Oh yeah... I have a LJ account... why do I forget that.... (or 2014 round up)
Why do I keep forgetting I have one of these?
I love my LJ. Slacker...
ANYWAY... just under 12 hours in my 2014 and time to put off washing the dishes for another hour.
How did my 2014 play out?
Well... Got dumped at the bus stop back in Jan. That was a lot of fun. I think I have gone over this before so not going to spend much more keystrokes on that one.
The rest of the year I have spent a bit down and gloomy - five months of not working does that to your self esteem - or discovering that you seem to be flirting with multiple people at once and suddenly get paranoid you have become a 'player', or having no real idea what is going on and fearing you may have gotten yourself DEEP into the Friend Zone and have no idea how to get out.
So yeah... confused more then anything I guess.
Work? Yeah... Worked a grand total of 14 weeks last finacial year. That was joy and cash filled happiness I can tell you.
On the plus side, I did get a good solid 12 weeks of work in the second half of this year. Almost like having a real job again. Still only working as a casual and still only really getting verbals that there MIGHT be some more work in the new year. Yeah... so my work is all floods or droughts at the moment. Oh well.
Sport? Yeah. 2014 was a completely rubbish year for our lacrosse club. We managed to get a grand total of NO senior teams into the final rounds and our best performer was the U-13 girls. Our State League Men went from third last year to wooden spoon and our pool of fit and availiable players got so low mid season that we were forced to forfeit our Div 1 team three weeks in a row. Bit shite really.
Family? I am still not REALLY speaking with my sister. On the plus side I have actually physically seen (and spoke with) her TWICE this year, which brings the total amount of times I have physically seen and spoken to my sister since 2009 to two.
On the down side, I managed to have an easy out for Christmas Day. My parents went over to the farm and left me alone in Adelaide. So yeah, I did get out of the horror of a Family Christmas(tm) but not under my terms. The entire point of refusing to go to a Family Christmas(tm) is that you get to childishly stamp your feet and hold your breath until you turn blue. Having your parents tell you 'have fun by yourself, see you sometime next weekend' takes all the Morale High Ground away.
So I stayed home. Ate a big fry up breakfast, watched Mad Max on DVD, at a big Thai chicken curry, watched two seasons of Archer back to back and then ate tacos. Oh, and drank most of a bottle of wine. Burp. Wasn't bad day really.
Fitness and stuff? Literally put on 10 kilos when I went back to work! I had actually managed to get down to nearly a good mass for my height and body type, then went back to work and in 12 weeks managed to blob out by 10 kilos. Basically I cut down my activity and snacked constantly. If you are eating at work then you are 'on break' and no one bothers you, so you start to formally take 'Morning Tea' as a break and things like that. Plus, since I don't drink coffee, I am drinking coke for the caffine rush and we all know how much sugary goodness is in one of those 375ml cans of joy.
Then I would get home and, since eating at night is what I normally do, I would go and eat tea. Since when I am not working I only eat when I am hungry (which for me works out to about twice a day), I effectively doubled my food intake for those 12 weeks. Joy and blobby.
So, good news is I am working at lot harder fitness wise. Probably still eating a bit too much but I am doing a lot more gym. Okay, part of that is that the 'Friend Zone' gym instructor girl (see above) suggested that maybe I should start coming to the classes she is teaching on a day that I normally don't gym and I effectively are doing three more gym classes a week based purely on the power of 'Nice Girl Asked Me'.
I am also doing the lacrosse pre season which is something I normally NEVER do. It's sort of hard - we do a lot of running work, and I am rubbish at running - and sort of just good fun to hang out and muck around. We also don't have a senior coach appointed yet (politics, ya...) so 50% of what we are doing is the team captains organising something and the other 50% is people asking 'hey, anyone want a throw?' on FBook.
But hey, I am working more at this stuff, my legs look great, my middle looks a bit less blobby then it did two months ago and my arms and shoulders are, well, passable at least. But mainly my legs. My thighs have gotten so toned/big that my dress pants for my tux are now skin tight in the upper legs. (ya!!!) They are also blobby tight and nearly impossible to get on around the belly and waist, but I guess you can't have everything.
So yeah, check out my legs!! :P
Which I guess brings me to my writing, and by writing I don't mean LJ.. cough.
How has that been going? Well... MOSTLY good.
I ended up Rage Quitting NaNoWriMo mid November after I realised that I REALLY wanted to be writing something else instead of the 'special NaNo Only' idea I had come up with.
(The 'letter' of NaNoWriMo is that you start a brand new novel on Nov 1 and spend the next 30 days getting it to 50,000 words plus. That is the 'letter' of the rules. The 'spirit' of the rules is that all writing is good writing, but to do the 'letter' you basically have to come up with a stand alone new idea and then sit on that idea until November.)
