• Hours trained 4/1,000
• Salads consumed:47/1,000

Notable Achivements: none

Lessons learned:

Yeah, all those good habits I painstakenly build over the course of a month? Gone now. Argh.

I basically start over at point zero, just with three kilo less. It’s only-salad-and-no-latte time again, at least until I got back into my good habits. And running. I need to start running again.

See you guys next week, I’m feeling kinda pouty right now.

• Gym visited: 6/1,000
• Hours trained 4/1,000
• Salads consumed:46/1,000

Notable Achivements: none

Lessons learned:

Well, I’ve been traveling, visiting home to be exact – in order to brave three different birthday celebrations. Which means Food, lots of food. Plus alcohol. And sitting around doing nothing but chatting. And braving the fact that my family has really, really BAD eating habits and sees feeding people until they can’t move as an act of love. Can’t say I didn’t expect gaining weight during those two weeks, but I didn’t expect it to be that much. Blargh.

Lets just say it tooks it toll and I can do the 5kg achievement all over again.

It’s good to be back on track.

• Gym visited: 6/1,000
• Hours trained 4/1,000
• Salads consumed:44/1,000

Notable Achivements: none this week

Lessons learned:

I’m coming closer to my goal of a half kilogram per week, I’m now just a little more than a pound behind the plan. I did the jogging – it feels great – and the cooking, and things are just plodding along.

But this week I realized one important thing:

It isn’t as dramatic as I made it out to be in the beginning. No starving, no grandstanding, no excessive renunciation, no loud declarations to the world. No suffering for beauty or martyrdom involved. Just me, a scale and some mindfulnes in how and when I eat. Step back, if the weight stagnates, eat more if it drops to steeply. There are still compulsions to stuff my face when chocolate and cake are near me, but they’re just that – compulsion. It’s not as if I have to obey them.

How many plans failed because of our human tendency to revel in drama? It’s so not necessary!

Plans for this week:

Celebrating my birthday. And alot of birthdays in my close family. :) I’ll continue to take my weight every day, although a family visit is coming up and with that heaps of good, tasty food – and the fact that my mom tends to take offence at people watching their weight. The former I’m looking forward to, the later I don’t know how to deal with yet.  The best might be just to not talk about it, but she’s going to pick up on my changed habbits… Erf.

• Gym visited: 6/1,000
• Hours trained 3/1,000
• Salads consumed:40/1,000

Notable Achivements: 5 kg down.

Lessons learned:

Yes, yes, YES! /dance

It’s all about movement. As much as I prefer to be a couch potato, I unfortionally need to move in order to convince my body to use up excess fat. As much as I try and whine and struggle (I’m lazy) – there’s no way around getting my arse in gear. Took long walks last week, and well – it’s the reason I finally made the 5kg mark.

It actually would’ve been more, but well, the weekend’s never nice to me. During the week it’s easy to keep up with the changes I’ve made – my office has a great canteen with a faboulous salad buffet and I don’t eat at home. At all. See the problem? I’ve got a tough time with food on Saturday and Sunday.

Plans for this week:

1. Jogging
   I want to start running at least three times. The weather’s nice, I’ve got good running shoes, I have no excuse NOT to do it, to be honest. I need a way to fit it into my daily schedule though, and I need to fit it so, that I have no wiggle room – otherwise I’m going to wiggle myself out of jogging. Finding a good no-wiggle-room trigger for running will be the hardest part of the endavor, actually.
2. Cook for myself on Sunday.
   Which means I have to have done two things on Saturday:
   1. Pick what I wanted to eat and buy the groceries. (‘coz I only have yoghurt and catfood home right now)
   2. Get my kitchen into shape, so that I can actually cook. It’s been used for nothing but a place to make tea and coffe for more than three months now, and well, that’s visible.

Those two things seem doable to me. Hopefully starting to jog will allow me to catch up with my original plan of a pound per week. :)

Well, lets face it, it’s highly unlikely I win the lottery anytime soon¹. Waiting for another kind of windfall or to be discovered or similiar stuff before I dare to chase my dreams is… ineffecient.

