2020 – De-frumping Goals

I had started this “postpartum” fitness plan post back in May or June of 2018 when I was thinking it was time to get fit after having my baby in March 2018… I never posted it… And I never finished it… Let’s just take a quick read at what I was going to say…

It’s official… I can no longer use the excuse of being pregnant for my extra weight… And now that I’ve waited the appropriate 6 weeks (okay, it’s more than that… but whatever…), I can get started on getting back in shape…

Of course, as with every new project, this starts with a spread in my bullet journal.  For my initial spread, I took to pinterest for ideas and found this one:

I believe I actually did make myself a version of that in my bullet journal at the time… I’ll have to dig back in to that book…

But that was over a year ago… almost 2 years ago now… And I never did “get back in shape”…

“But round is a shape…” Yes, yes, I can always find excuses for being overweight and sluggish, but I want to be healthy, and my current weight is not healthy for me. So, as I mentioned before, one of my themes for 2020 was to “de-frump.”

I left this theme purposely vague because I wanted to allow this goal to change over time, and also to give myself some leeway when making the goals to cover a lot of different aspects of my “frumpiness”… And with the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic adding anxiety and throwing curve balls at everyone’s regular routines, giving myself some leeway is probably the best thing… Ultimately, though, the goal is to get fit and healthy…

So, after all this discussion… Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. At the beginning of April, I thought it would be a great time to start my new goal… I started writing this post then, but got sidetracked by life, and am now just coming back to this post to finish it… Anyway… I’m going to try and make these goals cumulative, so I’ll start with one or two habits or goals each week, then add on to them the next week. I’m going to start simple to get myself started with some easy successes.

April De-Frump Goals:

Week #1: (April 1 to 5) Go to bed by 10:30pm on weeknights & brush my hair every morning.
The better sleep I get, the more energy I’ll have and the better I’ll be able to tackle other aspects of my life. And I know brushing your hair every morning sounds like a given, but honestly, my hair is so straight that I don’t often *need* to brush it, and normally when I get out of the shower I just throw the wet hair in to a messy bun and forget about it. I think that putting a it of effort in to my hair will make me feel better about myself and my appearance, even if I’m not actually seeing anyone really…

Week #2: (April 6 to 12) Get up at 5:30am on weekdays & take my vitamins every morning.
If I want to have any time to myself before the little monster wakes up, then I’ll need to get up before him… He typically wakes up around 7am, sometimes we can push it to 7:30am, so a 5:30am wake up time will give me some time to be productive, either on stuff around the house, my personal goals, my blog, or to get some work done. Also, I have totally fallen off the wagon of taking my vitamins… After years of being good (especially while pregnant and breast feeding), I’m not even sure why I got out of the habit… But it’s time to get back in to it.

Week #3: (April 13 to 19) Go for 2-3 runs & drink 8 cups of water a day.
I’m going to try getting back in to running in the mornings. Since I am not “single parenting” my mornings anymore, I can totally get up early (hence the 5:30am wake up goal) and get out of the house before anyone else gets up. I think that getting some early morning exercise will help my mental health along with my physical health, and will probably help me be better focused when I sit down to work. And I’m *pretty sure* that I am drinking the required 8 cups of water (mostly in tea form) a day, but I haven’t been tracking it for a while, so I want to get back in to that too…

Week #4: (April 20 to 26) Wash my face and apply moisturizer every morning.
This is another one that might sound like an obvious one to most people, and I do wash my face most mornings, but I rarely put moisturize on my face… And I’m not getting any younger, my skin could use all the help it can get to keep from getting too wrinkly as I get older, and my moisturizer has sunscreen built in, so as we approach summer, it will help keep my paleness from getting lobster red sunburns.

Week #5: (April 27 to 30) Don’t eat anything after 9pm.
I’ve heard that not eating after a certain point in the evening can be very good for your health. I believe this is probably true for multiple reasons, but for me, the big one would be that I never eat anything healthy late in the evenings. I have heard 8pm to be the magic time, but honestly, the little monster’s bedtime often bleeds close to 8pm these days, and I typically need/want to have a bit of a snack after he’s gone to bed so I can actually pay attention and enjoy whatever it is I am eating… So I’ve picked 9pm for my time. If I’m still doing the 10:30pm bedtime, it still gives me an hour and a half between my last food and bedtime. That should be good enough to mostly digest the food…

Of course, setting goals means a new spread in my bullet journal:

Of course, now that it is midway through April, probably best to show you an updated version of the page:

These goals have been created with the assumption that we will be remaining in this current social distancing lock-down until at least the end of April, which I’m pretty sure is pretty safe to say based on all the news I’ve seen.

What do you think of my goals? Too simple? Too complicated?

Daffodil Photo by Anthony Young on Unsplash

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2020 – Blogging Goals

In my last post I went over my four overall goals for 2020. I guess they were more themes for goals rather than specific goals… So I want to revisit each one with a bit more details, hopefully working towards a “SMART” goal that I can eventually say that I have definitively met.

I’ll start with #3 from my last post because once I commit to blogging, then I can use the rest of my goals to fulfill the blogging goal…

January 2018 Bullet Journal Set-up

It has been a while since I did an updated show and tell of my bullet journal.  I still use it daily, and have made some adjustments throughout the months, but rather than going through all of the various iterations, I will just show how I have set everything up for January.

