dancezwithkittehz - is persistent!

[dancezwithkittehz]

BEHOLD the challenge in which I pretty much do exactly the same goals as last challenge, but with NEW silly pictures. (SO FANCY!)

 

JUST KIDDING!  I added one goal that is totally new! 日本語, bitches! :D!

 

 

GOAL 1- STRENGTH

 

 

 

Strength training at least 3x per week! this can be bodyweight training, aerial, or lifting. OPTIONS, YO. I am especially determined to get my chin up back some day soooo yeah ALL the hanging and pulling and ab work!

 

 

GOAL 2 - RUNNING

 

 

Running 1x per week! I sucked at actually getting around to this last round so sticking to aiming for once per week and not ramping up just yet.

 

 

GOAL 3 - MACROS

 

Track macros on weekdays for duration of challenge!  I am happy with keeping track of these during weekdays. It helps me make sure I am getting enough protein, and since I am getting used to seeing about how much food I need to eat during the weekdays I still mostly stick to that on weekends even if I skip tracking on those days.

 

 

GOAL 4 - JAPANESE

OH LOOK I ADDED A GOAL. SO FANCY! 

Study Japanese every day for at least 15 min (at bare minimum this means doing Anki flashcards due for the day.)

I am SO MUCH BETTER at knowing how to develop habits and get better at things than I was back when I was getting my BA in Japanese. I never really did enough work on reading because "it was haaaard waaaah" and go figure I always sucked at reading and it held me back on getting better. Also just in generally I did not do enough practice on the route to fluency and then I just was like whateverrrrr I am out of practice guess I will just stop working on this at all. But yo, I LIKE studying languages and it is super fun and who cares if I don't plan to move to Japan or something; it's still a fun skill to have and to work on. Like...I do aerial and I'm not planning on joining a circus yo, so my whole "meh but it isn't useful enough" excuse is dumb. Also, I occasionally see jobs that want native English speakers fluent in Japanese and I'm always like THAT COULD HAVE BEEN YOU DUDE BUT NOOOO.... Anyway, LOTS OF REASONS. DO THE THING! WOOT!

 

 

Life Goal: GET SHIT DONE!

 

 

 

GET THE THINGS DONE WOOHOO. I copied over my list from last round and will add to it as I see fit.

My goal is to get ONE of these things on my list done per week.

 

LIST OF LISTYNESS:

 

Gather 1 bag of stuffed animals or clothes for donations or to trash because no one wants it (depending on the stuff!)  I gathered 3 total! Yay!

Move box of books into the closet.

Declutter the damn floor so you can actually move the desk and the AC unit and vacuum and stuff. - partial! water bottle graveyard is gone!

Disassemble your old desk.

Trash/Get rid of old desk.

Move air conditioner to correct spot once desk is gone.

Set up new air conditioner once moved.

Move furniture around in more useful configuration. (Even moving one thing or coming up with some schemes will count for this.)

Come up with better way to organize clothes and make things more accessible (this will also be a big process.)

Deal with water-bottle graveyard in my car -- partially!

Reseal leaking window on the studio appt

DO TAXES/ Do house finances/rental income info spreadsheet for me and brother

Come up with more expanded flea prevention scheme AND enact (last year was flea hell and it looks to be getting hot even earlier this year. DO NOT WANT. I want to do stuff NOW rather than wait until I actually see the little fuckers. I already started the kittehs back up on spot treatment, but I think I also want to upgrade to a better flea comb and maybe do a house treatment with borax..which will be a pain because I have to keep the cats out of the space to use that so I am thinking a room by room process and locking them elsewhere will be the way to go.)

[m rips]

Er mer gerd cat pitchers 

 

Love your list of getting stuff done, stealing that idea kthanks

 

PS following!

[dancezwithkittehz]

1 minute ago, mmead0105 said:

Er mer gerd cat pitchers 

 

Love your list of getting stuff done, stealing that idea kthanks

 

PS following!

 

hehehehehe. KITTIESSS ALL THE KITTIES!

 

And I find having a list of the shit I need to do but keep ignoring helps keep me accountable!! :D!!

