31 Amazing Days: Week 1 Roundup
31 Amazing Days is an event, a challenge, a celebration, and a conversation that's going on throughout the month of October 2012. The idea is to choose to make every day of the month amazing by doing something awesome each day, no matter how seemingly small that something may be, and to share what you did via Facebook and/or Twitter. To read the official introduction to the challenge and what it entails, go read this blog post.
I didn't find out about 31 Amazing Days until day 2, when I saw that a good friend of mine had shared the Facebook page for the challenge. When I read about it, I was instantly hooked and signed up right away. As some of you may know, I love getting involved in month-long challenges. (You're looking at an eight-time National Novel Writing Month participant and five-time winner, who has also at least attempted several Script Frenzies.) This one was just what I needed in my life right now, to get me motivated to accomplish all the things I have the freedom to accomplish now that I have an awesome, career-quality job with an awesome schedule. (Getting ready for this year's NaNoWriMo is one of those things, as are some other writing, beta-reading, and podcasting projects I've been putting off for way too long.)
I've been posting my amazing experiences to Twitter almost every day since October 2nd, only having to play catch-up today (October 8th). I'd like to say a little more about what I've done for the challenge than will fit in a tweet, though, so I decided to start a weekly series of blog posts about what I did each day. In these posts, I'll expand on what I said in my daily tweets.
Day 1: I kicked off the month of October with a visit to Vala's Pumpkin Patch outside of Gretna. (For those readers who may not already know this, on August 1 of this year, I moved from Southern California to Omaha, Nebraska, to work as a network technician.) It was a lot of fun. The other amazing thing I did was finally finish setting up my new desk, which was delivered to my apartment as a box full of parts. I put most of them together myself, but I had to have a friend come over to help me move it into place because it was so heavy.
Day 2 was amazing because I went to pollworker training and learned that I'm really going to enjoy being a pollworker this year. When I went out to pick up my very first pair of prescription glasses, the weather was absolutely gorgeous, and I walked around a nearby park just enjoying the sunshine. After that, I expanded and updated all the descriptive text on all my Fiverr gigs, a project I had been putting off for a while. I was really pleased to get that accomplished.
On Day 3, I broke my previous record for productivity at work (I keep records myself, on a spreadsheet) and attended a meeting of the Young Professionals group of Habitat for Humanity of Omaha. This trend continued on Day 4, when I beat the record I'd set the previous day (only by 1 point, but hey) and also came to this realization: I started out knowing basically nothing about computer networking, and look at all the new things I've learned since then. Learning more new things on top of those can't be that much more difficult. I can totally do this.
On Day 5, I met my new seatmates at work and used them as a resource to solve a problem I had. Also, I transferred my Kindle books from my old phone to my new one.
Day 6 saw the first major network outage I had experienced since I assumed my regular job duties, which was three weeks ago now. I'm on the team that deals with those, figuring out what's wrong, setting the repair process in motion, and doing damage control. I contributed to the second and third tasks on those lists, handling most of the second one myself (with help from a coworker), and I'm pretty dang proud of the fact that I contributed all that and didn't freak out about what was going on.
On Day 7, after celebrating a lovely Feast of St. Francis with an impressive turnout of family dogs (plus two cats and a small mammal of some kind in a cage), I went to another, much bigger and better corn maze with some friends. I also experienced my very first game of laser tag. It was very short, only 10 minutes, but I'm glad it didn't go on any longer, because the tagger was heavy and I was getting tired of carrying it.
Day 8 has already been pretty amazing. I finally started really getting into my Education for Ministry curriculum again, and getting excited about it. I also supported my local independent bookstore (always something to be proud of) by buying three books: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin, Lucid by Adrienne Stoltz and Ron Bass, and Son by Lois Lowry. I'm finding that my old love of and excitement about reading is resurfacing now that I have more leisure time and fewer worries about my future and my own situation. I'm also finally getting excited about being in Education for Ministry, after I sat down this afternoon and really studied this week's chapter, something I haven't done in far too long.
This challenge has been really good for me so far. One of the reasons I love month-long challenges so much is that they offer me accountability for what I do. Having this goal and expectation that I will find something amazing about every single day is really making my outlook on life more positive. I'll see you again next week (most likely next Sunday) with more updates on how things are going!
