sarakingdom

Week 2: Day 7 The Patrician opened his eyes. "You are a doctor, aren't you?" he said. Doughnut Jimmy gave him an uncertain look. He was not used to patients who could talk. "Well, yeah... I have a lot of patients." "Indeed? I have very little," said the Patrician. He tried to lift himself off the bed, and slumped back. Because I spent so much of yesterday in bed, and wish I could do the same today, only things to do. Still, I needed that massive extra dose of sleep. Fitness Points 7 hours of sleep0 Move Like a Snake: Workout (5 points available)0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water3 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Macros (5 points available)0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Effort BonusLife Points 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Waking Up Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Shower Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: bonus for remembering 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available)1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available)2 Productivity Bonus0 Adulting BonusTotal Points: 15 points Weekly Bonuses: Move Like a Snake - 1/3 bodyweight workouts, 1/1 endurance workouts, 0/1 sprints (5 bonus points per workout if 3 or more are done)

Yeah, you sort of have to eat them. I'd say you're good for up to a week refrigerated, though seven days is pushing it a little. I've made salads that far ahead, though not in jars. It's basically the leaves you need to watch out for, everything else is pretty easy.

Words to live by.

I've seen stuff about making salads in mason jars ahead of time, like the way to stack things so they stay fresh. That'd work perfectly in those.

Week 2: Day 6 Lord Vetinari stood at his window watching the semaphore tower on the other side of the river. All eight of the big shutters facing him were blinking furiously - black, white, black, white, black, white… Information was flying into the air. Twenty miles behind him, on another tower in Sto Lat, someone was looking through a telescope and shouting out numbers. How quickly the future comes upon us, he thought. Fitness Points 11 hours of sleep0 Move Like a Snake: Workout (5 points available)0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water4 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Macros (5 points available)0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Effort BonusLife Points 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Waking Up Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Shower Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: bonus for remembering 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available)1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available)1 Productivity Bonus0 Adulting BonusTotal Points: 19 points Weekly Bonuses: Move Like a Snake - 1/3 bodyweight workouts, 1/1 endurance workouts, 0/1 sprints (5 bonus points per workout if 3 or more are done)

Good luck! Don't worry too much about the five-hour distance yet. It's a thing, yes, and long-distance is tough, but there are lots of two-career couples, and they find ways to make it work.

Week 2: Day 5 Lord Vetinari stood up as he saw the Watch running towards him. That was why the first shot went through his thigh, instead of his chest. Then Carrot cleared the door of the carriage and flung himself across the man, which is why the next shot went through Carrot. Fitness Points 8 hours of sleep5 Move Like a Snake: Workout (5 points available)0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water4 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Macros (5 points available)1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Effort BonusLife Points 5 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available)1 All Control Starts With the Self: Waking Up Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Shower Habit Trigger (1 point available)8 All Control Starts With the Self: bonus for remembering 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available)1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available)1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available)15 Productivity Bonus1 Adulting BonusTotal Points: 52 points Weekly Bonuses: Move Like a Snake - 1/3 bodyweight workouts, 1/1 endurance workouts, 0/1 sprints (5 bonus points per workout if 3 or more are done) Man, I have a super-bad memory for my habit triggers. This is annoying. I did get one of them, so this is progress over neither of them. How the hell do people remember things without, like, lists? Maybe I should just take my journal to bed with me or something. I think the tendon in my ankle is on the mend! Today is the high-stress day for it, and it's... okay. I definitely feel it, but mostly it feels tight, not achy. A lot less stress on it than usual. Finally, man. (Using a bum-leg quote while it's still topical.)

WANT. That looks pretty sweet.

G'day, mate!

Yeah, I use them as a way to grease the wheels a little. If I'm really struggling to get it in, that's the compromise that gets things done. It helps me fall asleep a lot easier. I have a *lot* of things on my MP3 player for that, though usually not audiobooks, because I like to pay more attention to those. Usually it's podcasts I've listened to before. Lately it's been all books, all the time, though. There is no time it's not appropriate. He can learn to live with your MP3 player. Rincewind's got a certain loveable loser charm, and I really like the Luggage and Twoflower. And you're right, the university wizards are a pretty great ensemble. Unseen Academicals was a surprisingly funny book, largely because of them. But Rincewind's books never really get the sort of character development or depth or plot intricacy the others get. Partly because of the premise, because Rincewind can't really grow much, and he never ends up somewhere there's existing worldbuilding or characters to explore. I try to mention that one, because I struggled so hard to understand meditation, and ended up accidentally reverse-engineering it from primary and secondary sources in a variety of Japanese martial arts and philosophy schools, and it was a ridiculous amount of reading to figure out that really simple thing about meditation. I mean, that should be obvious, right? But it's not.