Not to say, kind of dumb.

Understandable, yes. Human, yes. But also very dumb.

Luckely neither you nor me have wait for a lucky break, because there’s alot of stuff any of us CAN do right here and right now:  I can start stop worrying and/or daydreaming and just get down to business. You can do… what ever you think it’s best – how shall I know about your own, personal situation?

But what I do know  is that everything in life has a price-tag attached, even if it’s “just” the time spent to practising the necessary skills. Some things in life are bargains. Some prices are just plain to high. What’s one person’s bargain is the other person’s no-go. There’s no way to know what’s what without thinking about what one’s willing to pay for one’s dreams.

This is my list – or at least some items on it, because I’m sure it’s far from complete. But even this few parts helps me to figure out my way.

What I am not willing to do:

1. Work-for-hire, especially on comissioned paintings.
   I don’t want to exchange working for one boss with working for another. I know artists who successfully handle comissions and I envy them. Work-for-hire can provide a good, reliable income. But for me it sucks all the interesting bits out of that art-thing. I want to be able to freely pick and chose what I do.
   That’s the reason I love having my day-job.
2. Keeping company of arseholes, self-righteous whiners – or okay people who just irk me.
   Delete button’s are my friend. Ban buttons are my friend. I don’t have to talk to them if I can stand them – even if they’re decent people otherwise. Sometimes people dislike each other, just because personalities clash. That’s okay! That’s where it pays to be polite but firm!
3. Administrating/moderating a forum.
   Having one for the comic would be nice – in a half year or so when it’s etablished – but the necessary administration and moderation work needs time and energy that I’d rather put into the comic itself. My meager attempts to outsource moderation were unsuccessful s0 far. Plus, and that’s my main-worry to be honest, forums & comments attract arseholes, trolls and uninvited and thusly unhelpful criticismn.

What I am willing to do:

1. Doubling the time I’m working on my comic
   And with that I mean doing the necessary ground work – like finishing the webpage, writing, drawing, everything that’s necessary. Daydreaming’s nice, but supremly unhelpful when it comes to getting things done.
   I’ll need to restructure my day to do so and cut down my slacking time, but it’ll be worth it.
2. Sticking to my guns, even when things get hard
   Writing (and drawing) Siendes gets… emotionally complicated sometimes. Thing is, it’s the emotionally complicated parts are the ones that resound most, it’s where truth shines and the meat of the story is. Censoring this parts is doing the story and the readers a disservice – even if it means that certain characters cease to be the paragons of strength and goodness I originally envisioned. People are full of shadows, and characters should be too.
   I must stop shying away from this fundamental pieces of the story. Telling a truth is the fundament of any writer.
3. Dealing with my issues regarding self-worth and visibility.
   I’ve got still alot of growing to do until I stop standing in my own way. I did mature alot in the last two years, be it as a person, as artist or software developer, but I’ve been never been so aware that I’ll never be done with that growing thing.
4. Sticking with my dayjob
   I’m happily doing that. It keeps alot of worries at bay and having it means I can concentrate on my art with a clear head. That alone is a worthwile effect. Plus: I don’t want to give up the little luxerys I so got used to. ;)
5. Figuring out what I truely want out of life
   Or: Making peace with the fact I might never know.
   This is a big one. There’s alot of noise about what a woman of my age SHOULD want and every single should is extremly unhelpful. I’ll need some time to sort things out and mull over them. There are some vague ideas and most importantly a direction I want to go, but nothing’s concrete yet.
   That’s okay though, in the thing I need to see is the next step, and that’s doable.

As always, borders can and will change. New things will be added, older things deleted, but as always – it pays thinking about it. Otherwise you’ll only find out that you had a personal “DO NOT WANT” there, if somebody accidientally (or totally intentionally) traipsed over your borders like over an old rug. In the end it’s what sovereignty² is about.

Who’d thunk that following one’s dreams would be so… prosaic?