It’s the start of March! And I have held true to my promise to myself to resume running on 1st March. (The last run was 23 December) And I went running on 3rd March too! Most surprising was that I haven’t lost as much ‘puff’ as I thought I would. I was able to do 20 minutes without stopping the first run and 30 minutes the second run. I’m still painfully slow but I can still run, and I can still run for a relatively long (for me) period, and that’s a little bit amazing.
However perhaps as a result of the running, I have been tired all week and also very hungry, which is not great when you’re on a healthy eating programme. Not that I’ve been very good this past week – we had our friend-in-our-bubble come over for a few days and got dirty burger takeaway on Monday night. So good but so bad! And that’s two Monday takeaways in a row. Very, very bad. This week I’m going to be more focussed on good healthy food.
My fitness tracker has been showing my stress levels in the red with an unhappy frequency this week. I wonder what caused that? Could it be that I took on a new (to me) project this week? I just want to also ask the world of readers, is it good practice to send a request for a 9:00am meeting-call at 18:32pm the night before? Of all the days it had to be this day I was a little bit late logging in and my phone is going ping-ping-ping as people message me to ask if I’m joining the call. And then when I do get connected to the call, the sound keeps dropping out and so I miss large chunks of the first 10 minutes. So – yay – this is me, making a great impression on my new project. (That said, I did work through until 7.30pm that night on this project so they are getting their money’s worth out of me.)
I’ve also added stress with my EdX creative writing course but I’m just about managing to fit it in at the end of my working day, with some extra effort on the weekend. So far I’ve learnt that outlining is important and it also counts as creative work; and that after doing the character questionnaire for the central characters in two of my novel ideas, I realise my characters are a little on the thin side and I need to do some more work to fill them out and get to understand them a bit more. I was surprised to find that the character of Megan, who I thought I knew pretty well after writing around her for about a year now, loves the movie The Sound of Music and is really good at sketching.
Things you didn’t know you needed : a croissant scented candle. Yes, if you can believe it, somewhere out there in the internet you can buy a candle that will smell like a delicious French pastry. Why you would want to torture yourself with something like that (especially if you don’t have any croissants in the house that you can eat) I don’t know.
It’s a short post this week. I’ve been up to my earlobes in work. I’m trying to plan tasks and book my time in my calendar every day so I get done what I need to get done but other fires pop up that take priority and my task list is getting longer and there are deadlines looming now that I am not going to make. I’m doing my best not to take any of this too personally and when I switch off at the end of the day I really do switch off (hence not knowing about the surprise 9.00am meeting). But I can see the next two weeks will be kind of intense as we’re running up to some big deadlines.
I hope my readers are all in a better place with their deadlines than I am. Have a good week and watch out for those surprise meetings!
Tales from Tobhamhor 