sarakingdom

I'm not doing that well! But I've decided that this challenge, I'm going to just do those two things till I get them right. I will learn to rest if it kills me.

An utter classic. And so necessary from time to time.

Pics, please.

Week 3/Day 1: You've Had a Most Strenuous Day, Have You Not? 20 minutes of meditation, redux. WIN Week 0: ☒☑☑☒☑☑☑ | Week 1: ☒☑☒☑☒☒☑ | Week 2: ☑☑☒☒☒☑☑ | Week 3: ☑☐☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 4: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ And I got to bed mostly on time last night. It was such a mental struggle to do it. But I do need the rest. Even in this fairly-good-habitty state, I can feel the tiredness at points. Also, I've been eating, I think. So there's that. When does the tiredness go away? Asking for a friend. But a nice big challenge win for today. I technically won last week. The reward: one fancy chocolate bar from Wienrich and Boettcher, one of Ankh-Morpork's better chocolatiers. Type: so dark it is black. Come on, this is the government service challenge, there's a dress code even for chocolate. Lately the meditations have been guided meditations from audiodharma.org, because I need the guide and there's so much damn fluff out there. Audiodharma's a bit earnest and a bit, well, Buddhist, but, hey, they do long and they do classically-trained content. (I'm not particularly Buddhist, but I'll give that full marks for being tested and scientifically supported meditation training, versus god knows what with annoyingly soothing music and beach pictures on Youtube.) So what the heck, I can get my meditations straight from a History Monk. The Clacks is a wonderful technology.

That sounds pretty delish. I do like veggies and dip, and never eat my veggies that way. That is a good one! I also enjoyed this slightly breathless article. I fear they might be. Lately I've been adding more cheese into my vegetables, and that helps.

Zer sleep is so hard! I haff been very good, und it is so difficult every night. It does not get easier. I do not vant to sleep, und must make myself close ze eyes. I have zer bedtime, und it slips very slightly, but zer is mostly ze sleep, und every night is a trial. Ve must take zer pledge vun day at a time, but it is not easy, my goodness, no. Brothers und sisters, I need zer cocoa und a singalong. Und perhaps an apple to bite. Is it vorth it not being vun of the children of zer night, I ask you? Vell, of course, it is, but... How is everyone else doing vith their sleep pledges this challenge? Progress? Backsliding? Problems to trouble-shoot?

Week 2/Day 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7: You've Had a Most Strenuous Day, Have You Not? 20 minutes of meditation, redux. FAIL FAIL FAIL WIN WIN Week 0: ☒☑☑☒☑☑☑ | Week 1: ☒☑☒☑☒☒☑ | Week 2: ☑☑☒☒☒☑☑ | Week 3: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 4: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ Wednesday is a fail I do not regret. I did well in general that day, and sleep was my priority. Thursday... not so much, and Friday I was sick. I've done five minutes of meditation today, but that is not 20, so we'll see if I pass. I think I need to schedule this thing for my mornings before I go to work, or something. I don't know, there's no good time to do it. ETA: Long, long guided meditation done. I would say I needed it (I did), but I also half-slept through most of it. Oh well. For is it not written, "You need your rest"?

Dude. You just flew into the worst natural disaster since/including Katrina. Dude. You just flew into the worst natural disaster since/including Katrina. Go on, take Company and evacuate to Tank's place.

It may come to that. I'm seriously like a thousand calories short every day, which is just too high a deficit for me, and I can't face making or eating more food. A couple or four of iced coffees with a heavy-handed pour of cream might do the trick. As for the olive oil, I... don't think I can stomach it straight. Maybe in some kind of dip.

