Priorities

During this time of unemployment, my main focus is on our health and fitness. We are going into the second week of calorie counting and still fiddling with food intake and what can or cannot be on the plate. We started drinking stinging nettle leaf tea a couple days ago. I had ordered it not knowing if I'd like it or not, but have been pleasantly surprised by the subtle flavor and the slight sweet undertone of the tea. 

I have great plans for this tea. 

Since it's a great tea base, I can add mint to it easily. I'm also contemplating tinkering around with the hibiscus, rosehips, rosewater, and lavender I have on hand. I have a handful of fresh ginger in the fridge and I'm sure it'd taste good with fresh lemon. Oh, right. I also have chamomile! I'll have to try that combination at some point. 

Over the weekend I gave cycling a break to recoup the body, but I started up again last night and did manage to add in some squats. I'm looking to add in squats, bridges, and planks into my daily routine, and I am looking to bullet journal these items into my daily journaling. 

I'm almost to the end of my current journal. 

So adding this new bullet feature into the next journal would be kind of cool. Since all of this is a 6-month plan and I tend to write in the 6-month time frame, this would work out great. Visually speaking, it would be pretty interesting to see. 

I've taken to skimming my journals more often as they're more visually stimulating compared to past journals. What with sketching and coloring in the last couple of journals, adding highlighted checked-off goals would showcase another dynamic layer to the viewing experience. 

Reviewing journals in that sense is a really good measure of past accomplishments. I think it would be a solid anchor and reminder as to what I've done and where I am going. It's also easy for me to carry around if I were traveling. 

I just have to figure out how I want to represent the bullets - do I draw tiny representative drawings of each item or maybe just create boxes for coloring in? I have to really think on this. 

I'm excited about this new visual adventure!

Some randomness

I got sucked into a reading vortex of Demon Street, yesterday morning and I just got out of it around 9am this morning. Hiveworks Comics has a plethora of webcomics that I've been meaning to start and get through, along with my usual reads. I didn't realize how long DS would be, but the artist had been updating since 2015 and the story is quite compelling. 

It was definitely a rabbit hole worth exploring. 

So because of that, I didn't get much done yesterday. I was pretty lax on my usual checklist items of blogging (ha!) and my PD courses. Also napping was in order and a bit of gaming. 

Today is also a chill day, but what's important is that I am getting my health in order with a food schedule and a pretty solid cycle routine in the evening. So even though there may be days of not getting checklist items taken care of, I feel satisfied with the day. I got my cycling in and kept to my food schedule. 

And that'll do. 

Going with the flow

I know it takes me 3 weeks to eventually accomplish a daily flow state. When I get a new task, the first week is getting over the antsy feeling. The second week is acclimatizing to the ins and outs of the task. And by the third week, I actually begin enjoying myself. When I was working in my previous job, I was lucky that there was a lot of data entry and document review for quality control. 

On the surface, it was tedious. Yet, it had to be done, and why complain about it. I found ways to keep myself distracted when first doing the task, but eventually, I cut out those distractions (mainly listening to music). After a time, I found time flowed. I would blink, breath, and oh look, it's noon. 

Having had a good run of being in the zone, I'm looking at my home space and trying to figure out how to achieve this same flow. The quantity of items to work on is quite different. Everything is piecemeal in the home environment but the data entry/quality control review was repetitive enough that you didn't really have to think and there was plenty of it. 

I'm dealing with quality versus quantity. 

The data entry was boring. That did become tedious after a while, and luckily I only did so much of it. The quality control was interesting because you could break and read the narrative or the rest of the documentation. There was a story in there, somewhere. 

I'm trying to find the repetitiveness of my personal tasks; enough quantity for it to become repetitive. I know these pursuits enrich me, expand my vision, and add a highlight to my personal story. 

The antsy feeling is slowly going away the more I focus on daily exercise. I push myself as hard as I can, and my brain and body are happy with that massive push. That's become a capstone of my day. 

Days are long but yet at the same time short. I know six months will easily be here. Hence there's a slight panic to get this all nailed down. 

So it goes

watercolor action

Loosing weight, loosing clothes

I really want to minimalize my wardrobe. The biggest roadblock to date has been my weight. Since my weight fluctuates, I've ended up keeping a range of clothing for my different weight sizes. I know I can keep clothes for long periods of time, but having different set sizes bulks up my wardrobe more than necessary. 

Past me held onto clothes that were loose-fitting, and current me is rather thankful for that call.

Weight loss and gain over the last 4 years (yay married life!) has been an epic journey. I think I'm almost at the end of the beginning. I've lost a lot of weight successfully, I've maintained successfully, and I've been more aware of my weight gain and what not to do in the future to repeat those steps. 

