Feb 9

An Update for Feb 2013

I have a terrible habit of not writing anything unless I feel I have something to say… which means I spend more time on Twitter saying ridiculously dumb things and quoting tv shows with hashtags instead. It’s easy to be semi-brilliant in 140 characters or less.

Lifestyle ChangeHestiah's Treadmill desk
The treadmill desk has been a huge success. I’ve worked myself up to being able to fun consistently for 3 minutes straight… which might not SEEM like a huge deal for many people, but when you’ve been such a lazy lump (as I have been) this is a helluva lot of exercise for such a short time. I also have managed to consistently walk at faster and faster speeds for longer distances.

At the request of many people on Twitter, I picked up some running shoes. I probably should have gone with walking shoes, but I wanted to do some running at some point and simply could not justify two pairs of shoes. I also bought some running socks which help give me cushioning and support. I rarely get blisters anymore (unless I push myself too far and walk 6+ miles in a day) and my feet don’t feel like they’re being set on fire anymore.

I’m more careful about what I’m eating and how much I’m eating. I didn’t realize until I started paying attention how much food I was consuming that I didn’t necessarily need. I wouldn’t wait until I actually felt full, so I’d just keep eating until that happened. By that point it was often too late and the over abundance of calories had been consumed.

I don’t have a scale, so I have little tangible evidence that any of the efforts I’m making are creating actual results, but I’ve hit a handful of milestones over the last few weeks. I can touch my toes and I can hold a plank for 10 seconds without collapsing or holding my breath. So even if I’m not losing any weight or changing my actual shape, I feel better. I sleep better. And some days I wake up and feel skinnier than I’ve felt in a long time.

Getting My Learnin’ On
School has been busy with taking 8 units a quarter (which is the same as taking 16 a semester for semester folks). Full time is a bit of an understatement for the amount of work and reading that’s required, but I’ve been managing to stay on schedule and get all of my assignments done on time.

The most interesting part of my classes this quarter is that one of them has to do with multicultural psychology and how to incorporate that into professional counseling services. It’s weird to watch as the other students learn about all of the -isms that exist. It’s appalling how many of them make racist, misogynistic, and homophobic comments without even realizing it. Or how many of them feel this need to point out how their god is guiding them through something or another.

I vent often on Twitter because my knee-jerk reaction is to tell these people that they’re stupid and don’t deserve to counsel anyone for anything ever, but then I remember that not everyone has a full, or even partial, understanding of the issues that people face out there today. While I feel like a lot of the information is stuff I’ve learned on my own without the guidance of a professor, I’m learning a lot about myself, my own biases, and how to handle myself in situations that infuriate me more than it should.

Balance and patience. I keep telling myself this… balance and patience.

Games and Time
In WoW I finally got [Double Agent] by leveling the warlock, and have been slowly working on getting her geared even just enough to run some LFR with friends now and again. She’s finally able to run all the current LFR’s, but come 5.2, that will change and it will be a grindfest again.

I’ve decided my hunter will be my next 90, though I doubt she’s going to get geared in any way. And then the Horde DK. That will complete my [Quintessential Quinet].

I started a little Hestiah on the EU realms, which has been kind of fun. The only downfall I hate is not having access to all of the beautiful mounts that I spent so much time acquiring. Otherwise, it’s a nice break. And it’s fun to get to chat and run lowbie dungeons with the UK folks I’ve gotten to know over the last few years on Twitter. I’m likely going to renew my subscription for at least another month or two. The experience has been rather fun overall… even if the random guild invite I took is being run by a guy who’s kind of a misogynist.

I’ve been playing WoW almost exclusively, even though I got Pokemon Crystal working with functional saving. I have Pokemon Emerald to work my way through. I still have Black/White to play through AND Black2/White2 to play through. I’ve got myself a LOT of Pokemon to play, it seems. I also picked up Fire Emblem: Awakening as a digital download. I should write about that experience all on it’s own.

Writing and Blogging
I’m trying to be better about actually reading blogs that I follow on a fairly regular basis. I’m going to try to use the iPad and a reader app for this, but I find that I spend a lot of time reading random things on the internet as they’re shared rather than following along with blogs. The writing, though, is something I’ve been really terrible about these days. I write less and less often. I did buy a new domain that I’d like to get started writing on at some point. It will be my ranting blog though. I’m not sure I want these two linked, but we’ll see what happens when I finally get it up and running.