Wait, did I just hear... a phoenix rise from the ashes? :-) It's built into the mobile calendar app. Maybe the desktop will do it, but I don't know where they've hidden it. Google Calendar now has reminders and goals on top of events. Reminders do what they say on the tin, either at a time or location. (And they integrate with Google Keep, so you could put a shopping list in there, even a shared household shopping list with your family or roommates, and have it pop up when you arrive at the store.) I've loaded up reminders with basically everything I might have to remember that's likely to slip my mind, from tasks I think of in transit but will forget when I get somewhere I can deal with them, to schedule implications that I might not be thinking about when the time comes to take the thing or not do the usual thing, to even simply why I want to actually go to bed on time, which I for damn sure never remember at bedtime when there are internets to be had instead. (Oh, just passed the store, there's my shopping list. Next time, Google.) Basically, it makes it low-effort to get things onto my list of things to deal with. I don't have to pull out the planner or know what to do about it yet. (Especially with voice commands, I don't even have to interrupt what I'm doing for minor things, but I can still get them out of my head and trust that I won't lose them, so there's a nice attention win.) Goals are new to me, but you tell it what frequency of various types of regular action you want to do each day, week, or month, and it auto-schedules them for open places in your schedule. (It's not perfect. Google Now knows about travel time to and from your geotagged calendar events, and pops up useful alerts to leave based on traffic and transit schedules, but Goals doesn't seem to understand location yet, so I've had it schedule things during commutes. Fine for mediation, less good for cleaning. But you can either manually move it, or just tell Goals to move it later, and it says it learns your scheduling preferences. I'm too new to it, but it looks like Goals tracks how well you hit your targets, with graphs and things. And all three lay out nicely in the one-day calendar view, so it's easy to see all your schedule constraints in one place and see what has to fit in the gaps when. You'd think a regular events calendar would be the same, but somehow that's still keeping too much on my head for me to usefully dissect the white space. And I just can't make decisions like "when do I go for a walk to break up my day" when I'm focused on work, so I either fail to pick a time each day, or I schedule a standing time that doesn't work half the days. So now I'm letting Google decide, so I have to opt out rather than opt in, and it's responsive to my schedule. (I've even put in some things that aren't really "goals", but need to happen on a flexible schedule, so it can float them into my schedule for me.) So it's partly dealing with choice fatigue, and partly just cutting down the size of the job. I also have trouble conceptualizing that the seven unscheduled hours are not really that, but three unscheduled hours with constraints based on later events, because those constraints don't appear there. It makes it easier to visualize the constraints, and have them appear when I need to deal with them, rather than when I need to have dealt with them. So, uh, I haven't be using it long, just this week. Very TL;DR, but I've been having major ADHD planning issues lately, so when I got a new phone, I loaded every Google ecosystem personal assistant app on to see if it really personally assisted, and so far it's a handy thing for freeing up mental RAM. We'll see in a few weeks if it sticks, but so far so good, and worst case I still have an up to date calendar out of the deal.

Week 2/Day 3: You've Had a Most Strenuous Day, Have You Not? 20 minutes of meditation, redux. ?? Week 0: ☒☑☑☒☑☑☑ | Week 1: ☒☑☒☑☒☒☑ | Week 2: ☑☑☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 3: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 4: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ Meditation is coming. I was supposed to do it on the bus, but was doing other stuff. This week is going a bit well, so far. I've been basically getting sleep - a little messy about the actual times, but about right. So far, so good on the meditation. Again, a little messy, but hey, life is messy. And once I eat this peanut butter in front of me, I'll have had my calories for today if we ignore the ones I burned at aikido, which I shouldn't, but I cannot face another 800-1000 calories of anything tonight. *pauses* *convinces self to eat some chicken, too* Okay, I'm only 200 calories short, if I assume it was just 800 more I needed.

I did move up the grocery run this week. I'm kind of down to basics. I used to do a lot of trail mix for portable calories. The dried fruit is currently out, but the nuts are in. They bore me, though. A lot of food has been boring me lately. I may need to find a way to drink those calories.

Definitely worth it, we have a lot of people doing meditation this time around. My best "even a minute or two helps" tricks are: put guided meditations on my phone, especially the short 3-5 minute ones when doing Pomodoro technique, slip in a 5-minute meditation as a break every now and again ten breaths is a minute, so just count ten breaths do a couple minutes before getting out of bed (this also helps with the "I'm not awake yet" mental fuzziness) am I waiting for a microwave or for a water bottle to fill? maybe I will breathe for a minute

Do this. I think after we've been around a while, we think we can do tons of stuff, and we kinda-sorta-a-little can, but really the thing the moves us further is still to take smaller steps every month. It's not bad to deliberately scale back sometimes. (Says someone who has scaled back about as far as is possible.)

