First Run Through...

...my block is tomorrow.  I'm going to get up early, empty my bowels and briskly walk for 5 minutes (possibly in the rain) before cycling between 60 seconds of jogging and 90 seconds of walking around my block.  I'm nervous.  What if I hate it?  What if I chicken out and decide to stay curled up in bed with my beautiful wife?  What if I fall over dead from the plague?

Well that last one hopefully won't happen in the next twelve hours so I have that to look forward to.  And well, if I really hate it, then I'll have to find some other exercise regimen I can fit into the my super small budget.  And I've already told my wife to kick me out of bed.  So no more fears.  On ward and around ward I will go...

Failure...

I'm kind of amazed that it has taken me 30+ years to start overcome the fear of failure.  Some days it feels like the older I get the more I fail. 

About two years ago I started working with a man who was teaching me his trade so that he could have a backup at work when he went on vacation or was sick.  There was a procedure he was working on that he told me I wasn't allowed to work on because I hadn't failed enough.  Yeah, thats right, I hadn't had enough failure in the lab.  His theory is that you learn more from the failures than through the successes.

This year has been a new experiment for me.  Each month I try a new resolution.  Something that I've wanted to do but haven't for whatever reason.  I think the biggest failure of my life is setting goals and not following through.  I think one of the reasons I started this blog was so that I can state my goal and the reasoning behind it.  And then of course have some accountability.  The accountability hasn't helped much since I'm not sure anyone even reads this, but the blog has helped inspire me to write more, which was numero uno (maybe april's goal should be to learn spanish so that I know more of it rather than just the number one) on my list of goals for the year.  

I decided for march that I would count calories, but I did it a couple years ago and I did well for a while.  Then the long term habits crept in.  Now after four days of not even starting the counting, I'm wondering if I need to begin again more intelligently.  But how?  I know over the last few days I have cut out about 500 daily calories.  Just little snacks that I ate every day which I don't need to.  After 7 days, thats a pound.  If I keep it up, I'll be losing one pound a week.  I do want to run though. I'll see how that goes on monday.  I might need to find a running buddy, which seemed to be the only thing that helped me in the past.  March might be a bigger learning experience than I anticipated...

40k

I've hit another milestone...it feels good.  I actually should've hit it last week, but I had a couple days of mega stress which knocked my brain loose for a few days. I think all combined I wrote a thousand words last week.  And the week before that I started rewriting a couple of the chapters I wrote a couple years back since they didn't really fit with what was happening in the story.  SO I wrote some and then deleted some which accounted for a net gain of about zero.

But I read this article last week of a lady who self publishes on Amazon.com.  She sells like 100,000 ebooks a month at like three bucks a pop. At 70% profits she makes a pretty sweet penny. So I started to look into what it would take to self publish.  It just takes money like so many other things.  With that in mind and all whole money situation at home, I'm looking into getting a part-time job.

It'll make life a little easier until the daycare goes into full swing, it'll help us reduce debt a little faster (woot) and help me self publish.  Then I'll just need to find a way to get my name out there once I do self publish.  I guess thats what facebook is partially for, and prayer.

All in all I'm more motivated to get this book done so I can work on the next...

March on good man...

New month...new goal. 

Its March, and I've already had two months of relative success with goals I've set.  The first month, I really wanted to consume less, produce more.  I was producing zero, so it wasn't hard to start producing more.  Then in February, I wanted to start producing even more and I didn't care about consumption anymore. 

Well now in March, I'm having to go back to the first goal of producing more and consuming less.  But rather than writing more and consuming less media, I want to physically consume less and produce some weight loss. 

I weighed myself this morning and I am up to 256 pounds.  I think my heaviest was reached after I got married at 260.  Right around our second year of marriage I dropped 35 pounds by calorie counting.  It felt great, but the whole calorie counting thing gets super tedious.  Especially if you are eating out or going to friends houses for dinner.  Well, we don't do either of those things, okay we got out on occasion, but not as regularly as we use to and I honestly couldn't tell you the last time we were invited to someone's house to eat (hope that's not a judge of our character).  To top it off, I eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day so it shouldn't be hard to calculate that and then only worry about what dinner brings. 

