sarakingdom

By and large, this challenge is going to be similar to the one I had planned, with points accrued for beneficial things done - but also with four focused goals, most of which are small tweaks. All Control Starts With the Self And then you realized that power was a bauble. Any thug had power. The true prize was control. Lord Vetinari knew that. When heavy weights were balanced on the scales, the trick was to know where to place your thumb. And all control started with the self. I read Kelly McGonnigal's book on willpower recently, and there are a few good tie-ins for an NF challenge. There are some actions that studies show increase willpower, and meditation is one of them. Meditation is also a habit I want to make stronger for ADHD reasons. Time to turn my haphazard practice into an actual regular, accountable practice, so I can hit two birds with one stone. Five minutes a day, first thing in the morning after getting up. (Next challenge, this will transition to sleep. That's the next big target I need to hit.) For the first week (week 2), "as soon as I sit down at the computer and see the reminder" will be close enough to "as soon as I get up". If You Can Stand the Excitement It was exasperating. He appeared to have no vice that anyone could discover. You'd have thought, with that pale, equine face, that he'd incline towards stuff with whips, needles and young women in dungeons. The other lords could have accepted that. Nothing wrong with whips and needles, in moderation. But the Patrician apparently spent his evenings studying reports and, on special occasions, if he could stand the excitement, playing chess. I need some better time management on my work. I don't have a really good plan for this one yet - I need to identify a good keystone habit to work on this challenge. My working days are not well-managed, and I've hit a bad patch here, so I need to put in some effort fixing it. Know What's Going to Happen A great many rulers, good and bad and quite often dead, know what happened; a rare few actually manage, by dint of much effort, to know what's happening. Lord Vetinari considered both types to lack ambition. I've been too overwhelmed to make plans for certain future things I need to take care of. I'm going to start very small this challenge, and just log the days I spend some time on it, even if that's just sitting and planning for a few minutes. Learn the Words It was said that he would tolerate absolutely anything apart from anything that threatened the city (And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.) Just a fun one, really. Duolingo. German. Learn the words.

I'm not very excited about another challenge with a vague set of Avatar gifs. I've been getting into Pratchett lately, and I've been considering a Discworld-themed challenge for next time... and just decided I was bored, and was going to do it this time and next time. It is not hard to figure out who Discworld's most prominent aikido practitioner is, and this is good news for people with a certain fondness for intellectual rigor and ruling their own city-state absolutely, by which I mean me: At which point, someone tried to slap Vetinari on the back. It happened with remarkable speed, and ended possibly even faster than it began, with Vetinari still seated in his chair, with his beer mug in one hand and the man's wrist gripped tightly at head height. (Wrist grabs, timed interceptions, and alcohol consumption all seem to play heavily into aikido. You would not believe how many classes I've been to that contain the words, "So you're hanging out in a bar, minding your own business...") Yes, Lord Vetinari, former member of the Guild of Assassins and current Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, a man who rules the city under the maxim, "One Man, One Vote" - he is the man, and his is the vote. You'd think this makes him the villain of the piece, but as he seems to be just about the only person in Ankh-Morpork afflicted by things like a conscience or sense of public duty, that turns out to be surprisingly far from the truth. It occurred to him that this was an extremely dangerous thing and he might probably have to have someone killed one day, although it would be with extreme reluctance. (On his part, that is. Their reluctance probably goes without saying.) Yes, totally far from the truth. "I'm sure no one could call me a despot, your reverence," said Lord Vetinari severely. Hughnon Ridcully made a misjudged attempted to lighten the mood. "Not twice at any rate, ahahah." Totally unclear how anyone could form that impression.

There are forms of sprinting exercise other than running, and many of them are kinder to larger bodies. A bike or rowing machine would be a lot easier on the body, though I'd choose to start with a couple of months of improving general fitness if you don't currently exercise much. Intense activity puts its own sort of stress on the cardiovascular system and connective tissue, beyond the potential damage from impact, and I'm not sure anyone should start cold with high-stress activities. A baseline of conditioning helps, and knowing your body's current recovery limits before intentionally pushing them will also be helpful to you, IMO.

