Celebrations all around!! 🥂 congratulations! And happy birthday!

Bon anniversaire!

I founded myself humming this old French song:

Not very appropriate for a happy birthday, but a song that aged rather well.

Thank you:
TheLibrarian
Mianevem
HellYeah
mavie
Matan
TopNotch
Fremen
PetiteSheWolf
DorothyMH
Redline
Anek
CODawn
Manuela
Hbomb3383
AnnieW


AnnieW a lot gets lot in translation for me with figures of speech. I think that song is about a love affair gone wrong--or perhaps one that was always a bad scene from the get go. Beyond that...?
Google Translate insists on giving me "our lemon love" for "Notre amour limonaire" but the French word I know for "lemon" is "citron" and "limonaire" I'm given to understand is some kind of fairground organ (named for the family name of the guy who built them). Is the singer suggesting their love is like a carousel ride/merry-go-round that goes around and around in circles without going anywhere? This maybe fits with the visual of the ballerina dancing in the snow globe (though I'm not clear on why the guy steals the snow globe). Or is she saying their love makes her dizzy/nauseated like a carousel ride (or sea sickness, which is referenced later)? People attempting literal translations of poetry should be a comedy act!

For my birthday workout yesterday I did:

51 for 51

1. 5.1 km run
2. 51 step-jacks
3. 51 squats
4. 51 alternating bicep curls
5. 51 lunges
6. 51 upright rows
7. 51 calf raises
8. 51 tricep extensions
9. 51 side-to-side lunges
10. 51 renegade rows
11. 51 one-legged deadlifts
12. 51 overhead presses
13. 51 front leg lifts
14. 51 side leg lifts
15. 51 rear leg lifts
16. 51 punches
17. 51 front kicks
18. 51 back fists
19. 51 side kicks
20. 51 elbow strikes
21. 51 knee strikes
22. 51 knife hand strikes
23. 51 mountain climbers
24. 51 side jacks
25. 51 chest expansions
26. 51 overhead fist clench/unclench
27. 51 bodyweight deadlifts
28. 51 torso twists
29. 51 side bends
30. 51 hip rotations
31. 51 high knees
32. 51 butt kickers
33. 51 knee-to-elbows (standing)
34. 51 glute bridges
35. 51 second wheel pose
36. 51 crunches
37. 51 butt-ups
38. 51 bicycle crunches
39. 51 second handstand (at the wall)
40. 51 second tree pose
41. 51 second dancer pose
42. 51 one-legged calf raises
43. 51 second crow pose
44. 51 second firefly pose
45. 51 second forearm plank
46. 51 second side plank
47. 51 second downward facing dog
48. 51 second dolphin pose
49. 51 second forearm balance
50. 51 toe tap hops
51. 51 jumping jacks

Norma did exercises 2-30 with me.

I also walked my dogs--but they got short-changed as it was late (only 1K each).


I did not meet any of my Baker's Dozen Goals for My 51st Orbit Around Sol though I did make good progress on most of them. There were some major stressors in my life last year that caused me to lose focus for a while. Then I took on some knew endeavours and returned to an old one and my priorities changed. Some of last year's goals remain works in progress for me. Others are not things I'm focussed on anymore (or at least not right now). I do not have a similar list of goals for the next year because one thing this past year has taught me is that my life is just too unpredictable right now for ambitious year-long goals to be useful. I'm going to focus more--at least in the immediate future--on weekly goals. (More on that this weekend.)



Please, if you can, hold some good thoughts for my sweet friend Trudy (and for me that I will have the strength and the wisdom to do right by her). She has a bump on her forehead, restricted airflow through her right nostril, and blood in her snot from that same nostril--all signs that there is likely something nefarious going on inside her head. She's on antibiotics right now, in the hope that her problem is just a nasty and persistent sinus infection. But I'm fairly certain this is a Hail Mary play on the part of the vet who did not want to send me away with nothing twice in one month. (The only way to know for certain what is going on is to do an x-ray. But that would require anaesthesia, which is itself a risk for a dog of Trudy's age. So I'm not going to do that as the results would not change Trudy's course of treatment in any case. She's almost 14 years old. I'm not going to put her through surgery and radiation therapy.)





At the moment Trudy is not much bothered by her funky breathing and is still a happy girl. She is on an anti-inflammatory which is making it possible for her to still go for her daily 3K walk, visit with her friends, and play in our yard. Most of the time she still acts like a playful little puppy! But if the haemorrhaging is being caused by a tumour, things could go downhill quickly.

Belated Happy Rainbow Day and Happy Birthday!

Sending healing vibes for Trudy and hugs for you.

You have the best birthday celebration.

Damn...that's quite a birthday workout! Congratulations!

On a more serious note, hugs and positive thoughts for you and Trudy. I'm really, really hoping it's just an infection.

