sarakingdom

Video workouts are such a tease. On the one hand, varied workouts in the convenience of the home! On the other, it's seriously true that the change of location and the social aspect make gym/team workouts immensely more likely to happen. There's just a switching of gears that never happens at home.

There is never enough adulting. It's always a drop in the bucket. I found out by accident that turkey burgers come out way better if you add a bunch of olive oil while mixing the ground turkey with the spices. It's still not a hamburger, but it's fairly pleasant and inoffensive. Chicken steamed in the rice cooker steam tray is way better than it sounds.

Yep, exactly. We don't always make perfect decisions. That's fine. Being aware of what's going on is a huge step, and bouncing back afterwards is, too. If you've got those two things, it's okay to be imperfect (which is good, since we all are anyway). Having a day slightly over maintenance is not a problem, and even if it were a lot over, one bad day is not a problem. (I've been reading a book on the science of willpower. Don't bother with the shame, it won't help you. Screw up guilt-free, it makes it easier to keep going.)

Which you will share, yes?

I should borrow your highly sensible and accommodating cat.

Ankles! One of my favorite injury subjects. Okay. I feel there are two stages, dealing with the active injury, and rehabbing the ankle. Excessive icing for the first couple of days, whatever anti-inflammatory stuff you've got. This is the RICE phase, but ice does miracles if you use a lot of it. Then, once it seems fairly solid with the walking, my rec is hiking. I started doing that as ankle rehab, to give it a slow, gentle workout on uneven terrain and build up strength at weird angles. It's not exciting. I'm so tired of trees and dirt. But it does seem to be good for my ankle. You want hills and uneven ground, things where your ankle is working to stabilize you under unpredictable conditions. If you can hike every day for a week without problems, you're probably good to go on most things.

IMO, feeling satisfied is a poor measure of whether you're eating enough. The body shuts down hunger pretty fast if the calories dip below the BMR for too long. 1400 does sound very low for an active adult.

Relaxing and flowing are skills to practice if you're an aikidoka, y'know. Irimi or tenkan that shit, relax enough to take it down, and keep going.

Week 3: Day 4 That is me, glaring at the world for having to get out of bed. Fitness Points +6 for six hours of sleep+1 remembered supplements+5 for the bodyweight half of my workout (30 Days of Change: Day 3), slightly modified to go easier on my knees+5 for the other half of the workout Life Points +8 bonus for completed tasks beyond tenTotal: 25 points Running Total: 333 points 39%39%

I need to find a way to reactivate all that adulting now! I don't know what happened. The two days of distraction don't include Halloween, alas. Monday and Tuesday, man, just not working out. I did a little better today, though not amazingly. I struggled with it and was mediocre, as opposed to simply falling flat on my face. I'm afraid there are no pics. I am not photo-inclined at parties. Imagine this with an egg whisk in one hand and a plunger in the other:

Week 1: Day 3 Okay. Two days of distraction. Not great. Turning this ship around now. Goal: Do as many things on my list as I can, regardless of priority. Just do the things. Fitness Points +1 remembered supplements+6 for 6 hours of sleep+1 for 5 minutes of meditation+5 for the first half of the workout (30 Days of Change: Day 2)Life Points +7 bonus for additional completed tasks past 10+1 for reading about a thing I'm going to be adulting, which is almost like adulting Total: 21 points Running Total: 308 points Percentage of first point goal: 36%36%

I have done a bizarre but highly welcome amount of adulting. And slipped a bit in the official first couple of days of the challenge. Ah well. Something to aspire to. I have no idea, I think I just had a few days that were too low for me, and was starting to feel it. I don't feel great when carbs are most of my diet, and, well, Halloween. Avatar: The Last Airbender. Mandatory monk viewing.

Request it from your library. Some library in your regional system is guaranteed to have it. Though I recommend used DVDs for the money thing. Especially if you're just ripping them to a media player anyway. Also, Monkey King!

The Uberlord has a point. Basic is really good. And IMO, it's legit to take Week 1 and make it a goal-setting, baseline-finding week. Whatever it takes to get the challenge working.

Sounds like something minor enough to work with, so far. Take a couple of aspirin and wrap it up really warm tonight for as long as possible, scarf or sweatshirt or something. (I have no idea why that warmth helps, to be honest, but in my experience, it does every time.) I'd try to really rest it tomorrow, though, not, like, "Kettlebells and yoga and pushups are rest, right?" Maybe ice it during the day as an extra anti-inflammatory measure, if you're really attacking it hard.

Which joints and what kind of pain? I had some aikido classes that my knees didn't love the next day. I've had fairly good results from a couple of aspirin and wrapping the joints up extra-warm overnight, like another blanket just wrapped around my knees. Glucosamine is supposed to be really effective stuff, though. Would be really good to figure out what it is that's aggravating them.