Week 1: Day 6 Fitness Points +6 hours of sleep+2 liters of water+5 meditationLife Points +2 adultingTotal: 15 I'm thinking of re-theming my challenge at the end of the week. I was planning to do it next challenge, but I seem to want to work on most of it now, so I'll probably shuffle into a new challenge thread. I'm going to stick with the points-gathering, because it's a nice focus for me right now, but there are going to be a few more formal challenge goals that I'll score.

It's not caffeine, I think, though I don't track tea, so it might be worth looking. It's mostly behavioral, I think. I just don't stop what I'm doing at night. Very hard to tear my focus away from things when I'm tired, which is a vicious cycle. I have high hopes for the calf muscle. Yesterday was quite a bit of stress on it, I didn't think it'd work out so well. I think I'm going to keep up with the ukemi-only for another week, then try to get back to my usual level of walking. (I usually run a lot of errands on foot, just to get some extra movement in my day. Not so much lately.) I've pretty much got used to the idea of a challenge of just recovery, which is a nice feature of the four-week challenges. A month is kind of a natural time period to set aside for something, and doesn't feel like you're wasting a lot of time.

Week 1: Day 3 Fitness Points +6 hours of sleep+1 liters of water+5 meditationNot enough water. Not enough at all. Total: 12 Week 1: Day 4 Fitness Points +5 hours of sleep-1 bad sleep life choices penalty+2 liters of water+5 meditationTotal: 11 Week 1: Day 5 Fitness Points +7 hours of sleep+1 liters of water+3 injury care+5 workoutLife Points +5 adultingTotal: 21 Not enough water. I need to work on that. Sleep has been terrible lately. Not sure why. But good news on the injury front, I wrapped 'em before setting out on the physically demanding day, and the calf muscle never complained once. That's big progress. Especially since, a week ago, it was super-unhappy with me. Ankle tendon is still a little sore and tight. But I think this is progress. Not a great week for remembering the workouts. (Not a great week for remembering anything, really. I was head-in-the-clouds all week.) But as this was basically a rest week and that seems to have paid off, I won't complain too much. I'll need to spend more time on the habit formation, though. I need to come up with some time management points.

To be fair, I'd imagine PTSD is an issue for most of the Potter characters, including Dumbledore. Elf sounds like a sweet kid who fits in pretty well with you guys. I'm glad seems to be working out. So basically every bit of this day was made of awesome, it seems like. (Keep the kid, he's clearly a good influence on your household!) That sounds like a really, really good day.

I learned a little bit of Swedish for a vacation, and I really enjoyed it. It's on my list of languages to go back to, although I have a couple of ones I actively want to use for things on the top of the list.

For chores, I find a lot of people who don't do well on FlyLady do very well with Unfuck Your Habitat, which is simple, supportive, well-aligned with NF's core principles of starting with what you can do and making slow and steady progress, and also supports a gratifying amount of cursing. Also, I keep misreading your posts as being about "Kaiju class", and wondering where to find these wondrous classes so I, too, can train to be a kaiju.

Man, it's like half of us are injured right now. Good to see you back with us, though.

Time and repetition for me, too, especially things like technique names. That may be the best way to do it, because words used in the martial arts context are sometimes subtly different from their common use. Not basic stuff, but it's not uncommon to find words where the usage is way more conceptual than you'd expect from the translation. If you're struggling because you're using a source that's peppering the explanation with random Japanese terms, maybe ask about the specific training issue in the courtyard and see if someone can find you a sport-specific reference. That's absolutely it - you're doing reps with a weight so lifting your grocery bags is easier in daily life, or deflecting a hundred sword strikes a day so your response is instinct when someone takes a swing at you in real life. It's trying to make that degree of mental focus an instinct when you need it, by practicing when you don't. It took me, no joke, years of studying a martial art in order to start to understand how meditation worked. That's why I always jump on this question, because meditation is so badly explained in the West that I literally had to deconstruct the pedagogical theory of multiple traditional Japanese arts from primary and secondary sources in order to really understand what was going on, and, even given that I'm an incredibly impatient person who wants to see solid evidence on things and who's a bad natural fit for meditation, that's ridiculous. It's absolutely not just you. And that was my experience, too, that accepting the difficulties as part of the process made it a lot easier and more relaxing to do it.

