a life in details

Week 16 Goals and Routines Wrap-up

Goals, planning, routines, Weekly No Responses »

Apr 182012

Last week went pretty well; I didn’t get very far with the pyjamas (pre-washed the material!) or have a singing session and I still haven’t finished all my thank-yous, but I’m up to date on baths which are obviously a priority!! Actually I do have quite a lot of discardia progress from my week and had a busy and productive weekend on the whole, much less sleeping than usual and some things are just taking a bit longer than planned, but that’s OK. I didn’t need to buy new trousers in the end (I did go and look but couldn’t find any I liked, but then came home and found two pairs in the closet that’ll do me for a while!) but I lost all the weight I’d put on so that’s good.

For this week then…

Weeknights:

1 social thing: SL on Thursday
1 gratuitous bath! (Wednesday or failing that Friday)
30min piano x3 at least
30min cleaning/clearing up x3
Do at least 2 thank-yous each day, get everything done except the Japanese ones
Make significant decluttering progress
Admin stuff (payday is Friday, balance budget on Thurs)

Also

Daytime: finish drafting JP letters
Morning workouts x2

Weekend:

Project Pyjama!
At least one Long walk!
Moving adventures: get some flat viewings, wander around a new area or go and pick up moving boxes.
Lose 2lb this week and the reward will be a new top I think? Unless something else occurs to me. I’m low on cardigans!
Songwriting/jamming session on Monday hopefully.
Finish and post the last of the thank-yous.

Some thoughts on a few of the routines I’m trying to implement:

Stop feeling so drained and tired (and often grumpy): The thought occurred to me that we do best by the people around us if we make sure we’re in the best possible mood we can be in, as much of the time as possible. Helping to see the stress-reducing tasks as a service to those near and dear to me seems to make them that much easier to commit to!
Be physically stronger, have more stamina and fewer aches and pains: I’m confident I can commit to 2 mornings a week and at least one long walk at weekends, plus normal walking – it seems manageable, works well, and gives my schedule some variety. I’m trying to be more active around the house as well and not avoiding doing things, that seems to be key to being active and fit in general. My foot feels better although my stretches fell off at the weekend. At least I have a guaranteed routine for them on work mornings.
I found time for two baths last week! And I think it has made me feel calmer. I didn’t think I could bear to sit and do nothing but actually, sitting in the dark in the bath is very soothing.
5-a-day: I had giant salads and at least a couple of servings of fruit three days running and – surprise – my chapped lip problem cleared up almost completely. I think maybe it’s reacting to the air conditioning at work a bit today, but it’s much better and I FEEL much better in myself for getting more nutritious food in my system so that’s got to be a good thing.

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From last week…

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Apr 182012

A couple of shots from last week:

We Built This City: this is the site of the Pinnacle, the City’s newest tower. It looks like it’s going to be phenomenal!

Rainbow from last Thursday

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Uplifting Routines

discipline, Goals, Priorities, routines No Responses »

Apr 122012

I’ve had a good think about basic things I want to change, routines from the past to which I’d like to return, and even some ambitious foresight-inspired wishcasting to imagine new improved habits I’d like to learn. Things I’m doubtful of my ability to achieve are in italics, for now.

Desired outcomes:

I want to stop feeling so drained and tired (and often grumpy)
I want to be physically stronger, have more stamina and fewer aches and pains
I want to find a way to do the things I need to do for myself without begrudging them or feeling the least reluctance. (I’ve made this transition with cleaning at home – it used to be a chore but now I see it as an uplifting and de-stressing process and I quite relish it.)

Things I’m already doing:

Morning stretches, first thing every day (by the window!)
At least SOME daily writing, goal-setting, progress-tracking and wishcasting
At least one long (2h+) walk at weekends, 2 if it’s a long weekend and we’re both around
Some sort of cleaning usually happens at some point most days!

Things I’d (ideally) like to stop doing:

Coming home from work and just collapsing on the sofa and not getting anything productive or enjoyable done the whole evening.
Not getting enough that’s productive or enjoyable done on the weekends. I look forward to the weekends so much but never quite seem to get from them as much as I expect.
Watching TV just for the sake of it – especially re-runs and programmes I really don’t care about! Life is too short.
Watching TV in the morning before work (this frustrates me massively because I get up early to have time to write but obviously can’t concentrate when the TV is on! So I might as well just get up an hour later for all the benefit it has!)
Watching movies to fall asleep. (I’ve been doing this for so long but the light can’t be good for the eyes, surely!)
Chain-drinking coffee and tea all day at work. (I don’t have anything against morning coffee but surely all this caffeine can’t be healthy and it’s probably not doing my teeth any good either!)
Worrying about ANYTHING that I can’t do something active towards. This is the big drain on my energy and happiness.