I'm lucky in that for the next 6 months, I'm the one responsible for food scheduling and weight loss. 6 months is a mental hurdle, but I am incessantly reminded that time flies when you are older. So buckle in and enjoy the process. Breath, blink, and be amazed at "where has the time gone??"

I daydream about going through my wardrobe and purging all the unnecessary items. 

I daydream about looking at each clothing item and critiquing my past usages - was it comfortable to wear? Does the material breathe well? Is it comfortable to walk around in during long periods of time? Can I sit for long periods of time in this? It is pretty but is it practical?  

I'm also analytical about my colors; do I wear solid colors only? Do I have some patterns sprinkled out, what kind of patterns are classics and keep well? Will these clothes keep well if we move? 

Yes, I do daydream a lot about minimalizing my wardrobe. 

Jjolang, the lazy house dog

The one thing I've kept to for 31 years

Journaling. 

The one thing I've managed to stick to like overcooked rice to a pot. Somehow, beyond my understanding, it's kept with me. 

I can't fathom it. 

Through all the moves, my attempts to learn new stuff, and new hobbies, the art of brain dumbing has kept with me. Brain dumbing? Maybe brain vomiting is a more apt phrase. 

I know much of my earlier works have been a place of venting unaffirmed emotions. I had no one to talk to, so I vomited on paper. During acute times of spiritual insight, I did prayer journals. During the time we were dating, I gave my husband my journals to read if he ever felt so inclined. He was not inclined. During our dating period, I didn't journal much, if none at all. My emotions were affirmed. 

I don't often return to rereading older journals and there have been times I've weighed the thought of destroying them. Yet, I hesitate. It's the part of me that is a physical manifestation of growth. It has kept me grounded in the interest of writing. 

Journaling has changed for me during our marriage. It wasn't about emotional venting, but more so a review and strategizing of the day with a dash of storytelling thrown in. A lot more sketching and coloring has taken place in the last 2 years. I'll often peruse my journals because of the art. I will skim because it's been a good measurement of how much has happened in my life in the last 4 years. 

I journal because my world has gotten much bigger.

I journal now because of adventure and the unknown of next week and next month; of who I will meet and when. Journaling is now about telling my own story. 

Lost Art of Mailing Stuff

I'm blogging about what I know or want to know better and the thought I want to cover today is letters, or more broadly, sending stuff through the mail. 

With this pandemic, I've not been able to see friends in person for quite some time, and to deal with this situation, I've taken to sending postcards. 

That motion alone has caused me to contemplate what in general I can send.  So I packed up some art and did up a card for my MIL and now that sits in the mailbox waiting for pickup. 

I only started last week, but I want to keep going. There's something special about getting something in the mail. It's a mental checklist of, "Yes, I connected with someone in a weird and obscure way".

It does get me thinking, though. How can I expand sending postcards to people I know, to maybe sending small random items, or getting signed up on some anonymous penpal site? 

Posting items in the mail use to be of the past, at least for me. As I get back into it, I realize that people send me stuff not for me, but for themselves. Sometimes we enjoy getting a surprise in the mail, and other times we enjoy sending stuff. 

I've started a mental checklist of who I can send stuff to, when I can send it, and perhaps for an occasion, I am sending items. I already know of several birthdays this month I need to start prepping for. And items must be small. It can't be big because cost-wise it becomes cumbersome. So small - which most of my art is. 

And so it goes. 

30 Day Challenge Found!

I'm going to do a 30-day sprout challenge! That's growing the sprouts and eating in them smoothies, rice wraps, or salads. Who knows, I may discover new ways to consume sprouts along the way. 

I put a batch of red clover and broccoli on to sprout yesterday that should be ready by Saturday/Sunday. I also have alfalfa and lentils seeds that I will start growing as well. 

I got a lot of my initial ideas of what kind of seeds I could sprout from SproutPeople but ended up just reading around or when something caught my attention.  

Sprouted broccoli has a high content of sulforaphane (powerful anti-aging and nootropic) and I want to see how that will play out by daily consuming (Dr. Rhonda Patrick has a great break down here).  She mentions that freezing them also increases the sulforaphane action. She also mentions that the feeling she gets from consuming it is equivalent to the boost that caffeine gives off. 

For about 6 months, I've been inconsistently growing sprouts and inconsistently eating them. There's this curiosity to see what happens when I eat them consistently. Will it energize me? Will it help with digestion? What will it do to my innards? How will I mentally feel?

Until they're sprouted, it's the age-old frozen spinach in the smoothies for me!