October Goals -- and how I will achieve them

Starting these on 9/30 for an extra day, here goes nothing:

Lifting

  • Achieve 10% body fat
  • Lift 5-6 days a week
How I will achieve this: Automatically by my routine. The 6th day will be super light and short before long running. Even 10-15 minutes is worth doing. 

Running

  • Hit 4-5 miles per day during the week and 14-16 on Saturdays
  • Run the St. George Half and the Haunted Half
How I will achieve this: Automatically by my routine. I'm already hitting that mileage. 

Rendering

  • Do all the Drawtober prompts. This is slightly more than 1 piece of art per week. 
  • Finish Pixar in a Box
  • Do 25 CtrlPaint videos and exercises (trying for 31 or even the full thing)
  • Finish basic Maya review. 
  • Continue with daily warmup sequence, Drawabox, etc. 
  • Watch shows every night. 
  • Game for 30 minutes a night at least, and 45 minutes on Friday/Saturday, optionally with some gamedev time too, and time to review Pokemon strategies. Exception: Monday night due to school and work, 5-10 minutes is fine. Sunday is also a grace day where 15 minutes is all right. Need to finish 1 game per month. 
  • Finish 4 pieces of 3D work
  • message friends regularly (I guess this can count as networking; wasn't sure exactly where to put it :) ) because I am terrible at it
This is stuff I've been stuck on forever. I'd like to do a lot more, but even if I do just this, I will be happy.

Also the Drawtober prompts will be fun this year:


How I will achieve this: Simply put, 45-60 minutes of art per day. Which means we will need to get creative. Gaming will be the first evening activity after cleaning. Watching shows is already built-in to my schedule -- multitasking during PT, dinnertime, and while getting ready for bed. Message people nightly. 

Coding

  • Finish basic DSA review completely, and start my next study sequence.
  • Finish all the code for my master's thesis. 
  • Finish the first draft of my master's thesis. 
  • Finish my part 1 overview of shaders. 
  • Outline Fortune Quest and decide on a game engine for it. 
How I will achieve this: 45-60 minutes of coding per day. Which means that I might need to add some into walking sessions, while riding roller coasters, or before bed. Working on game dev will be a nice reward at the end. I can also blend it with my gaming session. I will try and pick one data structure to focus on per week. 

Hacking

  • 2 videos/assignments per day of the Google IT certificate until it's done (not sure if will be finished by end of Oct though). I've been doing this since 2017 and it should not have taken until 2023 to finish. 
  • Finish at least a chapter of Ethical Hacking: A Hands-On Introduction to Breaking In. 
  • Begin a homelab, no matter how small. 
How I will achieve this: Google IT while eating my first snack of the day, and Ethical Hacking in the evenings. It's optional all evenings except Friday and Saturday. I kinda want to start up Pihole for my first homelab project, possibly on a Raspberry Pi Zero, but whatever I do should require the least amount of equipment possible. I'm also not entirely sure how to test that Pihole works when I already have Ublock Origin running, but it's supposed to do additional blocking. 

Writing

  • Hit 2000 words a week of Eternisummer, and submit a chapter each week. 
  • Finish Pokemon fanfic outline. 
    • write missing fanfiction reviews
  • Stay the course with poetry, duolingo, and dream journaling. 
  • read one book a week.
  • Stay on top of writing group readings, webcomics, NoSleep, fanfics. 
How I will achieve this: Write in the mornings before gymming and hit 286 words per day, logging it on WriteTrack. Pokemon fanfiction will be a warm-up, as will poetry! I will have a reading session, either on my hammock or my couch, every night! I usually satisfy the evil green Duolingo owl while taking a πŸ’©πŸ’©πŸ’©πŸ’© which means that I am often speaking foreign languages out loud in there. πŸ™ˆ

Rehearsing

  • Master my October 15th hymns completely by like Monday October 2nd
  • Start playing once or twice a month on a real piano
  • Get hymn sequence down and keep practicing drills and fun stuff 
  • Stay the course with clarinet and voice, will re-evaluate once piano is down. 
How I will achieve this: Lunchtime piano/clarinet/voice practice with evening overflow. At least once a week if not 7 days a week, we should run through each of our prelude/postlude songs too. 

