Pie day? Now I’m hungry! http://bit.ly/y433f3

Thoughts on luck. http://bit.ly/zKzLav

The girl with 7 horses. http://bit.ly/w2jHri

My daughter and I were leaving the grocery store and my 2 year old protested when I picked him up to go to our vehicle. Protested is an euphemism, he screamed in my ear at the top of his lungs.

I looked at my daughter and said, I’d rather fight evil then deal with him right now. And we started joking about ways that parenting is harder then fighting evil.

1. Options.

Parenting: a variety of options which range from passive (give into the child), assertive and positive (nurture the emotions but don’t give in on the limits you set), aggressive (my way or the highway) or even physical.

Fighting evil: Always aggressive and always physical. Stab, hurt, end.

2. What`s best for me.

Parenting: once you have children what works for the parent is a distant second to the child’s needs. Most of the time.

Fighting evil: this thing needs to die. Stab, hurt end.

3. Weapons

Parenting: my wits, and some days I’m pretty sure I’ve come to the battle unarmed and without enough armour.

Fighting Evil: swords, cross bows, arrows, daggers, hands, feet, and if you are lucky magic.

4. Victory

Parenting: once you are labelled parent, no matter how it comes about, you are a parent to that child(ren) for the rest of your life. I suppose if you get your children off to college and then living on their own, you could claim victory, but there are lots of little bumps ahead  yet.

Fighting evil: if you’ve done your job, the evil is ended and you can go the local tavern and celebrate with any companions who may have survived. If you haven’t done your job, evil has taken over the entire world and you are the one who is dead.

5. Allies

Parenting: I have a husband, and my Sister-in-law. My mom lives far away, my dad is recovering from back surgery and we recently moved and I don’t have many friends here yet. My husband is pretty good, but he works long hours.

Fighting evil: a motley crew of various characters who can run from crazy to insanely loyal to people who tag along and bitch about it the whole time. But at least they are well-armed.

What would you prefer parenting or fighting evil?

I finished Dragon Ages: Origins and become Queen!! of Ferelden. I <3 Alistair.  I need to stay away from fan fiction involving Alistair or Bann Teagan. It’s romantic word-crack.

And my son wound up with a chest infection and on antibiotics and now I have a cough. So, I’m whiney. On with the goals.

Writing goals:

Edit 5 days a week, 1 hour a day  After editing is done, write 250 words 5 days a week or 1250 words per week.

I’m not even tracking the hour anymore. But I am beginning to hate the book I was editing so I decided it was time for beta readers and I’ll go onto the next book. I haven’t looked at it since October.

Personal:

Get outside 5 days a week.

Since we are all dying, we walk to and from school because it’s super close and it’s super warm this week. (Yeah thanks weather and furnace, couldn’t have gone out THIS week).

Exercise with EA active 4 times per week

I’m several work-outs behind. See above whining for why I’ve fallen behind.

Plan meals (gotta get our budget under control).

All meals planned for this week. Sweet.

Read one book and watch one movie a week as per the fifty-fifty challenge.

Almost done Carly Philips book “Kiss Me If You Can“. Not sure if I’ll do a fiction or non-fiction next. I’m trying to alternate but I’m reading this one and Indie Journey at the same time. I guess it should be a fiction I start next since I started the fiction one first … okay I’m babbling.

Go to bed by 11 PM

It’s 11:30 right now, so I’m not making it today. I’ve been playing with pintrest and Goodreads (applying for the author program).

Only I don’t know what colours to go with. I saw a table painted yellow on Property Brothers a few days ago. Bright yellow.

After I paint the table I may have to paint the china cabinet as well.  The top is wood and the legs are metal. The top can stay as is, if it has to, but the legs need to be changed. i don’t want to go all dark because we are doing dark furniture in the living room and I need something else. Here is some of my inspiration so far:

i like the colour, maybe too much blue and the metal chairs are great.

Striped table

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
I’m 2 hours behind schedule now and no further ahead with my dining room plans.

Often we believe that problems occur because of people either in their rational minds or emotional ones, and if they just tried harder theyd change. But sometimes it is the world around us that just needs to be changed.

1) Change the environment. We all follow the path to least resistance, so make things easy. Or at least visible. A sticky note, not turning on the TV or computer until you’ve done X amount of work, going somewhere you don’t have Internet so you can work.

2) Habits. Flylady talks a lot about making habits or routines. I have a bad habit of vegging after supper and leaving the dishes until morning. Instead I’ve been unloading the dishwasher first thing and loading it right after supper.

3) Use peer pressure. The best way to keep a gaol or resolution is to have at least one partner doing it with you. If you promise a friend to meet at the gym every day you are less likely to skip gym sessions. Or for writing check the #Row80 and #amwriting hashtags for writing sprints. We succeed in groups. #WAna1011

Writing goals:

Edit 5 days a week, 1 hour a day  After editing is done, write 250 words 5 days a week or 1250 words per week.

I’m barely getting my editing in never mind my writing, so I dropped the writing goal. And I’m dropping the hour goal, as long as I get at least one chapter edited, I’m calling it success. So far I’ve been successful since our furnace came back to life.

The change was to protect my new bedtime of 11 PM, I need to get my son up earlier so bedtime for me has to get earlier.

Blog goals:

More guest posting: both getting and giving. Going to aim for 2 a month for Jan and Feb, one a week for March.

Dumping this goal. I hate reaching out to people. I’m stressed over just keeping up with my blog. So I’m just going to blog, connect via Twitter and do my mash-ups and call it good.