Things I’d like to introduce:

Some kind of exercise beyond just walking, on a daily basis. This will be the hardest thing to fit in as all the changing of kit and so on bugs me! But I miss the fitness I had when I was properly working out and doing strength training. Maybe I need to come up with something I can do in my pyjamas, and add that to a minimum number of proper workout sessions a week? I will start by aiming to get in 3 30-minute exercises sessions a week + 1 hour of walking each day.
Foot stretches – these need to be done regularly throughout the day and I need to not skip days, otherwise it’ll never get any better.
Daily household status check: there are certain areas (washing up, clearing away dry laundry, watering plants etc.) that need to be done regularly in order to avert disaster! I’m doing OK with doing a bit of cleaning each day, but I need to add on 10 minutes to make sure all the bases are clear with these little things.
Until we move, I want to try and do one small thing towards moving first thing in the morning (before work) – then that will hopefully stop me feeling fidgety and anxious about it all day.
Study time at home. I do a fair bit at work, but I have visions of myself at home, using some of my extended weekend time to do a bit extra, or get into something completely new! It would be nice to ring-fence at least a half-hour or so for this each weekend and make a habit of it.
Daily language reading. I made a good start on this and find it quite enjoyable, but I have some catching up to do if I want to finish Harry Potter this year. It’s a good after-dinner activity, provides an opportunity to rest on the sofa while avoiding bad TV.
Mid-week baths. In an attempt at overt and deliberate relaxation, I would like to nominate one work-night a week to have a nice hot bath and read something frivolous! As well as making the weekend one that I occasionally find time for a regular thing. Two baths a week?! I’m pretty sure that’s the height of decadence and guaranteed to achieve a blissful and calm lifestyle! That said, finding one night a week to do this would really mean a deliberate cut-back in my other activities so a definite commitment to being more relaxed.
More in-depth writing time. I’ve really gotten out of this (the notebooks are piling up!) and am lucky if I write more than a couple of pages a day. This is partly because I’ve been literally so busy with actual other tasks and partly, I think, because of the shallowness attention span that comes with watching too much TV. Particularly up to the period when we move, I’d like to do some focused reanalysis of my long-term beliefs and assumptions because a lot of things have changed and I need to move on. This would be great for mental/emotional spring-cleaning and a good activity to accompany moving home and purging our clutter.
Where writing’s concerned, I want to get into the habit of summing up the day’s food-related occurrences, analyse what went well and what I struggled with. Looking at what I’m actually doing honestly and in detail has always helped me make progress in the past and if I make a daily practice of learning whatever I can I think I can crack the code.
Daily gratitude journal, scrapbooking and photo-taking – all these things help to cheer me up.
More fruit and veg! I used to get probably double my five-a-day as a matter of course but this has gotten really off track and I think it shows in my wellbeing. I want to aim to eat at least one piece of fruit and hopefully a vegetable during the day, and have at least 3 servings with my main meal, and make a commitment to it.
At least some piano daily
Vocal warm-ups – try to get a few of these in each day.
Weekly song-jamming session

Hmmmm that’s a lot of habits to make/break! What’s the best way to introduce them? One at a time or make a giant list and try to go for an increased percentage each week? I’ve got a total of 114 available points for the week so far (15 daily items, 6 weekly and 3 exercise sessions). Anyway first things first, I’m off to have a bath

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Real life surprises…

change, Goals, thoughts No Responses »

Apr 122012

I seem to find myself having a lot to write about at the moment and things are getting a bit out of sequence! Hopefully this will all make sense in the end.

This morning I was walking to work pondering things and the thought occurred to me that although my dreams and goals are quite detailed and rehearsed, real life always comes as a bit of a surprise to me. In my dream life I know exactly where I’d be living and what the outcome of all my endeavours would be, and how I would spend my (probably totally overestimated amount of) time. My dreams never really come true though, I know a lot of the time I default on the targets I’ve set myself and I guess my expectations are too high and unrealistic to start with. There are massive gaps in my imaginative plans, huge piles of money that appear from nowhere and years and years of effort condensed into mere months! And yet obviously my outcomes look great from where I am and I know exactly what I’d do.

In contrast, I don’t really plan real life on a realistic, long-term scale all that much. I think part of my attitude is that hey, so much of it is out of my control, I have no idea what’s ACTUALLY going to happen so why not just imagine what might? What I get in the end is nothing like the dream but most of the time I’m happy about it anyway and grateful that most of the time I have stability and my needs are always always met. It’s so funny because I am such a control freak in my daily life, how I use my time and so on – but in the big picture aspect I am much more likely to say, oh well that’s life – and let things unfold, because life IS random and because if you knew everything that was coming and it all went exactly to plan, you’d be bored.

