…because I’m still busy. Hoping for a longer run sometime over the weekend.
It’s been another day of editing and writing, and it’ll be the same again tomorrow! It’s also been lovely and sunny, but quite cold, and so Geth has put the heating back on. Fingers crossed the summer arrives soon.
One more push tomorrow to get all my stuff done before the bank holiday on Friday.
What’s in the slow cooker for tonight? (Spoiler: it’s curry. It’s always curry on Wednesday, because it makes for a nice light meal before Thursday morning weigh-in.)
Today’s earworm playlist:
Revo – ‘He Of The Name’ Midnight Oil – ‘Beds Are Burning’ Duran Duran – ‘New Religion’ Gerry & The Pacemakers – ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ Little Mix – ‘Salute’ The Offspring – ‘Have You Ever’
…because it was another day with lots to do! I had some editing jobs to get on with, and have also been working on my writing. All set for another quiet evening now.
Another old holiday snap, this time from western Canada in 1998. It occurred to me this morning that I probably won’t want to get on a plane for a very long time, given the potential for contamination. As such, world travel might be out for a couple of years, and so I’ll just have to enjoy my memories instead.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Revo – ‘The Land Of Radiant Flowers’ Midnight Oil – ‘Beds Are Burning’ Gala – ‘Freed From Desire’
…because it’s the start of another busy week. I never find myself short of things to do! I’ve got a bit of editing work this week (much appreciated in the current circumstances), plus a short piece to write for a competition, and various admin and house stuff to get on with. It provides a nice structure to the week and means that the weekends feel more like weekends, rather than just random days.
I’ve been working hard to make sure that I finish all my work by 6pm every evening, which is when Mum calls for our daily catch-up. This means that I have the evenings free to do what I want (99% of the time this is playing videogames), which is something that just wasn’t possible before lockdown as I had too many commitments. I am massively less stressed as a result, which is the main instigator for me not wanting to go ‘back to normal’ when the current situation ends.
Things feel manageable at the moment, which hasn’t been the case in a long time. I hope I can work out a similar balance in the future.
I’m trying to ‘100%’ Bravely Default (as this is probably my last playthrough), which means that the game will have taken close to 150 hours by the time I’m done with it. As such, I have no qualms about using the ‘Big Pharma’ money-farming exploit, as making the in-game money by normal means would probably add another 50 hours to the game. My 3DS is very happily playing itself right now.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Revo – ‘Visitor’ Revo – ‘Ship Racing Across The Ocean’ Duran Duran – ‘White Lines’ Sailor – ‘A Glass Of Champagne’ Duran Duran – ‘Vertigo (Do The Demolition)’ Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth – ‘See You Again’ Queen – ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ FM-84 and Ollie Wride – ‘Running In The Night’ The Midnight – ‘We Move Forward’
…because I’ve still got quite a lot to do this week, and also I woke up slightly later than I would have liked. I think that for the next few weeks, long runs will be a weekend thing, with maybe a middling one squeezed in on a Wednesday if possible. This would be a return to my marathon training pattern, which is no bad thing, given that marathon training is currently scheduled to start again in just over a month.
I’m happy to report that I weighed in this morning and lost 4lbs! I’d been struggling a bit for the last few weeks, as I’ve not been getting nearly as much exercise in as I did before the lockdown (when I was marathon training and doing a lot of walking in addition), and yet my marathon training appetite has not gone away. This last week, I’ve been a lot stricter and have reduced my portions. It’s obviously working, and I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, because I would love to be back at my target weight by the end of lockdown. I’m currently paying a reduced Slimming World fee so as to maintain access to the website – I also have the opportunity to attend group on Zoom if I want to, but I’m not sure if it’s for me, because being hard of hearing has always meant that I’ve found teleconferencing difficult in the past. (I could write a whole post about my anxieties about social distancing as a hard of hearing person – and I probably will at some point!)