I don’t normally have a title or intro page for my months, but I figured the start of a new year deserved something special.  I got inspiration from Pinterest (so I cannot take full credit for my designs).  I also added a washi tape border so that I could flip easily to the beginning of the new year.  I am very happy with how it turned out, so I may continue doing something like this in the future… We will see…

September Focus Results

After the first week of meal planning, which I wasn’t really sure if it was a success… I took some of the advice I received and continued, though I didn’t concern myself as much with things staying on the exact day they were assigned…

Here’s how things went…

Week 2:

My meal plan in my bullet journal didn’t really get any prettier, but I think it was a bit better laid out…

Monday, I made my dinner plan be “my husband”… He had the day off work, and I had a meeting right after work, so we got him to do the meal plan and cooking.  Rather than force him in to cooking a specific thing, I left it open for his creativity/desires.  We ended up with BBQ chicken skewers, which were delicious!

September Focus: Meal Planning

One of my personal goals for 2017 was to have a focus for each month.  I did okay with my morning routine in January, and then I went the other direction in February by concentrating on realistic expectations… But then I didn’t define another monthly focus until June, and then it wasn’t even that successful… July and August went by without any focus… And so we have made it to September… I’m going to renew my attempts at having a focus for the month.

I originally tried having this as my focus for February, but that fell through… So, I have decided to revisit meal planning for my September focus.

I showed various versions of my past “meal planning” when I discussed my weekly spread in my bullet journal, but honestly, I wasn’t very good at it. And, at some point over the past year I stopped writing out a full week of daily layouts on my bullet journal ahead of time, and with that I stopped putting in a meal plan for the week… I still tracked what I was eating, but I didn’t have a place to write down the plan… And then, at some point in July, I stopped even keeping track of what I ate in my bullet journal (I still keep track, but I moved to keeping track of it in an app – MyFitnessPal).

Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that I haven’t had a weekly meal plan written down in a very long time…

Old Posts & Updating Things…

I have a lot of blog posts that I have started writing, but either they required me to do some more research, accomplish some sort of task, or work through some thought processes before finishing them up.  Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of these may never be finished…

Whether or not it was his intention, a recent post published by Steve over at ThinkSaveRetire got me motivated to revisit these posts…  (I realize that his post was intended to help us revisit posts that have already been published, and it may help me do that as well, but it reminded me that the drafts that are sitting unloved in my WordPress account could still be worth salvaging if I update them to my current status and mindset.)

But… As is typical with me, I always have grand plans but then fail to follow through.  So, I’m going to use you, my faithful readers, as accountability partners.  Here are a few posts that I am now committing to finish up and publish in the next few weeks:

Transitioning to a New Bullet Journal (Part 2)

Remember that time that I said I would get back in to regular posting?  Yeah, apparently that was a lie… Since it still hasn’t happened… Anyway, I promised that I would post the rest of my bullet journal transition, so I guess I should get this posted since I’ve already done the second month of my new bullet journal…

Transitioning to a New Bullet Journal (Part 1)

Despite my best efforts, and using my bullet journal, I still haven’t quite caught up on life since being back from our holiday and then being away for work.  But… One of the things I was working on is to transition to a new bullet journal for the month of April.  I started the process in March (and also started writing this post then), but just like most things in my life lately, I sort of only half completed the job… I did, however, take some photos of the process, so I thought I’d share them with you.

Hawaiian Trip Journal in my BuJo

Well, I’m back from my vacation, and it really was a holiday.  I didn’t bring a laptop, and I didn’t check email, or keep up on my blog, so it has definitely been a bit of catch-up now that I am back… The number of emails in my collection of inboxes was quite high!  I’m still working on getting back to the normal routine, so I don’t have any real content to share with you today…

Instead, I thought I’d share a couple images of my bullet journal that I used as a travel journal for my trip.  I’m pretty proud of my doodles, so I’m going to share… I “should” be back to normal by Thursday and will hopefully have something more exciting for you.  Until then, “Aloha!”

Travel Prep in my Bullet Journal

I never seem to get ahead of the game… every time I think I’m finally getting a handle on being organized, something comes up, or I say yes to one too many things…

Anyway, the latest thing that snuck up on me (other than missing a Tuesday blog post, shhhh) was our spring break vacation. I am currently typing this on my phone while I wait for our flight to Hawaii. (I know, I know, it’s not good to tell the interweb where we are going and when, but we have housesitters in our house, so it’s not abandoned, and that’s all the details you are getting… )

In order to help me get organized, I made a couple spreads in my bullet journal.  The first was just the trip details for planning purposes. 

This is where I put down the pertinent information about our flights, accommodation and car rental. It made it easy to check on and share with those that needed to have that info. 

The second spread that really helped me get sorted and not stress out was my packing list. 

I’m sure that I ended up over packing for this trip, but at least with the list I knew I wasn’t going to forget anything important. Or, at least I haven’t discovered that I’ve forgotten anything yet… 

Anyway, I probably won’t do another post while I’m on holidays, but will rest up and get lots of good ideas for when I return. Enjoy your spring break!