Six Months In

Well, I started this blog a little over six months ago, and I posted a bunch of benchmarks then as to some goals that I wanted to work towards.
Lets see how I'm going measuring up to those goals :)

Health & Fitness

• Weight: 81.5kg
   - Goal: 70kg
   - Current: 80kg. This one doesn't seem to be going too well actually, I seem to be losing very little to no weight. I ran with a calorie counter app for several months at the start of the year (so pre-blog), and by its calculations of my intake & exercise, I should have dropped around two kilos a month. 
• Girth: 40"
   - Goal: 36"
   - Current: 38-39". This varies quite a bit between days, evidently some of what I'm eating is bloating me a bit. Still, while it's not the speed of progress that I'd like, it's still progress
• Situps*: 19 (yes, I couldn't manage #20)
   - Goal: 50
   - Current: 30. Well, that's certainly better. And that's without actually doing regular situps too, that's just the workout that my abs get from other exercise. I really should be trying to do situps at least every couple of days.
• Riding Distance: Unknown, but somewhere over 10kms
   - Goal: 30+kms
   - Current: Well, I did the 50km leg of Around the Bay with no issues at all. True we had a large stop for lunch, but even without that I would have been fine. We're planning to do 100kms next year!
• Running Distance: Unknown, but not much
   - Goal: 5kms (Couch to 5K Program)
   - Current: Honestly, still don't know. I haven't done the C25K thing yet, though I did just pick up Zombies! Run!, so I should get some more running exercise soon. Not an easy one to benchmark unfortunately. I do know that I can out-sprint quite a few people at Swordcraft, so that helps :)
• Eating Habits:
   - Need to increase my Fruit & Veg intake by quite a bit. Going to kick off a new eating plan when I get back from Tasmania next week
   - This one I'm confident to say I have vastly improved at. Most of my dinner meals include 3-4 serves of veggies nowadays, rather than the 1-2 that they used to. Still don't tend to eat fruit regularly, but my general Fruit & Veg is vastyly better than it was.

Creative

• iPhone/Android App: Currently have one with a bunch of friends partway between planning and Alpha stages.
   - Needs a whole bunch of one-liners written up
   - Needs art done (This will be done by someone else)
   - Needs programming tidied up and tailored (This will be done by someone else)
   - Need to organise a team meeting to see where everyone is up to. Hopefully this weekend
• Writing: Going to leave this one on the back burner for the moment to relook at later on. May well do this for NANO this year
• Well, unfortunately the App plan fell apart, and I didn't take part in NANO, the whole 'big writing piece' thing is still proving too big of a stumbling block for me to have even started looking at.
  On the other hand I'm now learning Silk Painting, and am currently assembling my own kit so that I can start making my own pieces without Janet's assistance.
  So creativity has gone in a completely different direction to what I'd planned, but I think it's still valid progress. Sure it's not the "Woohoo, novel" thing that would have been nice to have done, but we take what we can get.
• Oh, and I Really need to start learning how to use my camera better. Only a few months until New Zealand!!

Big & Scary

• Career:
   - Goal: Intellectually stimulating job that still pays well
   - Current to dos:  A friend of mine runs a Recruitment agency. Must polish up my resume and send it to her
• Place to live:
   - Goal: Have my own place rather than renting, in a spot that is near work and appreciates in value so that if I decide I want to pack up and head overseas, I can sell it and cover my debts.
   - This one is also getting to sit on the back burner for a while. This will be looked at after Career is more organised I think
• Fully willing to admit, no movement here. I find trawling through job sites like Seek to damned hard to differentiate between, since most jobs don't give the exact location ("Inner City" could simply mean that the job agency itself is in the inner city, and the job is two hours out), or payscale (not even a broad range), and tend to just be a collection of buzzwords rather than an actual description of the job (tip for job agencies, saying that your job is "To be part of a hip, dynamic IT crew of go-getters and like minded people" tells me exactly NOTHING about what the job is about)

Intellectual

• Haven't done anything about courses or anything here either. On the other hand.. I haven't really felt the need to further my education either, so maybe it's safe to say that I think I have enough on my plate here.

In general.. things have actually been quite busy. I went from barely ever seeing people and spending most of my evenings doing nothing, to having four nights a week taken up by activities, and normally at least one day a weekend as well.

My sleep has been.. fluctuating. I had been fine for most of the last six months, but started having some sleeping trouble the last few weeks, and I'm taking some steps to try and figure out why (cutting a couple of specific things out of my diet and trying to eat dinner at a more normal hour for eg). Hopefully it's just an adjustment to the changing weather or something.

The other idea, which is quite possible, is that I've just been doing too much and I'm burning out from cramming so much into each week. The next couple of weeks have 1-2 things that I normally do each week having been cancelled, so we'll see if that makes any difference also. I'm also dialing back my Monday night swordfighting to learn the silk painting, so there's a bit less physical activity.

Mentally/emotionally I think I'm improving too. I've done a bunch of things that I'd never done before (and several that I wouldn't have even considered), I think I'm giving things a go a lot more than I used to. Looking back at past behaviours I think I've grown a lot as well. This is good :)

The two big bugbears of "Work" and "New place to live" are still hanging over me (Work especially), but other than that... I think life is actually going pretty well at the moment. Yes being thinner & fitter would be nice, but I'm.. not discontented with my life.

One thing that's been bugging me though. It's been a long time since I had a noticeable adrenaline hit. You'd think doing swordfighting three nights a week would mean I'd be pretty familiar with adrenaline, and certainly earlier on that was true, but nowadays it's just not happening. I nearly got cleaned up by a ute a couple of weeks ago and while I had a spike of fear before the guy opened his eyes and hit the brakes (moron decided that looking before entering a roundabout was for suckers), there was no corresponding adrenaline, and no shakes or similar afterwards.

