sarakingdom

Why is going to bed before midnight so hard? Why?

Yeah, stay the fuck away from that shit. Will be interesting to see if law enforcement takes it seriously anywhere. Maybe not in the US, but some of those locations are Europe, and I'm sure that in some countries, they're skating awfully close to hate crime legislation. (Like, is Belgium going to have a sense of humor about that? Not so sure.)

LOU WELCOME BACK. I love your challenges, because your life is so full of freakin' cool things.

It's only a true Mary Sue if he has violet eyes and Spock falls in love with him. I hear ya, though. That's why I decided my one attempt at story would probably be my last. Having an avatar of your NF identity as the protagonist of the story makes it hard to get the protagging vs. modesty balance right. At least I picked a universe where ironic downbeat endings and alienation were par for the course.

I don't read him often, but I like what I see when I do. Maybe I'll take a look for that. He had some scheduling advice I took on board for a while earlier, a few rules for making a weekly schedule. I do something roughly like that in my bullet journal, I have a task checklist on one page and a weekly schedule on the facing page. But it's not everything, it's the most important things, or things that need to be done on a weekly rather than daily basis. I keep everything for a given day in an electronic format so I can move it and reorganize it easily - being able to make my list look shorter or temporarily move down things I can't do until later is really helpful to me, the full list is just overwhelming. I can only focus on a handful of things at a time. But it might be worth giving that a try, so maybe next week I'll switch formats for a week.

I'll pick stealth. Brokentree's probably a bad-ass, she could take out a few of 'em. So just the two of them, provided she can get that Kyellan kid a cup of coffee. I'm half-expecting him to go into shock any minute.

You can do 'em in regular tupperware, if you have that. The general rule of thumb is get one that's 1mL for each calorie you want to take with you (600mL = 600 calories), and then pack it tight, so nothing can shift in transit. It'll look like the container is too small, but it'll be packed solid with food, and it's a lot more than it looks like. (Huge space savings in the bag, that's one of the reasons I like it.) I think the traditional way is 3 parts rice, 2 parts vegetables, 1 part meat, but I usually do more Primal/paleo ones, personally. You fill any holes where things might shift with, I dunno, grapes or tomatoes or cheese or anything that fills the gaps. Hard-boiled eggs and sweet potatoes are valid bento foods. People use silicone muffin liners to create dividers, if they need a section for something that doesn't play well with the other stuff, like they don't want rice to get on their grapes.

I can believe it. I listened to Light Fantastic as an audiobook early on, and it was okay on its own for a little light listening at bedtime, but the later books were loads better, and I'm not sure I'd recommend it. And when I went back to listen to The Color of Magic later, it was so bad it made me angry. I was literally angry I was wasting my time on it, and every scene made me angrier. So I stopped listening part-way through and returned the video to the library unwatched, and did not regret it. I think, when Pratchett did such a good job of making the books fairly self-contained, there's no reason not to start at any random good one. And when you've got the nice, mostly self-contained Watch series, why the heck not start there.

Week 1: Day 3 The thief shuffled out. It was always like this with the Patrician, he reflected bitterly. You came to him with a perfectly reasonable complaint. Next thing you knew, you were shuffling backwards, bowing and scraping, relieved simply to be getting away. You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn’t, he sent men to come and take it away. One point off diet. It was a good day for food choices, but I had a lot of calories to eat back, and hit 20% carbs instead of staying under 15%. Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep (I tried for more!)4 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 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 5 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)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)8 Productivity Bonus0 Adulting BonusTotal Points: 31 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)

Maybe take on the cooking for a while to "thank them for helping you out", and gently slide them in your direction? (A lot of times a good paleo meal can be had by swapping out one side for a more paleo one.)

Huh, I hadn't considered that sort of actual physical attention focus. That's interesting... That's a new way to think about it, I'll give that a try. In my style, we do a lot of pivoting around the center of balance, either vertically or horizontally, and try to be very aware of the placement of our center of balance compared to our opponent's, and the center of balance is at the hara. So I usually think about it as developing a physical sense of where your center of balance is and moving in a way that keeps it stable. But thinking of it as a way to keep the two halves of the body working together is very interesting. I think a lot of people move in ways that are very shoulder-led, in their day-to-day lives.

