagels. I like the idea of Andrea and I treating ourselves once a week to “something” that gets us out of the house. And with J at school, it means a simple outing for just the two of us, a rare occurrence.
28.2 was a meal planning outing, with Supperworks for September (three split meals, a couple of sides, and a few lunch options for Andrea and I). Oh, sure, I also got groceries at the same time, but that was just normal stuff. Pre-assembled meals that we like is a treat.
28.3 was organizing my new stretching routine more formally, and making up a new “workout poster” to follow along while doing the stretching. I’ve been lollygagging the last few days, time to get back to it in full tomorrow.
Most of my day’s self-nudging was linked to writing and being better organized.
27.1 was some extra blogging today. I wrote about my guide to astronomy as well as an article I liked way back in 2012.
27.2 was somewhat simpler, which is that I have never really done a deep organizational dive into OneNote. I used to use Evernote long ago, I liked how it was going initially, and then they changed their business model and I said sayonara. But with my writing heating up, I feel like I would like a better organizational approach to taking notes, even on my phone. I condensed some of my workbooks down to one main one, and now I’m going through and moving things around as necessary.
27.3 was a bigger writing exercise. Some time ago, I developed a rough outline for my “PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy”. Except when I did some rejigging of everything, I accidentally deleted the table of contents and outline from my blog page, thinking I had a separate copy on my hard drive. I didn’t. Sooooo, I recovered the old one from an old backup, and then added to it substantially. But I finished, and I have now sent out the ToC for feedback. Maybe some people will give me ideas, maybe they won’t. But my first stage is done.
I have been doing this series for the month, and while it had a clear purpose at the start of the month, I’m not as convinced the blogging is as relevant as when I started. I wanted it to hold my feet to the fire, to ensure I was making good planning decisions to nudge me forward, and it did that at the beginning. But now that I’m bopping along, the accountability requirement to blog almost seems redundant. Certainly anti-climactic. And, when I’m blogging about other things, this type of post is not necessarily at the top of my list to do before bed. Take this entry, for example. I didn’t write it Friday or Saturday nights, as I was too tired. Instead, I held off until tonight to close out all three nights at once. To be honest, I wouldn’t even do it tonight except my memory starts to fade.
24.1 was from Friday morning, which started off with dropping Jacob at school. With Jacob’s AFOs out of the picture for the foreseeable future, I think I’m likely to be running him to school most mornings, at least until we can figure out ways to get his endurance up (if possible). I followed up with a detailed conversation with the physiotherapist, and we have a way forward on his exercises. In the meantime, he’ll take the bus home, and most days we’ll try to meet him near the stop to help carry his backpack home. I need the exercise anyway.
24.2 was sort of “post dropoff”, running a bunch of errands to get things organized at home, with a pharmacy run for example.
24.3 was looking towards October and what I might blog about regularly, if anything. As I said above, I don’t need to post daily on my nudging behaviour, weekly at best, but I do have an idea that actually was sparked by an episode last week of New Amsterdam called “More Joy”. A little cheesy, I know, and it isn’t really tied to the episode, but we’ll see how it goes.
25.1 was the first item of Saturday morning, which was my full-body workout. I did my stretching exercises, and then went to the BowFlex system. Annnd, it was time for an step-up in my training. My body has been reacting well to the movement, the weights are about right, but for a few exercises, it was clear the reps were not up to the right level. Soooo, I boosted 8 of the 9 exercises from 1 set of 10 reps to 3 sets of 10 reps (most were already at 2 sets anyway), and for three of them, I boosted it to 3 sets of 25 reps (they too were already at 2 x 25). My body resisted a little bit, but overall, it was fine with the extra weight and breaking more of a sweat. I do, however, realize that I seem to be much better at doing the exercises in the morning. By late afternoon, or early evening, my motivation is way down, and I’m often tired with a burgeoning headache tied to allergies or blood pressure. Not a great time to jump on the weight machine. So mornings look like my best time.
25.2 was a small issue with Jacob’s setup of his Minecraft server. It’s generally working well for everyone, no lagging, but there’s a tweak needed for Jacob’s laptop and we haven’t quite nailed it yet. I did some research as to potential options, gave them to Jacob to try, and spoiler alert, it didn’t fix it. But at least it was a start.
25.3 was a blog entry about potential monetization of the sites. Or, more accurately perhaps, why I DON’T monetize the sites. I enjoyed writing it and was grateful for the organized input from another source to help me structure my thoughts.
26.1 is a big outstanding item, namely organizing the garage. Andrea and I got started on this way back in the spring, and part of it was in anticipation of my future observatory. When that died, so did some of my interest in the garage project. There are three major things that have to get done once I even get it organized, and it is the next major step in the overall set of projects. I had promised myself that I would do 30 minutes solid on it this morning, which turned into almost 2h+ instead. I’m happy to get as much done as we did, but my lower left back wasn’t too happy with me when we were done. Still, nice to have a major “chunk” out of the way.
26.2 was a simple outing this afternoon after an afternoon conference call to do some shopping for Jacob. He needs a new fall coat, some gloves, a new toque, maybe a few other things. We didn’t have much luck on the coat side, at least not at SportChek, but we ticked the box for the rest.
26.3 was some more research on alternative exercises. On Saturday, we did an outing for a massage for Jacob’s legs, and as part of the outing, we came up with five new exercises to replace part of our workout regimen that wasn’t working as well. While I had a great set of diagrams earlier, the replacement ones require a bit more work to finetune. I’m also considering going to see a local kinesiologist in order to figure out my workout options for me, and we have a PT coming who will likely have some fine-tuning ideas for Jacob’s routine. In the meantime, I downloaded some images I can use to remember each exercise.