It’s nice to be getting back to writing at the moment. I’ve got a small number of competitions to submit to over the next few weeks, and I’m also going to be spending May deciding which novel project I’m going to finalise over the summer, so that I can start querying agents again in the autumn. For various reasons relating to my career plans, late 2020/early 2021 is probably going to be the last substantial chunk of time for a good few years that I will be able to dedicate to writing, so I want to make the most of it.
I feel that being stricter about making sure my evenings are downtime-only has really helped with my productivity as well, because I don’t feel quite so burnt out. This is definitely something I’m going to continue with, even after lockdown has come to an end.
…because between writing, editing, admin and housework commitments, the to-do list has been pretty long this week, and so today has been as busy as the last two. I feel as though I’m getting a lot done though, which is great, and I’m still managing to make time for a bit of videogaming at the end of the day.
Today’s minor irritation was an interior door handle that has suddenly become loose and refuses to tighten up again. One more thing to look for when we brave the social distancing queues at B&Q later in the week!
Tomorrow is a ‘less admin, more writing’ day, which I’m looking forward to.
This week’s ‘next door’s cat’ photo. Our wheelie bins provide a good vantage point.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Traditional – ‘Morning Has Broken’ Duran Duran – ‘Ball Of Confusion’ Vera Lynn – ‘We’ll Meet Again’ Roxette – ‘Dangerous’ Roy Zimmerman & The ReZisters and Sandy Riccardi – ‘The Liar Tweets Tonight’ Paula Abdul – ‘Straight Up’
…and felt so much better for it! My shoulder pain seems to have subsided for now, although I will be putting it to the test with a bit more yoga later today. I’m hoping to get out for some longer runs over the weekend as well.
It’s a bit busy inside my head at the moment, and I feel like my creative ideas are not keeping their two metres of social distance apart from each other (or, you know, two centimetres, or whatever the correct scale is for inside your brain). I’m not working on as many creative projects as I usually am – I’m having a few months’ break from prose fiction writing in order to refresh (and it’s probably working because I miss my characters BADLY); I’m not writing as much poetry as usual due to poetry night having gone virtual like everything else (although I did enjoy writing my short verse today for the group poem we’re doing this month!); my adventure game creation process is currently in a drawing-bad-graphics phase rather than a writing-interactive-fiction phase; and I’m not actively seeking out writing competitions and submission requests and the like because it was starting to stress me out by the end of last year.
It’s good to take a semi-break, especially in the current circumstances (many writers have blogged more eloquently than me about the fact that a pandemic does not actually make for an efficient writing period, despite all the additional free time, because the ever-present sense of dread is something of a distraction). However, I’ve always found that if I don’t get my ideas out, they rattle around in my brain, and at the moment there are a lot of them in there.
I think I just need a couple of days to write freeform and see what happens. Maybe next week, if work is still quiet.
I’m looking forward to the weekend (such as it is) now. Geth and I will be doing the parkrun quiz tomorrow morning and taking a trip to the now-reopened B&Q on Sunday in order to get more gravel for the garden and stretch the car’s wheels (I’ve not turned on the engine since we returned from Inverness last month, and I know it needs to be done every now and then). I’ll be doing a couple of scenic runs and not thinking about the parallel universe and my parallel self’s trip to London. And, of course, I’ll be playing a lot of videogames.
As I mentioned last weekend, I won’t be doing diary posts tomorrow or Sunday – I’ll be sharing my running vlogs, though, and I’ve got a couple of review posts that will be going up. I’ll be back on Monday to update you all on my continued lockdown adventures 🙂
Today’s run was another sunny adventure with bright blue skies and beautiful blossom everywhere. This spring has been so good to us weather-wise.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Toto – ‘Africa’ Pulp – ‘Common People’ Survivor – ‘Eye Of The Tiger’ Timecop1983 and Primo – ‘My DeLorean’ Yasunori Mitsuda – ‘Elysium, In The Blue Sky’ Chaka Khan – ‘Ain’t Nobody’
…because I was still being careful regarding my shoulder. It feels a lot better now though, and I also managed a fifty-minute YouTube yoga session at lunchtime, so I think I should be able to go for a longer run tomorrow.
