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This last week's theme, if there was a theme, was "staying up until 1AM reading". Also, half-assing my workouts, which is something I'm explicitly working on fixing. (Half-assing my lunches is strongly related; I'm not quite eating enough early in the day.)
Fun thing: playing Öoo from end to end. You play as a cute caterpillar who looks like the game title, and it's just an inventive little puzzle-platformer that doesn't overstay its welcome.
Also fun: reading The Witch Elm with the bug as part of our two-person book club. I am starting to feel a little torn on Tana French; she writes wonderfully about deep friendships but also has a lot of idiotic male main characters, and wanting to wring their necks while I'm reading isn't always pleasant. She also writes smart women, and sure enough, my favorite book of hers so far has the smart woman as the narrator. Looking over her books, I think there's one more of those.
Confusing: spending a few hours pulling black swallow-wort (or sometimes just its pods), on the nicer days and while listening to Alien Clay on audiobook. It's a pleasant enough endeavor, and I'm up for an hour or so when it's nice out, but it's hard to know whether I'm doing any good.
Slow: the buying-a-condo project. I spent time on it last week, measuring windows -- they're all the same -- and ordering window blinds, privacy window film, coat hooks. Also applying for homeowners' insurance for the thing. And informing the closing agents that the way I'm taking title is Sole Ownership, thankyewverymuch... of the options they offered me, all of them were for joint title. Feeling the burn of being a single person in a world designed for couples, I guess, and I'm not even single!
I submitted my second crossword puzzle to the NYT, this one aiming at much earlier in the week. It's easier; the theme is simple but cute. Construction of the puzzles is a little bit dangerous for me, in that it can be very distracting and engaging. In terms of feedback loops, dynamism and discovery, the "fill" part is midway between a video game and programming... both of which are known to bring on flow states, and make people wonder where the last 2-3 hours went. So, while I think this is a fun creative thing and suits my needs in a lot of ways, I also should be careful with it. (With that said, I have a proof of concept complete on my third puzzle. My plan is to take a break from filling to re-score a bunch of words, and give the poor flooded NYT staff a chance to accept or reject the first two puzzles. They have a limit of 3 in the queue per constructor, anyway).
All of this is in the continued context of wanting to wind down the big projects and do a better job with smoothly running my days. In particular, I want to be exercising differently. Lots of things are going great, but some are not. It's been pretty easy, over the last few weeks, to start addressing the various bits of joint jank that had built up in my body -- and this is part of the "going great" -- but it's been less easy to regain some of the strength moves I used to maintain as an absolute minimum a few years ago. So I want to get more regular about those. So far the Turkish Get-Ups are on their way back, just the way I used to do them, and I am LOVING that; but chinups are much slower to return, and I probably will need to get back to 3x/week to get real gains there at this point. Pistol squats too. In general it's always been harder for me to gain than to maintain, and standard strength moves haven't been my #1 fitness priority for the last few years of handstand obsession, but I miss them. I know it might be harder to get them back now that I'm older, but I also let them go for a while, so who can tell? I want to pick them back up. And as mentioned earlier, that means I need to start eating better lunches. Back to basics, as a true priority, is likely to feel really good. So with that, I'm getting on the elliptical machine like I meant to an hour ago. :P
Fun thing: playing Öoo from end to end. You play as a cute caterpillar who looks like the game title, and it's just an inventive little puzzle-platformer that doesn't overstay its welcome.
Also fun: reading The Witch Elm with the bug as part of our two-person book club. I am starting to feel a little torn on Tana French; she writes wonderfully about deep friendships but also has a lot of idiotic male main characters, and wanting to wring their necks while I'm reading isn't always pleasant. She also writes smart women, and sure enough, my favorite book of hers so far has the smart woman as the narrator. Looking over her books, I think there's one more of those.
Confusing: spending a few hours pulling black swallow-wort (or sometimes just its pods), on the nicer days and while listening to Alien Clay on audiobook. It's a pleasant enough endeavor, and I'm up for an hour or so when it's nice out, but it's hard to know whether I'm doing any good.
Slow: the buying-a-condo project. I spent time on it last week, measuring windows -- they're all the same -- and ordering window blinds, privacy window film, coat hooks. Also applying for homeowners' insurance for the thing. And informing the closing agents that the way I'm taking title is Sole Ownership, thankyewverymuch... of the options they offered me, all of them were for joint title. Feeling the burn of being a single person in a world designed for couples, I guess, and I'm not even single!
I submitted my second crossword puzzle to the NYT, this one aiming at much earlier in the week. It's easier; the theme is simple but cute. Construction of the puzzles is a little bit dangerous for me, in that it can be very distracting and engaging. In terms of feedback loops, dynamism and discovery, the "fill" part is midway between a video game and programming... both of which are known to bring on flow states, and make people wonder where the last 2-3 hours went. So, while I think this is a fun creative thing and suits my needs in a lot of ways, I also should be careful with it. (With that said, I have a proof of concept complete on my third puzzle. My plan is to take a break from filling to re-score a bunch of words, and give the poor flooded NYT staff a chance to accept or reject the first two puzzles. They have a limit of 3 in the queue per constructor, anyway).
All of this is in the continued context of wanting to wind down the big projects and do a better job with smoothly running my days. In particular, I want to be exercising differently. Lots of things are going great, but some are not. It's been pretty easy, over the last few weeks, to start addressing the various bits of joint jank that had built up in my body -- and this is part of the "going great" -- but it's been less easy to regain some of the strength moves I used to maintain as an absolute minimum a few years ago. So I want to get more regular about those. So far the Turkish Get-Ups are on their way back, just the way I used to do them, and I am LOVING that; but chinups are much slower to return, and I probably will need to get back to 3x/week to get real gains there at this point. Pistol squats too. In general it's always been harder for me to gain than to maintain, and standard strength moves haven't been my #1 fitness priority for the last few years of handstand obsession, but I miss them. I know it might be harder to get them back now that I'm older, but I also let them go for a while, so who can tell? I want to pick them back up. And as mentioned earlier, that means I need to start eating better lunches. Back to basics, as a true priority, is likely to feel really good. So with that, I'm getting on the elliptical machine like I meant to an hour ago. :P
