[oromendur]

The world is changed. I can feel it in the water. I can feel it in the earth. I can smell it in the air.

 

 

Greetings everyone! Your friendly neighborhood disappearing Adventurer/Tolkien scholar/mythologist here, returning to the NF challenge boards after yet another successful but mostly silent challenge. Having a thread going here really does work some sort of mysterious magic on my ability to get things done. So, despite my (quite characteristic) utter lack of updates and interaction last time, I'm back again, to keep on keeping on.

 

The last few challenges have more or less been clones of each other because I just didn't have the wherewithal to do the thinking necessary to update them. I was hoping to do so this time. Ha ha. NOPE. 

 

Same-old same-old. I have made some tweaks to some of my long-standing routines  to take advantage of their rock-solid status, and -- since I am facing a summer that may involve some very extensive changes in my life -- to shore up the familiar ground where I'm standing so I don't fall down as I contemplate those changes.
 

Spoiler for Adventure™ report from the end of last challenge:

Spoiler

During Week Five I headed up to the Trinidad area of northern California to lead an American Hiking Society Volunteer Vacation. It was a good trip with a good crew, and the project was one that produced a good amount of satisfaction. 

 

Sub-spoiler for pictures:

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The old stairs we were replacing

 

 

My office view all week

 

   

Stairs in progress

 

Me clumsily channeling John Henry

 

    

The alder tree we saved from invasive English ivy (with bonus image of me making questionable decisions about climbing trees)

 

The mind-bogglingly huge pile of invasives we pulled out over the week

 

Stairs completed

 

Overall I'm glad I went. These trips, which tend to break into my long stretches of depression and self-sabotage like sunrise into a cave, always remind me just how powerfully this kind of outdoor leadership activity resonates with my soul. I enjoy it. I'm good at it. It's much closer to my image of who I really am than the self-destructive depressive I can turn into, holed up at home in willful isolation. 

 

Why don't I do more of it, you might ask? Well, because it wipes me out.

 

I hate Hate HATE that I'm nowhere near as strong and fit and sturdy as I used to be. After the last trip back in March I was sore and achy for about a week, but it was nothing serious. This time, though, the toll was much higher. We finished our work on Friday night, I drove thirteen hours back home on Saturday, and I tested positive for COVID on Sunday (sigh)

 

Double-vaxxed. Single-boosted. (I wanted the second booster but the VA wouldn't give it to me because won't be 50 until October.) Still caught the [BLEEP]ing plague -- after INTERACTING WITH OTHER FULLY VACCINATED PEOPLE EXCLUSIVELY OUTDOORS. Grr...

 

I am grateful that my symptoms never progressed beyond really-bad-cold-level (fever, cough, sore throat, fatigue, and a horrifically itchy rash on my arms and legs I had originally imagined to be some sort of nasty contact dermatitis from nettles or something but apparently according to Dr. Google is a common COVID-adjacent thing). But I'm also pretty sure I would have dodged this bullet had I not been so depleted from the bone-breaking work of the previous week.

 

Anyway. I drifted in and out of bed until my fever broke on Wednesday, and took it slow and easy all weekend, and am now feeling much more better today. I think I'm ready to face a new week and a new challenge. I'm not scheduled for any more AHS trips this year; I hope I can get some distance from this unpleasant experience before November, when I'l l have to decide if I'll do any trips next year or not. The program is important to me but I am NOT interested in going through this whole COVID thing again 

 

Spoiler for THE PLAN this challenge:

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PAI: I will keep my PAI score over 100 every day. I have some work ahead of me to get this number back up where it belongs, and realistically I may not get there until tomorrow, but we'll see how today's workout goes. I did great on the trip. The PAI gods are greedy and demanding of sacrifice, though, and my score plummeted from over 200 to under 50 in only five days while I was drifting in and out of bed last week

 

Writing: I will do one fiction and one nonfiction session of writing every day. My current fiction project is a Celtic shapeshifter novel; my nonfiction projects for this challenge are a proposal for my second academic nonfiction book (my first book, about Tolkien and wilderness,* was published in May) and my Tolkien paper for Mythcon due in Week Zero of the next challenge (working title: Bertilak, Britomart, and Bombadil Walk into a Bar  ). What counts as a 'session' is totally up to me and my energy level -- but I must actually type words into a document for it to count (mere rumination or structure shuffling will not suffice).

 

Daily Routines: I tweaked these again in my never-ending quest to find ways to trick myself into doing needful things I don't want to do.

