Ravings of an Undead Cheese Minion

Lagoon is closed except for the Biergarten. All fall festivals are closed, no more haunts or pumpkin patches. Outdoor water parks were shuttered months ago.  So it's indoor season. The season of being freezing cold, entering a rec center, doing an extra workout to warm up, and then doing water slides inside while pretending that it's summer. Then getting into the hot tub, then changing out of my wet clothes and venturing back out into the cold.  In addition to that, I'll take walks at Nielsen's Grove Park and go on the swings. But that's about it.  It's enjoyable, yes, but not much compared to the lighthearted fun of summer. It can feel kind of somber.  For a few weeks, this will feel quite nice. After a Saturday morning long run, no obligations to do anything crazy because of the brevity of summer and fall. I need that rest period. But all too soon, the restlessness will start picking up, and I'll be chomping at the bit to get outside again. It usually hits...

Maybe I've used this title before, I don't know.  I'm getting my system under control. I flubbed it yesterday, but that happens. Most other days this week, I actually made it. Study and practice blocks as non-negotiables.  This is huge as it's the first time ever  that I actually felt like I was making consistent forward progress  without being explicitly forced to by a mandatory external obligation.  Will see what happens over the next few weeks. The system will  work. It has  to.  With that working, I'll have a better idea as to the timeline for my long-term goals. But the system has to be in place and cemented  first.  I'm sitting in a messy apartment that really needs to be cleaned, with a bunch of unachieved dreams strewn about the floor. I'm picking everything up and doing what I should have done 10 years ago. Once I am in full swing, then in about 2-4 years, I'll have made up for all that lost time. 

I actually got close yesterday. But I was tired during my art block, so I went way over, and then that compressed my writing block. Then music, code, and engineering were all compressed. Gaming was fine but I didn't do any dev. Now, to be fair, I did bank extra time off since it was Halloween. But I think I might need to break the 110 into segments with small breaks.  Even so. It is working.  Also Wilkerson Farm really needs to stop closing early without posting a notice online. Like holy crap that is terrible business tactics. 

It's actually going well so far. I have made more consistent progress in the last few days than I have in a long time.  The main things I need to make sure of are that I still get to bed on time, and that I keep my spaces clean. And I've only been gaming for 5-10 minutes instead of 20, so I need to fix that.  But if I treat my pursuits as non-negotiables just like a workout, this seems to work well. 

Sunday night until Monday morning, 7 pm to midnight. This is what no CI/CD does to you and why you should never join a company that “operates like a startup” even when they’re not one  Great for an early bird like me who values work life balance and goes to bed at 9:00 every night 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

It's simple. I keep missing my daily marks. I hit the 2-minute rule but that's it. I have to solve this issue of hardly making any forward momentum.  So, I'm setting a baseline goal of 90 minutes for personal work per day. It's not enough, but it's much more than I've been doing. Then, I will also have 20 minutes for gaming and game development. 110 minutes total. That's also not enough, but I have to start somewhere. This might be the ideal summer schedule actually.  So basically something like 25 minutes art (even though an hour is better, got to start at 25 since I haven't been doing enough ever since dreamworks cut me), 25 writing and reading, 15 music, 10 coding, 10 engineering, 5 visualization. I cannot compromise my workouts to do this.  I'll still need to clean a lot more too, and keep my trello boards organized. But let's see if I can do this. I might have to get very creative some days. 

I have a choir performance tomorrow at church. But I also went to the Haunted Forest this evening. I was kinda stressing about whether or not all the yelling and screaming would jack up my vocal cords. Well, turns out I don't scream that much unless I'm with other screamers. I mostly just laughed when I got jumpscared, with a shout here or there. I'll drink a lot of fluid tonight but at least for now it seems that I can talk OK. I won't be doing any more vocal work tonight at any rate.  And after all that I forgot to grab merch. Oh well, my wallet is probably happy about that. Except not really because I ate out three times today WHOOPS Also let's be real I'm not exactly carrying this choir. :D So even if I do feel hoarse tomorrow we're going to be fine.