My 100 Days Post #8. Week 3 review, Week 4 plan

Here is the week 3 plan [and here is how I did]

5/15 Monday–Swim [Walked instead of swam.  Metronome @43]
5/16 Tuesday–Walk in the morning, tap dance [No walk, yes tap dance]
5/17 Wednesday–Swim, Square dance [Walked instead of swam. No square dance]
5/18 Thursday–Walk in the morning [yes, metronome 43]
5/19 Friday–Swim [nothing]
5/20 Saturday–AM yoga [nothing]
5/21 Sunday–walk to meet a friend for an event we have planned. [nothing]

Meditate:
According to the new plan and my calendar I should meditate in the morning on Monday, Thursday and Friday.  I should be able to meditate in the evening on Tuesday and Wednesday. Weekends I will meditate when I feel kind of exhausted.

[It turns out I don’t really feel comfortable meditating on the train.  So that won’t be a solution. Meditation was fairly successful this week, because I wasn’t doing much else]

Food habits:
I’m experimenting with getting 800 grams of produce per day.  Let’s see if that ends up to be triggering in any way.  Also I need to put my food books on hold at the library.  I can’t afford to buy my own copies right now.

[I did put the food books on hold.  There is a long wait.  The produce thing worked well on the weekend, when I’m eating all meals at home, but not so much on the weekdays, when I’m dragging my food around to work and such.]

Soooooooo.

What happened this week is that I got sick.  I lost my voice on Monday and Tuesday and I had a cough.  It wasn’t the kind of cough where I could swim. Then, instead of getting better as the week went on, I got worse.  I had pink eye on the weekend, and some stomach issues.  I write this from the end of week 4, when my cough became a killer cough and the stomach issues stuck around.

The Saturday and Sunday of Week 3 had me hanging out on the couch for most of the weekend.  I cancelled plans.  I put off going to the store.  This turned out to be a good thing, because I lost my appetite on Sunday and it didn’t come back for the rest of the week.

This gave me a lot of time to think.  I’ve been feeling overly busy in the last month or so, in a way I don’t like and don’t want to be sustainable.  I’m worried about the summer, when I’m taking an online class that supposedly will take me 13 hours of work per week.  I find that those estimates tend to be generous, but even at half the amount, that’s still 6.5 extra hours to find.

I looked for things to drop from my schedule.  I had the happy realization that on busy weeks, I don’t need to cook five or six separate and different meals.  I can make one or two things and eat them all week.  I don’t need new kinds of food every day.

And maybe, I thought, I need to ratchet back the blog. Maybe it needs to be book and movie reviews only this summer.  That seemed like a good plan.  The next day I remembered this project.

There was a time in my life when I would gut through with stuff like this.  I said I was going to do it, and by gum, it was going to get done, no matter how complicated my life was because of it.

But I’m older now, and I have left that tension behind me.  This is not going to be my 100 Days summer.  I’m setting aside this project for now, or possibly forever.  If I do pick it up again, I would rather do it in the cold and dark winter, than the glorious summer.  And I would like to come at it from an angle of motivation.  John Green must have partially been motivated by the fact that people with cameras were going to be at his gym, so he had better be there too.  I don’t have that particular motivation.  So how do I get myself going on days I don’t want to?

This has been a good trail month.  I’m glad I built it in.

4 thoughts on “My 100 Days Post #8. Week 3 review, Week 4 plan”

  1. I know this is long after the fact, but I’m sorry to hear that you were so sick! It sounds absolutely miserable.

    Your reasons for shelving this project seem quite sound. When I read your previous posts, I kept thinking to myself, “I’m not even a quarter this busy!” It did seem like a lot. I’m glad that you came to a decision that feels right and healthy for you. 🙂 I hope you’ve been enjoying the summer!

  2. That cold that never left! (Thanks Matt!). Ooof!

    I appreciate that you have taken a reevaluation step – but for now and for your summer posts. Your are busy and need to find those spaces where you can cut some things out enough to feel human. I’m glad that you have found the balance. I know the blogging will resume when you are a GRAMMAR ROCKSTAR! It was so helpful to me to also scale back on the blog. Getting it caught up with our new spotlight system and streamlining the posts has made all the difference for me. It is sustainable and ENJOYABLE again. It was becoming such a slog. It was also important for us to figure out that we do the blog for ourselves. Our readership has fallen away with all the other forms of social media out there and that was making us feel meh as well. Then we realized – hey, this is our digital photo album. Its our record of what is happening in our life. If people read it and love it, great! If not, fine, too. That was quite freeing as well. I just posted the July spotlight – so the blog is up to date and i didn’t break my back making it happen! It was work, mind you, but fun work.

    1. It’s true, what you say about the blog being the digital photo album. I really like writing the posts and I like randomly looking back. It’s like a nicer, less angsty version of the journals, but with photos.

      p.s. Still not a GRAMMAR ROCKSTAR! But perhaps on my way.

Leave a Reply to Sara K. Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *