The Daily Report
Everything is going super awesome for me, except for one thing: the back of my brain is still super sold on the idea of Friday as posting day. I spent a lot of yesterday fighting to get the creative gears engaged, took a walk, blew some steam off on Twitter, moved around the house… and still couldn’t get out of the “mostly brainstorming TOMU” frame of mind. Just wasn’t happening.
After a super productive Monday and Tuesday, I got very little done yesterday (except for the walk, which was nice). Today I’ve had a bit more luck, but it’s not coming together into a finished chapter for me. So, I think I’m going to need to shift things around progressively. This week, I’ll post on Friday. Next week, I’ll aim for Thursday. Week after that, Wednesday.
Everything else is seriously super great for me, mentally and emotionally. I think it’s just a matter of having stressed so much out over the idea of Friday posting (while being unable to actually do it many weeks) that trying to turn the train around is harder than I imagined.
The State of the Me
Remember when I mentioned I took a walk yesterday? Well, the day before I had a slightly shorter walk as part of an errand. I walked about five minutes out and five minutes back. The next day, when I realized I was stuck, I took another walk, about twice the length… ten minutes out, ten minutes back. Today, I walked twenty minutes out and twenty minutes back. I made it about a mile out, as the Google Map flies, which puts my average speed at about 3 miles per hour.
When I worked outside the house, I actually used to walk to or from work quite a bit, a distance that was between five miles and eight miles, depending on where I worked at the time. Having this kind of endurance/range made a huge difference for me as someone who doesn’t drive, in terms of being independent and self-reliant.
I stopped walking so much when I wound up working from home, and then even less when I moved to a part of town that I knew less. Then I moved to Hagerstown, which I know even *less* and which I’ve never walked around. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve only gone to a store by myself twice… at least, not counting the small plaza across the street from the apartment we were in during the years I was bouncing back and forth.
I have two goals here. One is to get in good enough shape and town-knowledge that it’s not a big deal for me to pop out for an hour or two on my own from time to time. The other is to get so used to walking that I can incorporate it into my workday as part of a daily pre-work “commute”. My ideal is that every day I’ll go out of the house, walk for half an hour, then walk back. This will give me an hour to myself, away from the internet and alone with my thoughts, and a clear start point for my day. This was something that came up at last year’s WisCon, I think in a panel about self-employment (if that wasn’t the major topic, it was at least an ad hoc theme), and that I have yet to fully put into practice because I haven’t been comfortable enough walking around.
Plans For Today
I’ve been working on Tales of MU. I’m going to post a thing here in a bit. I’m working myself up to the idea of posting A Thing A Day. It won’t always be a long or meaningful thing like it was Tuesday, but it’ll always be a thing.