There are also plenty of blog posts that I start but inevitably sit in the queue as drafts. I don’t know if it’s because my brain just wanders so much that I can’t put two coherent thoughts together in some sort of comprehendible way, or if I’m just a terrible writer. It’s likely both. Ha! At some point I do have a couple of posts I want to write that are about things I feel pretty passionately about. I feel like those are usually my best posts. But my thoughts jumble so often that I feel like I might need to create an *gasp* outline!

Jan 16

New Adventures

I made some half-assed resolutions at the start of the year. Mostly having to do with my health, because let’s face it, I’ve been an utterly lazy ass and my body has decided to revolt against the tyranny of my laziness and demand I do something about it. It’s like my heart is the union leader demanding fair… health.

fitbit_standingsSo I purchased a Fitbit One, mostly to help keep me motivated to do something. I snagged a handful of friends both IRL and WoW/Twitter in an effort to keep me accountable as well. You can see your weekly progress as it stacks against other people, which I suppose I meant for it to help keep me motivated by appealing to my slightly competitive nature.

As you can see, I’m not doing too fantastically with regard to keeping up with the others. And the 4 you can’t see in that friend list? Well, they’re well into the multiple thousands that because I rarely leave the house, I find I won’t actually ever catch up.

<queue the acquisition of a treadmill>

I started looking on the local Craigslist for treadmills to see if there was a working and functional one within a reasonable price range. Remember, I want to move to Australia, so the spending needs to be pretty minimal. The reality is that I simply can’t afford a gym membership at the tune of $35-50/month, and it is extremely cold for this very lazy, and very unmotivated overweight person to go outside and exercise, even if it’s just walking. I don’t fool myself into thinking that my health issues, though in their infancy stages, are enough to motivate me enough to go out in very cold weather.

I was told to try to make a standing table/desk contraption to go WITH the treadmill (once it was acquired) and play WoW while walking! This is an idea of brilliance I’m not sure I would ever have put together, but lemme just say, it’s really a great damn idea.

Now you add to the fact that at some point in the last two days I decided I wanted an European (EU) WoW account. Considering the way I’ve been spending most of my WoW time on Hestiah, this seems to be the exact opposite of what I was doing – Grinding reps, getting achievements, farm killing for mounts, and pet battling. Even though I accidentally found out that you can use the same bnet information for both a North American (NA) and EU account, all of the account-wide achievements and mounts would not carry over to the EU account. After much battling with the internet (and google), attempting to avoid having to wait for a nearly 20 GB download and installation of a second WoW client, and the missing addon button for UI necessities, I have a working EU WoW account that uses the same login and authentication (authenticator) as my NA account.

It is almost perfect timing, that everything sort of just worked out the way it did. With my finding a treadmill on Craigslist, and deciding I wanted to venture down the path of “New Player” status (without the nearly 15,000 achievement points, 170+ mounts, and 300+ unique pets), that it would all sort of just work out just right.

I don’t plan on actually running on the treadmill, at least not while I’m playing WoW. I was graciously gifted a EU battlechest license so I can quest and herb EU Hestiah up to level 80. It just seems apropos… new Hestiah, new me.

Jan 2

Out with the old, In with the new

Every year I think about those things I want to do in the coming months. Each new years brings the hope for possibility. I generally don’t make New Years Resolutions, but a handful of things that have changed in my life that require me to do something about it. Mostly, my health.

So this year I am planning to make a handful of resolution.

1. To make great strides toward saving and planning to move to Australia. Even if I don’t meet the February 2014 deadline I’ve set, I want to want to at least make the time between now and living there permanently shorter.

2. Take food choices more seriously, and make better ones. I’m not a horrible food decision-maker, but I allow my moods to dictate what I’ll end up eating. I had made some good efforts toward cutting out fast food, only to pick back up the habit out of laziness. I need to change this.

3. Exercise more. I don’t have a weight goal, but at this stage any exercise is more than what I did in all of 2012. I picked up a FitBit to help track not only my activity, but also my sleep. Hopefully it will also help me stay motivated and help me feel accountable for these things.

4. Write more. I did a lot more reading in 2012 than I had the previous few years. That was probably the only goal I set last year. I reached it, but only just barely. This year, I want to try to write more. Whether it be here and about video games, or elsewhere and about life, or even fiction. Either way, I want to write more.

And with that, I wish you all a wonderful year. Blizzard, for the first time ever, decided to give me a nice surprise. As often as its trolled me with reputations, never giving me mount drops ever, and just general frustration with LFR or PUGs, WoW decided to grant me with Ashes of Al’ar.

Ashes of Al'ar