The rub is that if there are some things I absolutely do not want to miss out on experiencing and achieving in life, I really do need to make some realistic plan as to how these need to come about otherwise I definitely will run out of time and resources. One big example of this is that I quite had my heart set on taking HH to Japan next year as it’ll be 5 years since I was last there. In my fantasy world of course we would have unlimited resources and be living the high life by then, and what I was imagining is that we’d go for two or three months, hire a car and drive all around the country seeing the sites! But in reality, if we go, we’ll probably be trying to find two weeks in between work, we’ll have to be selective about where we go and what/who we see, and the cost?! It’s at least six months’ worth of savings even after all our current obligations are paid off. That’s a six month delay in setting aside savings or building up a deposit on a house – a house which is likely not going to be the mansion in the country in which we would already be living, if life went according to my imagination!

Clearly I need to get my act together if I actually want to have a shot at living the life I really want – this is something I have to work on. At the same time, I’m OK with life unfolding as it will. When I was in last in Japan four years ago I didn’t even know HH and in that time I’ve met, fallen in love with, married (twice) and gone through all sorts of crazy stuff with him as well as travelling to a new continent and meeting a new family. I could never have predicted any of that but it all worked out pretty well…

That said, things have been very oriented around practical survival for a while, and maybe it’s about time for a return to my lofty-goal-setting ways! Who knows? The bar is just sitting there waiting to be raised!

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Daily Details: 10 April

Days Out, Details, Gratitudes, London No Responses »

Apr 112012

Some great weather today – sunny and then rainy and sunny again. The sun was really trying extra hard in between the showers. Some great Shard pictures, and a Gherkin for good measure:

I met up with J after work and we found a funky French bread place on the edge of Borough Market, where they serve coffee and hot chocolate in bowls with great decorations!

Then we wandered around for a while and eventually found a pretty nice Indian restaurant and had a very decent dinner.

And I got to use my “new” bag today!!

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Weekly goals and weekend goals

Goals, planning, Weekly No Responses »

Apr 102012

We’re going back into a few weeks of “regular” scheduling now, after several weeks smattered with extra days off here and there. For me there are six straight weeks (because the one bank holiday falls on my normal day off) before we get into Moving Season and I’m feeling quite happy about it actually, I quite like coming to work as it’s easy and my coworkers are lovely! I just need to learn to perfect the amount of things I schedule around it – and replace the excitement of random days off with goals and activities that’ll keep things varied.

One thing I’ve noticed is that having separate sets of “projects” or tasks for the weekday evenings and the weekends really helps me feel happy and excited about each day – I like having specific tasks and enjoyable activities to come home to and the challenge of achieving something concrete on my days off. So you’ll probably find me here on a Tuesday outlining goals for the week/end.

Kicking off with this week, week 1 of 6, Week 15 of the year…

Weeknights:

1 social thing: J on Tuesday
1 gratuitous bath!
30min piano x3
30min cleaning/clearing up x3
Chip away at thank-yous each day – see how many more I can get done, currently stands at 10
Order all photos
Burn all CDs
Work on setting more time aside for journaling
Make significant decluttering progress

Weekend:

Our wedding list is arriving! Exciting! Need to work out how to store stuff and what we can throw away that’s old.
Project Pyjama! I never have enough PJ trousers and find them annoyingly expensive in comparison to “real” clothes! I was hunting for cheap ones and then found this pretty great looking green spotted cotton jersey for just £4 a metre (let’s face it it’s hard to resist things when they’re cheap AND green!) so I am going to have a go at making some myself. Would be great if I can get 3 pairs out of the two metres I’ve ordered, will have to adjust my existing pattern a bit and buy some elastic. Excited about this though, trousers usually come together quite quickly and the jersey will be forgiving – the reward being PJ abundance!
At least one Looooooong walk!
Lose 2lb this week and buy new work trousers as a reward (concrete rewards give me something to focus on!)
Various adminny bits and pieces to sort out
Songwriting/jamming session on Monday hopefully.

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Daily Details & a mending project – Easter Sunday

Creative, Details, Happy Moments, life, Sewing No Responses »

Apr 092012

YAY new camera for Moose After much fiddling about it’s all working now – here are some details from yesterday (Easter Sunday)…

No chocolate at Moose Mansions this Easter, but the treat of opening a new pack of Lazy Sunday coffee for breakfast…

One of my favourite corners at the moment – Gwin the Penguin, Fred the last surviving pot-plant from 2008, the sugar flowers from our wedding cake, some cute cards, and photos from SE Asia

HH’s amazing mustard chicken with roast veg – can’t take any credit for how pretty this looked (or how good it tasted!)

Bit of a soggy day out but some more shots of the blossom on our street…

My project for today was fixing the handles on one of my old favourite bags – the handles broke last year but it’s still the best bag, very roomy with lots of pockets!

