Jarric

Wonky knees unite! Thanks fearless, good to see you

I absolutely LOVE this. Congratulations! Only 2 weeks to go!

I still haven't finished EXU - I really should. Calamity was great, Brennan is downright scary when he wants to be.

Yeah, I really don't like being sold to like that. To be fair, I think NF Coaching actually sounds like a great product, though it's not a great fit for me right now. The preparing for amber and red days idea I love, I'd never considered it before. I kind of want to run a challenge where I have all of my daily goals, but every goal has the 4 levels and I do the level to match the day (so not just for workouts, but for everything). What is your plan for amber and red days, if you don't mind me asking?

This is the thing I hate about flying - hope they clear soon.

Congratulations on the forthcoming grandson! You're definitely going to be a fun grandma. It was 1am for me, so I watched the recording this morning at a more reasonable time instead. I thought it was really useful - they focussed on nutrition but I can see it being more broadly applicable for me. Just so you know (because I wish I had), it says 2 hours, but the pressure gauge system bit is only the first 50 minutes or so. Then theres 25 minutes of advertising NF coaching, and then a long Q&A on various topics. I watched pretty much the whole thing, but that first 50 minutes is the main bit.

Oh I love them both! I might have to try and draw my own now... Good to have you mate.

Sorry for the double post - I meant to respond this earlier. Have you looked at account information apps at all? The kind of thing where they collate all of the information from all of your bank accounts and categorise your spending for you? I've been playing with one recently (Snoop), and you can set it to alert you when you spend money in certain categories/over a certain amount in a given category. I know you track your spending meticulously, but maybe a judgemental little notification saying "you've spent over £400 on groceries this month" might help?

Bonus here, if you do manage to track everything for a few weeks, and if you're also tracking your weight, you'll get a really good baseline for what your total daily energy expenditure actually is. There's all sorts of online calculators for calorie goals, but every one of them if going to be based on an 'average' person and assumes perfectly accurate tracking methods. If you can get a good few weeks of tracking and you know what your weight did each week, you can get much better calorie goals which are both specific to your body and to the way you track. Then if you decide you want to gain/lose weight in the future you can just add/subtract a percentage from that number. Personally, I weight food all of the time, and I haven't tracked calories in ages. I'm no good at eyeballing what a serving of pasta is, or how many potatoes to put in a meal, but I do know I can weigh out 2oz per person or 150g per person respectively, and that is a normal serving for me. I don't bother weighing most stuff (a bell pepper is a bell pepper, and being a little bigger or smaller is largely irrelevant), and meat usually comes with the weight on the package, but for pasta/rice/potatoes etc. I measure. Sounds like a good idea to me - it's a really good life task you've got there.

I'm willing to bet you're a lot of fun at parties, regardless of what you drink.

