Wednesday, February 26, 2014

New Things and The Ocean at the End of the Lane

So, hey. A blog.

1. New Things

I'm going to talk about some new things! They're not terribly exciting, but they've kept me busy and more tired than I should be for the past two weeks. Which is why I have not posted anything for a while.

Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.


5000 Steps

I got myself a little Fitbit Zip a while back during the summer when Shannon and I went walking almost every day. On the one hand, it's really helped me keep track of how much activity I have during my day.

On the other hand, it's a really good indicator of how much I have slumped into a slowly moving ooze over the past couple of months. There were a couple of days there where I didn't even pass 900 steps in a day. Like... I didn't get off my ass to eat lunch because, ugh, moving. Not good.

So I've got my Google calendar set up as my homepage when I start up the browser and every day as a task labeled 5000 and I can only check that off if I've walked over 5000 steps. I've only missed a couple of days, but I still managed to get over 4500 on those days, which is better than not trying. My average day without any additional walking is around 2500 because I'm a desk-monkey, so attempting to double that until the ice allows going on a walk is a first step.


Superhero Workouts

Some of the exercises from this site has made their way onto my tumblr dashboard, so I saved them until I could get up the nerve to print them out and see just how out of shape I am. I've got 8 or 9 of the nerdy ones (mostly superheros) and I've got a task for "Superhero Exercise" every other day on that Google calendar. I'm struggling through one set of these suckers (and "Level 1" is 3 sets D: ), but I'm making progress.


1 Square

This one's dumb. It's not fitness related or anything, but after the new year I started working on these Christmas ornaments for the Etsy shop. Mostly because I really weirdly missed the Christmas season, but also because I have no time to make these any time around Christmas. But I got ahead of myself and spent a whole week of doing nothing but these things. There's some embroidery elements involved, so there's a lot of elbow movement and I ended up with ridiculous elbow pain for a while.

And by ridiculous, I mean, it hurt enough to make me not want to move my arm, but was not actually painful in such a way that indicates actual damage. Like I just strained my elbow. Which is super annoying.

But I want to keep making these stupid ornaments. So I'm limiting myself to 1 square of these things per day. It's slower, but I'm not killing my elbow. Which is good, because hurting my elbow also stops the knitting and it was driving me bonkers.


So, yeah. This has worked for two weeks for me so far. I just wish I could schedule repeating tasks like you can with events.



2. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I finished this book a while ago, but the universe converged in such a way that I read it over a cold, grey weekend with a half dozen cups of tea and I was in the perfect headspace for this. I've sort of lost that headspace trying to think about what I want to write about it, but I can't not talk about it. It's a beautiful book filled with blurred shading between the real and the magical. Neil Gaiman's writing is always a joy, but the sort of... nostalgic dread that the narrator experiences in this book was weirdly comfortable. I mean, terrible things happen in this book, but it's sort of filtered through the narrator's remembering the experience in a safe(ish) place and my own grey day and warm tea were a safe haven to see the story unfold from.

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