I then got slowly annoyed with all the 'experts' telling me that I was 'doing it wrong' and should be 'SnowFlaking' and should be writing 'Ten Reasons my Novel Must be Written' and 'Preping my Writing Area' and 'Selecting my Writing Totem' and that wanting to pants Goat Simulator Fan Fiction was not taking it seriously enough.
I got bored with my main idea. Personally, if I have a good idea, I want to run with it then and there, and even if I only run as far as the corner shops, at least I have that idea down on paper. Instead for NaNo I was sitting on an idea for about two months so I could do NaNo 'properly'. Also there was a small cult of 'Sprinters' who do nothing all year except plan out their ideas so they can go on November 1 and sprint out 50K plus words within 24 hours.
Which is... yeah.. wonderful, but if that is all you are doing then basically NaNo isn't a creative process, but an exercise in typing speed, and, if by your own admission a lot of what you write is borderline gibbberish that you normally never get around to editting, then who are you to tell me that *I* am writing wrong. I mean congrats on your 100K words you wrote in the first three days, but if that is all you write in the year then you are still WAY behind me sunshine.
So yeah, Rage Quit and went back to writing my Regina Slacks stuff :)
(for the record, Regina Slacks and the Mystery of the Red Diamond of Kerang (aka Regina Book 1) is currently still under consideration by a publisher. I sent it off in Oct during a 'New Big Thing' cattle call from a publisher and are currently 'medium listed'. How I will end up going I don't know. They promised reply or rejection by end of Jan 2015 but if I made the first cut then I know at least someone in the publishing game doesn't think my story is complete crap. Ya me.)
So the new year approaching, what am I to do?
Well there are the things that are basically not fully yours to control - I want to get my working career back again, I want to play in a winning Grand Final (actually, at my age, I just want to play another season :P ), and I want to find someone wonderful who will let me devote myself to her happiness.
Those things you can work towards, but can't really control. Still, see what happens.
I would like to control my fitness, but then again I am working reasonable hard on that already, so making it a New Years Res is sort of cheating. Too easy.
So, formally, my 2015 New Years Res!!!!
Get Regina Slacks and the Exciting Second Adventure to a formal finished and editted ready to submit stage and get at LEAST one of the other stories to a finished first draft.
(Regina 2 is currently just under 70K words and is procrastination away from 'First Draft'. Regina 3 is a rather disjointed 10K and Regina 4 about 25K. Regina 5 and 6 are about 3K each and VERY vague plot wise. I probably should also get around to finishing the Matilda spin off short story and properly edit the Silver and Gold short I wrote back in March. But yeah, that is where I am.)
So there we go - 2015? Bring it on :D
I love my LJ. Slacker...
ANYWAY... just under 12 hours in my 2014 and time to put off washing the dishes for another hour.
How did my 2014 play out?
Well... Got dumped at the bus stop back in Jan. That was a lot of fun. I think I have gone over this before so not going to spend much more keystrokes on that one.
The rest of the year I have spent a bit down and gloomy - five months of not working does that to your self esteem - or discovering that you seem to be flirting with multiple people at once and suddenly get paranoid you have become a 'player', or having no real idea what is going on and fearing you may have gotten yourself DEEP into the Friend Zone and have no idea how to get out.
So yeah... confused more then anything I guess.
Work? Yeah... Worked a grand total of 14 weeks last finacial year. That was joy and cash filled happiness I can tell you.
On the plus side, I did get a good solid 12 weeks of work in the second half of this year. Almost like having a real job again. Still only working as a casual and still only really getting verbals that there MIGHT be some more work in the new year. Yeah... so my work is all floods or droughts at the moment. Oh well.
Sport? Yeah. 2014 was a completely rubbish year for our lacrosse club. We managed to get a grand total of NO senior teams into the final rounds and our best performer was the U-13 girls. Our State League Men went from third last year to wooden spoon and our pool of fit and availiable players got so low mid season that we were forced to forfeit our Div 1 team three weeks in a row. Bit shite really.
Family? I am still not REALLY speaking with my sister. On the plus side I have actually physically seen (and spoke with) her TWICE this year, which brings the total amount of times I have physically seen and spoken to my sister since 2009 to two.
On the down side, I managed to have an easy out for Christmas Day. My parents went over to the farm and left me alone in Adelaide. So yeah, I did get out of the horror of a Family Christmas(tm) but not under my terms. The entire point of refusing to go to a Family Christmas(tm) is that you get to childishly stamp your feet and hold your breath until you turn blue. Having your parents tell you 'have fun by yourself, see you sometime next weekend' takes all the Morale High Ground away.
So I stayed home. Ate a big fry up breakfast, watched Mad Max on DVD, at a big Thai chicken curry, watched two seasons of Archer back to back and then ate tacos. Oh, and drank most of a bottle of wine. Burp. Wasn't bad day really.
