April 2015: Goals in Review

April rolled by pretty quickly, thanks in part to the A to Z Challenge, which never seems to last as long as I want it to. It’s hard to believe that we’re a third of the way through 2015 already. It would be easier to believe if it would stop snowing in my neck of the woods, but that’s a rant for another day. Let’s get to the important stuff: how did my goals fare this month?

Goal #1: Take care of myself more.

Though there is always room for improvement, I can honestly say that I did a pretty good job of this goal during April. There were several contributing factors:

First, I’ve made a point of eating better while I’m at the work camp out West. It’s difficult, since so much of the available food can hardly qualify as ‘edible’, but believe me when I say I’ve been making a huge effort. The big thing is avoiding pop (except for once or twice per 14-day shift when I have my treat nights) and drinking as much water as I can force down my throat. I’ve also been avoiding the baked goods like the plague, because I don’t know what they do with some of that stuff, but it seems like every time I have a camp-made chocolate-chip cookie I wind up with a roiling stomach all evening. The hardest part though? A vast deal of the meat here doesn’t taste right to me (I swear some of it isn’t even actually meat) so by the end of the shift I tend to be pretty protien deficient. I’ve been trying to remedy this by making friends with both cheese and peanut butter, and thus far it seems to be going fairly well.

Also, I’ve been running again, using my Zombies! Run! app, and it’s been going very well so far. I didn’t go out once while I was home last time, but there’s a reason for that, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Oh, and for the record, I’ve lost about 7 lbs in the last couple of months, so that’s pretty awesome. ^_^

The other thing that I have to mention in my “taking care of myself” goal, is that I had an extremely relaxing days off in April. There was a bit of a snafu on the first day I got home, in which my car fell victim to the insanity that is the pothole-riddled roads back home, but other than that I had quite an excellent 12 days. I played with my daughter, spent time playing video games while snuggled up in a blanket with my little spectator, took some rather relaxing baths, and just in general did almost nothing. I didn’t write, I didnt’ work on the blog, I didn’t exercise. The only things that I did that I would consider “work” was to install our new dishwasher and to record some YouTube vidoes, but all of that only accounted for maybe one full day’s worth of time. So it was pretty good. I needed it. And although I definitely want to get some fiction writing in more often, I plan to have a similar days off in May as well.

Goal #2: Continue to build my readership/viewership.

It wasn’t really a bad month for this goal either, for a combination of reasons. For one thing, at the beginning of the month, and then on my birthday, I gave away several copies of “Nowhere to Hide” to readers who took part in my giveaways on the blog and on Goodreads. The Goodreads giveaway in particular had a huge response – I think something like 800 people entered – so I’m hoping that it pays off and that the winners write some nice reviews for me.

Another factor, of course, was the A to Z Challenge, which didn’t have an enormous impact on my stats this month but resulted in several new people deciding to follow the blog (hi guys!), and I even picked up a few new followers on Twitter as a result of the challenge.

Additionally, my Instagram and YouTube following has been steadily increasing over the past few months. I’m not sure exaclty what I’m doing on Instagram that people are enjoying, but I’ll take it! As for YouTube, my “Enormous Funko Haul” post has been dragging people in from the woodworks – it’s gotten over 6000 views, which isn’t bad for someone who isn’t exactly a major presence on YouTube – and some of those people decided to stick around. I am very close to reaching my first 100 subscribers, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s pretty awesome to me considering that I just do these videos for fun. 🙂

Goal #3: Write. Write a lot.

This is the one goal that suffered in April. The main reason is, of course, as I mentioned above, the fact that I didn’t write a damn thing while I was on my days off last time. 12 straight days of not writing definitely puts a girl in the negative column. It was worth it, of course, but between that extended period of nothingness and the fact thatI planned, wrote, and scheduled most of the A to Z Challenge posts in March, I didn’t do a whole lot of any kind of writing in April. All total I wound up with 12844 words, which is more than a 7000 drop from March. Still though, all things considered, I don’t think it was that bad a month. I mean, come on, almost 13k words is pretty descent, right? Right.

With that said, I would like to bring your attention to my blogging plan for the month of May. First off, because of the A to Z Challenge, I haven’t done any of the unboxing and review posts for the month of April yet. Most of the videos are up on YouTube already if you’re a subscriber, but I didn’t want to clutter the blog with the corresponding posts while the challenge was going on, so those posts will be going up the rest of this week. I also have an additional few videos – some hauls and a YouTube TAG that I decided to take part in – that will be going up soon, and I’ll be sharing them on the blog as well. Aside from those I plan to take it mostly easy on the blog for the month of May. I need some time to deal with other stuff, figure out my priorities, and keep up with that whole relaxing thing, so I’m not going to panic about making sure that there are at least 5 posts a week. If I have something to talk about, I will, or if I see an awesome prompt or something else I want to share, I will, but I’m not going to hold myself to any standards this month because, hey, everyone needs a break every now and then.

So I hope you’ll all keep coming by to check out the videos, and make sure to relax yourselves! It’s absolutely worth it!

How was your April? Did you participate in the A to Z Challenge? Did you get any good work done? Did the emerging post-winter potholes destroy your car as well? Please share!