Week 1: Day 2 "And is he a fair and just ruler?" Carding thought about it. The Patrician’s spy network was said to be superb. "I would say," he said carefully, "that he is unfair and unjust, but scrupulously even-handed. He is unfair and unjust to everyone, without fear or favor." I am eating enough, and drinking a bit more like what I think I ought to be, and the macro balance is better... but for some reason, I'm STARVING today. Like, really starving. Makes me wonder if I'm suddenly getting enough of something that I wasn't before, and now my body is all, "NORMAL FUNCTION RESTORED, FEED ME NOW". (Seriously, I've eaten 70% of my calories for the day, and normally I'd be really full around now, and instead I'm up for another two meals.) My penalties for Bad Life Choices is now going to include time management. I had a very slow start this morning, and it affected the whole day. So today was a time management penalty. Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep (would have been more, but yesterday had a very late nap)5 Move Like a Snake: Workout (5 points available)1 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras - bit o' dancing3 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 5 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)0.5 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)3 Productivity Bonus0 Adulting Bonus-1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: time management penaltyTotal Points: 28.5 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)

Bento lunches are designed this way. Admittedly, they're mostly not hot just because people don't heat them, so it's just a question of getting used to the idea of cold cooked food, and then putting anything you like in them. I think the rigid box helps when schlepping stuff in a bag all day, anything in my bag that long gets pretty beat-up, and they're packed pretty densely, which is a more space-efficient way to take a whole day's worth of food.

People underestimate walking. It's easy on the body, and easy to do a lot of it, which can get a nice baseline level of fitness and burn a lot of calories, especially if it's not flat where you live. It is relatively slow, which is the downside, but it's the kind of thing you can use podcasts for, or take a walk with partners. Beyond that, there are things in the gym, all the cardio machines. (Minus rowing, probably, due to the elbow, which is a shame, because I like it for getting a bit of a resistance workout in with your cardio.) But, honestly, with eye surgery on the one hand, and a big physical trauma like a car crash and an elbow injury, I would not feel bad taking a month or two at a slower pace. Things like food tracking can become obsessive for some people. I think it can help to think of it like an audit or a check-in. If you do it for a couple of weeks to see where you are, you'll probably learn your trends well enough to make some choices without having to permanently track. If you're worried about your partner's reaction, I think it's very reasonable to say that you've been working hard on your fitness, and that diet more important now that your exercise is restricted for a couple of months, so you're just finding a baseline.

Charles Dance? Quite well-known in the UK, he's been around a long time. He's in Game of Thrones, and he was in The Imitation Game. I think he was in Jewel in the Crown, back in the day. He's got an IMDB listing as long as your arm (and a theater listing almost as long), but he's usually a supporting actor, IIRC. Vetinari is kind of what he was born for, most of his roles are bureaucrats or villains. And Vetinari is both. Sort of.

There already! Where's your challenge? No more week between challenges, y'know, it's go-time already. Challenges are good feedback on how to adapt next time around. Even a failed challenge isn't really failed, so much as it's data. I think the temptation is to start from the beginning, and that's a mistake with Discworld, because the first one is TERRIBLE, and the first handful are a little rough and not what the series is later. Which is fine, there are thirty more, so losing the first five or so is nothing.

Excellent. Straight to the point, full of bokken, and made of Discworld. A challenge to be reckoned with. There are a few things I don't have formal point values for, I just assign based on how hard it was to do it afterwards or on how important it was to get it done. (I have a habit of not crediting myself for things done, so if the points are a little generous now and again, well, that's fine, because it reminds me that I do things.) So as long as you have a list of things to do, don't worry about going freeform on it.

Waiting for a History Monks challenge, yo.

I've always found the awareness of the hara to be confusingly undefined. I have a fair sense of what it's for, but little sense of how I ought to do it. (I've thought about this one a bit, because it's one of the four big principles of my style. The instruction is "Maintain one-point to develop calmness", and I know it refers to the hara, and has to do, in part, with our motion coming from there. But how the heck to I 'maintain' it?)

When I've got a dojo handy, I do, yup!

Any roasted veggie will store easily. Every vegetable that's not a leaf can be roasted. Gotcha, I will keep an eye on the douche levels.

I've done that, too, and when it works, it works well. It's a good way to wake up more gently and get the brain working. There is a big sleep risk. I have too much control over my own schedule. It makes time management a bigger hassle than it would if I worked on-site more.

Oh yeah, kale is great, especially in Portuguese/Italian stews. (Italian sausage, a sauteed onion, a can of diced tomatoes, and a fuckload of kale is AWESOME.) Also, eggplant. Cubed, tossed with olive oil, and roasted. Or sliced into rounds and baked with a little cheese on top.

Dude, you didn't know? I thought you knew! We've been tl;dring about aikido over here for the past challenge and a half.

I will remind you to calm the fuck down if you remind me to calm the fuck down. (Also, I'm going to read Walking the Way on your rec.) Zucchini is great roasted, along with red peppers. I've been doing a lot of cabbage in okonomiyaki or stirfries lately. Get a bulb of fennel, makes a good salad with an orange or is nice cooked with an onion.