Previously, on Nerd Fitness... Honour amongst thieves I'm unnecessarily excited for the new D&D movie next year. It comes out on my birthday, and it looks really good. And I know it's early days, and I know we've only got one trailer and a couple of interviews to go on, but I dare to dream. So, the challenge theme is the easy bit. As far as I know we don't even have the names of the main characters yet, but that's not going to stop me building a D&D party. Barbarian - +2 STR The goal here will be to do my physio exercises at least once every day. I buggered up my knee earlier this year, and I've been regularly seeing a physio to try and get it sorted. We haven't had much luck so far, and if there's no improvement in the next couple of weeks I think my physio will be sending me to a specialist for scans and such. Regardless, the goal is to do as I'm told and try and get better - this includes taking it easy when I'm told to! Druid - +3 CON This is all about beer (I feel like druids would make the best brewers; it's all about fermenting stuff. Well, ok, monks definitely make the best beer, but we don't have a monk in this party). Prior to lockdown, I didn't really drink at home. Then, when I could no longer go out for a beer, I started drinking at home instead, and I haven't let that go since restrictions ended. I also don't go out anywhere near as I used to, so it's not as bad as it sounds, but I've been finding myself drinking 3 or 4 days in a row and that's not good for my health - physical or mental. The plan is that 6 days per week I won't drink at home. I'll still drink at home on Wednesdays, because a few beers in front of Questing Time is a genuine pleasure, and I'm happy to keep that. Drinking out of the house any other time is fine, it's just home beer we're trying to curb here. I'll be tracking beer-free days, so counting out of 6 instead of counting up. Bard - +2 CHA, +1 SAN Do something creative every day. Really, it's that simple. A lot of the time it might be drawing - I have so many cool drawing resources I want to play with and I rarely pick them up. Other times it might be D&D prep; we're starting a new short adventure (we being myself, WW, @DarK_RaideR, @jonfirestar and @WhiteGhost), which doesn't need a ton of prep but it does need some. Most of which is drawing maps and loading stuff up on Roll20 to be honest. Creativity can be anything else - occasionally I might pick up my guitar for 5 minutes, and I might even allow singing or practising accents (though I do that stuff in the shower/car quite a lot, but maybe if it's genuine practise for something). Sorcerer - +2 INT I'm currently working through the final stages of a professional qualification (which is apparently about equivalent to a bachelors degree, I learned recently). I have 5 essays left to write, at 3,500 words each, the first being due in September. The others are due December or further away, but I really just want to get the whole lot done and get this over with - I've been doing qualifications in my industry since 2012 (with a bit of a break), and it would be nice to come to the culmination of that. The goal is 4 hours of essay writing per week. I should get 2 hours during the working day, so it's just an hour each day on the weekend to keep this moving. The more of these I write the easier they get, so I hope I'll get through them quickly with this much effort. This goal would work better with a wizard than a sorcerer, but we don't have one of those Paladin - +1 SAN This is about brushing my teeth, twice daily (because paladins are shiny, obviously*). I do better with this when I track it, and it's a good signifier of my mental health. I'm not sure that brushing my teeth helps my mental health, though challenge structures most probably do, but if nothing else I can pretty much tell how many good days I've had but how often I hit this. Zero week As I hadn't written this challenge for most of zero week, I just set myself two simple goals - physio and teeth. So far both are going well. SHOW ME THE MONEY I've previously tried to bet money on my goals, but that falls down at the end of the week or the end of the challenge when I don't have the cash to pay the bet. So, new plan: I've budgeted £250 per month to bet on my goals. On payday each month, I'll take that £250, plus any leftover money in my account, and bet it against my goals over the past month (using only the full weeks since last payday). For the percentage of challenge goals I hit, I get to spend that money, or put it in my savings. For the percentage I fail, I use the money to pay off my mortgage. This means that the bets won't line up with challenge dates, but they will line up with me having money and that's more useful. For this challenge, weeks 0 to 3 will be in the August bet. The September bet will be weeks 4 and 5 of this challenge, plus 0 and 1 of the next one. Other thoughts In weeks 1, 3, and 4, and I have counselling appointments that I booked a few weeks back. If I can, I'll talk about those here, and if I need to I'll add a new goal to address any actions from them. I don't really know what to expect, so we'll see how it goes. Right at the end of week 5 I have a race - Summer Nuts. I won't be doing much running training for it with my knee, but mercifully the two guys from work I'm running it with are doing bugger all at the moment, so it shouldn't be an issue. I just hope I can make it round without too much pain. *Massive tangent - I have a sudden urge to play a paladin devoted to a god of decay, or something similar, so I can have a really gross, fungal paladin. Maybe fungal paladin would make a good subclass?

Exciting that you're nearly at the new job - it feels like it's been a long time coming. I've never seen the video to this song before - the repetition feels worrying relatable to my life not too long ago.

Pint of the black stuff, barkeep. Stick to what you know...

Rho, you are a badass. Getting back to D&D and back to work must both have been tough, for different reasons, and you did great. I'm glad they went well, and that work are taking the OH advice seriously. Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen white pudding outside of Ireland. Which is a shame, because I love it. How did I miss this? He's literally a punk rock! That's amazing! My favourite this series is Fern all the way. I never clicked that well with Ashley's previous characters, but Fern is sooo perfect.