I know those days. You've got the right of it, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just do as much as you can of the stuff that'll put you on a more even keel.

This is true. Also bicycles. And Vetinari was remarkably indulgent of Drumknott's interests. (And also of Leonard, who's a bit of an engineer.) So he might be Making A Point, rather than being, you know, actually truthful.

Week 2/Day 1 & 2: You've Had a Most Strenuous Day, Have You Not? 20 minutes of meditation, redux. WIN WIN Week 0: ☒☑☑☒☑☑☑ | Week 1: ☒☑☒☑☒☒☑ | Week 2: ☑☑☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 3: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 4: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ I meditated yesterday morning before everything. Awkwardly, today I'm scheduled for posting here before I'm scheduled for meditation. (I'm letting Google manage my schedule now. It knows my calendar, it knows my goals, and it auto-schedules things unless I manually position them. I'm experimenting with it. Today the meditation is running late, because I only started setting this up when I left work.) I have packed a lunch for tomorrow. I have still not quite eaten enough today, but there is no more food to eat tonight. Basically all I have left is jam and unshelled sunflower seeds. I'm... um, a thousand calories short for the day. That's not awesome. But. ETA: Meditated. Took me ten minutes to physically relax, and nearly another seven or eight minutes to mentally relax. So I needed the full 20 minutes, but I'm not sure I got any actual benefits out of it, beyond the basics. Honestly, I need another ten minutes in that state, I suspect. I'm wondering if I should add short five-minute sessions earlier in the day. I think those are a bit cumulative for me, or at least they sometime have been. After three or four of them over a few hours, I get to about this place. Something to think about, anyway.

This is true, he is remarkably understanding of Modern Times for a tyrant. And he tends to have a lot of patience for non-conformist members of society. But let's be honest, I'd wear it to work. Because I am an engineer. And if there's one thing Vetinari has Strong Opinions about, it's engineers. Lord Vetinari was not a man who delighted in the technical. There were two cultures, as far as he was concerned. One was real, the other was occupied by people who liked machinery and ate pizza at unreasonable hours. But it's important to wear clothes to work that you can climb under furniture in! You never know when you're going to have to hunt resistors or cables or things on short notice, and I can't just put on jeans. It's practical. Oh, that would get such a raised eyebrow. Especially if I wore something with machinery printed on it into his nice, normal palace.

I have been doing a lot of coconut milk and peanuts lately, and neglecting avocado and cheese. I should rectify that. Also, I remember that sort of cheese! Gosh, I haven't seen that in years. Now that's some amazing stuff, grilled up and served with some honey and walnuts.

Speaking of which, particularly as this page seems to be so bare of them, it seems to be time for this Vetinari quote: "Let me rephrase things," [said Vetinari]. "Ahead of you, Mr. Lipwig, is a life of respectable quiet contentment, of civic dignity, and, of course, in the fullness of time, a pension. Not to mention the proud goldish chain." "And if I don't do what you say?" "Oh, you misunderstand me, Mr. Lipwig. That is what will happen to you if you decline my offer. If you accept it, you will survive on your wits against powerful and dangerous enemies, with every day presenting fresh challenges. Someone may even try to kill you." "What? Why?" "You annoy people. A hat goes with the job, incidentally."

They haven't arrived yet, so you'll have to make do with the ads in the Times ("the truth shall make ye frep"), right across from the perennial ad for trusses, and under the article about the Dolly Sisters Cake Competition: I just could not resist space robot leggings. I am such an adult. But there will be no heels. I do not do heels. I... think I'm failing at government-clerk black, to be honest. I mean, the intent is there, but... Drumknott would give me such a disapproving look if I turned up for work in that. And, while Vetinari would no doubt have some platitude about "wouldn't it be dull if we were all the same," he'd raise an eyebrow. He'd raise an eyebrow, Tank. My career in government service would be... well, not over, because I wouldn't be that lucky. There would be some unspeakably creative retaliation.