I’ve spent the rest of the day editing, writing, and getting on with admin stuff. Sometimes I feel like I’m making progress with my lists upon lists of things to do, but most of the time – even in these quieter lockdown days – it seems as though I get one thing done and then several more get added to the other end of the list! At least I’m never bored…
Looking forward to another good few hours of videogaming this evening. Geth has finished work early so has started his XCOM session already!
Geth was rather taken with the colourful-ness of the washing line yesterday and asked me to take a picture. To be fair, I am amassing an extremely good collection of funky-patterned running tights.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Main Theme’ Ben Haenow – ‘Something I Need’ Lucy Spraggan – ‘Lighthouse’ The Wonder Stuff – ‘Don’t Let Me Down, Gently’
…because I really woke up on the wrong side of bed this morning. I always feel massively out of sorts when the clocks go forward, and I also didn’t feel well (nothing to do with colds or anything else that could be coronavirus, thankfully!). So a short run it was, and if it hadn’t been for keeping my RED (run every day) streak going, I probably wouldn’t have made it out the door (especially given that a blizzard started as soon as I stepped outside – what happened to the nice spring weather we’ve been having all week?). However, I did feel much better after my run. This is why I’m doing RED in the first place, and it’s working, which is especially important in the current situation.
Geth is still playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses, so I’ve been getting on with admin this afternoon, plus a bit more work on my text adventure game. I estimate that I’ve got about two more hours left to play on the Bravely Default II demo this evening, and then I’ll be focusing on my 3DS games again for a while.
Camp NaNoWriMo starts on Tuesday (it’s a secondary NaNo where you set your own goal – they run them every April and July), so I’m going to sign up to that and use it as motivation to get some more game creation and other writing done over the next month.
Things I did during the pandemic: swapped some coasters around so that we’re not constantly trying to find the black coasters on the black table.
Today’s earworm playlist:
Kuana Torres Kahele, James Ford Murphy and Napua Greig-Nakasone – ‘Someone To Lava’ Ollie Wride – ‘Back To Life’ Mike Harding and Myfanwy Talog – ‘DangerMouse Main Theme’ Eddy Grant – ‘I Don’t Wanna Dance’ Toto – ‘Africa’
…and since then I’ve had a very pleasant afternoon working on my new game, with Geth’s first playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses in the background for entertainment. My game is based on the first idea I had for the most recent game jam – I didn’t have much time to work on my jam game last month, so chose a simpler game idea, but I knew I wanted to make the first one as well once I didn’t have any time constraints. It takes place in a fictional world that I originally invented in 2003 when I started working on my first adult full-length novel. I worked on the novel on and off for years before moving onto other projects, and so I never quite got it to a completed state, but I’m excited that I will finally get to share the story with the world via a few different releases (games and possibly some ebooks) that I will be putting out in the next couple of years.
I’ll also be doing a bit of gaming myself this evening. I’ve been really enjoying the Bravely Default II demo, and I’ve also still got a lot of games that I’m dipping in and out of on the 3DS. I find that, alongside running, it’s the best way of maintaining my mental health during these difficult times.
A similar day tomorrow, I hope 🙂
This is the new game Geth is playing after he finally finished Dragon Quest 11S the other day. I’m already appreciating the change in background music!
Today’s earworm playlist:
Spandau Ballet – ‘Gold’ Wiz Khalifa – ‘Black And Yellow’ Stereophonics – ‘Handbags And Gladrags’
A practical combined run and grocery shop this morning…
…because last night the UK government announced stricter measures to encourage people to stay indoors. You can still go out to exercise once a day, and you can still do essential grocery shopping, but the idea is to minimise your time outside as much as possible and so I combined my run with my shop today.
I’ve spent the rest of the day working for clients and catching up with my writing game on 4thewords. Looking forward to another quiet evening.
Stuff I wouldn’t normally eat #1: early hot cross buns with jam. Geth found these in Sainsbury’s the other day while on an unsuccessful crumpet hunt. I’d never usually eat hot cross buns when it’s not Good Friday, but these are exceptional times.