• Morning: Every morning immediately after waking up I will write out five things for which I'm grateful, do my old teacher's 28-form Taiji sequence, do 13 twisty pushups and ring rows, and do Julia Cameron-style morning pages.
• Home: Every day I will complete a daily task (see spreadsheet for details), spend 15 minutes in the FlyLady zone of the week, do at least one task outside (anything, seriously, pull one blade of grass out of the driveway, just GO OUTSIDE FOR [BLEEP]'s SAKE), and do something to progress on a home, tech, or art project (it's mostly smart home stuff on this list, or reshuffling furniture upstairs, or any of a number of arty projects languishing in my basket, but anything that isn't simple cleaning will count).
• Health: Every day I will do my PT exercises or other mobility work, drink two liters of water, eat at least three different colors of freggies, and get up when my tracker shouts at me to earn a full 9 active hours.
• Evening: Every evening before bed I will write down three wins for the day and three wins planned for the next day, take supplements/brush and floss/wash my face, tidy the bathroom (wipe sink and swish toilet at a minimum, more if I've made a mess), and do the Theragun sleep routine.

I can earn an extra credit point for my daily routine by: starting my meditation before 8, starting my fiction before 10, starting my zone cleaning before 3, or climbing into bed before 11. I will lose a daily routine point if I don't: do an HRV morning reading, make the bed, complete one crown on Duolingo, or wipe out the kitchen sink. 

 

Minor tweaks in the home and health routines here, basically just casting about for something that might work to motivate me in these things that so reliably kick my ass, and a more-major tweak to the morning and evening. 

 

I've moved the gratitude journaling to the morning in order to make room for a technique I want to try from a self-help book I recently encountered: The Gap and the Gain* by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. Like pretty much every other self-help book out there, this one presents one or two compelling ideas buried in a lot of fluff and flapping about. But the main compelling idea from this one is particularly so: ALWAYS MEASURE BACKWARD. The big concept is that unhappiness/lack of success comes from measuring the gap between one's current state and the (unattainable) ideal to which one aspires, while happiness/success comes from continually measuring the gain between one's current state and where one began. It's not the aspiration to greatness that's the problem, it's the way one measures progress. In a nutshell the idea is the whole tired old gratitude thing -- but it's been dragged kicking and screaming from the realm of a soft spiritual practice into a solid, hard-nosed, business leadership world that entrepreneurs are discovering helps them. I like it.

 

The new technique here, based on this idea, is to take a moment every night to a) list 3 gains from the day, b) plan 3 gains for the next day, and c) publicly communicate the list to an accountability partner. 

 

A few challenges ago I caught a glimpse of the pure magic of putting something in this thread every day about what I was going to do the next day. Unfortunately the edifice I tried to erect around it was too complicated and kind of fell in on itself -- but I'm going to try again with this structure and see if I can capture it again. I know it's utter folly to say I'll update here every day. I will try. I may also decided to write these out physically and post on Instagram instead of (or in addition to) coming here. But, yeah, that's the main tweak.

 

Also, it wouldn't be one of my challenges if I wasn't planning to travel in a way that will totally disrupt my well-laid plans, so of course I'm getting on an airplane to Buffalo this coming Saturday to visit my sister and her family for her birthday  Thankfully I'll be well within the new COVID isolation guidance (five days isolate, wear a mask for the next five). I won't plan to track things too carefully while I'm gone, but I'd like to hold onto the PAI, the gratitude and morning pages, and the 3 gains thing. We'll just have to see. 

 

*Disclosure: I set up an Amazon affiliate account when my book was published, and these are affiliate links. I might earn, like, fifteen cents from Amazon if you buy something after you click on them.

 

Quote

Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanima´lion nostari!’ he said. ‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.’

 

And Celeborn said: ‘I do not know, Eldest.’ But Galadriel said: ‘Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell!’

 

                                                     ~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings 50th Anniversary Edition, p. 981

 

Spoiler for discussion of upcoming possible changes in my world:

Spoiler

Real talk: my finances are shit right now. Since finishing my PhD in 2019 I've been slowly selling off retirement assets while looking for an academic job. Unfortunately the current bloodletting in the markets took me from "Well, it's not ideal, but I've got a good cushion and I've got that book coming out soon and all will be well" to "AAAAAAAAAH OMG WHAT AM I GOING TO DO" in less than six weeks. As of the first of July I will have to make another stock sale if I want to pay my mortgage in August -- and it is emphatically NOT a good time to be selling

 

The stress is real and starting to get overwhelming. It's vanishingly unlikely I'll ever find an academic job (I'm now up to 72 applications without a single interview). I don't know if I'm too old, too interdisciplinary, too military, or just trying to break into a market that is too impossible (probably a combination of all of these), but even though I've already published my first book (something people normally don't do until after they're on the tenure track) I think it's probably a hopeless ambition and I really need to just let it go.

 

It's time to admit the truth: I need a job.

 

I don't need a career -- I had one of those, and I will begin drawing the pension from it in 2029 -- but I *do* need a job.