[Manarelle]

Woot, it's another kittehz challenge! What's your Japanese level? I've been working (super slowly) on wanikani to learn the kanji, and it does seem like a pretty hard language to read/write, at the very least. You can do it though, I have faith in you and you are awesome!

[dancezwithkittehz]

Just now, Manarelle said:

Woot, it's another kittehz challenge! What's your Japanese level? I've been working (super slowly) on wanikani to learn the kanji, and it does seem like a pretty hard language to read/write, at the very least. You can do it though, I have faith in you and you are awesome!

 

Hard to say!  I have a BA in Japanese and studied it for 6 years, but then I've barely touched it for yeaaaars. So it's weird because there are a lot of things I can understand but I've lost SOOO MUCH vocabulary. I'd put myself in intermediate to high intermediate with some major gaps? And yeah I've forgotten nearly all my kanji. It takes me SOOO LONG to read. Oddly enough I still have really good memory of stroke order for a ton of different kanji radicals but actually remembering the meaning of most of them is like HAHAHHAHAHA NOPE.

 

My reading level sucked even when I had just graduated because they just didn't make us memorise all that much in my program here in the US. When I went to a language school in Tokyo over the summer I placed at a level waaaay below what I should have been because my reading level was so bad. So like..basically I was bored out of my mind because I knew all the grammar points we were doing in the class and there was just some new vocabulary words for me occasionally. Hilariously enough I was in a class with all students from Taiwan except for me, so they were all pretty decent at reading but they didn't know the grammar. (I think I also had the issue that my answers on the placement exam went too much into problem solving and expressing opinions and that wasn't what they were looking for hahahaha.) Anyway, I digress!

[BlackTezca]

So many cat threads and awesome cat gifs and images!  Yay!!

 

Awesome on the Japanese quest!  I need to get back onto doing some duolingo with Spanish!  I'll be following along!

[karinajean]

in for new! awesome! pictures!

 

[raptron]

YAYAYAY!

[dancezwithkittehz]

16 hours ago, BlackTezca said:

So many cat threads and awesome cat gifs and images!  Yay!!

 

Awesome on the Japanese quest!  I need to get back onto doing some duolingo with Spanish!  I'll be following along!

 

THIS GIF IS SO MESMERIZING.

 

Also HIIIIIIII!!!! :D!!!

[dancezwithkittehz]

Week 0, Day..I dont know 2? (I DENY YOUR SUNDAY START DAY, CHALLENGE! DENY!)

 

I'm going to try to do slightly more regular challenge updates this time so I might as well get started now, riiiiiight?

 

 

TUESDAAAAY was aerial day, so strength workout 1 of 3 for the week! We learned a "new" thing, arabesque sequence on silks (well, not new but I haven't done it in 2 years because yeah out of practice so I am totes noob now). I did the thing! And figured it out on first try without too much flailing, so that was exciting! I had NO stamina last night so foot locks in the air were LOL NOPE for the most part (I got to that station last as we were working on a circuit rotation and yeaaaaah. NOPE), but I did get in one clean left footlock which has been my nemesis as of late. So yays!

 

I also have a plan in place for both (1) flea prevention plan since it is getting hot, and (2) what to do to declutter my room this weekend. So YAYS PLANNING ALL THE THINGS TO GET DONE. And I should really do taxes. UGH TAXES. (I'll make sure I have beer. That will help.)

 

Also, I did my Japanese for both Monday and Tuesday this week. (I did totally fail to do even my flashcards over the weekend so I had lot of cards due in Anki come Monday and my review list on Memrise got me through most of my current points per day goal I have set before even looking at new stuff. Woooooops!)