Sad bag with broken handles

So I thought I’d try making new handles and it gave me a chance to work with some of the leftover green silk from my wedding dress (any excuse really!). I found a spare pyjama cord to go down the centre which saved messing about with interfacing:

Cutting lengths of silk on the ironing board

I cut two doubled-over lengths of silk, sewed them down the side, trimmed the seam allowance and turn them through, threading the cord up the middle. Then sewed a line at each end to hold the cord, sewed the ends together and hemmed them and voila! It’s almost a brand new bag!

The silk should be pretty strong but it frays easily once it gets caught so we’ll see how long they last… it took maybe an hour and a half to do so I can always do it again if they break. Can’t wait to start using it again! I’ve missed sewing for the last couple of weeks but the great thing about jumping in the deep end with the wedding dress, is that little projects like this come quite easily. I think the bag cost £40 originally so it’s well worth saving!

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Daily Details: 4 April

Details, Nature No Responses »

Apr 052012

It rained last night, for the first time in AGES. I got wet walking home and I didn’t even care. Everything smelled so good, the trees and the mud. And then along the street to home I walked under the dripping blossom and it reminded me of when we used to go to night-time cherry blossom viewings (夜桜) in Hirosaki – invariably rainy affairs but so atmospheric. I didn’t have any night-blossom pictures but here are a collection of old (mostly rainy!) sakura photos (mostly from Hirosaki):

We went out to the Hummingbird for cupcakes at lunchtime. That’s reason enough to celebrate in itself! (I didn’t manage to get a pic of mine before I scoffed it, but take a look at the website…) While we were there we chatted about living abroad and how it’s one of the best experiences and it reminded me how lucky I was to have those years in Japan. I can’t wait to go back and it’s comforting to think that, although we can’t afford it at the moment, a return is extremely likely at some point, one of the more likely things in our lives. Sometimes life seems so completely random, but it feels good to have a strong connection to at least one place in Asia as well as one in Africa.

I’ve started doing my morning stretches in front of the living room window. It doesn’t have a great view, but there are trees in gardens across the street and at that time (almost exactly dawn, this month) the sky is so beautiful and everything is so quiet. It’s a great way to start the day, and a great motivator for doing something that I know is good for me but sometimes feels a bit hard to drag myself out of bed for. After a couple of weeks I’m already starting to feel an improvement, and the more I do it the more I’m convinced that stretching is crucial for relieving that general muscular fatigue that makes me feel so dull and lethargic. It’s important to have beautiful and soul-replenishing routines to wake up to.

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Potential April Theme: Joys of Spring?

change, thoughts, time 1 Response »

Apr 042012

Every so often (about once a week) I’ll have a day where I feel like doing absolutely nothing. This is irrespective of the amount of energy I have or the amount of stuff I have to do – even if it’s fun and exciting stuff – it’s like I need one day a week where I can pretend that nothing is urgent, and it’s not even about having the liberty to choose what to do, it’s like I’m frozen in this weird but somehow satisfying laziness.

I say satisfying because I don’t even actively enjoy it – which is why I guess I tend to be happier being busy and can go without doing nothing for weeks at a time when it’s really necessary. I know I can break out of it quite simply by reviewing my projects or even making a simple list of all the possibilities of things that could be done, and yet on Nothing Days I resist even getting that far, in the knowledge that all I want is to scale it back to the bare minimum.

I’m not sure if it’s really necessary or even healthy, but at the moment there’s so little on my plate that I feel like I may as well invest some time in learning how to properly relax. It feels like for the past several months I’ve been running purely on necessity, because there’s so much that’s needed to be done, with a few well-worn vices thrown in to instigate a “timeout” by default when I’ve had enough of being busy – but what about using free time to learn to purposefully and joyfully relax? The joy to be found in elective time is mostly a matter of perspective – am I enjoying doing nothing? Am I doing nothing in a place that makes me feel good or makes the experience a something of its own? Am I doing nothing with someone who makes me laugh (and therefore it’s fun nothing)?

I need to switch gears. In terms of physical tasks, there’s so much less that I have to do, even after I’ve gone back and done all the things that were getting neglected before. I can make more work for myself, but I’m also tense and distracted by the house-move that’s hanging over us, I’m not really feeling settled and maybe a bit of learning how to relax, guilt-free, in a purposeful manner, would not only help me now but set some good habits for the future. Not to mention that, with time on my hands, I’d do well to devote more time to reclaiming the stellar routines I had before, more regular exercise, self-care, home care, cooking… Maybe I just need to pick one completely non-obligatory frivolous activity, or maybe I should start by trying to string together as many gratuitous moments of joy as I can.

Life is different now, and my time is up for grabs.

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