Week 2: Day 4 The Patrician has expressed a wish that, one day, he could retire and cultivate a garden. It will probably never happen. It is impossible to imagine him as a mere civilian. But if he did indeed take up horticulture, the roses would grow in lines, the garden would bloom on command - and the slugs would eat the caterpillars. Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep4 Move Like a Snake: Workout (5 points available) - deducting points for a workout that doesn't fit the plan0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water3 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Macros (5 points available)1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Effort BonusLife Points 5 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available)1 All Control Starts With the Self: Waking Up Habit Trigger (1 point available)1 All Control Starts With the Self: Shower Habit Trigger (1 point available)15 All Control Starts With the Self: bonus for remembering 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available)1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available)14 Productivity Bonus2 Adulting BonusTotal Points: 55 points Weekly Bonuses: Move Like a Snake - 1/3 bodyweight workouts, 0/1 endurance workouts, 0/1 sprints (5 bonus points per workout if 3 or more are done)

I'll have to give something like that a shot. My quads are always tight.

How do you roll your quads with the lacrosse ball? (I may need to downsize my foam roller this spring, which would be a sad thing, but the tennis ball is going nowhere.)

The one I started with, and the one I stuck with, was the simplest one I could get away with: counting the breath. Because I've basically always got breath, and the counting gives me good feedback on when I've let my attention slip. (I am not yet the kind of master who can just focus on the breath, without that feedback. Tried it. I know I'm cheating.) Basically, you breathe normally, focusing on the physical sensations of breathing, and count the exhales, up to ten, then go back to one. You will find yourself losing count, or suddenly noticing you're on fourteen or fifteen (or twenty), which means you've lost focus, and if you do that, you just start back at one. It's simple, but really hard to do. I don't sweat it if I screw up a lot. Like being on the mat, you just get back up and try again. I don't do formal Zen meditation (zazen), which is pretty picky about physical posture. (It's interesting, I just don't think it's practical for me.) I'm not that picky. If it'd pass for reasonably good mat etiquette under the circumstances, it's fine for me. But what I do like about their theory of meditation that other schools don't do, is that it's done with your eyes open but lowered, so you're aware of what's going on around you, just holding it at a distance. I like that from an MA perspective, and I like that for meditating in situations where privacy isn't totally possible. (I once read some interesting study on how meditators from different traditions reacted to startling interruptions, and the outward reaction was similar, but the Zen meditators uniquely had no inner startle reaction, because they were very aware of their surroundings, not blocking out parts of it.) So there are formal traditions, but I think things like posture and where you meditate are a little negotiable. I dabble occasionally with some other traditional forms of meditation, like the odd guided compassion meditation when I'm in a bad mood and don't think it'd be a great idea to give the thoughts in my head five unsupervised minutes to dwell on shit. One of the other big ones is taking an inventory of physical status, which can probably be a good one for people who do high-injury-risk sports, but I don't really do it, just when it's in one of the fallback guided meditations. But basically, it's all breath counting for me. Still does the job, and I can do it anywhere.

Go you on the meditation! I normally just do the breath-counting thing, but sometimes I'll do guided ones if I'm really struggling to sit and get it done. (Or if I'm doing it some place I've got my MP3 player but not a lot of privacy.) It's probably just stress and stuff. Or my body getting more sensitive to the sleep debt I tend to run up. Man, I would love that. Maybe I will try to make it an early night sometime this week. I'm mostly out of Pratchett till the library gets my next batch in. I'm half-way through The Last Continent audiobook, and I like audiobooks for going to bed early, because closing your eyes is great. It's not my favorite, the Rincewinds really kind of pale next to the others, but it's pleasant enough.