 

Anyyywhoo now I am going to go into long rambly reviews of both Memrise and FluentU -- please ignore if you aren't interested in this level of detail! And my apologies for the long windedness! =P

 

Reviews:

 

So far I am really liking Memrise. For being free it is EXCELLENT and the format works really well for me. I don't find myself getting bored even though a lot of it is review in the Intermediate section. I think it helps that the responses are written fully with kanji and without hiragana or romaji to tell you the pronunciation except the FIRST time you see it when they are teaching you the "new" word/phrase. So even if the term isn't actually new to me, my textbooks I used always gave us that pronunciation/ phonetic reading each time so I never adequately was forced to learn the kanji characters. I would prefer actually WRITING the characters to learn them but this thing mixes up the responses so sometimes you are reading the answer in japanese, answering in english, or reading english translation and selecting kanji from multiple choice, or sometimes typing in the response in japanese (must use kanji/ it won't let you get away with shortcuts), and there are also listening and video things to listen to and then respond with either multiple choice or typed responses. I LOVE that they switch it up a ton and I'm finding it's really helping me remember stuff. And if you fail an answer it sends you back to the 1st learning it page to relearn it. (This is MOSTLY useful. Except occasionally I accidentally click enter too many times or my Japanese keyboard thing argues with me about entering something correctly and I end up running out of time trying to find the right character etc...ugh.)

 

I am also using FluentU, which is not free but so far worth it for me (but we'll have to see how often they add new videos.) It has youtube videos sorted by different language levels, and you can set it to show subtitles in Japanese below (with or without the hiragana) as well as you can have it show the english translation OR not if you want. As you are watching if there is a word you don't know you can mouse over the word you don't know and it will pause the video and it will pop up the reading and the translation for that specific word.  I am finding doing that mid video to be too disrupting, so what I am doing is I watch a video all the way through once (these are 1-5 min videos generally.) I then watch it again and then actually hit pause and go through and look at each word and go through the video section by section for each sentence, trying to translate myself before I read their English translation of the full sentence (vs word by word). Then I'll usually watch it one more time without looking at the subtitles or english translations. I try to watch 1-2 videos at minimum per day. I can generally handle the intermediate to high intermediate, but I did accidentally watch one at native level not realizing it and wondered why it took me soooooo long to read through and really understand...and then I saw the level when I saw it in my watched videos sections and was like OOOOH RIGHT HAHA WOOPS. (It was from this Japanese guy's Vlog and this one he was reading through an article he had read about how you can tell personality types by what people do when they ride they subway. It was complicated! I will totally visit that guys vlog for when I want practice listening to super fast japanese. It'll be a while before I can understand it well...)

[dancezwithkittehz]

I did not do anything challenge related last night because I am in serious pre-shark week anxiety and mopeyness mode. 

 

 

 

Buuut I did try out a new eyebrow stain that requires you go to bed looking like Graucho Marx!

 

 

You peel off the thick gel coat in the morning for brow color that's supposed to last a week. (We shall see if it actually lasts a week!) I was way too entertained by the Graucho Marx brows and should have taken a picture. Anywho, it DID in fact leave a really nice color and groomed brow look that I didn't have to do anything else to once I removed the gel stuff, and the gel did not pull off my eyebrows so that's exciting (hahahahahahahahhahaha.) YAY FUN KOREAN COSMETICS!  I have stupidly sparse and light eyebrows and it looks like I have no eyebrows if I don't put something on them soooo if this actually lasts a week this is awesome and will save me a few min in the mornings since I won't have to do brow stuff!

 

Other side note, DOMS OWW DOMS. My lats and core are full of oww! On the plus side though my lat activation is SO MUCH BETTER this time around with aerial. Yays for all those months of lifting work!! (Deadlifts especially!)

[dancezwithkittehz]

Exercise planning stuff!

 

I am DETERMINED to finally be able to do a damn tuck under the trapeze to pike to knee hang. I can do this in other instances where I am NOT trying to get under a bar, but I don't fit under the damn trapeze bar. UGH. I'm honestly not sure I will ever be able to fit under there as I have lost a ton of weight and I am now SO CLOSE but still I get stuck with my shins resting again the bar. I think my only chance is if I can manage to get my tuck and pike closer to my body by increasing flexibility and strength.  One of my aerial teachers made a blog post years back giving a workout to help get inverted pike, so I am going to do this workout as part of at least one of my strength workouts each week:

 

On pull up bar:

2 sets of 10 shoulder shrugs

3 sets of 10 straight leg lifts

3 sets pf 5 pull ups (these are going to have to be assisted pulls for me for now and I can only do 3 max in a set soooo something to work towards for sure!)