Oh, no... Trudy's symptoms sound worrying. I really hope it will turn out to be nothing grave!

Congrats on your birthday workout!

I am sorry Trudy is ailing. You’re right, it does not sound good. My neighbor’s dog had something similar going on recently, which ended sadly. I hope it’s just an infection for Trudy🤞🏼🤞🏼🤞🏼….

Your birthday workout was amazing! Lots of love for sweet Trudy though

Healing vibes for Trudy.



Congrats on your workout!

Belated Happy Birthday

Healing vibes and well wishes for Trudy

Happy birthday and anniversary!
and best wishes for Trudy, hopefully it's just something minor

That's one heck of a Birthday workout!

Hoping things go well for Trudy.

Thank you:
Whirly
CaptainCanuck
CODawn
Mianevem
DorothyMH
Manuela
AnnieW
Gandhalfit
NancyTree
Aku-chan

I like it!


Further to my previous post re: weekly goals, this is what I am going with for the time being:

writing: 5 hours per week
French: 3 hours per week (Fluenz or other active use of my French skills--not just watching Netflix)
yoga teacher training: 5 hours per week
artwork: 3 hours per week

workout: 5 hours per week (moderate to intense physical activity)
yoga/dance: 3 hours per week
running: 5 km per week
restorative: 90 minutes per week (includes meditation)

I find that maintaining I-did-X-every-day streaks is motivating for me. The problem is that I am trying to do a lot of different things, and trying to do all of them every day doesn't play to my strengths well. I am good at sinking my teeth into a project or activity and working on it for long periods of time with intense focus. I love the flow state which I get into from doing this. I do not like interrupting what I'm doing because I got my 15 minutes for that activity in that day and now I need to move on to something else just so I can maintain my streak in that other thing. Doing this makes me far less productive at everything, even when I succeed at jumping directly from one activity into the next. (If the next activity is not something I feel motivated to work on in that moment, I often don't succeed in jumping straight into it and I end up procrastinating instead.) So through trying to maintain so many streaks, I end up pulling a lot of late nights (which messes up my sleep schedule for the next day), and inevitably end up dropping the ball on something anyway. And once I've lost a streak I don't have the motivation to keep squeezing that activity into my day every day, so it often ends up being neglected for long periods of time. Which is not what I want. So...

The only daily streaks I am going to continue with going forward are:

1. My daily workout streak. Today (January 16) marked day 634 for that.
2. Daily French. Today was day 432.
3. Limited duration exercise-a-day goals.

To maintain my daily French streak, I just need to be exposed to French somehow for a minimum of 30 minutes. Watching shows in French on Netflix does not count for my 3 hours a week of French study, but it does count for maintaining my streak.

My current daily exercises are dolphin pose and forearm balance (today is day 143 and 43 for each of these, respectively). The idea here is more or less to focus on working on one pose for 100 days. The 100 days is not a hard limit, but I think it's a decent length of time. As with all things, there are a number of different yoga skills I want to develop, and I cannot possibly work on all of them every day. This is a way to hopefully give myself enough focus on one or two poses at a time to be able to master them, and then move on to something else. (I'll still need to practice the previous daily poses regularly in order to maintain my ability to do them. I just won't be doing all of them every day.) I don't intend to ever have a long list of poses I"m trying to do every day all at once. (The only reason I'm still working on dolphin now beyond its first 100 days is really because dolphin pose is the prep pose for forearm balance.)

By switching to weekly goals for everything else, I can hopefully find a way to work on everything I want to be working on regularly without the problems associated with trying to do everything every day. Also, my weekly goals might change from time-to-time, depending on what else is going on in my life at that time. (And also depending on the weather. My weekly running goal is low right now because I do want to be running. But I don't want to be running in nasty weather. And we get a lot of weather that's really not very pleasant for running in where I live this time of year.)

I've decided to take a page from BlackButler 's book and make some pretty Hive-themed graphics to track my weekly goals. Here's what I scored for last week (January 9-15):



Definitely not perfect scores on most of these items for last week! But I only made up my new targets yesterday. So this is more just for a sense of where I need to make some changes.

For GOBOT and GBOT I am still working with my star system and the same 6AM/6:30/7AM and 10PM/10:30/11PM goals. Yesterday I got 3 stars for GOBOT and zero for GBOT. Today GOBOT was zero, and it's already past 11PM, so GBOT is zero today too. More room for improvement!

Norma and I are still working out together every day. (I don't have the streak day # for that at hand, but will try to look it up for tomorrow's update.) We completed Ironheart last weekend and will be completing Pathfinder towards the end of this week. So I need to make up a new schedule for our workouts soon! For this week, however, we are still on this one (except minus Ironheart, which we have finished).

À demain.

What you say about streaks makes sense, almost like you are beholden to them, especially when they become more like a chore and less like a pleasure.