Riding

  • Accomplish one task per day in the following domains: Embedded Artistry For Beginners, mathematics review in-depth, PLC programming, OSEE/OpGuides Opinionated Engineering 
  • Do at least one theme park activity per week: fall fair, Lagoon, water slides, and/or Planet Coaster/Planet Zoo/NoLimits
  • I'd like to read my coaster engineering book again, in addition to Show Networks and Control, which I am reading nightly before meditation. 
  • Work on theme park daily
How I will achieve this: This is my weakest area. I will pick an assignment for each in the morning and think about them in 3 separate blocks, then work on them during a break, OR during a brief block. 

Dreaming AKA improving imagination and visualization skills

  • Nightly meditation, daydreaming, and lucid dreaming prep. 
  • perfect visualization: human figure from all angles (practice at least 10 minutes per night towards this goal as part of meditation -- which means getting to bed a little bit earlier -- I may not finish it this month but I need to consistently practice)
  • earlier phase training (Raduga) before it's night and I'm getting all sleepy 
How I will achieve this: Shutting down at least 45 minutes before true bedtime -- usually no later than 7:45 pm during the week. For the earlier phase training, all we need is 5 minutes a day to train the techniques as a start. I'll be in total wizardry mode eventually, but first, I just need consistency. 

Additionally, I will stick to a cleaning schedule:
  • Tuesday: Kitchen, living room, laundry room
  • Wednesday: take out recycling
  • Thursday: shopping
  • Friday: bedroom, bathroom 
  • Saturday: take out trash
  • Sunday: laundry, account for finances
In general, the hour a day each of art and technical studies, plus ideally 30 minutes of writing, means that I will have to rely on evening sessions, and stop skimping on Saturday sessions. 

I will evaluate these goals nightly and try to post updates here. 

September 30th (Saturday) evaluation: 
  • Started the day with a cybersecurity quiz
  • Lifted for about 5 minutes -- bit of rotator cuff and elbow pain so will take it easy for a bit. Saturday lifting sessions are usually short due to long run. I was just trying to do an extra set of rear delts and some bodyweight push-ups and squats. 
  • Ran 16 miles
  • Swam for like 10 minutes plus 15 minutes hot tub. Closest I'm gonna get to an outdoor water slide, but now pools are also closing. 
  • Caffeine-loaded because it's the only way I'm gonna get anything done after running 16
  • Pivoted to art, did for 45 minutes (after a long delay messing with my broken swivel chair, hurts to sit man), ordered swivel chair part replacement and a pedal and headphone jack adapter for my ancient Casio keyboard
  • Coded for 40 minutes: DSA, MS thesis code, and gave myself my control assignments: 
    • 1 mapping shape question because I suck at those
    • 1 PLC quiz question
    • Reading at least a page of my first EE book, Understanding the Digital World
    • Embedded Artistry: Learn Python 3 the Hard Way, Numbers and Math section
  • And my graphics assignments:
    • I installed the Triangle.NET Unity ported library, and next I need to create the triangle and visualize it
    • I haven't looked at my shader work for today so I'll pull it up and try to understand the last few lines of the green screen 
    • As part of my gaming session, I'll work on the Fortune Quest outline for a bit -- so after dinner
  • Stressed about how I am not at Lagoon yet and it's almost 3 pm and it might rain and I need to get back in time for dinner and holy HELL clouds are depressing 
  • prepped for lagoon
  • wrote 1 (one) sentence of my novel
  • did 6 minutes of music (6 minutes, slim shady, you're on) including 1 runthrough of one of my first batch of hymns to play as a ward pianist. will need to do a LOT more at work
  • headed to Lagoon for a very brief trip
  • lagoon was wicked crowded, piddled around with some readings and math + PLC questions, plus googled some raspberry pi projects to start my homelab soon hopefully
  • went home, showered, went to dinner/dessert
  • banged my head against the wall on my current PLC question, but figured it out and got it right :)
  • read for just a few minutes
  • played some games: Adastra, Plastic Placid Duck Simulator and this was for about 30 minutes
  • After that, I was wiped out, so watched a quick show and went to bed. 
So no, I did not achieve all the goals I had set, but it was a good prep day, and more productive than many previous days. I cannot slack on writing any longer though...

Here's the math question:

October 1st (Sunday) evaluation: 
  • Started the day with a 0.8 mile walk, felt amazing
  • Did one cybersecurity reading
  • Began some laundry
  • Did art for about 40-45 minutes, but did not get to CtrlPaint -- will try to do later -- and am a bit stuck on my current 3D piece 
  • did a walk
  • started coding: CS warmups, CG warmups (got today's assignment -- try to understand the smoothstep function in GLSL and its parameters), MS thesis work

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