Fitness and stuff? Literally put on 10 kilos when I went back to work! I had actually managed to get down to nearly a good mass for my height and body type, then went back to work and in 12 weeks managed to blob out by 10 kilos. Basically I cut down my activity and snacked constantly. If you are eating at work then you are 'on break' and no one bothers you, so you start to formally take 'Morning Tea' as a break and things like that. Plus, since I don't drink coffee, I am drinking coke for the caffine rush and we all know how much sugary goodness is in one of those 375ml cans of joy.
Then I would get home and, since eating at night is what I normally do, I would go and eat tea. Since when I am not working I only eat when I am hungry (which for me works out to about twice a day), I effectively doubled my food intake for those 12 weeks. Joy and blobby.
So, good news is I am working at lot harder fitness wise. Probably still eating a bit too much but I am doing a lot more gym. Okay, part of that is that the 'Friend Zone' gym instructor girl (see above) suggested that maybe I should start coming to the classes she is teaching on a day that I normally don't gym and I effectively are doing three more gym classes a week based purely on the power of 'Nice Girl Asked Me'.
I am also doing the lacrosse pre season which is something I normally NEVER do. It's sort of hard - we do a lot of running work, and I am rubbish at running - and sort of just good fun to hang out and muck around. We also don't have a senior coach appointed yet (politics, ya...) so 50% of what we are doing is the team captains organising something and the other 50% is people asking 'hey, anyone want a throw?' on FBook.
But hey, I am working more at this stuff, my legs look great, my middle looks a bit less blobby then it did two months ago and my arms and shoulders are, well, passable at least. But mainly my legs. My thighs have gotten so toned/big that my dress pants for my tux are now skin tight in the upper legs. (ya!!!) They are also blobby tight and nearly impossible to get on around the belly and waist, but I guess you can't have everything.
So yeah, check out my legs!! :P
Which I guess brings me to my writing, and by writing I don't mean LJ.. cough.
How has that been going? Well... MOSTLY good.
I ended up Rage Quitting NaNoWriMo mid November after I realised that I REALLY wanted to be writing something else instead of the 'special NaNo Only' idea I had come up with.
(The 'letter' of NaNoWriMo is that you start a brand new novel on Nov 1 and spend the next 30 days getting it to 50,000 words plus. That is the 'letter' of the rules. The 'spirit' of the rules is that all writing is good writing, but to do the 'letter' you basically have to come up with a stand alone new idea and then sit on that idea until November.)
I then got slowly annoyed with all the 'experts' telling me that I was 'doing it wrong' and should be 'SnowFlaking' and should be writing 'Ten Reasons my Novel Must be Written' and 'Preping my Writing Area' and 'Selecting my Writing Totem' and that wanting to pants Goat Simulator Fan Fiction was not taking it seriously enough.
I got bored with my main idea. Personally, if I have a good idea, I want to run with it then and there, and even if I only run as far as the corner shops, at least I have that idea down on paper. Instead for NaNo I was sitting on an idea for about two months so I could do NaNo 'properly'. Also there was a small cult of 'Sprinters' who do nothing all year except plan out their ideas so they can go on November 1 and sprint out 50K plus words within 24 hours.
Which is... yeah.. wonderful, but if that is all you are doing then basically NaNo isn't a creative process, but an exercise in typing speed, and, if by your own admission a lot of what you write is borderline gibbberish that you normally never get around to editting, then who are you to tell me that *I* am writing wrong. I mean congrats on your 100K words you wrote in the first three days, but if that is all you write in the year then you are still WAY behind me sunshine.
So yeah, Rage Quit and went back to writing my Regina Slacks stuff :)
(for the record, Regina Slacks and the Mystery of the Red Diamond of Kerang (aka Regina Book 1) is currently still under consideration by a publisher. I sent it off in Oct during a 'New Big Thing' cattle call from a publisher and are currently 'medium listed'. How I will end up going I don't know. They promised reply or rejection by end of Jan 2015 but if I made the first cut then I know at least someone in the publishing game doesn't think my story is complete crap. Ya me.)
So the new year approaching, what am I to do?
Well there are the things that are basically not fully yours to control - I want to get my working career back again, I want to play in a winning Grand Final (actually, at my age, I just want to play another season :P ), and I want to find someone wonderful who will let me devote myself to her happiness.
Those things you can work towards, but can't really control. Still, see what happens.
I would like to control my fitness, but then again I am working reasonable hard on that already, so making it a New Years Res is sort of cheating. Too easy.
So, formally, my 2015 New Years Res!!!!
Get Regina Slacks and the Exciting Second Adventure to a formal finished and editted ready to submit stage and get at LEAST one of the other stories to a finished first draft.
(Regina 2 is currently just under 70K words and is procrastination away from 'First Draft'. Regina 3 is a rather disjointed 10K and Regina 4 about 25K. Regina 5 and 6 are about 3K each and VERY vague plot wise. I probably should also get around to finishing the Matilda spin off short story and properly edit the Silver and Gold short I wrote back in March. But yeah, that is where I am.)
So there we go - 2015? Bring it on :D