One of the benefits of having a birthday in June is it makes a nice target for reviewing my goals and seeing how I am doing. Previous readers will recall that I set some really ambitious goals back in January, and by about the third week of February, my weekly monitoring and tracking was pretty much done. I do review my goals, and check in on my progress, but I haven’t been posting about it.

For blue / mind / organizing / planning goals, my two big ones for the year were to do more on astronomy (to re-kickstart my interest in and use of my telescope) and a kitchen renovation. For the astronomy, I had the problem last year with the gears (losing it to the repair shop for August and September), and I have to confess, I’ve been somewhat disappointed anyway with my progress. I bought a good beginner scope, and it comes with a Go-To mount that basically uses a computer to track the sky and auto-adjust to various locations.  » Read the rest

Time to do a quick update, here at the end of week 7.

My body goals, the red ones in the pie, are going absolutely horribly. I am one lazy git. Pushups, crunches, lunges, back extensions, finding a new doctor, finding a new dentist, giving blood? All pretty much zero since the beginning of the year.

If I was looking for excuses, I could find them — I spent weeks 1-2 pretty much focused on getting the goals going and blogging. Weeks 3-5 were pretty much wiped out with a flu bug that was crushing my lung capacity. Week 6 I was starting to feel a little better, more myself, but not quite there. Week 7? I was just plain lazy.

I have a little light progress here and there. I’ve managed to do my back extensions here and there, pushups here and there. I figured out some internal walking options at work, and I’m considering a FitBit / pedometer to track steps rather than the 100K walking goal.  » Read the rest

Time to do a quick update, here at the end of week 7.

For my astronomy, considering that I haven’t actually dug the telescope out and got it set up yet, mostly because I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I’m a fair-weather (i.e. warm-weather) astronomer only, I’m doing okay. I’ve played around with a few things, even managed to get a photo of the Mars / Venus / Moon conjunction on the weekend. While I had hoped to be doing something astronomy-related at least once a week, I’m at a combined total of 3 so far.

For the kitchen reno, we got going a few weeks ago with our first meeting with the designer, but haven’t heard anything in the last two weeks (contractor needs to come talk to us about moving a wall, see what the options are). I’m going to follow up this week and see about booking them for a specific 2 weeks in the summer.  » Read the rest