The Jawbone has exceptionally good sleep analysis, and the earliest models are often going for a song on Amazon these days. There are also smartphone apps that'll do it by measuring vibration on the mattress, so you may not have to buy anything. Personally, I feel that the longer I stay pseudo-sleeping, the easier it is to do real sleeping. Getting up wakes up my body a little too much. I try to roll over and go, "It's cool, I'll just lie here under this warm comfy quilt for a while, maybe listen to 15 minutes of quiet podcast, get in a little relaxin' time. No rush on the sleep." It's usually not more than 15 or 30 minutes, which is okay. Worst case, well, I'm pseudo-sleeping, which my body will thank me for later. (On the really bad nights, when that stretches into 3-4 hours, then I give up on the sleep idea and make some tea. And without podcasts, my brain can whir forever, sometimes in some really unhelpful ways. Distraction is so, so useful.)

The Uberlord of Doom.

Kraken is pretty light for Mieville.

RotS had the most sexydark fightin', but my god, every scene and line of dialog was just midichlorians all over again. I'd sooner cut off my own right arm than watch another fight with a robot weedwhacker, painfully unbelievable romantic subplot that the plot supposedly hinges on, or cameo by Jimmy Smits indicating where on the cutting room floor all the actual plot ended up. This was me through that whole movie: Never again. Never again. You have a stronger stomach (or perhaps a stronger table) than I do, my friend.

AotC isn't a great movie, but I'll forgive a lot of things in return for Christopher Lee, no little kids, and Obi-Wan bondage. It's perhaps the most watchable of the prequels. I mean, Phantom Menace is unwatchably bad. Revenge of the Sith is unwatchably bad. AotC is watchably bad. It's the only one of the prequels I'd voluntarily watch a second time.

I do wonder if something like a Gantt chart with all the shared maintenance and chores and holiday prep on it wouldn't help - "Here's what the house has to get done in the next quarter, so let's divvy up the man-hours. Take your pick of what you'd like." I sometimes think it's a problem of 1) chores being invisible, and 2) taking extra time for equal ownership in the tasks to sink in. If you have the hours of work sitting in front of you, it's harder to miss them, and if you have to build your own portfolio, I think it might be easier to feel you own those jobs.

I have periods of 1 and 2, usually a week at a time. Super-annoying. Valerian might help the first one. It's sort of mildly sedative. It might help the second, if you're awake enough to do things like take pills in the middle of the night. (I'm usually not awake enough to make rational decisions at that time of night.) Other things that can help: Activity tracker that does good detailed sleep tracking, including periods of wakefulness. Having an objective double-check on my subjective impression of how much I slept helps a lot on some nights. The frustration of not sleeping is actually worse than being tired, for me, and my mood is a lot better if I can say, okay, that felt like nothing but it was actually about five hours, which is not great, but enough.Resting in bed has a lot of the benefits of sleep. Sometimes the anxiety of not being asleep is the problem, and remembering that helps a lot. I can just relax and lie there comfortably and enjoy it, and it's cool. (And then there is often sleep.)Likewise, it helped a lot to realize that waking up after four hours is actually the natural human sleeping pattern. As a species, we're biphasic sleepers, and before the industrial revolution and artificial lighting, it was so common to have First Sleep and Second Sleep that the literature talks about what people did in the break when they were awake. It's normal to wake up after four hours, not something your brain needs to worry about.Breathing meditation in bed. A little bit of relaxation and shutting off the brain can help a lot.The right sort of podcast. I've found that 15 minutes of podcast can nip two hours of brain-whirring in the bud. It needs to be something not too exciting, but absorbing, but not unmissable because you're trying to fall asleep to it. The BBC's Infinite Monkey Cage is one of the ones that works well for me. Light science entertainment, not a lot of surprising loud noises, and enough episodes that I can pick a few I've heard, but not for a long time, so it's fine to fall asleep during them. Basically, in all those cases, it's sort of trying to replace the brain chatter while the body settles down again. A tired brain is a really irrational brain, without any sense of perspective or self-control, and it's not going to make good choices or think useful things while you're lying there, frustrated at being awake. That stuff deals with most of it, for me. Sometimes there's still a bad week, but it's a lot less often.

Double post, so:

Week 1: Day 2 Gaaaaah, so distractable today. But there will be points. When I can focus on 'em. Fitness Points meditation TBA+1 remembered supplements+7 for 7 hours of sleepworkout TBA (30 Days of Change: Day 2)Life Points I don't knowsomethingthere have to be some, right?Total: 8 points