 

Floor

3, 30 second planks  (I may switch this for just holding a plank for a minute and then doing a second one at 30 seconds...or just doing one for 1min and 30?)

3 sets of 10 shoulder taps (from plank alternate lifting each hand and touching your shoulder)

3 sets of 5 tuck ups

5 plow holds

+bonus I will also do 3 sets of 5 tuck ups but with straight legs and then focus on lowering SLOWWWLY from the plow at the top of these (we've been doing these in class lately and they are EVIL)

 

[BlackTezca]

On 3/15/2017 at 11:06 AM, dancezwithkittehz said:

 

THIS GIF IS SO MESMERIZING.

 

Also HIIIIIIII!!!! :D!!!

 

[dancezwithkittehz]

Official challenge start time! WOOT WOOT! I was good about sticking to the plan for zero week so here's to hoping things go well for the rest of the actual challenge too!

 

Zero Week Recap:

 

Goal 1: STRENGTH  - 3 out of 3 per week   Yep! 

 

Goal 2: RUNNING -  1 out of 1 per week - Yep! One of my dance fam good friends was looking for a running buddy and we are planning to run weekly on Saturdays now. Yay! I want to try and get in an additional run during the week, but either way, YAY this should be easier to not forget now!

 

GOAL 3: MACROS- Tracked macros on weekdays?  Yep! We'll ignore the fact that most of the week this was all carbs GRAINS GRAINS CARBS NOM NOM....Stupid shark week and pre-shark week cravings. But nonetheless. At least I KNEW I was eating terribly. hahahahahah

 

GOAL 4 Japanese- Studied Japanese 15 min every day?   Yep! I did the thing!

 

GOAL 4/ Life Goal- GET STUFF DONE - 1 out of 1 per week YEP!   Water bottle graveyard in my room is GONE as is half of the one in my car. Did not do taxes yet though...WOOPS. Next weekend!

 

[Koaladle]

[mom2sjm]

Love your list of listyness!  thinking I'll be stealing that for the next challenge...

[BlackTezca]

Awesome Zero week!  Love all the YAYS!!!

[dancezwithkittehz]

Today in not super fun, but yay. I have my sinus surgery scheduled! Since even after doing a round of prednisone and antibiotic AGAIN I have yet another (or the same?) sinus infection, the Ear Nose Throat Specialist said he thinks it would be reasonable to consider doing sinus surgery to make them able to drain on their own (so he wants to both fix the deviated septum AND fix the opening of the sinuses.) He thinks this should help a lot with me not having a perpetual sinus infection.

 

He also thinks in addition to that it may be worth it for me to see an allergist to see about doing allergy shots. He actually offered that I could try this first to see if this would improve the sinus situation as well, but I've been plagued with horrible sinus pain for many months of the year for YEARS so I am pretty keen to have that not happen all the time.

 

A friend of mine also recommended that her allergies were pretty much cured by seeing a Homeopath who gave her different tinctures over a 6 month period or so, and she hasn't had issues with her allergies in years since doing so, but homeopathy just seems so damn...unscientific. (I've known too many of the people who way into holistic medicine stuff who believe that microwaves make food not actually food and are super into spiritual energy of crystals and stuff...and just..no. not my jam, yo. GIVE ME SCIENCE AND RESEARCH AND STUDIES PLEASE.)

[Koaladle]

Delightful, and thus I thought of you. <3

[dancezwithkittehz]

OMGGGG that picture is great! Sidenote: I SOOOOO want a storm trooper outfit! Or Vader! And I want to be a dancing Storm Trooper because GOALS or something.

[Koaladle]

There's a charity for that!

 

https://www.501st.com/

[dancezwithkittehz]

Ooooooooooh!

[Taffter]

Love the GIF's Will follow this thread.

 

Goals are awesome too,  I wish you luck. Also..

 

CatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCatsCats

[dancezwithkittehz]

 

[Koaladle]