I have not yet read Thief of Time, though it's a good one to read before Night Watch. Beyond that, a handful of the Watch books, like Men at Arms and Feet of Clay, that'll do it. And, oh wow, you have not read Night Watch. It is really, really a good one. For a comedy fantasy series, he isn't remotely fucking around in that book. It's one of the ones that grabs some really big ideas and runs all the way with them. Night Watch... kind of changes everything, in a very subtle way. Getting useful things done why I've been so into audio books lately. I can listen while I make meals and do chores. It's increased my book rate significantly in the past couple of months.

The science behind meditation does exist, not in large quantities, but it's looking pretty strong. I felt the same way, so I did take a bit of a look into that. The way it basically goes is this: the brain is always active, and if you're not actively thinking things, it fills in with noise. People don't control that noise as well as they think they do. (This is looking like a serious contributing factor to a lot of mood disorders, impulsive behavior, etc. That noise is probably just semi-random activation of heavily-used synaptic connections, which in some people is pretty harmful, if the thoughts and emotions that keep getting activated repeatedly are a problem. The brain tends to reinforce negative pathways, like fear or social alienation, more heavily than positive ones, because those things are high-risk and high-priority for monkeys in trees. At best, it's a background noise of activity that's taking up a lot of brain cycles and slowing down the thinking that has to get done to respond to a situation.) But behavior can be trained through repetition, so you can train yourself to recognize that noise and, importantly, get some control over it and over how to stop listening to it. It uses a teaching style that's not common in the West, and often gets misinterpreted as mystical. It comes out of the "do it over and over in order to learn it" style of teaching, rather than the "explain it verbally in order to understand it" style of teaching. It's the same way a lot of martial arts teachers got the whole "wise inscrutable sensei" bullshit when they came to the US, when really, you just need to learn some things by doing, because you can't explain someone else's body sensations or build muscle memory with words. Yes. Easily so. Quite a lot of meditation, even a fair portion of the stuff wrapped up in traditional language, is basically that. The point of most meditation is learning to perceive what is actually happening, without a lot of mental noise and knee-jerk reaction muddying the issue. So it's pretty much all about being aware of what actually is, and understanding what part of that is under your control. (There is religious Buddhism, but a fair chunk of it, especially as it moves further east and gets adopted outside monasteries, is basically secular, and about how to handle being an ordinary mortal person in a world with no supernatural referees to appeal to. Traditionally, it's more treating it as a profound insight than a mystical one. The mysticism is, IMO, a bit of a misinterpretation and a bit of playing up Eastern exoticism. There's a lot of "this ain't mystical shit, you better ground yourself in the real world" running through actual Buddhist teaching, at least in the schools that most of the martial arts had contact with. And there's a lot of really dodgy Orientalism in the new age community, which should be given about the same attention as the really dodgy science in the new age community.) On this one, you're kind of fucked. Because the point of meditation is not to occupy the distractable portion of the mind, but to train it to behave differently. Which doesn't happen if you're distracting it, because that's the noise you're training yourself to recognize and control. In MA terms, those are the incoming attacks you're practicing the techniques to counter, you can't get on the mat and just avoid the incoming attacks. As a fellow easily-bored person, I sympathize, because this made starting miserable, at least until I started looking at them as increased opportunities to practice technique. (There are more active forms of meditation, like walking meditation and probably some of the suburi practices, but if you're doing things to occupy your mind during meditation, you're not doing meditation.) A few things helped me on this one. First, recognizing that the focus that had started coming in the dojo was kind of the same idea, so I was capable of that shift in mindset and I wanted to recreate it when I needed it. Second, just deciding to try it a few times for very short five or ten minute sessions, and going, "oh, shit," when I started seeing how sharply that brain-noise could drop off. Third, giving myself permission to suck at it. Even people who are good at it are going to have distracted days when they suck, so I can suck a lot, and that's fine. And last, on a really bad day, I'll fall back on a guided meditation. I don't totally love going the more passive route, because I'm not convinced it does as much good in terms of practice, but a supported practice is better than no practice, so if that's what gets me through that day, sure.

