A couple of things to say before we get down to it this week. First of all, I know I’ve been rather slow when it comes to responding to comments and the like lately, and I apologize. I’m having one of those times when it just seems like there’s a million things to do and I can’t concentrate, so I’ve been a little lackluster when it comes to responding to the various forms of internet communication. I tried to catch up yesterday, but if I missed anyone I apologize, and feel free to shout at me. 🙂
Second, as of this coming Monday I will officially be at my new job in the Alberta oil sands. That means that for two weeks at a time I may be fairly absent online. It all depends on what the cell reception is like where I’m going. So if it seems as though I’ve disappeared (except for scheduled posts), I haven’t…I’m just having a difficult time communicating.
Okay, now that I’ve explained that, let’s get down to brass tacks.
Goal #1: Lose ten pounds and become healthier overall.
I must admit that I had a rough time this week. Part of the problem was good old fashioned being too busy. On Wednesday I had overnight visitors, then on Thursday I had to do a 3-hour round trip for a doctor’s appointment and a visit to my sick grandmother, which was punctuated by an almost five-hour trip to the circus with the daughter and the niece, and then hubby and I took the niece to our house for two nights, which just always wears me out even when the kids are really good (which they were). So all in all, I ended up missing all my workouts for those days, plus ate a ton of junk like pizza and pancakes.
I totally planned to make up for those lost workouts early this week, but somehow it just never happened. I managed to fit in the one run that I missed, but I never made up for the strength training sessions that I missed, and as of a strangely exhausting day today I’ve managed to get another run behind. I’m just all kinds of screwed up, and to make matters worse I’ve been reverting to bad habits like drinking pop constantly.
On the positive side of things, I finally got a medical diagnosis on my stomach problems. It was the one I was dreading, because it involves a lot of work to figure out your triggers (of which there could be many), but there’s an upside to it. Given my descriptions of the problem the doc thinks that my biggest (maybe only) trigger is anxiety, so he’s given me a prescription to hopefully help with that. I’ve only been taking it for a couple of days so I can’t really tell if it’s helping yet, but I should know pretty soon since my worst times are when traveling to and from work. Everyone keep your fingers crossed for me, okay?
Goal #2: Be more active on social media and work hard on my “author platform”.
As mentioned above, it’s been a really bad week for this kind of stuff. I haven’t touched Twitter once, and have only been on Facebook in order to link to my blog posts. There’s not much more to say about that, aside from that I’ll try harder next week.
Goal #3: COMPLETE my zombie apocalypse novel, Nowhere to Hide.
You can probably guess based on everything else what I’m going to say here. Like everything else, it was a bad week for this goal, but I am at least able to say that I got one more chapter done. Along those lines, I can tell you that I’m starting to understand that “kill the little darlings” thing that everyone is always talking about. The chapter I was working on was one that my beta-reader said dragged a lot, so when I was going through it I was trying to find ways to shorten it or speed up the action, and it was harder than I would have expected. Every line seemed important and well-written, so it was really difficult to cut anything. In the end I managed, but it really gave me an appreciation for how hard it is to cut stuff that only you feel is worth leaving in.
Goal #4: Write 500,000 words.
Surprisingly, this is the one goal that I’m not too disappointed in this week. It was definitely a weaker period than the previous few weeks, but it was still pretty good overall. Honestly, I’m not even sure where these words came from, but somehow I wound up with a total of 5198 words. Not too shabby for such a busy and confusing week!
All in all, I would have to say that this week was frustrating in a great number of ways, but at least I can say that I kept writing, right? Right.
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Just wondering… What is Alberta Oil Sands? It sounds interesting, an oil refinery or drilling, perhaps?
It’s the land in general. Alberta’s land is filled with oil. In the places with the highest concentration you can see that the dirt actually looks black. They call it “oil sands” because, I assume “oil dirt” doesn’t sound as good. lol
The oil is somewhat difficult to separate from the sand, which is why Alberta hasn’t completely taken over the world with it’s outrageous wealth, but technology is always advancing and so there are plenty of work sites out there (and plenty more coming) that work to remove the oil in various ways. The previous site I was at had a complicated system of hot water, steam, chemicals, and some crazy centrifugal force motions that remove MOST of the dirt and other gunk. The result is a kind of dirty oil (bitumen) that is then sent off to a refinery to make it useful.
I had no idea. I always found it slightly amusing that a writer and aspiring author worked at a paper mill. 🙂
Anyways, best of luck with your new job. 🙂
I’m an anomaly, I think. At least, according to a world of personality tests and research on the two drastically different sides of the human brain. I’ve always been technologically/mechanically minded, good with numbers and the like, but also very artistic, creative, musical, etc. I’m a career councilor’s worst nightmare. lol