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One of my biggest enemies to productivity is schedule changes. I find that as soon as my schedule changes dramatically I neglect my new good habits and return to my old bad habits. And these next two weeks my enemy is returning. I just finished my summer internship at my church and will be going back to college after a 2-week lull. So my schedule is changing twice over the next two weeks.This means that I need to be extra careful to keep up the good habits I have been starting to form with my last challenge. I'm mainly going for consistency this challenge instead of trying to do more. 1. Drink 1.5L of water a day. At work I brought my water bottle with me wherever I went. I will continue doing this at home and at school. 2. Workout 3 times/week. Although over the next two week this will be easy with all my free time, this won't be the case when I go back to school. Working out while being stressed with homework and exams will be the challenge. 3. Spent 10 minutes in prayer and Bible-reading every morning. As a Christian this is super important for me. Yet these I seem to neglect the most during major schedule changes. 4. Find 5 healthy snacks I enjoy. In my last challenge I had troubles substituting unhealthy snacks for healthy snacks. I think it will be easier if I can build an arsenal of healthy snacks to combat the unhealthy ones. If you have any suggestions for healthy snacks let me know! Since I have several things I would like to get done over the next couple months, I will add in my personal to-do list for accountability. One of the big things is that I'm getting married in February! And with all that excitement comes a lot of planning! We are going for a short engagement (we got engaged in July) so we have to get going on getting it all ready! We have already done a bunch of planning over the past month and a half but still have a lot to do. Here are what we hope to get done over the next month. Wedding To Do's: A. Buy a suit. I'm going to use a suit instead of a tuxedo at my wedding. I don't have a suit yet and want to buy one so I decided to buy the suit for my wedding so that I can use it afterwards. I will need to look online for what kind of suit I want and then I will have to go out and buy it! B. Plan table center-pieces. We have been looking around at how we want our tables to look. We just need to make some decisions and try it out to see if we like it. C. Decide on our honeymoon. We have to decide where we want to go and what we want to do! D. Find a musician. We want someone to play the guitar at our wedding. We have a lot of musical friends and hope to get one of them to play for us. E. Decide on wedding favors. We need to look around for what we want to give our guests as a thank you. This needs to be done early in case ordering takes a while. F. Decide on Groomsmen gifts. What will I get my men? Not sure yet so I need to spent some time thinking about that. Non-wedding To Do's: G. Complete my book summary. One of my teachers for next semester is giving us the option to complete one assignment early. We have 18 pages to make a summary of our 500-page textbook. I want to complete this before school starts so that I don't have to worry about it during school. H. Complete 2 more Inkscape Tutorials. I want to learn about graphic design so a couple weeks ago I found the application Inkscape. I have completed 2 tutorials already (pictures to come) and hope to do 2 more this month. For each tutorial I complete I also have to use what I learned to make something else (i.e. I can't just duplicate exactly what they did but have to also make my own artwork). I. Woodburn a design on wooden coasters. I have also been learning the art of pyrography. I really like the minimalist design and want to try out a design on wooden coasters. This will require going out and buying a set of wooden coasters, making a design, woodburning it, and then applying a finish to it. I realize this is a lot to do but I do have 2 weeks of spare time. I will aim to do at least 1 post every week with updates but I hope to do it more frequently than that.

I’ve been enjoying the amount of graphic designs I have made lately for my blog and want to continue on in that vein. To that end, the “theme†of this challenge is playing with texture and font by making my own versions of those uber popular Instagram and Pinterest click bait quote images. As for challenge, I’m keeping things on the simpler side this go round. Last challenge I got really lackadaisical and really didn’t post much. I continued on (mostly, minus some completely off the rails time), but really didn’t feel like posting. NF seemed like a ghost town - most everyone on my friends list either bailed on the last challenge (last *few* challenges) or didn’t really update. I *know* these things shouldn’t deter me, but dammit, NF had been slacking for 3 challenges in a row and it’s hard to keep going when you feel like you’re screaming into the void. /rant I know myself and without the support of this community, I totally wouldn't be where I am today - and wouldn't have the stamina to shoot for my big goals this year. This year, my goals continue on from last year - I want to continue to improve my body; I have a bunch of OCRs & quick moving for bling things going on; and I still feel like I need to minimize the crap I have lying around. I also still have that GD SCARF to finish. I’m tired of that damn scarf. Oh, and to make things more interesting, I’ll be doing a Whole30 this January. So, there’s that. Goal 1: Fitness I think I want to go back to bodyweight workouts. I like barbells in theory, but I really miss my jumping all around and working on the fundamentals workouts when I'm not doing them. I plan on either grabbing a Neila Rey program or trying the January program from PopSugar's new app - and I'm starting late (on the 5th) because I'm battling some hefty thigh DOMs from last week. Goal 2: Metrics Metrics make me happy and they work for me, so I'm sticking with them. As a refresher, my metrics are: 100 grams or under of carbs, 70 grams or over of protein, under 100 grams of fat and around 1500 calories. Water is the recommended by FitBit 64 ounces, and on the weekends I like my step count to be over FitBit’s recommended 10,000. I track food with My Fitness Pal and exercise, sleep and water with the FitBit app. Last month, my FitBit Flex fell off my wrist sometime between here and the grocery store and I have yet to decide what I want to replace it with (ok, so I'm waiting to see if I want the Apple watch - shocker). Weight and BF are tracked with my FitBit Aria scale. I also use a combo of FitBit + Zombies, Run! To track my quickly moving through space workouts if they're in the wide world. Goal 3: Get My Shit Digitized I bought a Groupon waaaaayyyy back last winter to get another chunk of my mother’s pictures digitized, and just purchased another to get some of the other things scanned/duped as well. Maybe those VHSs of my tiny little blonde self singing in the church choir as a kid (BWAHAHA) won’t disintegrate after all. Goal 4: Get Out Of My Comfort Zone I’ve been doing really well at getting out of my comfort zone over the past few months, but I want to do more. I plan on going to exercise classes outside my bubble, socializing with new people, and creating new things. I’m not putting a time crunch on myself so I don’t burn my little introverted brain out, but I will continually look for new and different things to do. So far, I have at least 1 yoga class and 1 dance(!) class that I may go to in my building’s new gym + 1 yoga class out in the wild at of all places - Urban Outfitter’s flagship store. I did this class last month, and it was fantastic. And I didn’t die of exposure. Win.