Week 1/Day 5, 6 & 7: You've Had a Most Strenuous Day, Have You Not? 20 minutes of meditation. FAIL FAIL WIN Week 0: ☒☑☑☒☑☑☑ | Week 1: ☒☑☒☑☒☒☑ | Week 2: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 3: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ | Week 4: ☐☐☐☐☐☐☐ My meditation today was 30 minutes, and... I think I was tired. That was rough. I did not pass week 1. (And, frankly, my bedtime was often bad, too.) So I will redo it for week 2. I suspect I need a better cue, not just "oh, sometime today". Before work would be a good one, except that it'd make me late. During lunch... maybe, but there are other time management problems with my taking time in the middle of the day. (I don't reliably do it.) On the commute to work? That's a possibility, I have enough time. I just tend to like to do other stuff then. After work... doesn't happen, and probably not a good time to count on doing it. Well, I'll try during my commute tomorrow, and if I don't feel like it, I'll try during lunch, and we'll see which time works best. Also, I have not been eating enough the past few days. I know this, because I have groceries left over that I should not have. I was going to eat more, but I think I ran out of time. I dunno, man, this is complicated. I can eat or I can sleep, but I can't do both. I didn't get the Rogue One DVD for last week's win, although I nearly did. Instead I got space robot leggings and a new (Vetinari-black) dress. That will have to qualify instead.

Nanny Ogg is a wise woman who understands a lot about people.

"This may well have been a case where chilly logic should have been replaced by the common sense of, perhaps, the average chicken." Before I left for work in the morning, I stuck an average chicken in the Instant Pot with some barbecue rub, to start getting some of the stuff in the fridge cooked for dinners this week. That resulted in a cooked chicken and two cups of chicken broth. Then I came home for lunch, chopped up leftover carrot and mushrooms, and stuck them in the broth with some ginger and chili sauce and cellophane noodles to make soup for lunch, and put the Instant Pot back on for four minutes, which is the fastest damn soup-from-scratch in the world. (Again, not quite LCHF, but... well, I needed to get the noodles out of the cupboard, so a few small cheats this week, then back to usual.) While that was cooking, I de-boned and packed away the chicken, reserving bits of meat from de-boning and the wings for my soup. Served the soup with cilantro and lime wedges, and had two huge bowls of soup for lunch. Stuck the chicken bones, carrot ends, cilantro stems, lime peels, and two frozen containers full of of chicken bones and lemon peels back into the Instant Pot for four hours to make soup stock. I'll probably get a stupidly huge amount of stock, and then I still have two more containers of bones and vegetable bits in the freezer for more stock. (Cilantro-lime pork stock, by the way... excellent.) I have no idea what I'll do with all that stock, honestly, because I don't often make soup. I guess I'll just have to eat more soup. It will... help me hydrate? I just have no soup imagination right now. My meals have been super-boring lately. I sort of feel like I just got ten billion meals out of a single chicken. (An Ankh-Morpork housewife would be proud.) It was pretty decent soup, too. ETA: Four Mason jars full of very lemony-smelling chicken stock. Well, mostly chicken. (Like scumble, which is mostly apples. I do sort of toss everything into the stock pot indiscriminately.)

Sadly, between allergy issues and macro-related health issues, granola is not on my list of possible foods. Yummy as it is. I can store it at work, but I can't carry enough and find it hard to prep enough. A complicating factor is that starches and sugars are out, so a lot of portable and calorie-dense foods are out, too. (Your breakfast by itself is 3-4 times my daily carb limit, for instance.) Protein isn't that calorie-dense. Fats are, but you can really only eat so much along with less calorie-dense stuff, so it's not that helpful. If you're packing mostly meat and vegetables, your calories instantly go down by, like, 50% for the same quantity of food. Okay, you can throw in a little cheese or something, sure, but even 4oz of cheese would just make a dent in my portable calorie needs, and that's an inedibly huge amount. I think I'm gonna need to take a lot of nuts.