But I don't want to just eat less, I want to get more active too.  One thing I did the summer before DaNae and I met was run.  I loved it.  Actually I hated it when I did it, but I felt great afterwards.  I got up to 5 mile runs pretty quick, but I didn't feel like I improved in speed or anything.  SO rather than starting off with a three mile run like I did that summer, I'm going to take it slow and do the couch to 5k program.  Hopefully it'll help me build speed and endurance rather than just tearing me up. 

Now all I have to do is figure out my calorie intake goal and start jogging!  Monday will be the start of the jogging for me (I'm attempting to wake up earlier this week to be ready for early morning jogs) and I'll start the calorie thing tomorrow. 

P.S.  I'm not doing this as a means of reaching some glorious weight.  I want to just build better habits in my life.  Out with the old, in with the new!

Take a bite out of this...

I had an actual teeth checkup on monday.  Its the first real one (if you don't count the one a couple weeks ago that only checked two of my teeth) since third grade.  The dental assistant was pretty surprised by this and combine that with my poor personal oral hygiene, I was expecting all my teeth to be riddled with holes, falling apart and rotting away.

After sitting and waiting for a while dreading the worst, the dentist finally came back in and after poking at my teeth with something metal to make sure there was no pain, he simply stated my teeth were great except for some tartar build up.  So I get to go back in a month to have them thoroughly cleaned (I'm hoping the tartar isn't what is holding my teeth together).  I'm thinking, however, that my dentist is trying to milk my insurance by having me come back multiple times for short periods.

Well, I was thinking that I should probably be more diligent with my brushing.  I discussed the matter with DaNae and realized that I hate the flavor of toothpaste.  It leaves an after taste that lasts for hours and I've never liked it. So I thought that if they had cheeseburger flavored toothpaste I would probably brush like four or five times a day.  And then I saw this:

Bacon Toothpaste

and I thought, its not cheeseburger flavored but its the next best thing...I might have to splurge someday.

30k

I just reached 30 thousand words in one of stories.  Yep 30,000 words written.  I wish I had a dollar for each one of them. Maybe someday. 

I looked up novel lengths the other day and I was way off.  I was thinking 150,000 words, but it turns out that most publishers consider a book over 50,000 words to be a novel .  I'm 3/5's the way there.  Of course, I'm not quite half done with the story if you look at my initial outline.  Actually my outline isn't helping me much other than reminding me of the ideas I had for the story.  I originally had what was happening right now happen two chapters ago and then the story took a detour, it'll probably take some more. 

I'm actually feeling more and more hopeful about the whole thing.  I've been averaging over a thousand words a day.  and at this rate this book should be done by the end of march and then I'll have to decide to right the next one in the series or continue one of the stories I've already started, or start another one that has been burning a hole in my brain.

woot woot! 

follow up...

In case you missed it, I challenged myself:

http://extra-toe.blogspot.com/2011/01/who-you-calling-addicted.html

I officially have 11 days left and I'm sitting here at 11:30am watching a movie on netflix with my wife.  This has been the common theme of my life for the last week or more, well maybe not watching movies at 11:30am but I haven't been abstaining from the tech/media influences until 5pm.

At first I was down on myself, but I realized that the heart of my goal, was to quit doing one thing so I could have more time for something else.  I wanted to write more.  And well I've written more.  One of my stories that I started couples years ago, that has been brewing in my brain for over 7 years, sat around 20k words for two years now.  After this last week and the little bit I did the week before, its up to 30k words.  I tapped out 7k words last monday through friday.  Thats an average of 1k a day and if I did that everyweek I could have two full length novels done by years end.  So for the new month resolution I'm shooting for 1k a day.   Weekends and days homes are the hardest with distractions and chores, but I have made a small change already, and now I'm ready to make another small change that will hopefully make a big difference in the future.

I have another goal set for the beginning of March already, and hopefully the weather cooperates.