*nods* One of the things I like about aikido training is how conscious they are of everyone being responsible for other people's training. All martial arts do that to some degree, but I think aikido is unusual in how big and explicit a part of the dojo culture they make it, and how they really mean everyone. (And, actually, in my experience that's not an uncommon ratio of black belts to junior belts, in adult classes. Maybe 20-25% of the class.) You may have a few weeks of finding your feet in class, in terms of how hard to push yourself, that's possible. But I doubt very much you'll do anything that causes you more than a day or two of ache. Very, very few injuries happen in an aikido class, and you'll probably get the hang of it quite quickly. They're going to teach you to slowly approach your limits, then back off - you learn that fast, because you're doing it to other people, too. Bruises are a lot more likely, but they're not a big deal. Man, kind of a shame the BJJ warm-up fits so badly with the rest of your training plan. I guess it helps them guarantee a certain minimum of fitness for class purposes, but not great for you. They will absolutely get easier. They won't be comfortable, if you're getting a good stretch, but they'll be difficult-stretch sort of uncomfortable and feel a bit warmed-up when you're done. If they really hurt beyond that, ease off a little at first. (Like in all things aikido, ease into that point where it hurts, but not past it.) You can take some time to get into them, as long as you've got the basic stretch motion correct. Just try to do enough that you're warmed up for the actual techniques, because those have a lot of wrist work. And I think they will give you a lot of wrist stability over time. Aikido's pretty funny on belts. It always operates like what it really wants to do is have two ranks: white belts and black belts, and everything else is a slight compromise. It's not necessarily an easy process to benchmark, no. Especially since the change in your ability to do techniques is so gradual that you might not even notice it. Hrm, what else makes good benchmarks. RP and Mistr are good people to ask, but let's see. Stuff will get more comfortable. Your ukemi will start to feel smoother. If your dojo uses students as demonstration ukes from time to time, one day that'll be you. You'll figure out the techniques by their Japanese names. Someone is going to point out your technique when someone's struggling, and that person who's struggling might be senior to you. When a new beginner comes in, you'll see how much you've learned since that was you. You'll start getting in really good throws on black belts, not reliably, but you'll know when one feels really good, compared to them letting you have that one because you're learning. The black belts especially will start giving you more to work with, and you'll feel that difference.

You will have a great class. Everyone starts as a newbie. A dojo that can't treat its newbies well is a place you don't need to be, frankly, because new students are the lifeblood of an art and a dojo. It takes a certain amount of patience to be a complete beginner, but the right school will be intensely fun to go to every class. And I am gonna get my free toaster, I can feel it now.

Yay, you got a good dojo! That sounds like a nice one. That's one of the things I love about aikido, it's such an unusually open and supportive training environment. They're very serious about helping everyone in the class do the best training they can and feel everyone is there to learn from everyone else, and you have a lot of freedom to go at your own pace and figure out with your partner what you need to work on. I think you've got a really thoughtful comparison of the arts and the practical logistics there. I suspect that the stress on your body from BJJ would level off after a while, because I'm sure a lot of people lift and do BJJ, but I don't know how long that would take, and it may not be a tradeoff you want to make on your primary sport. In the end, there's not much substitute for an art that feels like it fits your body naturally, or a teaching environment that clicks. RisenPhoenix does a lot of aikido and lifting, so he could give you more insight into how the joint stress affects lifting. My own experience (as a non-lifter) is that, within general safe class practice, it's actually quite a beneficial thing. Those aikido exercises they taught you in the beginning, the wrist ones, totally saved me from years of RSI from typing. They're the reason I can do pushups on my wrists instead of dying from pain. IMO, there's a subtle limbering and strengthening of joints from aikido. I think you will know if there's an issue, you shouldn't really be training to the point of lingering joint soreness in general. (Although a good nikkyo day can definitely leave your wrists feeling, um, well-used.) It's also not a problem to walk into class and tell every one of your training partners, "I've been overtaxing this joint a little, so let's go easy on that move." Don't feel at all bad about setting that limit if you're having an issue, they'd prefer you did.