 

Honestly, I have plenty of options. I have 20+ years of worldwide operational experience, an easily-reactivated security clearance, lots of past successful technical jobs, a good record of senior leadership, and a PhD. I could probably email a resumé to a senior military recruiter today and get any number of interviews tomorrow. 

 

The problem? I don't WANT any of those jobs. I don't want to put on a suit and wheedle money out of government programs as a contractor. I don't want to act as a middle-management shit screen trying to protect a team of questionable individuals from upper-level political garbage in some faceless widget corporation. I don't want a stressful on-call-24/7 tech management job. I don't want to dive into the soul-sucking dull grind of technical communications. I've been-there-done-that on all of those and really don't want to dive back into any of them again.*

 

I want to do my writing and research while helping young adults learn about the magic of stories (sigh). 

 

That apparently isn't an option in this crazy post-pandemic world, however, so clearly I'm going to have to find something else. The VA has a program (for which I am eligible because I am unemployed, ostensibly due to COVID) called VRRAP. This program will pay a housing allowance and tuition for training in a "high-demand occupation," many of which (coding bootcamps, CCNA, IT management, etc.) are something I could probably already do without bothering with the training, some of which (health care administration, various nursing/med tech certs) interest me not at all, and a few of which look like they might actually be kind of fun. I'm toying with the idea of picking something interesting from this last group for the purpose of kicking the financial can down the road a bit. The three main contenders right now are a certification as a holistic health practitioner, a communications design program, and a diploma in recording arts. The first and third are reasonably local full-time programs in things I might enjoy that would give me the full housing allowance, and the second, while a bit further away and only part-time (which sadly halves the housing allowance) is mildly interesting (and might help me break into a local academic powerhouse through the side door). 

 

I haven't made any serious decisions. I won't be doing so at least until after I get back from WNY. But, if I'm going to do this, I'll need to get on it soon, because the program ends in December and I'll need to be accepted, approved, and matriculated by then.

 

So, watch this space. Next challenge might be looking considerably different, depending on how things shake out over the course of this one.

 

* I am very aware that I'm in a privileged position here. I acknowledge that many people would give anything for the advantages I am so flippantly handwaving away. But the fact that there are others (including, to be honest, my younger self) who would give anything to have my problems does not change the way I feel about this. I have worked really hard to get myself in a place where I am confident enough emotionally not to accept something I know will make me unhappy, and things are not yet dire enough that I'm willing to give up on that. 

 

Anyway. As per my usual, I make up for weeks of silence with a ridiculously sprawling and overwritten brain dump of a post to initiate the new challenge If you made it all the way through all of that, you are a hero --  thank you for poking into my little corner of this crazy space where we all try and create positive new stories for ourselves.   

 

Good luck everyone! Day One! Let's go!

[oromendur]

Spreadsheet snapshot

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Wins report 6/20

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Right now it looks like daily digital updates here will apparently need to happen in the morning as reports on the analog work of the evening before. But I guess that's OK.

[oromendur]

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Wins report 6/21

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Did the things. Plus BONUS things! Probably wouldn't have done the things without this practice. Looking forward to more doing of things  

[Ann of Owlshire]

I literally logged on to see if you’d made a challenge yet so I could bug you in email you if you hadn’t ❤️  I’m glad you’re feeling better after your bout with Covid. The newest Omicron variants (by my non expert reading) are very, very contagious and they don’t give a flying f—- that you’ve had boosters or even Omicron already (to be honest, the vaccinations don’t stop you from getting it anyway, they just reduce severity of symptoms). On the better side, the newer variants much more mild in effects for most people and the boosters and previous infections do help it make it even more so.

 

I’m sorry things are getting tough financially, but maybe getting some solid ground beneath you (even if it’s not quite what you wanted) will help toward your other goals. Despite the romantic notions and stories, most find being broke and stressed isn’t all that great for creative output.

 

Regarding looking at your successes backwards - one thing I’ve done for moments when I’m feeling low, intimidated by a life challenge,  etc. is review my “reverse bucket list” which is, as it sounds, a list of the many big challenges or successes I’ve had in my life  that I’ve already done. It reminds me that I can be that person, that I can overcome, and that I can do it again. Might be a good mental exercise? I’m very generous on my list, anything at all that seems like a win, I put down.

 

Another and more Nerd Fitness-like exercise I’ve done is create a old World of Darkness style NPC write up (so basically a background, future goals, etc. I don’t bother with stats although one could—I can send you a picture of one if you want) that reminds me that no matter how much I feel I can’t take on a new challenge or issue, I’m not a starting character. I’ve done things, I’ve had adventures. I have defeated tough life level bosses. I can do it. You could even do the official NF character generator (is that still active?) and go in and put things in in reverse as a sort of combination of all of these things! 

 

Keep on with those updates, and if they’re too much find a way to simplify them. ❤️ 

[oromendur]

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Wins report 6/22

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Bad brain chemistry day yesterday. Bad back pain day today. Doing things is hard  

 

But if I hurry and start the fiction session in the next three minutes I will earn an extra credit point, so here I go...

