My Jar of Marbles

2014 is the year of learning new things. These are the new things I am learning.

[myjarofmarbles]

Writing tonight. Starting at 12728.

[myjarofmarbles]

13001. Not gonna lie, spent most of my time on the Tumblrs. But hey, I did a bit.

[myjarofmarbles]

Writing tonight. Starting at 12728.

[myjarofmarbles]

Starting wordcount: 12,514.

[myjarofmarbles]

June update!

Writing: Three marbles! (Last month: two.) Still not getting back into the swing of this. Made a resolution at my last writer's group that I would write every day rather than focusing on word count. Haven't really got there yet. But I'm going to write right after this, so there you go.

Aerial/flexibility: One marble! (Last month: eight.) I'm done aerial/flexibility classes for the summer, and took a break from working on flexibility for this month.

Strength: Five marbles! (Last month: four.) Mostly pilates classes, which have been going really well! Not as much (read: any) biking as what I intended - I'm a fair-weather biker, and it rained most of the month. 

Home: Thirteen marbles! (Last month: thirteen.) Kept on top of house cleaning and laundry and garden work and everything. Super proud of myself for this.

Projects: New marbles: six! Working on Burning Man projects this month! It went really well and I'm learning a ton of new skills which I feel pretty good about.

Total Marbles: 28!

[myjarofmarbles]

To-Do List!

So I have a rare day off on a weekday, where I’m the only one in my little group that has the day off. Wtf, right?

This is my list of all the things that I am going to work on today so that I can keep track of them.

house:

bedroom

bathroom

hallway

front room

kitchen

living room

financial:

pay bills

update expense spreadsheet

other:

writewritewrite

eat foods

massage appointment

woodworking

[myjarofmarbles]

wooooooooo.

Today went really well.

Just have the writing left - and will probably have a bath before I do that.

<3

Go me.

[myjarofmarbles]

To-Do List!

So I have a rare day off on a weekday, where I'm the only one in my little group that has the day off. Wtf, right?

This is my list of all the things that I am going to work on today so that I can keep track of them.

house:

bedroom

bathroom

hallway

front room

kitchen

living room

financial:

pay bills

update expense spreadsheet

other:

writewritewrite

eat foods

massage appointment

woodworking

[myjarofmarbles]

oh man, building shit is totally a new skill for me. yikes.

We're building a facsimile of a boy scout chuckbox to keep all our kitchen gear in for Burning Man. It's coming along, and will be perfectly usable, but I can already tell that round 2 of making-shit-out-of-wood is going to be so much easier than round 1 has been. There have definitely been some missteps and some errors made, and there will be some fancy footwork in making it all fit together - but hey, that's part of the learning process.

also, I need a power saw. hand sawing sucks. I'm getting super buff, but only on my left side. :p

I did get a really cute sander though. Its name is Mouse. Hi, Mouse! Mouse is super awesome, and very helpful so far. I only intended to use Mouse pre-painting, but Mouse is so much better than a sanding block. SO MUCH BETTER.

Oh, and I added a new goal category this month (Goals: project). It's basically a catch-all for any miscellaneous projects I'm working on. Right now it's mostly Burning Man.

[myjarofmarbles]

May update!

Writing: Two marbles! (Last month: five.) Pretty much did no writing this month at all - the fact that I'm at a weird spot doesn't help, but mostly it's that writing got pushed aside for the epic amount of housework.

Aerial/flexibility: eight marbles! (Last month: six.) Backbending and hoop, mostly. Both those are done now, so I'm going to have to make sure I carve out time to keep up with it.

Strength: Four marbles! (Last month: six.) Continuing with pilates, and started biking to work as well. Continuing with physio - the problems I was noticing in my arm position in backbend are totally fixable, but they're taking a while.

Home: Thirteen marbles! (Last month: twelve.) So we did a massive purge of the house. Forty four bags of trash/broken things, if you can believe it. Seven bags (so far) of clothing donations. A bunch of stuff to be dropped off at Value Village. It was a really, really good month for house things. The house feels so much cleaner, and we've made so much progress.

Still feeling really great about this system.

[myjarofmarbles]

These webcam photos are terribad - sorry about that! 

I was testing out a new thing where I video-record my stretching sessions. Unfortunately, this wasn't much of a session - but based on the quality of the screencaps I got, I'm okay with that.

So, parts of backbending are going really well. I learned how to do a forearm bridge - and it's really exciting for me! Normally I end up struggling and failing at new skills a lot before I even vaguely understand how they're supposed to work. The only reason I asked how to do a forearm bridge last class was because it was the last backbending class of the session, and I was feeling cocky.

So I asked. Then my instructor explained it to me. Then I followed the steps - and I did it! I started laughing manically in class when it happened, because I was not at all prepared for it to work, and ended up crushing my head really heavy into my hand, and my body was like WHAT DID YOU JUST DO, and my mind was like 'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee'.