In my martial art, boys do like having their butts kicked. Just sayin'. Injuries are the worst. Do you have a sense of what part of the hip is the problem, so you can find activities that will slow your recovery or strengthen the hip? That would be really helpful for planning your challenge. IMO, it's wise to switch to bodyweight strength training while healing. It's not impossible to injure yourself with bodyweight, but it's got some amount of built-in safety with the inherent limits of just pushing your own body around, and it's good to start with being able to lift and move your own body, before adding iron plates into the mix. Also, if the hip is a big problem, don't be embarrassed to substitute walking for running. Do what you can do without injuring yourself, until you're ready to do more. Light exercise often feels like "not enough", but I think it's underrated for keeping injured areas flexible and active, and keeping all the supporting muscles strong and working together. Chris has a really good take on this, which is that challenges are good opportunities to improve, by forcing us to stop relying on the things we used to rely on - injury is a good opportunity to focus on form, and on rebuilding your physical strength for fencing. Awkward as it is to feel judged by someone who you want to impress, it's important to remember two things: first, you've already impressed him and that's why he's noticed, and second, he cares enough to want to support you when you need it and get you back on top. It's tough to find mentors when we need them, so that's quite a good thing.

I got a handheld spiralizer for Christmas. Nice and compact, and seems to work really well. Dinner tonight: sweet potato noodles in Thai peanut sauce. Awww yeah. All the vegetables can get in my mouth.

Self-driving cars are apparently super-considerate of cyclists, even the ones drivers can't see. I bet that when we all switch to self-driving cars, bike accidents will drop sharply.

I pity anyone married to Dumbledore. Very charming, but crazy ADHD, even as far as wizards go.

When I started out, enough people called me out on hissing non-sibilant words that I feel the need to pass on the experience.

I seem to recall an offer of a Pratchetty nature...

I'm sure you can get someone to write you a hall pass for one challenge. But after that, well, our enforcer is very tall and breaks the hands of guild leaders.

I KNOW RIGHT? But it's fine day to day, if I don't stress it, so it's a lot better than it could be, even if it's frustrating. On general principle, I don't like emasculated coffee. But in practice, it's fine, as long as I enjoy an average French roast. (It's an entirely reasonable daily coffee. Even if it's not my fair trade Bolivian-source latte with notes of caramel. *sniffle*) I'm just complaining loudly about now being a second-class coffee citizen.

My best advice on meditation - and I would have forgotten this completely if I hadn't had a notification on it recently - is here. The summary is sort of this: Basically, it's like kata for the brain, the way martial arts are kata for the body, so I'm afraid it is a chore in that sense - it is actual mental work. It is, alas, not easy and relaxing while you're doing it. (Afterwards, it can be. It can settle the brain a lot when you're done. Like exercise, not so great during, but the endorphins come afterwards. So with a little practice, you may find it feels good when you're done.) Brains make a lot of noise and random chatter, and meditation is the practice of noticing that chatter when it arises and making it get quieter, so all that difficulty you're having turning off your brain is the actual activity of meditation. A lot of people think the brain is supposed to quiet down first, and that's not true. That's the really hard task you're practicing, so that you can do it easily one day. That's the ongoing challenge even for experienced meditators, but it will get more comfortable to do it, and understanding that it's meant to be that sort of noisy-brain practice can help, because I think it's frustrating as hell when that's not what you're expecting to happen. I think it's a lot less frustrating to think of it not as doing something relaxing, but as taking a few minutes to do some reps and practice a skill. If your brain is really noisy when you sit down, then that's good practice, so no harm done. Don't worry about that. Just work with what you've got, spend a few minutes repeating the skill of keeping focused and dismissing distractions, then you're done. You don't need to worry about being in any state of mind or reaching any state of mind, and some days will be better than others. It actually gets a lot more relaxing if you stop putting the pressure of all those expectations on yourself.

Sucks to have to change from something you liked. But it's not forever, you can return to it some day when you have better options. There are silver linings there, if you look hard enough. I guess this is just when you start picking up your supplemental art.

I've been off caffeine for about ten months. Well, off caffeinated coffee. I still drink tea a few days a week. I really don't know, it's possible it was having an effect, and statistically it would, I guess, because the studies say it does. Very hard to say. I looked for Tiger Balm on New Year's day, but they didn't have it, just some menthol cream. Which I could use more of, until I find some Tiger Balm. I have been wrapping the ankle and calf for walking any sort of distance, and it helps, but I don't on a day when I don't have that planned. I guess I don't want to give the skin a chance to get irritated from the wrap. (You know, I think I might have some ginger-cayenne Badger Balm somewhere. I wonder if I still have that. That's a lot more subtle, but it's really good stuff.) I don't even notice the difference with the decaf, to be honest. I just hate the lack of selection. And just the general principle of the thing.