Challenge wrap-up Physio Rx - 34/42 - +3 STR Well my knee isn't a lot better than at the start of the challenge, but it's a process. I've stuck with the physio pretty well, and I'm just going to keep doing that until we find a solution. I'm not going to get to run as much as I want to between now and the races I've got this year, but that's life. Creativity - 23/42 - +1 CHA Well, I didn't do much drawing in the new book I bought just before this challenge, but stuff was done. A bit of drawing, a bit of messing around with my new drawing tablet, some playing guitar, some D&D prep. It's all good for me, thought I would have liked to have been more consistent. Study - 12/42 - No stat increase Well, that was a pretty poor show, wasn't it? I've started my next essay, but that's about the most I can say here. Work was pretty unbearable at times this month, which took away some of the study I would have done during work time and a lot of the motivation to do any after work. I'm starting to pick up the pace on it though, which I need to to get everything submitted on time, so here's hoping next challenge goes a bit better. Teeth - 23.5/42 - No stat increase It felt like I was doing better than this, but clearly not. Still, that score is approximately 23 higher than I would have done had I not made it a goal, so it's a bit of a win. Waistline tracking - 25/42 - No stat increase I'm not sure if I like this goal or not. I think it's a useful thing to track, but I didn't really get much insight from doing it daily (when I remembered to do so). Also, it's quite hard to measure my waist and know I'm doing so consistently. I think if I try it again I'll try measuring the maximum and minimum I could get on a given day, rather than trying to get a natural number, if that makes sense? I don't know, it might well not come back. Other stuff It's been a really challenging 6 weeks, with work stress and my general mental health not being fantastic. But having the structure of this challenge has helped, I think. And it, together with some of the lovely nerds who contacted me at various points and some people in my real life, encouraged me to reach out for some professional counselling support. The actual counselling calls will be next month, but it feels good that's in the diary. I have also come up with a method of betting on my goals again. I've been trying things for a long time, and generally they have fallen by the wayside. I'll detail that for next challenge, but this time what you need to know if that my average goal completion was 55.95%, resulting in me keeping £359.62 in my savings, and paying £283.11 to my mortgage (I got my bonus this month; these numbers will be substantially smaller most of the time). I think that's about it - tomorrow's job is to post a new challenge!

Awesome job, well done on the challenge. That workout tracker is a thing of beauty. Keep that file somewhere safe - I still have my first ever workout tracker, and it's amazing to look back years later and see how far I've come.

I'm really sorry to hear that. Alzheimer's sucks. *hugs*

This is just plain wrong. For many people, their romantic partner may be the person that they are closest to, but I can imagine many people are closer to casual sexual partners than they are to long-term friends. I would hazard a guess that the author assumes people do not have sex before marriage, or at least before dating someone for a long time, in which case the table would still be wrong but at least more understandable. I feel like everyone's got that friend that disappears off the face of the earth as soon as they get into a relationship? It really annoys me, I don't think anyone should have to dump their friends to make a relationship work and I don't think it's healthy to do so.

Week 4 stats Physio: Physio: 7/7 - aww yeah! Creativity: 3/7 - that's surprisingly bad if anything Study: 0/7 - need to get my head in the game here Teeth: 3/7 - again, a head space issue Waist tracking: 4/7 - I've started going blind to the reminders, which doesn't help On Friday I went straight to the pub from work, had a couple of beers in the glorious sunshine, and then bought some more beers and went home. I spent the evening catching up on Discord chats and drinking, which was nice. Saturday morning I went climbing, with surprisingly little of a hangover. I then did bugger all for the rest of the day, until going to The Captain's house for Little Mermaid's 3rd birthday barbeque. It was a nice evening of catching up with some people who I don't really see except at The Captain's house, and we got home at a reasonable time too. On Sunday we had a chilled morning, then spend the afternoon wandering round people's gardens in the sun (the local horticultural society was doing an open garden thing). In the afternoon I did some D&D prep, so actually managed to tick off my creativity goal for the first time over the weekend. Overall I've been really struggling with motivation and mental bandwidth - hoping that week 5 will be better.

@Rhovaniel welcome back to the forums - it's good to see you here.

Ok, I've been a bit short on time and energy the last few days to update (mainly energy really). I plan to do a proper update soon, but in the meantime just wanted to say I'm still here, some of my goals are still happening though not super reliably, and I'm going to aim to do better for week 5.

Yeah, I know what you mean. At least you can see the importance in the 'soft' work though. And thanks mate, that's encouraging to hear.

FTFY. That's a really rubbish thing to have happened, but it's not your fault - you didn't know that those notes were stored in cookies, and you took care to set up a sync so that they would back up. It's not your fault that the sync failed.

That's a pretty metal way of thinking about this - I like it. This is a really cool skill. I started working on that tutorial a while ago and then forgot about it ; I should pick it back up.

Thursday - W4D4 Physio: ✅ Creativity: ❌ Study: ❌ Teeth: ✅ Waist tracking: ✅ Yesterday was a good day. My knee wasn't good enough to run, so I did a yoga video and my physio exercises first thing, which was quite nice actually. Work was ok - busy but it feels like I'm achieving something now. I was at home, and a bit of quiet to try and rattle through stuff does help. After work I decided to walk up to meet WW from work, and then walk her home. That was a nice way to end the working day. It's been hot as balls here, and neither of us felt like eating much, so I made macaroni cheese with leek and spring onion and chilled out on the sofa reading up for our next D&D adventure. There's a weird line where D&D prep probably does fall under my creativity goal, but just reading an adventure book doesn't really. I marked it down as no creativity anyway.