[oromendur]

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Wins report 6/23

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Not the greatest day yesterday. Only did one of the things -- one thing that took ALL [BLEEP]ING DAY -- and it was stupid hot, and it eventually turned into a muscle-relaxant evening (which more or less halted the doing of things). But now many things must absolutely be done today...I'm leaving early tomorrow...

[Sovalis]

Wishing you success with everything you need to get done today! 

[oromendur]

Catching up...

 

Wins report 6/24

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Wins report 6/25

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Wins report 6/26

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The doing of things was extremely curtailed by a difficult and annoying travel experience and a day to try and recover, but it could have been worse, I suppose. With today's Monday energy I'm going to try and climb back on the horse.

 

In that vein, please allow me to present my (on-time!) [WEEK ONE UPDATE].

 

Week One spreadsheet

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Not too bad, all things considered. Lots and lots of extra credit lifted me from a failing grade to a solid B, and this is why we love extra credit After playing with this over the last few challenges, I have found that having a set time as an extra credit opportunity really does help with finding the activation energy to get started on something. I don't think I want to make a set time the actual requirement, though. If I do that and miss it, I'm very susceptible to an attitude of "well, I've failed the task and won't get the green box anyway, so I won't bother to do it at all." If I miss an extra credit time, it's an annoyance -- but I can still get a win out of it, and therefore am much more likely to do the thing anyway. More of this doing of things, please and thank you

 

Weeks Two and Three are likely to be tricky. I'm trying to figure out what I can hang onto and what would be more trouble than it's worth. I've missed the mark on a bunch already this morning, but I think going forward I'll try at least to achieve these things every day: PAI, gratitude, morning pages, water, active hours, 3 wins, and my supplements/teeth/face routine. If I can get into (and hold onto) a morning update process here I will. My sister and her family are notorious drama llamas, though, and it's possible I won't have the spoons. We'll just have to see. 

 

Good luck everyone in Week Two!

[oromendur]

 

On 6/23/2022 at 3:28 AM, Ann of Owlshire said:

I literally logged on to see if you’d made a challenge yet so I could bug you in email you if you hadn’t ❤️

#AdventurerMom on the job! Thank you so much ❤️ 

 

On 6/23/2022 at 3:28 AM, Ann of Owlshire said:

The newest Omicron variants (by my non expert reading) are very, very contagious and they don’t give a flying f—- that you’ve had boosters or even Omicron already

Well, the way I see it, since they wouldn't give me the booster I went ahead and took care of achieving the extra antibodies myself 

 

On 6/23/2022 at 3:28 AM, Ann of Owlshire said:

I’m sorry things are getting tough financially, but maybe getting some solid ground beneath you (even if it’s not quite what you wanted) will help toward your other goals.

I'm hoping so. When the market was flying high I had more cushion, but that's all evaporated now and I'm really going to have to figure something out.

 

On 6/23/2022 at 3:28 AM, Ann of Owlshire said:

review my “reverse bucket list” which is, as it sounds, a list of the many big challenges or successes I’ve had in my life  that I’ve already done. It reminds me that I can be that person, that I can overcome, and that I can do it again.

This is a great practice. It helps tremendously to remind yourself you can do hard things. But I'm prone to struggling with the whole "you USED to be this awesome person but are really now kind of useless" attitude, and if I go over my list of prior accomplishments too much I can get stuck in the past. So there's a balance here.

 

On 6/23/2022 at 3:28 AM, Ann of Owlshire said:

Keep on with those updates, and if they’re too much find a way to simplify them. ❤️

Thank you for the push ❤️ I will try and keep up. It helps that my sister re-did her office and I have a (reasonably) quiet place to escape to and work instead of trying to do it on the floor of my nephew's bedroom, so I'm hopeful  

 

On 6/24/2022 at 3:34 PM, Sovalis said:

Wishing you success with everything you need to get done today! 

 

Thank you! Not all of it got done, but enough did that I successfully got out the door and made it to my destination, and everything that didn't get done will certainly be waiting for me when I get back. I appreciate you stopping by!

[oromendur]

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I think I might have to give up on the morning pages until I get home 

 

Wins report 6/27

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Wins report 6/28

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[oromendur]

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Wins report 6/29

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Someone else<*cough*mybrotherinlaw*cough*>'s poor planning ended up constituting an emergency on my part and I have now changed my flight  I'll be home Monday of Week Four now (a few days later). Whatever. It'll be fine...  

[oromendur]

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Wins report 6/30

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Some of these 'planned for today' things have been hanging around for a few days now 

[oromendur]

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Wins report 7/1

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[oromendur]

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Wins report 7/2

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[Ann of Owlshire]

*bump*