(Crossposted here, on Dreamwidth, and on my WordPress blog.)
I didn't find out about 31 Amazing Days until day 2, when I saw that a good friend of mine had shared the Facebook page for the challenge. When I read about it, I was instantly hooked and signed up right away. As some of you may know, I love getting involved in month-long challenges. (You're looking at an eight-time National Novel Writing Month participant and five-time winner, who has also at least attempted several Script Frenzies.) This one was just what I needed in my life right now, to get me motivated to accomplish all the things I have the freedom to accomplish now that I have an awesome, career-quality job with an awesome schedule. (Getting ready for this year's NaNoWriMo is one of those things, as are some other writing, beta-reading, and podcasting projects I've been putting off for way too long.)
I've been posting my amazing experiences to Twitter almost every day since October 2nd, only having to play catch-up today (October 8th). I'd like to say a little more about what I've done for the challenge than will fit in a tweet, though, so I decided to start a weekly series of blog posts about what I did each day. In these posts, I'll expand on what I said in my daily tweets.
Day 1: I kicked off the month of October with a visit to Vala's Pumpkin Patch outside of Gretna. (For those readers who may not already know this, on August 1 of this year, I moved from Southern California to Omaha, Nebraska, to work as a network technician.) It was a lot of fun. The other amazing thing I did was finally finish setting up my new desk, which was delivered to my apartment as a box full of parts. I put most of them together myself, but I had to have a friend come over to help me move it into place because it was so heavy.
Day 2 was amazing because I went to pollworker training and learned that I'm really going to enjoy being a pollworker this year. When I went out to pick up my very first pair of prescription glasses, the weather was absolutely gorgeous, and I walked around a nearby park just enjoying the sunshine. After that, I expanded and updated all the descriptive text on all my Fiverr gigs, a project I had been putting off for a while. I was really pleased to get that accomplished.
On Day 3, I broke my previous record for productivity at work (I keep records myself, on a spreadsheet) and attended a meeting of the Young Professionals group of Habitat for Humanity of Omaha. This trend continued on Day 4, when I beat the record I'd set the previous day (only by 1 point, but hey) and also came to this realization: I started out knowing basically nothing about computer networking, and look at all the new things I've learned since then. Learning more new things on top of those can't be that much more difficult. I can totally do this.
On Day 5, I met my new seatmates at work and used them as a resource to solve a problem I had. Also, I transferred my Kindle books from my old phone to my new one.
Day 6 saw the first major network outage I had experienced since I assumed my regular job duties, which was three weeks ago now. I'm on the team that deals with those, figuring out what's wrong, setting the repair process in motion, and doing damage control. I contributed to the second and third tasks on those lists, handling most of the second one myself (with help from a coworker), and I'm pretty dang proud of the fact that I contributed all that and didn't freak out about what was going on.
On Day 7, after celebrating a lovely Feast of St. Francis with an impressive turnout of family dogs (plus two cats and a small mammal of some kind in a cage), I went to another, much bigger and better corn maze with some friends. I also experienced my very first game of laser tag. It was very short, only 10 minutes, but I'm glad it didn't go on any longer, because the tagger was heavy and I was getting tired of carrying it.
Day 8 has already been pretty amazing. I finally started really getting into my Education for Ministry curriculum again, and getting excited about it. I also supported my local independent bookstore (always something to be proud of) by buying three books: Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin, Lucid by Adrienne Stoltz and Ron Bass, and Son by Lois Lowry. I'm finding that my old love of and excitement about reading is resurfacing now that I have more leisure time and fewer worries about my future and my own situation. I'm also finally getting excited about being in Education for Ministry, after I sat down this afternoon and really studied this week's chapter, something I haven't done in far too long.
This challenge has been really good for me so far. One of the reasons I love month-long challenges so much is that they offer me accountability for what I do. Having this goal and expectation that I will find something amazing about every single day is really making my outlook on life more positive. I'll see you again next week (most likely next Sunday) with more updates on how things are going!
(Crossposted here, on Dreamwidth, and on my WordPress blog.)