perldiver

Argh.  Had a medium-long post written, all proofread and ready to go, and I accidentally hit "Back" and lost it all.  Grrr.

Short form:

• I'm going back on Carrot and Stick.  It kept me focused last time
• Not going to officially start today, because I have not yet figured out what I want the carrot to be, and haven't listed the goals that I'm trying to further. 
• Tomorrow's list will center around figuring out exactly what my carrots will be and what goals I want to further.

Carrots: 10
Sticks: 0

Wow, the month is over. Many thanks to everyone on my friends list for not dropping me in annoyance when I got this experiment going. It was really interesting, and I learned a lot.
( What I learned... )

Once again, thanks to everyone who hung in with me, and especially to those who commented! And now, I'm off to enjoy my weekend. I think, in a fine display of irony, I won't work out at all this weekend to celebrate. :>

Carrots:  17
Sticks: 0

Woohoo!  Go me, with the being all productive 'n' stuff.  As an aside, one of my tasks for today was "Start reading Paradise Lost" This is one of those things that I'm pretty sure I was supposed to read in school at some point but never did.  I've given myself permission to take it slow, just a paragraph or so a day, so that I can really digest it / think about it / look up the references, instead of feeling like I'm being a slacker if I don't gulp the whole thing at a sitting...which is good, because it's not easy going.  I'm enjoying it, but it took careful parsing to untangle the web of subordinate clauses so that I could figure out what the first sentence was saying.  I'm looking forward to it.

 Carrots: 6
Sticks: 0

Tried a different approach today.  My only tasks boiled down to "be in the chair working by 9", "spend the whole day on Scheme" and "don't goof off".

It worked pretty well..  I got some flow going and made significant progress.  Tomorrow, however, will be a day for many odds and ends such as paying bills.

Carrots: 7
Sticks: 0

Worked out at the end of the day, not the beginning; solely yoga again, and really more of a stretching session than a strength or aerobic workout.  Just enough to pop a very light sweat and make me feel loose, then stop because it's bedtime.

Tomorrow I'm going to try something different:  I'm going to start using negative tasks as well as positive ones (e.g. "Don't do XYZ between 9am and 5pm").  I feel like I'm getting the good habits that I wanted, but it's more about eliminating bad ones.  Need to reward those behaviors, then.

April is almost over, and with it this experiment.  I'm not sure if I'll keep doing this or not.

 Carrots:  6
Sticks: 2

Feh.  Two sticks today, and really no good reason--I tried to have Internet TV running in the background while I was working, and it was too distracting (especially Season 5 of Hustle, which is really good).  I did work on one of the two missed tasks, I simply didn't get any significant amount of work done so I don't think I can count it. 

Carrots: 11
Sticks: 0

Short but intense workout today; lots of upper body. Ran the stairs for the first time in a while; floor 7-8 seems to be the consistent limit on where I can't run any more, and am reduced to walking at best and trudging at worst.

( Gaming stuff... )

Carrots: 7
Sticks: 0

Nothin' more to see here. 

 Carrots:  12
Sticks: 0 

Pretty good day; made some breakthroughs with the Scheme stuff that I've been working on.  Yay!

Ok, that's all I've got.  Bed time.

Carrots: 5
Sticks: 0

Today's total was small because the only real item on the list for today was "spend it with avivasedai  celebrating her birthday!"

We started off with breakfast at Alice's Teacup; much tasty food was eaten, including a yummy omlette and a nutella-and-almonds crepe that was SO GOOD!!!! Ohhhhhh.  Yum.  avivasedai had raspberry with peanut butter, which she seemed to enjoy--at least, I noticed that both of us put the last bite in our mouths, looked blissful, then looked guilty and said "oops, I forgot to offer you some".  :>

From there we poked around a bit, then went over to see "In The Heights".  WOW.  That was an incredible show.  Quite possibly the best I've ever seen.  And we had what I think were the best seats in the house--row E (so, 5 rows from the stage, which put us just slightly above stage level), and dead center.  It **rocked**.

We had picked up an extra couple of scones from Alice's, and we had those for lunch during the intermission.  After the show, we wandered
over to Ruth Cris's Steakhouse for dinner (it was 5pm by then), where we had a **delicious** meal (steak and garlic mashed for me, multiple sides for avivasedai).  Then on to the Hirschfeld theatre, where we saw "Hair".  Very well-costumed, well-lit show, many great songs.  Really got across the feel of the 60s.  It was a fine show--had I seen it on its own my review would probably be higher, but I'm afraid it didn't really stack up against its competition which had (a) hordes of beautiful dancers doing red-hot Latin dance numbers (b) fantastic songs sung with perfect clarity so you could hear every word, where the lyrics resonated with pain and fear and joy and pride and many of the issues were things that the audience (or, at least me personally--I won't speak for anyone else) could personally resonate with from our own experience.


So, great day.  And now, I'm headed for bed.  Tired Dave.