Week 2: Day 3 Vetinari lit a candle and read the poster carefully. "'Free Festival of Music with Rocks In It'," he said. "That's where you don't have to pay to go in," said Foul Ole Ron helpfully. "Buggrem, buggrit." "'Bee There Orr Bee A Rectangluar Thyng'," said the Patrician. "This is some sort of occult code, do you think?" "Couldn't say, yerronner," said Foul Ole Ron. "My brain goes all slow when I'm thirsty." "'They Are Totallye Unable To Bee Seene! And A Longe Way Oute!'" said Lord Vetinari solemnly. He looked up. "Oh, I am sorry," he said. "I'm sure I can find someone to give you a cool refreshing drink..." Foul Ole Ron coughed. It had sounded like a perfectly sincere offer, but, somehow, he was suddenly not at all thirsty. Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep0 Move Like a Snake: Workout (5 points available) - deducting points for a workout that doesn't fit the plan0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water5 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Macros (5 points available)0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Diet Effort BonusLife Points 3 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Waking Up Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Shower Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: bonus for remembering 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available)1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available)1 Productivity Bonus0 Adulting BonusTotal Points: 18 points Weekly Bonuses: Move Like a Snake - 0/3 bodyweight workouts, 0/1 endurance workouts, 0/1 sprints (5 bonus points per workout if 3 or more are done) Noooooo, I forgot my morning meditation schedule! Ah well, things will settle down slightly, schedule-wise, after today. Very slightly.

I love that you dreamed about the fashion police. Some days, a snow day is really good. Shakes up the routine, makes for a bit of a rest, lets us get all sorts of little things done that we wouldn't ordinarily do. I approve of 'em.

So I've posted this before, in response to people's questions in threads, but I should probably put it here, too. The thing that made meditation click for me was realizing that meditation actually is a kata, but for the brain instead of the body. (It really literally is. Japan transmits a lot of traditional knowledge and arts via kata, not just martial arts, and that's how Japanese meditation traditions teach it.) Meditation is a practice in the same way that, say, aikido is a practice, where you do hundreds of repetitions over months or years, to develop the skill you're working on. Your brain might not calm down during the meditation. It may not feel relaxing. And I think that's really frustrating for people who think that meditation is meant to be a relaxation period in their day, and feel like they're failing at it if their mind doesn't calm down. We sort of talk about meditation like it's, "Clear your mind of thoughts, and then you can start meditation," but that feels backwards to me, because what it's teaching you is how to clear your mind of thoughts. If you knew how to do that, you wouldn't need it. Meditation is the practice of taking your uncontrolled thoughts and sitting them down in the corner, over and over again, so that when you have to use the technique in real life, it feels natural. Like your martial arts practice, some days are going to freaking suck and you'll mess up every move, and some days you'll just be on fire, but you just go to the practice and finish it. So, you know, meditation: it doesn't have to feel good or make you calm while you're doing it. And maybe don't expect the black belt performance of yourself when you're a white belt. Most focus meditation, in my experience, feels a lot like the feeling you develop after a while on the mat. There's a sort of very calm, focused attentiveness and awareness you develop on the mat, and can start slipping into out of habit when you get into the dojo. I find the feeling a lot like that. Not surprising, probably, because meditation goes back a long way with martial arts, so that people could develop those mindsets. When you start hearing people talk about the martial arts mindsets like mushin, zanshin, shoshin, fudoshin, you're talking about that shared language and practice of meditation and martial arts. So I think martial artists have another frame of reference for getting the feel of meditation. But learning to do that outside the dojo is hard.

I often do fairly short meditations, because they fit into the schedule more easily. It's hard to say you don't have time for five or ten minutes here or there, and you don't worry so much during the meditation about your deadlines. (Once in a while, I'll extend them for another five minutes if I feel like there's still a ways to go.) If time pressure is part of why you're having trouble, maybe shortening your meditations would help, or doing short ones more frequently through the day. Sometimes I feel like, if you've gotten fairly good at centering yourself through meditation, you don't need a long meditation to get back there, but you might need more of them in a day to remind yourself what it feels like.

If your company is doing the withholding right, that shouldn't happen. What probably happened is that they didn't change your withholding enough with your pay bump, and it didn't cover what you owed on the new salary.

Parchment paper is the traditional way. If you're looking for something reusable, a glass baking disk with an oven-safe glass lid would pretty much do the same job.

Good point, and something I did consider a few days ago and forgot. I haven't really been good about taking vitamins lately, and it might be hitting me a little harder than usual. Iron's always a tough one to get enough of from diet, too. I'll try to make a point of that for a week or so. Will do. I've definitely had a somewhat more difficult schedule lately, and feeling it. It wasn't that much, but it was on schedule! The schedule was kept. That is a win.

BINKY! Sounds like a really good day. Wouldn't mind that sort of day myself.