There it is! My baby forearm bridge. My head is still crushing my hands really hard - I couldn't figure out why, but looking at the pictures now, I can see it's because my elbows need to go further in/more vertical to make room for my head.

My regular bridge is coming along okay - I'm having trouble with two things on the bridge. One of them is my shoulders - they feel straight to me, but as you can see in this photo, my arms are totally at 45 degree angles. This is something that feels "stuck" for me - so I've got a physio appointment tomorrow to look at it.

I'm also feeling "stuck" with my quads/hamstrings, which are the other things that are really acting up for me. I was doing a bunch of hamstring work to build them up after having a rough time trying to learn splits this year - and it's feeling now that working on my hamstrings has made my quads really upset. So, again, physio tomorrow.

I'm proud of my melting heart pose. I'm having trouble advancing the pose by raising my hands up - I can do it, but it doesn't seem to be advancing my flexibility so much as it just seems to create tennis ball sized knots in my back that my massage therapist tsk's me over. Again, physio.

Anyways, sorry for the poor photo quality - I'm going to work out a better solution.

Does anyone have any suggestions for stretches or exercises I could do to get further into these positions?

[myjarofmarbles]

Spent the weekend doing spring cleaning - three twelve hour days of sorting, donating, trashing, trashing, donating, sorting. Thankfully, we had the help of my ruthless sibling and my princess sibling, who were hugely instrumental in getting a good dent made into almost ten years of clutter in this house.

I have all the personality of a squash right now.

Squash, squash, squash.

[myjarofmarbles]

YES.

This is a new pose for me, and I'm really proud of my progress so far! It's the first flexy thing I've done where I can actually touch parts of my body to other parts of my body, so I feel really great about that.

Having picture references is great too - I can tell that I'm kinda going WHUMP backwards (I try to keep my pelvis against the door as long as I can), but when I'm upside down, it's hard to figure out what I'm supposed to do to fix the pose. I can see from this that I need to focus on keeping my hips up and pulling my quads up as well, and hopefully that will eventually allow me to get my head closer to my feet, and my elbows closer to the ground.

(Elbows, why you wow out like that. Get in there.)

[myjarofmarbles]

April update!

Writing: five marbles! (Last month: eight.) Wrote four thousand words, went to a writer's group meeting, had a couple of brainstorming sessions with the boy. Figured out the things I was writing were not the things the story was about, but hey, that's okay. It's all fixable.

Aerial/flexibility: six marbles! (Last month: twelve.) Only taking hoop this month, no silks. Finished up splits, started backbending. Splits necessitated another trip to physio to figure out why I hit a wall - but it's all fixable. Backbending is going really well for me.

Strength: six marbles - but why do they all look the wrong colour?? (Last month: two.) Started taking pilates classes, and also got in a couple more gym sessions. I should probably start giving myself marbles for doing my physio too, but since physio doesn't take that long, I haven't been - maybe one marble for a week of physio or something would be in order.

Home: twelve marbles! (Last month: seven.) Did a LOT of work on the house this month. Mostly prepping for a garage sale at the end of this month, but also working on general spring cleaning, purging of junk, all that type of thing.

So basically - I did a thing most days, so I'm keeping up where I want to be, and I'm proud of myself for that! Go me.

[myjarofmarbles]

Trust your body, they said.

Your body knows what it wants to eat after a workout, they said.

Now look where they've gotten us.

What is this even.

[myjarofmarbles]

Aerial hoop calluses/blisters!

[myjarofmarbles]

so this is the summary of my March! (I hope you also enjoy all the random junk that I didn't crop out of the picture.)

Writing: 8 sessions. I wrote 6,000 words! And also had three or four good brainstorming/plotting/worldbuilding sessions.

Home: 7 sessions. I did laundry and put it away! And I did dishes and put them away! And vacuumed things!

Aerial/flexibility work: 12 sessions. Lots of hoop and silks and splits classes! My splits are getting SO CLOSE.

Strength sessions: 2 sessions. Two sessions of the gym, I think! Which isn't much, but I broke a bunch of personal records the last time I went, so that's awesome. I can do 100 pound lat pulldowns for five good solid reps now! Which is a huge improvement from two shitty reps at that weight in October.

So basically, I did a productive thing every day! Well, I had a bunch of days where I did two things, and then had a bunch of days off, but hey! I did SO MANY THINGS.

I'm super proud of myself.

[myjarofmarbles]

Writing tonight.

Starting at 5710.

EDIT: 6110. Bleh.

[myjarofmarbles]

Writing!

Started at 2400 words today, ended up at 4100. Quite pleased with that, especially since I'm in new (not previously drafted) territory.

I can feel the skills coming back!