Working out a schedule in a spreadsheet, because I’m a geek.

I want back to this but it’s not really working for me. Maybe when the boy-child is off antibiotics and I’m sleeping at night.

Personal:

Get outside 5 days a week.

Haha. It was below -20 all week. I had to drive my daughter to school, we live 3 blocks away. There was no recess, buses didn’t run most of the week. And then my son wound up with a chest infection. Someday it will warm up and we won’t be sick. Before we moved to oiltown, we NEVER got sick. Since we got here, we’ve been sick constantly. It might be all the damned wind. I so want to move back to Central Alberta.

Exercise with EA active

I missed one work-out last week. 4 days on, 3 days off. But I’m less excited about exercising, but I have noticed a change in my endurance and muscle strength. I’m not trying to lose weight (I’m sadly underweight) but I have to exercise to stave off Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Plan meals (gotta get our budget under control).

Doing well. Been using up some freezer stuff since I didn’t get to shop on my usual day, Tuesday thanks to furnace-gate.

Read one book and watch one movie a week as per the fifty-fifty challenge.

Lord, I have to get a list of these. I lost my notebook. I had a bunch of late books from the library so I got banned from borrowing E-books as well. But I fixed that. I read “Write Good or Die” edited by Scott Nicholson but it was written before the e-book boom so half of it was related to making pitches, which I skipped. When I finish The Indie Journey, I will count the two of them as one book.

Oh I did finish The Happiness Project.

And I immediately thought “I should start my own project” and then I thought of all the other things I had going on and how crappy I was feeling about not keeping up, and I ditched the idea. I didn’t watch a movie, unless you count the last half hour of  the second Star Wars movie, which was on when I got up the other morning. My husband had fallen asleep on the sofa while watching and it went on repeat. My son was excited to see “bain-bain” or airplanes so early in the day.

Happy birthday to my mom.

Tomorrow I will watch a movie. Not sure what yet, something child-friendly. Or with pretty guys in it.

The other goal I’m adding, which I’m not really tracking, is just keeping my sink shiny again. I’ve been slacking on routines once again after the holidays and illness and furnace-gate. So, I’m doing minimalism and just doing the shiny sink thing, and it’s working. I’m getting dishes done consistently before bed.

There was a Friends episode where Phoebe had a spirit in her who wanted to see everything and did. Me too: bit.ly/yujlhP

Yummy first kisses. http://bit.ly/A7PuaV

Snow day. http://www.prudencemacleod.com/2012/01/snow-day.html

Lay Weird Alga? http://bit.ly/xzrk1q

Someday i’m going to attend a Creative Dreamer class from ABCCreative. http://bit.ly/yZqaSL Plus Andrea is gorgeous.

I was reading it and I recognized myself.

Not with crayons.

With MY computer.

Not the current one, but my first one. It was a Compaq Presario my mom bought me in 1999 as a graduation present. At the time I was posting bad poetry on-line from our school computers or from my dad’s because he had Internet. And I had met the most wonderful boi from England who I was conversing with via E-mail as often as possible.

He introduced me to IRC, which is short for Internet Relay Chat. It was like Twitter. You joined a server, connected in a chat room that was labelled by a hashtag #vampire was my very first IRC hang out.

Anyway, most of my friends did not have Internet, so they would come to my house and want to use my computer.

I would hover and make sure they weren’t harming my baby.

I think it was more I was jealous, I had friends over so I wasn’t allowed to be on the computer but they were.

People stopped asking to use it or would do so quickly.

We had one issue back in October or November. It wasn’t that cold.

Yesterday morning it was -30 C(-22 F). And our furnace would not start.

Called the heating guys, they came and we needed a part. It was no where to be found in the city it had to be ordered and would not come until the next day.

We pulled out mattress into the living room and turned on our oil heater, electric fireplace and a couple desktop heaters. My power bill should be really nice next month.

This morning it was -44C (-47F) with windchill it was -38 without. And we were cold.

I called the school to say my daughter wasn’t attending and they asked me why. No buses were running and neither was I. I think if I had gone outside I never would have warmed up.

Despite turning on the taps and having heat tape, our water froze.

The heating guy came around 11:30 and got us running. And then took a big check.

We are feeling warm now.

Which is good it is supposed to be -50 C overnight with the windchill.

So what is the weather like by you?

Week one

Week Two

This week is about the emotional side of changing habits, which is probably what most of us struggle with when we try to change. And yelling at yourself or getting tough are not the answers.

1. I gotta feeling. This is best summed up as SHOW don’t tell. We are creatures of immediate gratification. It makes me happier right now if I play Farmville then if I do the hard work of writing. Except tomorrow I will feel crappy that I wrote nothing and made no progress on my goal to becoming a best selling author (or even to write 500 words a day). Besides, writing those 500 words will make me happier in both the short and long term.

2. Break it down. This is basically the same as think small from last week. When we have a monumental task before us like write novel, we get freaked out. If we break it down until we are no longer scared to take that first step, we can do that. So if you can’t commit to writing 500 words today, how about 100 or 50 or writing for just one minute. You can build on it tomorrow.

3. Learn to do better. This might be learning specific skills, but most of the time it’s just cultivating the mindset of “I can do it.” There are two types of people: those who believe abilities are innate and unchanging and those who believe that abilities can be learned.

Guess who are more succesful?

Those who believe they can learn skills. Believing you can do something or that you can change is the first step.

Do you need to work on the emotional side of change? Can you see steps here that might help you make a switch?