Not losing the weight that I think I should be, not getting as much rest as I want, and adrenaline just not happening? Is there some kind of metabolism issue or something that could be causing/contributing to this? 

Probably worth me doing some research into.

Anyway, I think I'll wrap this up here.

What I would like, is anyone reading this, please let me know if *you* think you've seen a difference in  how I've been acting/behaving verses six months or more ago. I can think internally all I want about what I think has been happening, but I can't see myself from the outside and know if other people are noticing anything :)

PS: I can't let any "Halfway there" comment go by without referencing this somehow. Enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDK9QqIzhwk

Another one of those "Stuff" updates

So, time for another one of those semi-rambing "what's been going on" updates :)

First up, apologies for the delays for the planned post on gender stuff, haven't been finding a chance to sit down and write it all out, hopefully it shall come soon.
It won't be the next one however, since I've just passed the Six Months point of this blog, and plan to do a writeup there. I'll need to compare myself to my benchmarks from the start before I can do so though.

Anyways, main things that have been happening:

Entertainment:
I've been reading through the Dresden Files books recently, up to book nine at the moment. Urban-fantasy detective books with a noir feel. I won't go into too much detail for fear of spoilers, but they're definitely worth a look if you're interested. There's quite a few books but they're self-contained and relatively small, so you don't need to worry about "Arg, I'll need to read a dozen books to get the whole story" type of thing.

Food:
Well, as people have been continually poking and prodding me about, the 'vegetable of the week' plan fell by the wayside as something that I just didn't have the time to keep up with, but I've been trying a few new things with food.
Most recently I've been having a go at roasts. Sounds simple, right? But not something I'd done before (other than one of those ready-to-roast splayed chickens that you just throw in the oven for X minutes), because growing up I'd ended up with the impression that Roasts were some huge arcane ritual taking hours of prep and half a day of cooking time, so I'd never attempted one.
Laura disabused me of this notion while chatting online one night, so I've been having a go at a few of them recently.
Here's one of my first attempts:

It was tasty :)

I'm still failing at managing to do a decent roast potato though, they're just not coming out crispy...

I roasted a Girello last night (from what I can gather it's a similar cut to Silverside) in foil, mustard on the top and covered in red wine. It came out tasty, but a bit dry somehow :(. I've made up a few containers with meat, potatoes, steamed veggies and gravy that I can heat up for lunch the next few days.

Oh yes, my plans to start making my lunch rather than buying it each day? Have been up and down. Some weeks I'll manage it but more often I won't. Hopefully as Summer approaches and non-warm sandwiches look more appealing I'll get back into the swing of things.

I've also been doing more experiments with my shortbread, mixing in new and different things. People seem to be enjoying it :). I've been asked for the recipe, and a couple of people have asked me to bring some along to the next Swordcraft camping weekend.

Alas I'm.. having issues eating it a the moment due to mental association (while I was sick with gastro the thought of shortbread made me ill, so those associations are still there, even though I know it won't make me ill), but that should pass in time.

Hair:

A couple of weeks ago I went into a new hairdressers (also discovered through Laura) that should hopefully be able to finally kill off the pink hair that my 'do had turned into after Shave for a Cure. 

For reference, the pink hair had had temporary auburn and dark brown colours put over it (by me), and a dark red (professionally) and yet the pink still kept coming through.

So I went into this place, which has received awards for its colours, and figured that they should be able to do something with it, plus I was ready for a new style.

So we agree on a dark brown, the hairdresser says there will probably still be some reddish bits to it in the sunlight, but I didn't think that'd be a problem. Then while washing out the dye, she takes one look at my (still wet) hair and goes "Hrm.. let me get some toner to try and get rid of the pink that's still showing..." so even after having a permanent dark brown done over it, the pink was *still* visible. Talk about hard to kill!

After the toner was put in as well, the pink is finally gone, but rather than dark brown I have black hair in anything other than direct sunlight. 

I also had it cut into a new style with some layers (moreso than they'd normally do) and such, and for shits and giggles I had it curled before I left (hairdresser's idea, though I went for rather smaller curls than she'd thought), I was only having a weekend at home catching up on tidying and stuff so no big issues if it looked horrible. 

I think it came out pretty darned well though.

New Thing (TM):

Another new thing for the month, a couple of Thursdays ago I went along to a Burlesque outing with a few friends. It was an.. interesting.. show. Lots of audience.. if not participation, at least banter, very strong kinky themes, probably quite confronting to a lot of people since there was no sugar coating of anything.

It was quite funny watching the reactions of some people who were there. Some evidently were quite into it and having fun, others were very obviously going "Ohgods what have I gotten into, pleasedonttalktome!"

The group of girls I'd gone with were very much in the former category, several of them having been to the show before (and were recognised as such by the performers).

I dressed up for it as well, ending up rather more... feminine than I'd planned, but it worked. I learned two things: 1) Silk shirts offer NO wind protection, and are freezing cold even with a woolen jacket on over it. 2) Corsets aren't nearly as hard to ride in as I'd suspected.

Patient Zero:

This one hasn't happened yet, but it's booked for a few weeks time and I thought I'd mention it :D

There's a place running what is basically a laser-tag Zombie outbreak in Melbourne. You and a bunch of friends (half a dozen total) form a squad, make a booking, and have to go through a building full of people dressed as zombies, presumably find survivors and the source of the outbreak, and get out again.

Very much looking forward to it, I think it's going to be awesome :D

Anyways, I think I'll finish up this post there. Next one should be up in a day or so once I've compared myself to my starting benchmarks and can give a "Six Months In" update.